Liturgical Processions Research Articles

The Historical Context of Boat Processions in Adriatic Maritime Pilgrimages

In this article, we argue that the different ritual structures of maritime pilgrimages result from the different historical backgrounds of each site. We have focused on two maritime pilgrimage sites in the Adriatic Sea: Nin, in contemporary Croatia (Northern Dalmatia), and Perast, in contemporary Montenegro (Kotor Bay). We compared these two locations and maritime pilgrimage processions because they have similar historical backgrounds (both were under Venice’s significant influence), and comparable boat processions with similar structural elements. We concluded that multilayered customs, consisting of diverse popular traditions, were fused in these pilgrimages through ecclesiastical (para)liturgical processions. Based on material presented in this article, we concluded that the Nin and Perast elites drew on local traditions and developed maritime pilgrimage boat processions in order to draw out their political, religious, social, and economic potentials.

The Heavenly Field: A Reconsideration of Mother Earth in the Æcerbot Rite

The Heavenly Field: A Reconsideration of Mother Earth in the <i>Æcerbot</i> Rite

Dancing in the Streets of Byzantine Constantinople

This article evaluates the significance of processions in Byzantine Constantinople and the role of dancing within them. Evidence is drawn from literary sources concerning imperial, church-sponsored, guild, hippodrome and more spontaneous urban processions, as well as from material culture. Medieval Constantinople saw a large number of processions, perhaps two a week, and they traversed all areas of the city. They were noisy affairs, accompanied by chanting, acclamations and, often, musical noise, so that even when they were not directly visible, they were audible more or less everywhere in the city. Dancing was incorporated in all but liturgical processions (though it may also have been part of these, on occasion). Processions could create a sense of urban unity, or become expressions of conflict: audience participation was normal and sometimes violent. Hence one key-though unofficial-the role played by processions in the Byzantine capital was to give voice to the urban population.

Processions in Byzantine Constantinople: the evidence from the Dresden A104

This paper discusses supplicatory liturgical processions (litae) and their routes in eleventh-century Constantinople by examining a hitherto neglected source; the eleventh-century Praxapostolos Dresden A104. References to supplicatory processions found in this source are examined in comparison with one of the most important sources on Byzantine ceremonial: the tenth-century kanonarion-synaxarion known as the Typikon of the Great Church. By comparing the evidence relating to the use of sites within the city during commemorations that included a procession in these two sources it is possible to draw some conclusions in terms of the way the litanic landscape changed between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The paper aims to present new evidence relating to the way annually commemorative processions were performed in Byzantine Constantinople.

Religious and Cultural Meanings in the Lighting of the Worship Room of the Denpasar Holy Spirit Cathedral in Bali from the People's Perception

In Catholic teaching, light is a fundamental design element. The symbolic function of light in the worship space illustrates the relationship between humans and the Creator. The Holy Spirit Cathedral Denpasar building is designed to be able to facilitate worship activities in conveying religious and cultural meaning through the presence of its lighting design. This meaning plays a significant role in shaping the atmosphere of the sacred space that is felt by the people when the liturgical procession takes place. This study aims to understand the role of light in the worship space of the Holy Spirit Cathedral Denpasar in Bali to be understood by the people. The data collection technique used was in the form of observation at the Holy Spirit Cathedral Denpasar, when interviews and questionnaires were distributed to the people and priests as space users. The sampling technique of the study is purposive sampling on certain subject groups, namely Catholics with Balinese ethnicity and non-Balinese ethnicities aged over 17 years. Differential Semantic measurement scale is used to tabulate field data obtained from distributing questionnaires to respondents. The results of this study indicate that the presence of light in the Denpasar Holy Spirit Cathedral Church can communicate well the religious meaning and cultural meaning that the church wants to convey. Thus, the people can feel the spiritual experiences and actively participate when following the course of the worship procession Keywords: Balinese Culture, Artificial Light, Holy Spirit Cathedral Church Denpasar, Meaning DOI: 10.7176/ADS/100-03 Publication date: April 30 th 2022

Liturgical wooden carved cross from the collection of the Russian Icon Museum

The paper considers a carved priestly cross of the XIX century from the representative collection of Ethiopian art of the Russian Icon Museum. This is one of the typical Ethiopian crosses with a characteristic rhomboid shape, with the image on the front side of the liturgical procession and the icon of the Mother of God, and ornamented on the back with a braided pattern with cross-shaped ornaments woven into it. The image of the dancing participants of the liturgical procession with drums and sistra represents a unique fusion of different traditions, the influence of the Old Testament tradition was manifested in the symbolic image of tabot.

