Easter Liturgy Research Articles

Der liturgische Exkurs in der Kirchengeschichte des Sokrates

Abstract As the longest of all the digressions in the Church History, the chapter on Easter liturgy (5,22) plays a crucial role in the work of the Christian church historian Socrates of Constantinople. This is the reason why it has been examined in several monographs on Socrates. For example, it has been shown that Socrates’ tone in this chapter is polemical and that he deals with a conflict within the church of the Novatianists. This contribution provides an analysis of the language Socrates uses and the rhetorical strategies he adopts, shedding light on the question of how Socrates displays Jewish and Christian and, among the latter, also Novatianist liturgical customs. In particular, it shows that Socrates downplays the tensions between the Novatianists in order to portray them as a unity and to bring most of the Novatianists closer to the Western church.

A LAST EASTER SEPULCHRE: THOMAS WEVER AND ST MARY’S CHURCH, TARRANT HINTON, DORSET

The defaced and probably unfinished Easter sepulchre at St Mary’s Church, Tarrant Hinton, in Dorset is exceptional in its scale and sophisticated renaissance decoration, in comparison to other sixteenth-century structures associated with contemporary Easter liturgy. Previous notice of it has been impeded by failure to assess properly the upper part of the monument, which new photography now renders accessible. This demonstrates a remarkable resemblance between its (defaced) angels and the bronze angels by Benedetto da Rovezzano being prepared at Westminster in the late 1520s for the tomb of Cardinal Wolsey; while the lower part of the structure displays influence from contemporary French decoration.This structure is assessed in the contexts of other monuments of the early sixteenth century intended to support a temporary Easter sepulchre and of what can be reconstructed of the career of the minor but wealthy cleric who was responsible for its erection. Thomas Wever MA (d. 1536) made additions to two of his rectories besides building substantial extensions on the north side of Tarrant Hinton church. It is suggested that both his building there and the Easter sepulchre itself are unfinished and were abandoned at his death as a result of his continued indebtedness. The sepulchre itself suggests a direction that English church decoration never took.

… nicht so, wie ich es mir erwartete: Der Rom-Aufenthalt Kaiser Franz’ I. von Österreich im Jahre 1819

In February 1819 the Austrian Emperor Francis I left his residence, Vienna, accompanied by his fourth wife Empress Carolina Augusta and a large entourage, for a six-month tour through Italy with stops in Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. This special journey is well documented in Francis I’s personal diaries, written during the trip. It was Rome that dominated the whole journey. Soon after starting the first preparations for travel, it became quite clear that the visit to the Eternal City would be a delicate matter because of long-lasting disputes between the Papal states and the Habsburg monarchy. Originally Emperor Francis I wanted to celebrate the Easter holidays (Settimana Santa) privately, but ultimately it turned into an official state visit with all the concomitant pomp and circumstance. The monarch completed an intense but diverse program, beginning with the Easter liturgy. Typically for his solid character, the religious solemnity did not impress him at all. More precisely, he found these festivities quite odd and disappointing. Following the traditional Grand Tour pattern, the Emperor enjoyed himself by visiting well-known Roman sights. He entertained himself by studying lesser-known places in Rome’s surroundings and liked to discover the local flora and fauna there. In particular, the Roman ancient buildings impressed him deeply. Meeting the Roman elite and aristocracy, Francis I became the centre of attention on many occasions. Furthermore, he also came into contact with exiled monarchs and met other aristocrats who were visiting Rome, e. g. the Duchess of Württemberg, with whom Francis finalized the marriage contract for his younger brother Archduke Joseph. Finally, numerous personal meetings between Pope Pius VII and Emperor Francis I solved religious and political disagreements, which finally lead to a friendlier relationship between Rome and Vienna.

