Medieval Worship Research Articles

Interpreting Medieval Scottish Church Stained Glass Windows: Decoration and Colour in Relation to Liturgy and Worship

During the Protestant Reformation of 1560, most of Scotland’s Catholic churches faced widespread destruction. Items considered idolatrous were targeted and destroyed. Significantly, stained glass windows were smashed and buried on site, or otherwise left to decay, and were replaced by austere, plain glass. In recent decades, archaeological excavations have recovered shards of this glass from several ecclesiastical sites across Scotland, allowing scholars the opportunity to better understand medieval liturgy and worship. Scientific analyses have been conducted to determine the ingredients used in manufacturing this glass, and to infer a place and timeframe of origin. These studies have proven invaluable in gaining an understanding of medieval trade links between Scotland and Europe, as well as of building and decorative phases for individual churches. Here, we consider the glass as an integral part of daily worship. Decorative patterns and colours of surviving fragments of glass, approximately dated, are considered in the wider and evolving context of medieval worship, and the prevailing religious Orders that were in Scotland at the time that many of these churches were founded. Two case-study sites are discussed in depth: Elgin Cathedral in Moray, which has yielded a significant number of glass shards through archaeological excavations; and Dunfermline Abbey in Fife, Scotland’s royal mausoleum. This inter-disciplinary study is the first to consider Scottish stained glass in terms of both its physical and chemical properties, as well as its wider religious meaning. This methodology will form the basis of future research to—for the first time—catalogue, scientifically analyse and liturgically contextualise all identifiable assemblages of Scottish medieval church glass.

Bisericile din Brașov ilustrate pe planurile orașului întocmite înainte de 1800

In the later Middle Ages Brașov was one of the leading urban centers in the Kingdom of Hungary and boasted over a dozen churches and chapels, the most impressive one being the Black Church. Most of the medieval worship sites were still standing in the 18th century, after the Habsburg takeover of Transylvania, but some were subsequently renovated or rebuilt. Additionally, two new churches were erected in 1783 in the northern suburbs. This article has recorded all the worship places depicted by the city plans of Brașov published in 1699, 1702, 1736, 1747 and 1796. The five cartographic documents illustrate nine churches (five Lutheran, two Roman-Catholic and two Orthodox). Besides the churches, three Roman-Catholic chapels are represented by the 1796 city plan and by two local survey plans of the Cetățuie (“Fortress”) area from ca. 1750.

Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany by Jacob M. Baum

Reviewed by: Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany by Jacob M. Baum Mary Jane Haemig Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany. By Jacob M. Baum. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 296 pp. This work re-examines the familiar assertion that the Protestant Reformation significantly changed the sensory impact of worship. Its nuanced analysis offers an interesting window into the impact of the Reformation. Chapter one reevaluates the claim that late medieval worship was a rich sensory experience, appealing to all five senses, and finds this claim overstated. "The ritual edifice of Christianity looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted rather different from one location to the next" (45). Examining parish inventories, Baum concludes that many parishes, particularly rural ones, lacked the resources to produce the sensory show often assumed for medieval worship. Chapter two reviews late medieval intellectual understandings of sense perception. In these, the perceiving subject was passive while objects projected their qualities into the environment, striking and moving sense organs and thereby affecting internal processes. Baum examines, in turn, the senses of hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste, concluding that "thinking with the senses was an essential means of explicating the power of ritual practice to affect and transform the bodies and souls of churchgoers" (74). Chapter three considers how late medieval laypeople understood the roles of the senses in their religious experience and argues that they "made playful use" (104) of the intellectual understandings previously described. Particularly interesting is his examination of how personal prayer books, collected and annotated by both religious and lay, used sensory language to describe the reception of the Lord's Supper. [End Page 465] Chapter four examines the rise of the narrative of "the reformation of the senses." This narrative "did not provide an empirical description of reality, but it did provide a lens through which people viewed, experienced, and understood that reality" (106). The narrative portrayed late-medieval religion as superficial, consumed with producing a sensory spectacle. Reformers saw themselves as rejecting such worship, with its incense, pompous processions, ringing bells, and burning candles, and instead offering a purified form of Christianity, focused on the audible and visible Word. This narrative emerged before various reforming groups differentiated themselves. It also had a gendered aspect, associating sensuous worship with femininity and non-Christian cultures. "Over time, the idea that late medieval Christianity was fundamentally sensual and that evangelical Christianity represented its antithesis became a widespread assumption—a backdrop to the cultural scene that didn't necessarily require explicit argumentation to survive" (131). Using ecclesiastical ordinances, visitation reports, church inventories, and contemporary reports, the author asserts in chapter five that while the narrative of the reformation of the senses continued to dominate, actual practice demonstrated "important continuities with the sensory culture of the late medieval past, alongside some surprising, often overlooked ruptures" (136). Lutherans identified much of liturgy and material culture as adiaphora and emphasized flexibility in practice. In Lutheran areas, much of late-medieval material culture (art and chalices, for example) continued in use. But the Lutheran emphasis on the sermon changed worship's soundscape, as did the transition to vernacular worship and congregational singing. So too the widespread elimination of incense changed the olfactory experience. The final chapter, on the second Reformation, adds Calvinism into the narrative. Focusing on ritual controversies, the chapter claims "both Lutherans and Calvinists actively and positively thought with the senses in fundamentally the same way" (171). Aristotelian thought, mediated through Melanchthon, continued to dominate reflection on how the senses functioned. Baum's conclusion reviews the paradox and contradictions that his study reveals. Both in the fifteenth and sixteenth century the sensuous structure of religious practice varied widely, often determined [End Page 466] as much by the availability of material elements as by theology. The impact of Lutheran liturgical reforms was "erratic" (200), allowing the retention of many medieval elements but also producing significant ruptures, leading to a drift to simplification. Baum rejects Ernst Walter Zeeden's conclusion that"Lutheranism ultimately amounted to a veneer of new doctrinal ideas laid over the same old material substrate of worship" (202). This work offers a...

Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices: Medieval Domestic Devotion in the Seventeenth Century

Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices was first published as a Catholic primer for worship between intimates, then reformed for individual Protestant worship, and then reformed again for Protestant worship between intimates. Each adaptation engages the so-called “ancient” quality of its offices, primarily medieval, as authorization for the kinds of domestic worship it promotes. I examine how the author and adapters of the text authorize their creative and adaptive devotional texts through a nostalgic interpretation of medieval worship practices as uniquely representative of the worship practices of the early church. While confessional debates had polarized discussions about the lineage of the church, this text represents a trend in seventeenth-century Protestant devotional primers attempting to reconcile spiritual divisions by re-introducing Protestant believers to pre-Reformation practices of domestic devotion.

The Relevance of Singing the Te Deum Laudamus in the Postmodern Era

This paper investigates the relevance of singing and performing the Te Deum Laudamus in the postmodern Christian era, especially in view of changing enactments and perceptions of the purpose of the hymn. The Te Deum has been used in various ways in church history, sung as a confession of praise and regularly used since the time of St Benedict during Matins (morning service). While the Reformers were critical of the late medieval worship, they did not query incorporating the Te Deum into their liturgies, because it brought meaning to the glorification of a benevolent God. This explains its use also by most Christian churches in their liturgies in the postmodern era. However, the pertinent question remains: Is the Te Deum still applicable to the postmodern church, which is characterised by secularism, charismatic sermons, and commercialised worship. The question is instigated by events and conceptions of the universe from the era of Gregorianism to Darwinism. In answering this question, the paper highlights the history of the Te Deum and its application within the church, and seeks to find out whether the hymn addresses the present needs of Christians, which have been affected by postmodernism. The paper contends that the Te Deum is still relevant and contributes to the glorification of God’s mission (missio Dei).

Jewels Set in Stone: Hindu Temple Recipes in Medieval Cōḻa Epigraphy

Scholarship abounds on contemporary Hindu food offerings, yet there is scant literature treating the history of food in Hinduism beyond topics of food restrictions, purity, and food as medicine. A virtually unexplored archive is Hindu temple epigraphy from the time that was perhaps the theological height of embodied temple ritual practices, i.e., the Cōḻa period (ninth-thirteenth centuries CE). The vast archive of South Indian temple inscriptions allows a surprising glimpse into lived Hinduism as it was enacted daily, monthly, and annually through food offerings cooked in temple kitchens and served to gods residing in those temples. Through analyzing thousands of Tamiḻ inscriptions from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries CE, I have gleaned information concerning two distinct material cultural facets. (1) The practice of writing these rare but remarkable recipes which themselves are culinary textual artifacts has allowed us to access (2) Hindu food offerings of the past, also complex, sensory historical artifacts. In exploring these medieval religious recipes for the first time, I aim to show: the importance that food preparation held for temple devotees, the theological reality of feeding the actual bodies of the gods held in these temples, and the originality of the Cōḻa inscriptional corpus in bringing about a novel culinary writing practice that would be adopted more extensively in the Vijayanagara period (fourteenth-seventeenth centuries CE). This study, a radical new attempt at using historical sources inscribed in stone, sheds new light on medieval Hindu devotees’ priorities of serving and feeding god. The examination of this under-explored archive can help us move our academic analysis of Hindu food offerings beyond the hitherto utilized lenses of economics, sociology, and anthropology. Further, it contributes to our understanding of medieval temple worship, early culinary studies, and the history of food in India.