Downside MS 61166 and the Processional Liturgy of Poissy

Downside 61166 is a very small manuscript processional – a highly portable book of chants and music for liturgical processions. The present article contains the first full description of Downside 61166 and demonstrates for the first time that it was written for the Dominican nuns of the Priory of Saint Louis, Poissy. Well over 30 other late-medieval processionals from Poissy are known to survive, and this unassuming little Downside manuscript is therefore part of an important corpus of material, promising rich and detailed evidence for the evolution of liturgical text and practice within a female monastic context.

Программные основы первоначальной фресковой декорации северо-западного помещения Владычной палаты (кельи Иоанна) в Новгородском кремле

The survived murals of the Vladychnaia Chamber despite their fragmented state can help to understand ideas and images which inspired the Novgorod archbishop Euthymius in his political and ecclesiastical activities just before the turning point in the history of Velikii Novgorod. In accordance with the structure and functions of architectural spaces of the Chamber, these frescoes arranged the ceremonial preparations for the episcopal services, organized as a solemn transition to the cathedral. Obviously, the sequence and ideological content of the fresco compositions can shed light on the purpose and meaning of the various rooms and halls of this architectural complex. The article discusses the decoration of the “Cell of ArchbishopIoann” — the room, where the archbishop, most probably, spiritually prepared for the liturgy and started the liturgical procession to the Cathedral. The image of two archangels overlying the entrance portal, testify of the sacral significance of this room, most probably the private praying chapel of archbishop. The frescoes in the niches of the east wall inside the Ioann’s Cell consist of the image of “St. Sophia the Divine Wisdom” and a fragment of the fresco depicting a complicated architectural scene. The research argues that this fragment highly likely is a part of the“Crucifixion” thematically related to the image of St. Sophia the Wisdom. Both had close affinities in their compositional structure as well as in their theological content. The iconography of the fresco “Sophia the Divine Wisdom” in the Cell represents an early type which appeared in the first decades of the 15th century and formed outside Novgorod. Thus it anticipates the iconographic variant of the famous icon that appeared in the St. Sophia Cathedral about the end of 15th century and is known as “Novgorodian”.

Historiografía sobre la monodia y las procesiones litúrgicas en Aragón en la Baja Edad Media y su relación con los libros litúrgicos

Ante la dificultad que supondría realizar una reconstrucción de la historia de Aragón en la Baja Edad Media que comprendiera aspectos de la historia de la música, del libro litúrgico, de la liturgia y de los depósitos documentales durante los siglos XIV y XV y sus límites de transición, se propone una revisión historiográfica que incluya aspectos relacionados con el estudio de la monodia y las procesiones litúrgicas en Aragón en la Baja Edad Media en relación a los libros litúrgicos.

PLAZAS AND PROCESSIONAL PATHS IN TIWANAKU TEMPLES: DIVERGENCE, CONVERGENCE, AND ENCOUNTER AT OMO M10, MOQUEGUA, PERU

Reconstructing access patterns, in particular processional and liturgical movement in ceremonial architecture, can illuminate social processes within expansive states. Extensive excavations from 2010–2012 in the uniquely preserved Tiwanaku temple at the Omo M10 site in Moquegua, Peru (ca. AD 500–1100), shed new light on connectedness and access patterns of the temple. Extensive areal excavations confirm past interpretations of a central axial series of doorways and staircases presided over by stelae and U-shaped, altar-like structures leading from public plazas to the sunken court and a central shrine. However, new findings revealed separate lateral pathways through the structure, which suggest liturgical processions to walled patio groups that were isolated from the central axis. We posit that these small patios and their roofed chambers may have functioned as chapels for distinct groups or pluralistic cultic activities that were separate from those of the central axis. Implications for Tiwanaku social structure are studied in light of other examples of triple entryways in Tiwanaku monumental architecture, and Kolata's suggestion of “Taypi” as a structural amalgam of a center and complementary halves, with implications of mediation and bilateral complementarity between ethnicities, genders, moieties, or other pluralistic entities within Tiwanaku state and society.

Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America by Karoline P. Cook

Reviewed by: Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America by Karoline P. Cook Nabil Matar (bio) Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America karoline p. cook Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 259 pp. This book has been very much needed. As Karoline P. Cook points out, scholarly studies on the Moriscos in English have been limited, and even more so in regard to Moriscos in the New World. Cook observes that there has been a vast amount of research on the conversos in America, but very little on the Moriscos, excepting works by Louis Cardaillac, Miguel de Epalza, and her own published articles. With this book, the need for a study of the Moriscos' arrival and conditions in American begins to be filled. The subject is vast, the archive is extensive, and the opportunity for scholars to continue what Cook has so ably started should be attractive. The book focuses on the Moriscos from the sixteenth century, when the Moriscos were "created" and began the legal and illegal crossings to the Spanish possessions in America, to the mass expulsion of 1609–14, which Cook explains was seen by Spaniards as the completion of the reconquest. In the first two chapters, Cook describes the beginnings of Morisco mobility and settlement, relying on extensive archives in Spain, Peru, and Mexico, along with depositories in the United States. She shows the challenges that Spanish authorities faced in regard to the Moriscos, and the Moriscos' own challenges in adapting, or failing to adapt, to the triangulation of Spanish-Morisco-Indian in the New World. After all, as Cook observes, the Santiago Matamoros crossed the Atlantic and became a fixture of carnivals and liturgical processions. In this context, the discussion of Morisco history would have benefited from Arabic sources, some of which are available in English translation. There are numerous firsthand accounts from the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century that show not only the manner in which Moriscos viewed their memory of, and relationship to, Spain but also describe, in their own words, the manner in which they were received by their North African co-religionists. As a scholar deeply aware of the complexity of her subject, Cook begins and ends many of her chapters with questions. Who was a Morisco, she asks, because there is no easy answer. Was the designation ethnic, religious, cultural, professional, or what? Was the Morisco a North African? Or a crypto-Muslim? Or a speaker of Arabic? Or a healer? Or one who dressed [End Page 268] differently? Or iconoclastic, like a Protestant? Are they to be understood by their own definition of themselves or by the way in which "white European" Spaniards described them? After all, in the Arabic that the Moriscos of North Africa used, they never referred to themselves as "Moriscos"; rather, they were Andalusiyyun (Andalusians), defining themselves by geography rather than by the ethnoreligious designation of "little Moors." And why did many Moriscos want to go to America, sometimes using false licenses, in defiance of royal decrees and colonial policies? While enslaved Moriscos had no choice in going—and Moriscos were as enslaved as Indians—why did free Moriscos venture to New Spain? Did they think there would be less discrimination from the church there? And how were Moriscas viewed since a good amount about their history appears in the confessions and interrogations of women? Cook addresses these questions systematically, appealing to multiple trial records, chronicles, and church records. She examines the variety of Morisco practitioners and the long history of Morisco association with magic, showing how traditions and customs crossed from the Iberian Peninsula to Central and South America. The association of Moriscos with "superstition" had been widely used in Spain to indict them as secret Muslims, and in the New World, the offices of the Inquisition as well as testimonials from witnesses continued to be used. At the same time, Moriscos raised silkworms and produced silk, and sometimes acted as healers and diviners. Cook dedicates various chapters to these labor divisions as she configures the Morisco identity from as many angles as possible. The strictures placed on Moriscos were necessary because of the conversionary nature of...

The Medieval Inchinata Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the nascent independent communes of central Italy expressed a new sense of civic identity through the staging of elaborate public liturgical processions that shaped and were shaped by local mythology and idiomatic urban landscapes. The Medieval Inchinata Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune examines Tivoli's Inchinata procession, which continues to circle the city every year on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption. Reconstructing the route and performance of the medieval Inchinata through textual, topographical, and archaeological data, Rebekah Perry argues that the procession evolved as an adaptation of “official” liturgical rites introduced by Tivoli's rival Rome to a native apotropaic ritual and local narratives embedded in the city's topography. Through the cosmographical choreography of the procession, the young municipality may have used this amalgamation to invoke the New Jerusalem as an appeal to divine authority for the right to self-rule.