Das Andere der Visitatio Sepulchri in Liturgie und Geistlichem Spiel

The visitatio sepulchri is an unusual, if not to say ‘strange’ immersion in the liturgy of Easter. The acting persons take roles and turn into ‘actors’. Their clothing and the liturgical instruments they use are turned into costumes and props. Liturgy’s hic et nunc is replaced by a narrative. This kind of ‘play’ is normally performed in the openly accessible part of a church; laymen thus had the chance to somehow participate in the plays. Medieval libri ordinarii prove that the visitatio sepulchri is more than ‘paraliturgy’ (as it has been called by Johannes Janota), which could be added to liturgy or alternatively left out, but it is a fully integral part of liturgy; it was compulsory, and even small parish churches obeyed to the rule and had a visitation sepulchri as part of their Easter liturgy.

Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality by Marvin Carlson

Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality by Marvin Carlson Elizabeth E. Tavares Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality. By Marvin Carlson. U of Michigan P, 2016. Cloth $60.00, 145 pages. In his recent monograph, Marvin Carlson develops the premise first established in The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (2003): that theatre capitalizes [End Page 144] on the memories of audiences to provide opportunities for meaning. The past lives of objects and the previous roles of actors ghost performances that follow. In this new monograph, Carlson argues that this hauntological feature is crucial when examining the tension between reality and imitation—a primary concern of modern and postmodern theatre. Using Hamlet's allusion to Socrates as an organizing conceit, each chapter considers the theatre's turn away from mimesis to the appropriation of the "real," including borrowing words, the body of the actor, the affordances of physical surroundings, the prop, and, eventually, the audience itself. While at first blush a study of "utilizing real words from the real world" may seem too all-encompassing, the first chapter effectively traces the evolution of documentary theatre from the living newspapers of the Russian Revolution to twentieth-century testimonial dramas (21). Citing examples from an international range of directors, special attention is paid to the Wooster Group and Tectonic Theatre. The initial intent of borrowing "real" words was overtly political: Utilizing found materials, troupes shifted their interest to structures of power (27). Carlson deftly traces the historical expanse of this tendency toward social justice themes from survivor testimony plays to the current fashion for reproducing literal slices of banal speech. Through two especially compelling examples, the second chapter considers how the body of the actor produces multiple levels of mediation between the "real" and stage worlds. Carlson argues that the nineteenth-century fascination with the celebrity female actor, particularly Sarah Bernhardt and Adelaide Ristori, was partly driven by a contrast between their stage and domestic lives. Contending that the on- and offstage actor produces a "feedback loop between life and theatre" (56), Carlson turns to the Wild West show where attendees were given to understand that "during the summer months [Wild Bill] Cody would return to the West to pursue his scouting to fight the Indians…and during the winter he would tour," which "provided a kind of authentication" (47). As in the borrowing of words, the borrowing of bodies was challenged by 1990s cultural theorists who argued it was impossible to present an uncompromised self if all identity was already a product of an acculturated set of codes. In response, a penchant for using nonactors has arisen and, by extension, so have concerns about exploitation. In order to think about the history and connotations of non-traditional performance spaces that have been co-opted, chapter 3 draws on pre-modern performance traditions, such as the Easter liturgy, to demonstrate the ways in which postmodern "realist" strategies frequently seem to return to un-realist earlier ones. Like the testimony drama's borrowing of words, the borrowing of places produced a cross-cultural trope of the passion play, evident in Vienna, across Egypt, Jerusalem, and even contemporary religious re-enactments by the Mormon Church. Where these early performances attempted to capitalize on the religious connotations of a man-made site, by the eighteenth century, experiments by Goethe and Marie Antoinette desired to make contact with the "real" by moving into ostensibly untouched, pastoral locales. This gave way to nineteenth-century stagings, especially of William Shakespeare's plays, that attempted to reflect "with greater and greater realistic accuracy the locations indicated in the dramatic text"—live rabbits and mossy stage included (66). These strategies anticipated what the [End Page 145] 1980s would eventually label site-specific theatre, not to be confused with the "part hobby, part recreation" amateur tradition of historical re-enactment prevalent in the United States (74). In his transhistorical and transcultural exploration, Carlson demonstrates that popular site-specific performances, returning to theatricalizing man-made spaces such as the factory and warehouse, are strategies for co-opting the "real," rather than revealing a certain objective truth (77). Chapter 4, on borrowing the pre-histories of props, is indebted to a...

