Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton

Abstract

This book speaks successfully both to students embarking on their first forays in the field of medieval liturgy, and to specialists. The editors and contributors offer a guide to studying medieval liturgy, and a set of model explorations of particular liturgical materials. While much liturgical scholarship has tended to prioritise the earliest materials, this volume primarily engages with rituals preserved in manuscripts dated 900–1100 AD, concentrating on the functions of the texts for those who made, copied and used them, rather than interpreting them as signposts to the origins of western liturgy, or as stepping-stones in an ongoing historical process. There is an unusual level of engagement by each contributor with the work of others in the same volume, which is a testament to the genuinely collaborative approach of the two editors, Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton. The result is very much more than merely a collection of essays. The book begins and ends with chapters that lay out a vision for studying medieval liturgy productively (chs. 1, 3 and 10, by Helen Gittos, William T. Flynn and Carol Symes, respectively). I thoroughly recommend sending students at all levels to these chapters, for inspiration, advice and up-to-date bibliography. Gittos introduces the strategy (that underlies almost all the contributions) of exploring why particular texts were written down. She emphasises the importance of comparative analysis in order to make sense of medieval rituals. This is exemplified in several of the later chapters. Gittos further points out the importance of working iteratively with the evidence. As manuscripts are studied more closely, dating or provenance might shift, or new ideas emerge about the (sometimes complex) relationship between the dating of a manuscript and of its contents. Thus, secondary literature must always be treated with caution, while retaining value as a basis for current knowledge, another theme that returns later in the volume. Symes writes about the erratic survival of liturgical materials, with libelli as a particularly striking example, and about the lack of authoritative liturgical books right through the Middle Ages, which intersects with the very gradual shift from a primarily oral culture to one in which writing played a more central role. She also reminds us that there was much more non-Latin liturgical activity, and more non-clerical participation, than later Protestant narratives have led us to assume. Flynn summarises issues that chant-specialist musicologists have tended to focus on, and discusses recent work that he considers to bridge disciplines successfully. This includes holistic manuscript work; computer-aided chant analysis; analysis of textual grammar and rhetoric together with melody; and exemplary cultural histories of music that speak compellingly beyond musicology.