The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages by Hendrik W. Dey

Reviewed by: The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages by Hendrik W. Dey David K. Pettegrew Hendrik W. Dey The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 Pp. 296. $99.00. This is a bold, ambitious, and innovative work. In just 250 pages of text, Dey offers a wide-ranging survey of the transformation of the ancient city and the persistence of late antique urban forms from the third to ninth centuries. He does so by presenting a vast array of evidence from regions as distant as Arabia and Germany that shows the centrality of colonnaded avenues and processional ceremonies in post-antique urban centers. Porticated streets, Dey argues, were the common stages for expressions of civic authority in late antiquity, and their development, elaboration, and maintenance well into the early middle ages point to the continuity of the urban habit and civilization itself. Dey’s argument is built on the recognition of three predominant patterns of ancient cities: patronage, processional ceremonies, and linear architectural schemes—which together came to form an essential expression of urban topography in late antiquity. As emperors multiplied after the establishment of the Tetrarchy and created new capitals, they increasingly sponsored the construction of colonnaded avenues for staging ceremonies such as the adventus. Ceremonial processions from city gate to palace along crowd-lined avenues functioned to create distance, awe, and authority between the potentates and their acclaiming publics (Chapter Two). Other agents of power adopted this pattern in the fourth to sixth centuries by constructing and embellishing porticated streets and the symbolic monuments between or along them, such as city gates, commemorative arches, palaces, baths, circuses, and theaters. Ecclesiastical authorities especially partnered with secular powers to commission episcopal residences, cathedrals, and significant extramural churches, and to stage liturgical processions and the translation of relics along porticated avenues (Chapter Three). This new architecture of power persisted in most regions of the former Roman Empire, including the western Germanic kingdoms, even into the murky seventh and eighth centuries, when cities were materially poorer, smaller, and less connected, and when power concentrated among an even smaller class of ecclesiastical and political elite. Despite the sharp decline in new urban investments, porticated colonnades continued to be maintained for public procession; Dey presents evidence that encroachment and demonumentalization date to the ninth century or later (Chapter Four). Indeed, Dey makes the case that monastic centers and palace-centers of Carolingian Francia (e.g., Centula and Aachen) dating to the late eighth and early ninth centuries were modeled on the colonnaded topography still prominent in Christian capitals such as Jerusalem, Rome, and Constantinople (Chapter Five). Porticated avenues remained important as far as (and as long as) emperors, kings, bishops, patrarichs, and state officials needed to express their authority through ceremonial processions. The Afterlife of the Roman City is compelling because its integration of multiple and diverse sources (textual, material, and iconographic) creates a broad [End Page 162] and consistent picture of a persisting urban topography, ceremony, and authority, despite the very real gaps in evidence. The author’s extensive coverage gives him liberty to pivot from detailed, technical descriptions of urban topography to colorful stories about specific ceremonial processions to discussions of the image or idea of cities. Swept along by the lucid presentation of the material, the reader can easily forget that, apart from a few cases like the fascinating inscribed acclamations from late antique Ephesus, the evidence of architecture (a colonnaded avenue) and ceremony (e.g., adventus) rarely aligns for the same contemporary urban context. Dey’s general and broad picture of persistence, moreover, raises a number of questions about real differences in contexts across space and time. For example, how did the subtle differences in late antique urban topography speak to distinct evolutions of ceremony between regions and cities over six centuries? What did the absence of porticated avenues in cities indicate about authority and its expression in those urban centers? And how did the development of porticated streets and ecclesiastical ceremonies in cities relate to the development of the (distinctly linear) early Christian...

‘Cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce’: Singing and Community in the Commedia

This essay argues that in the Commedia song becomes a key means of shaping and expressing modes of communal being. The singing of In exitu Israel that marks the souls’ arrival in Purgatorio and the performance of the Gloria that marks each soul’s departure create multiple communities that stretch across time and space to encompass the purgatorial souls, the angelic hosts, and even the readers of the poem. I examine contemporary liturgical practices to suggest that the souls’ sung arrival into purgatory evokes a particular liturgical procession and that Dante’s treatment of word, music, and movement offers the reader an opportunity to partake in the communal dynamics of Purgatorio.