A Multiplicity of Washing Rites and a Multiplicity of Experiences

If experience can be defined as the affectively charged interaction with the world by means of the body as agency or medium, various sites of such affectively charged interaction mapped on to the body may be fruitfully analysed to explain the operations of religion as discourse. Baptism is one such site. In fact, baptism as the shorthand for of collective noun denoting a spectrum of ritual practices is a particularly apposite example. Baptism as ritual practice has had a varied history, both in terms of originary context as well as interpretive or discursive trajectories. This essay primarily tracks two such significant trajectories: the one being baptismal practices as purification rites operating in socially ‘heterodox’ early Jewish and early Christian groups within an apocalyptic, dissociative framework; the other being ‘orthodox’ baptismal discourse as expressed in, for instance, Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catheceses. In the former, the strong affect of dissociation is coupled with visionary experiences, hence its embeddedness in apocalyptic trajectories with their strongly dismissive stance to the surrounding world. In the case of the latter, the dramatic performances of the Easter liturgy, arguably, created the experience of salvation and resurrection. In both instances, the intersection of ritual, bodily experience, religious discourse, and social imaginaire provides the explanatory framework for baptism as foundational ritual practice in the making and maintenance of religious discourse and its attendant experiential effects. In this sense, such is the argument pursued in the essay, baptism is a core facet of early Jewish and early Christian religious experience.

Stirring the Waters: Old Testament Baptismal Types in the Easter Liturgy

We entered the darkened church by candlelight while the cantor intoned, “Christ our light.” That space had been darkened since Holy Thursday when the symbols of Christian faith were removed, the Eu...

Liturgie en Letterkunde - �n �Herfs�-liturgie vir Paasfees in die Suidelike Halfrond

Liturgy and Literature � An Autumn liturgy for Easter in the Southern Hemisphere. The aim of this article was to explore possibilities regarding the liturgical inculturation of the Easter liturgy in the Southern Hemisphere. The Easter liturgy originated in the Northern Hemisphere, where it was and is celebrated during Spring with all its concomitant symbolism of new life. That symbolism seems to be lacking in the Easter liturgy in the Southern Hemisphere, where Easter occurs during Autumn. In order to address this issue an interdisciplinary exploration of the themes of both the Easter liturgy and the liturgical ordo was undertaken, as well as a study of Afrikaans poems about Autumn. An example of a liturgy making use of the ecumenical-protestant fourfold order of worship [ordinarium] and enriched with liturgical elements based on the poems studied here as well as some traditions relating to the Easter liturgy [proprium] is presented. As a whole this article serves as an example of how Liturgical Studies can seek alliances with other disciplines in order to address its own questions and for its own purposes.

The Passion of the Jews of Prague:The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody

Outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in late medieval cities were hardly rare. For that reason, among others, surviving records are often frustratingly brief and formulaic. Yet, in the case of the pogrom that devastated Prague's Jewish community on Easter 1389, we have an extraordinary source that has yet to receive a close reading. This account, supplementing numerous chronicle entries and a Hebrew poem of lament, is thePassio Iudeorum Pragensium, orPassion of the Jews of Prague—a polished literary text that parodies the gospel of Christ's Passion to celebrate the atrocity. In this article I will first reconstruct the history, background, and aftermath of the pogrom as far as possible, then interrogate thePassioas a scriptural and liturgical parody, for it has a great deal to teach us about the inner workings of medieval anti-Judaism. By “parody” I mean not a humorous work, but a virtuosic pastiche of authoritative texts, such as the Gospels and the Easter liturgy, that would have been known by heart to much of the intended audience. We may like to think of religious parodies as “daring” or “audacious,” seeing in them a progressive ideological force that challenges corrupt institutions, ridicules absurd beliefs, and pokes holes in the pious and the pompous. ButThe Passion of the Jews of Pragueshows that this was by no means always the case.