Praying with the senses: Examples of icon devotion and the sensory experience in medieval and early modern Balkans

This paper discusses sensory experience in the practice of devotion of two highly venerated icons in medieval and Early Modern Balkans: the mosaic icon of the Virgin Hodegetria from the monastery of Chilandar and the icon of Gospa of Skrpjela (Our Lady of the Reef) from the Bay of Kotor. Although part of two different, albeit historically intertwined and perpetually connected cultural and liturgical spheres, icon veneration in both the Orthodox and the Catholic community of the broader Mediterranean world and the Balkans in medieval and Early Modern times shares the same source. It relies on the traditional Byzantine manner of icon veneration. This is particularly true of highly venerated and often miracle working images of the Mother of God, identity markers of political, social and religious entities, objects of private devotion as well as performative objects around which are centered public rituals of liturgical processions and ephemeral spectacles.

Imitatio Rerum: Sacred Objects in the St. Giles’s Hospital Processional

In the late fourteenth-century Processional (London, British Library, MS Add. 57534) made for St. Giles’s Hospital, Norwich, nine brightly colored paintings describe a series of liturgical processions in exceptional detail. The manuscript’s images are, however, most remarkable for what they do not render visible: the human figures who enacted each ritual performance. In the Processional’s paintings the beholder is instead offered a vision of liturgy as an assembly of vasa sacra and ornamenta, invested with considerable authority, even agency, by the artist’s brush. This essay examines how the paintings in the St. Giles’s Hospital Processional represent sacred objects not as the “props” of Christian ritual but as the subject of ritual and the subjects of ritual action. Attending to the imbrication of objecthood and subjecthood in the Processional’s text and images, the essay elucidates the Processional’s participation in a powerful medieval tradition of imitatio rerum: the refashioning of subjectivity after the model of things.

:Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe

By enabling the spiritual or ineffable to register as visible and palpable, ceremonies perform the essential cultural work of ensuring continuity of belief and practice across generations. In the process, each ceremony becomes a visual drama with highly scripted acts, movements, and rhythms. Unlike anthropologists in the field, scholars of the medieval and early modern world cannot witness ceremonies - the processions, dramas, rituals, and liturgies - and their choreography, or how they engaged with time and space. Denied the possibility of personal observation, how are historians to understand ceremonies such as a Catholic liturgical procession moving through a medieval town or the triumphal entry of a Renaissance ruler into a subjected city? Fortunately, considerable documentary, visual, and material evidence survives from Europe to help scholars frame necessary questions about pre-modern ceremonies. The essayists in this volume identify and recover the excitement and dynamism that characterized ceremonial culture in pre-modern Europe. Each turns to key issues: the relation between public and private space, the development of fully-realized dramas and rituals from earlier forms, and the semiotic code that ceremonies manifested to their audiences. Their subjects include the Adventus procession at Chartres; Epiphany and Palm Sunday rituals in medieval Moscow; the staged entry of the future Emperor Charles V into Bruges in 1515; and ceremonies in Italian Renaissance cities interpreted through the lens of Renaissance optical theory. What emerges from each essay is a deeper understanding that any ceremony is, finally, an attempt to close the divide between abstract and literal, ideal and actual.

Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (review)

Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. By Robert S. Nelson. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 278, 11 color plates. $65.00.) This fascinating investigation of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul amasses a wealth of documentation-some of it well known and some of it new-to document and assess how it became a modern icon. It focuses on the people, writings, and illustrations that illuminate this history. Intelligently and beautifully written, and well produced, with 119 figures and ten color plates, the important monograph of the Byzantine art historian Robert S. Nelson should appeal to the scholar and the general reader alike. Nelson begins his inquiry with the completion of the last major restoration of the building from 1847 to 1849 by the Swiss architects, the Fossati brothers, and concludes around 1950, a rather arbitrary date, as he admits. But the century of his overview was crucial for the transformation of Hagia Sophia as artifact of the past-first as the cathedral and patriarchal church of Constantinople and then as the sultan's and the caliph's principal mosque Aya Sofya, into a monument of the present-since 1934 a museum seen by virtually all visitors to the city. We learn about the critics, poets, archeologists, architects, illustrators, photographers, philanthropists, government officials, and religious congregations who are tied to the fabric of Hagia Sophia's modern reception. The monograph is selective, focusing upon the European and American reception of the building, and excluding interpretations by Turks of the late Sultanate and early Republic, modern Greeks (except for some Greek Orthodox communities who migrated to the United States and built churches), and Orthodox Christians in late Czarist and early Soviet Russia. Nelson's narrative unfolds in eight chapters. In Chapter One he sketches the lines of the Early Byzantine church of the sixth century, its post-Iconoclastic mosaic decoration, and the liturgical processions associated with the building. Then he outlines the scornful attitudes about or neglect of the building by late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers. A few writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, however, offered positive appraisals of Hagia Sophia. For example, in her popular illustrated travel book The Beauties of the Bosphorus (London, 1838), Miss Julia Pardoe,who gained admittance to Hagia Sophia, termed it an architectural wonder (p. 63). Chapter Two analyzes how certain scholars and architects in Germany, France, and England appropriated Byzantine architecture in the service of their respective countries. The next chapter discusses the sympathetic attitude toward Byzantine architecture in the writings of John Ruskin and how Ruskin made it relevant to Victorian building. No matter that Ruskin never visited Constantinople and based his grasp of Byzantine architecture on Venice, especially on architectural sculpture and mosaics in San Marco inVenice.Yet his The Stones of Venice (1851-1853J) launched a general reappraisal of Byzantine architecture in general and Hagia Sophia in particular. Chapter Four is to my mind the most important in the book. In the second half of the nineteenth century both photographic images of the building and its first scholarly studies appeared.The latter are well known in academic circles, but the photographs, engravings, and other reproductions gathered by Nelson are less familiar. The superhero of this period was the British artist James Robertson, who moved to Constantinople in 1841 to modernize the Ottoman mint and who within a decade had taken up photography. …

Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life by Nicholas M. Healy

498 BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life. By NICHOLAS M. HEALY. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 168. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 07546 -1472-7. In his classic The Nature of Doctrine: Toward a Post-Liberal Theology, George Lindbeck distinguished between a cognitivist, an experiential-expressivist , and a cultural-linguistic understanding of Christian doctrine. The major approaches to the interpretation of the thought ofThomas Aquinas over the past century can be seen to correspond, mutatis mutandis, to these categories. The neo-Scholastic school-represented by Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Journet, and in recent times, Ralph Mcinerny and John Wippel-presents a rather cognitivist version of Aquinas, stressing the philosophical doctrine that can be distilled from Thomas's oeuvre. The Transcendental Thomist schoolinaugurated by Marechal and Rousselot and brought to prominence by Lotz, Rahner, and Lonergan--offers a more experiential-expressivist reading of Thomas, emphasizing the subjective sensibilities that inform and condition his teaching. In the last couple of decades, a third school has emerged, one that places emphasis neither on propositions nor underlying experience, but rather on the densely textured and unique world that the writings ofAquinas create and on the form of life that made them possible. This approach, which might be styled cultural-linguistic or postliberal, is on vivid display in Nicholas Healy's Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life. A concern of postliberal Thomists such as Healy is that both neo-Scholasticism and Transcendental Thomism, in their preoccupation to ground the claims of faith in something more elemental (truths arrived at through philosophical reason for the former and universally available experience for the latter), are essentially modernisms, which allow the content of revelation to be marginalized or muted. But Thomas Aquinas was not a modern foundationalist and his principal interlocutor was not the skeptical nonbeliever; hence a new path ofinterpretation-more in line with the assumptions and preoccupations of Thomas's time-must be essayed. It is of supreme importance for Healy that Aquinas was a Dominican, a member of the Order of Preachers, charged with the task of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. Though Karl Barth and many others have complained that Thomas's Christology is incidental to his system, Healy argues throughout his book that evangelical proclamation is, in point of fact, the organizing and animating principle of Thomas's intellectual work. He agrees with Torrell that Aquinas is best read as a Christian spiritual master. Part of the problem is that contemporary interpreters of the Angelic Doctor, saddled as they are with foundationalist assumptions, tend to believe that what comes first is what is most important. Thus because Thomas discusses God in a largely philosophical way in the first part of the Summa Theologiae and gets to a consideration of Jesus Christ only in the third part, it appears as though the rational account provides the ground, setting, and context for the Christology. Healy suggests that this is to have it precisely backward, to forget that the BOOK REVIEWS 499 Thomas's masterpiece is structured along the lines of a liturgical procession in which the most significant players come, not at the beginning, but at the end. When we follow Healy's examination ofAquinas's Christology, a key feature emerges with special clarity. In accord with the formula of Chalcedon, Thomas affirms that divinity and humanity come together in Jesus in a noncompetitive but asymmetrical manner, since the natures are joined "without mixing, mingling, or confusion" but are embedded, so to speak, in the unity of the divine person of the Logos. The creaturely is not overwhelmed, but rather enhanced, by the proximity of the divine, and this noncompetitiveness is guaranteed through the power and primacy of the divine. What is ruled out by this Christology is a view that would either construe God and the creaturely as rivals or allow God to be in any sense positioned by the creaturely. This dynamic understanding of Jesus, which contains elements of what contemporary theologians would call both "high" and "low" Christology, provides, on Healy's reading, the hermeneutical lens for reading the whole of Aquinas's evangelical work. The Christological lens is particularly clarifying in regard to...

Res et verba in der Renaissance by Eckhard Kessler , Ian Maclean (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1075 in the middle of a liturgical procession through the streets of Rome. Since then, the tale continues, papal processions have made a detour to avoid the spot, now marked by a statue, and it has been a fixed part of the investiture ritual that prospective popes must sit on a chair with a hole in its seat, while the 'lowest ofthe deacons' verifies his gender by means ofa medical examination conducted from underneath. The resulting term 'pontificals' as a euphemism formale pudenda deserves to have wider currency. In this study, originally published as La Papessejeanne (Paris: Aubier, 1988), Alain Boureau investigates the thirteenth-century origins of this myth with painstaking attention to detail. He begins with the chairs, which still exist; they are a magnificent pair of marble bathing chairs, or just possibly birthing chairs, which were presumably part of the furnishings of the Lateran when it was an imperial palace. Boureau argues that they were used in the investiture ceremony because their shape could be seen as an echo of the folding curule chairs which were a symbol of the power of consuls and praetors, but as they also echo a commode, they invited scurrilous parodies, including the fiction of the verification ceremony. The 'four times' were pre-Christian nights of misrule in which a bawdy inversion of the liturgy developed; Boureau sees the female pope as an inevitable extension of this. Along these and similar byways of history he is able to explain each element of the myth in terms of the dynamics of papal power, its outward demonstration, and the reactions it provoked. Next, Boureau traces the historical development of the figureofJoan as a weapon in a succession of ecclesiastical debates from the teething troubles of the early Franciscans through the bitter polemic ofthe Reformation to the anticlericalism ofthe French Revolution, revealing her as a supple jade, adaptable to every need. As her political usefulness wanes in the Enlightenment, she finds a new life as a theme for literary representations, such as Achim von Arnim's Pdpstinjohanna. This excellent investi? gation of the history of a motif raises profound questions about gender constructions and the self-understanding of Church and papacy in the Middle Ages. A lengthy dis? course on Joan's 'sisters'?Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Are, and others who, in dif? ferent ways, challenged the patriarchalism of medieval institutions?places the myth of the she-pope in the context of the tensions and frustrations of gender and power. The book is beautifully written. In the discursive style typical of French academies, Boureau does not lead us in a straight line from the beginning to the end of his ar? gument, preferring to approach issues from obscure angles, circle around them, and spiral in towards his central point. For the Anglo-Saxon reader it is a delight to peruse such accomplished Gallic writing so proficiently translated. The distanced irony and dry humour of the book make it a thoroughly entertaining read, without ever compromising scholarly integrity. The language of the translation is extremely fine; Ms Cochrane has clearly taken time and care, for which an academic translator is rarely compensated adequately. Given so many virtues in a single volume, it would be boorish to quibble about details, and I therefore merely mention that a thirteenth-century German poet wrote Middle High German, not Old High German (p. 116). University of Regensburg Graeme Dunphy Res et verba in der Renaissance. Ed. by Eckhard Kessler and Ian Maclean. (Wolfenbutteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, 21) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz . 2002. 398 pp. ISBN 3-447-04654-6 (hbk). Conferences on the Renaissance and the volumes of their proceedings are legion, but relatively few of them explore neglected topics. The organizers of the colloquium at Wolfenbuttel out of which this volume has emerged deserve to be congratulated for 1076 Reviews thinking of the relation between words and things in the Renaissance as a possible topic, as well as for putting together a team that could engage with the subject in an interesting and scholarly way. The resulting volume consists of fifteenpapers, one in French, four in German, and ten in English, by scholars in fields that include...