Karl Tamburr, The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval EnglandThe Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England. Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii+211.

<i>Karl Tamburr,</i> The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England<i>The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England</i>. Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii+211.

The Sound of Silence: Interpreting Mark 16:1–8 through the Centuries

The women's silence in response to the message of the “young man” at the tomb is a feature found only in Mark. Its omission by Matthew and Luke suggests that they found this element in the narrative problematic. Yet Mark's text has played a significant role in the Easter liturgy of the ancient church and beyond. The reception history of the narrative reveals both harmonization and discord.

&lt;i&gt;The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England Zbigniew Izydorczyk The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England. By Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii + 212; 18 illustrations. $85. Karl Tamburr’s book offers a collection of essays exploring the motif of the Harrowing of Hell in medieval English literature and art. The book is the fruit of the author’s life-long fascination with the tradition of Christ’s Descent into Hell, a once pivotal but now mostly neglected tenet of Christian belief. Tamburr convincingly demonstrates its centrality in popular medieval view of salvation and, with a wealth of illuminating detail, exposes the larger trends in its reception and treatment in the medieval England. The collection opens with a brief exposition of the ancient tradition of incorporating the themes, imagery, and typology of the Descent into Hell in liturgical celebrations, especially those connected with Easter. That tradition not only remained very much alive in the Middle Ages but was further expanded, as the fourteenth-century Latin liturgical play of the Harrowing of Hell from the Abbey of Barking clearly shows. The second chapter introduces two important themes of the Descent: the deliverance of the righteous souls and Christ the warrior-king. The author surveys early Christian sources for the two motifs and investigates their adaptations in visual arts and in selected Old English texts. Chapter 3 presents in-depth analyses of representations of the Descent in several Old English poems (Christ I, the Exeter Book Descent into Hell, Christ II, Christ and Satan, the seventh Blickling homily, etc.) and in Anglo-Saxon art. These nuanced readings reveal that, while acknowledging the historicity of the event, Old English writers tended to view the Descent as a nexus of typological, tropological, and eschatological meanings and as a focal point in “the larger, providential scheme of human history” (p. 102). The Harrowing took on for them “significance as a paradigm for the salvation of the individual Christian as well as an image of the redemption of the race as a whole” (p. 70). The fourth chapter discusses later medieval representations of the Harrowing, inspired—directly or indirectly—by the Gospel of Nicodemus. In contrast to their Anglo-Saxon antecedents, these later depictions emphasize the human dimension of Christ’s salvific work and usually occur in the context of other episodes from his life. Since the dramatic potential of the Gospel of Nicodemus was most fully realized in medieval plays, the bulk of this chapter is devoted to medieval English drama, although other texts (e.g., Piers Plowman) also receive some attention. Recognizing that not all later medieval versions of the Harrowing were influenced by the Gospel of Nicodemus, the fifth chapter investigates several independent, often highly creative and idiosyncratic depictions of the Harrowing, both visual (psalters) and textual (e.g., Dunbar’s “Done is the battell on the dragon black,” St. Erkenwald, Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Digby play of Mary Magdalene, and Julian of Norwich’s Showings). The final, sixth chapter traces the post-medieval decline of the Descent into Hell as a tenet of belief, challenged by Reformation and downplayed by Counter-Reformation, and the demise of the Harrowing of Hell as a literary motif, making its last stand in the poetry of Edmund Spenser. Since the book is a collection of “interrelated essays” (p. ix) rather than a fully integrated monograph, it does not always provide full background information for the sometimes complex uses of the motif. A reader might have appreciated, for instance, a brief, strategic exposition of medieval theologians’ views on the Descent (like the exposition of the sixteenth-century attitudes that opens chapter [End Page 533] 6), or a brief summary of the relevant theories of redemption. As it is, the format of the book makes such information, given piecemeal in several places in the text, rather difficult to locate. Because the essays were written over a period of several years, the opening remarks on “The Harrowing of Hell and the Easter Liturgy” and, more generally, the treatment of patristic sources might benefit from some bibliographic updating. While MacCulloch’s 1930 study remains useful because of its thematic approach, R. Gounelle’s La...

Herrschaftspraxis und soziale Ordnungen im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Ernst Schubert zum Gedenken (review)

Herrschaftspraxis und soziale Ordnungen im Mittelalter und in der fruhen Neuzeit. Ernst Schubert zum Gedenken. Edited by Peter Aufgebauer and Christine van den Heuvel. [Veroffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission fur Nieder Sachsen und Bremen, 232.] (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung Verlag. 2006. Pp. 591) The late Ernst Schubert, Professor for the History of Lower Saxony at the University of Gottingen, served simultaneously as the Director of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen. This collection of thirty-one essays, gathered originally for a sixty-fifth birthday Festschrift, is published now as a memorial volume upon the untimely death of the honoree. The book is divided into five sections: aside from two appendices listing the dissertations directed by Schubert and his published works, the other sections arrange the contributions into four loose thematic groupings that reflect Schubert's own research interests and agenda: i.e., the constitutional and social history of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire, especially the dialectic between local/regional and imperial history, exemplified particularly by cases from the North German realm. Chronologically, the essays range from the Carolingian to the nineteenth century, mirroring the expertise of a professor of Landesgeschichte in the German universities: narrow geographic focus a la longue duree. A first group of seven essays discuss the theme King and Empire. Four of these deal with the Middle Ages: Heinz Thomas analyzes the flag symbolisms of Emperor Heinrich VIPs journey to Rome; Frank Rexroth analyzes the forced abdication of Adolf von Nassau using the Dominican Chronicle of Colmar; Beate Schuster discusses a work by the twelfth-century writer Odo of Deuil, a pupil of abbe Suger, on the morality of the model ruler; Bernhard Schimmelpfennig surveys the German Pontificale to discuss the image of the German ecclesiastical princes. Peter Aufgebauer's contribution, on the problem of calendar precision and Easter liturgy, is particularly instructive, in that he traces the discussion from Roger Bacon in 1267 to the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582. The interplay between regional and imperial politics is expertly analyzed by Gerd Steinwascher in his study of the relationship between the county of Oldenburg and the Emperor from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. A similar theme is echoed in Christine van den Heuvel's contribution on the politics of Hannover and the imperial election of 1764. Another seven essays constitute the second section Princes and Subjects. The two articles by Heinrich Schmidt and Hajo van Lengen focus on the Friesian region in the fifteenth century; Wilhelm Janssen analyzes the conflict between the ecclesiastical enclave of Xanten and the Lord of BronkhorstBatenburg in the late fourteenth century; Dieter Brosius analyzes the relationship between territorial lord and urban jurisprudence, using the court records of the territorial town Dannenberger in the sixteenth century; Werner Buchholz argues for the strong resistance to the Protestant Reformation in Sweden between 1527 and 1617, a religious innovation imposed from above with the aim to expand royal power; Gunther Scheel interprets the ceremonies associated with the visit of the Duchess of Mecldenburg-Schwering to Hannover in 1679; and Rudolf Endres offers a study of the late seventeenth-century planned town St. …

You Can't Be Serious!

Jim Cotter frames this paper in the form of a one-sided conversation with Michael Vasey about two particular phrases that Vasey was responsible for in the current Anglican liturgy. The first comes from the baptismal rite and talks of the candidate submitting themselves to Christ as Lord. By reference to marriage and other liturgical contexts, Cotter asks whether this is an appropriate image for the twenty-first century, especially in the light of the debate about sexual abuse. The second phrase is taken from the Easter liturgy and talks of light invading the darkness. Once again Cotter challenges the military implications of this language and the negative associations that such a phrase gives to ‘darkness’ Cotter makes a call for far more careful reflection on the use of language in worship and offers a number of alternative suggestions of his own.

La célébration de Pâques d'après les littératures homilétiques quarto-décimane du deuxième siècle et pseudo-chrysostomienne du quatrième

This article aims at tracing back the genesis and development of the Christian ritual of Easter as reflected in the liturgy of the Early Church. The research is carried out through the information provided by Asian and pseudo-Chrysostomian homilies of the 2nd and 4th centuries which reveal the twofold problematics entailed by the catechetical consequences of the theological interpretation of the mystery and by the embodiment of the corresponding didactics into Easter liturgy

The Malevolent God and Paul Celan’s “Tenebrae”

The essay examines one of the most frequently discussed poems of Celan and has two focuses. It seeks to understand the reasons for the quite disparate interpretations of this poem, and finds them in the reluctance of many interpreters to give due weight to Celan–s attack on both the Christian and the Jewish God. To exemplify this rejection of God and of Christianity (which verges on the blasphemous), Celan employs the traditional topos of the malevolent God. The essay tries also, on the way to this insight, to illuminate the intertextual character of the poem: the many allusions to the Old Testament, to the Odyssey, to the Easter liturgy.

Religion after Ceausescu

Easter, 1990, was the first time that the greatest Christian festival could be openly celebrated in Romania for forty years. The coincidence of the Orthodox and Western calendars gave especial significance to the celebrations of the Easter Vigil in both Patriarchal and Catholic cathedrals in Bucharest and in churches throughout the capital and elsewhere. Romanian television celebrated the feast as it had Christmas, treating viewers to the incongruous sight of the presenters, all familiar faces from the past, surrounded by Easter eggs, intoning throughout the weekend, even before the weather forecast: ‘Hristos invitat’ (Christ is risen).Although the joy of the crowds of worshippers able to process freely for the first time at midnight was common to all denominations, disputes about the relationship between Church and State under the Communist regime bedevilled the atmosphere. Shortly before Easter, more than forty leading intellectuals issued a petition calling upon the Patriarch Teoctist to abstain from celebrating the Easter liturgy. Teoctist had already abdicated once before in January after fierce criticisms of his compliant behaviour under Ceausescu and most particularly for his public congratulations to the Conducator for his stern measures to repress the ‘hooligans’ in Timiscara before Christmas. Teoctist’s abdication had placed the Orthodox Church in a dilemma, since his natural successor, the Metropolitan Antonius of Sibiu, had distinguished himself still more vigorously than the Patriarch when it came to rendering unto Ceausescu. For instance, Antonius was an indefatigable traveller to the West always ready to deny that the programme of ‘systemization’ had led to the demolition of churches and monasteries, insisting it had affected only ‘redundant’ buildings, of which there were apparently at least twenty-four, including some of the most ancient, in Bucharest—all concentrated in the area designated as the new Civic Centre containing Ceausescu’s Palace of the People.

Signs of the Cross: Cruciform Symbolism In Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Willehalm

(1983). Signs of the Cross: Cruciform Symbolism In Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Willehalm. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 33-39.

The Iconography of the Felix Culpa

It is still some hours before dawn. In the dark church the congregation assembles for the crowning moment of the Christian year. The Easter liturgy of the mediaeval Church is beginning. In the churchyard outside a small group looks on as fire is struck from a flint to light a flame. At the church door the priests take up their place to receive the new flame, which is blessed in remembrance of the pillar of fire that led Moses out of Egypt, of the light of the world, and of the eternal glory of heaven. The flame is used to ignite the paschal candle, which moves to the front of the church in procession. The light from this candle breaks the darkness like the new light from the risen Christ. The deacon begins to chant the Exultet: "Exultet iam angelica turba. . . ." In the hymn he proclaims this night as the night our fathers were led out of Egypt. This is the night the pillar of fire dispelled the darkness of sin. This is the night in which Christians, separated from the murk of sin, are restored to grace. This holy night dispels all evil. Let this Easter candle mingle with the lights of heaven to dispel the darkness of this night. At the climax of the hymn, in the midst of such exalted paradoxes he exclaims:

Langland’s Bells of the Resurrection and the Easter Liturgy

Langland’s Bells of the Resurrection and the Easter Liturgy