Investigating the experience of late medieval worship

Investigating the experience of late medieval worship

A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages by James Monti

Reviewed by: A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages by James Monti Kevin Magas James Monti A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012 684 pages. Paperback. $34.95. The accounts of the Western medieval liturgy given by prominent 20th-century liturgical historians, such as Josef Andreas Jungmann and Theodor Klauser, tended to depict the period along the lines of a “corruption theory” of liturgical development. The living and vibrant liturgy of the patristic era gave way to the dissolution of liturgical community, with the laity reduced to silent spectators estranged from the liturgical action in a language they no longer understood. Recent scholarship has challenged these sweeping generalizations by highlighting the medieval laity’s creative and multidimensional engagement with the liturgical action as well as the theological profundity underlying the allegorical explanations of the medieval liturgists. It is into this stream of scholarly thought that Monti places his work. Medieval liturgy is for him not an embarrassing relic to hide away but a rich treasury that our ressourcement has yet to adequately explore. To contribute to this ressourcement of medieval liturgy, Monti seeks to capture the “sense of the sacred” and profoundly theocentric orientation permeating the ceremonies, rites, texts, and rubrics of the medieval liturgy. He aims to let the liturgy speak for itself rather than provide his own extensive commentary and interpretations. After providing a brief overview of the medieval liturgy centered on the shape of the Ordo Missae and the Divine Office in chapter one, Monti divides his work into three main sections: the first details the seven sacraments, beginning with the Mass; the second examines the celebrations of the liturgical year; and the third explores a variety of special liturgical rites and blessings, such as the consecration of virgins and the election, installation, and coronation of a pope. Since Monti’s work focuses largely on a descriptive account of the liturgical celebrations themselves, he offers a substantial amount of his own translations directly from the Latin liturgical sources, or, in some cases, a vernacular original. Some readers may take issue with Monti’s decision to translate as literally as [End Page 338] possible, which he thinks conveys “unaltered the meaning of the original texts” (xxiii). While Monti brings together a variety of liturgical sources for each chapter, he also looks more in-depth at case studies which add texture to his account, such as the Corpus Christi procession in Kraków, Poland, or the rite of extreme unction in Jaén, Spain. Throughout the text, Monti displays not only an expert familiarity with medieval manuscripts but a skillful command of the allegorical interpretations offered by medieval liturgists, such as Amalarius of Metz (d. 850), Lothario of Segni (later Innocent III, d. 1216), and the incomparable William Durandus of Mende (d. 1296). His helpful collation of these liturgists’ allegorical interpretations of each part of the Mass in chapter two offers a wonderful introduction to this medieval literary genre. Medieval allegory has often been too quickly dismissed by contemporary liturgists, and Monti’s sympathetic treatment intends to renew our appreciation for the theological creativity of the genre. Unfortunately, the field of medieval liturgy still remains a daunting, esoteric, and seemingly impenetrable subject, even to many medievalists. Perhaps the chief value of Monti’s work lies in his talent in opening this world to a wider audience, allowing those without a working knowledge of Latin to enter into the liturgical sources themselves. Many of the allegorical commentaries Monti cites have not been translated into English, and many medieval manuscripts, especially those of medieval Spain, have neither been translated nor adequately mined for their depth. The extensive footnotes and bibliography encourage further study of the Latin originals if the reader’s interest has been piqued. For this reason, the text could serve particularly well in introductory courses to liturgical history. While the abundance of dense, descriptive material does not lend itself to a casual read, the text remains an invaluable compendium and reference work for any interested in medieval worship. In addition, as Monti suggests, his collection of beautiful liturgical prayers and hymns can even serve...

Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. By Clare Costley King'oo. Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 2012. xix + 283 pp.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England . By Clare Costley King'oo . Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame , 2012. xix + 283 pp.Book Reviews and NotesReaders of Church History will perhaps be familiar with Clare Costley King'oo's first monograph, which won the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2012. King'oo's study distinguishes itself among other excellent scholarly works on the Psalter (such as those by Hannibal Hamlin, Michael P. Kuczynski, and Rivkah Zim) for its carefully considered focus on the unique textual tradition of the Seven Penitential Psalms. King'oo compellingly demonstrates the Penitential Psalms' reflexive relationship to a changing religious climate through her thoughtful treatment of their circulation in books of hours, theological commentaries, political polemic, funerary rites, songs, and lyric poems. Given King'oo's training as a literary scholar, her attention to the Penitential Psalms' form, genre, language, and even the material texts in which they were available yields exciting interpretations of their nuanced revisions and their implied audiences. Miserere Mei , like other works in Notre Dame's Reformations series, adroitly rethinks the conventional distinction between the and periods and thus serves as an inspired example of a diachronic study. In the narrative that she patiently tracks, King'oo shows that the Penitential Psalms traditionally used in medieval worship were not suppressed by the Reformers but rather appropriated and resignified by them.Chapter 1 (Illustrating the Penitential Psalms) examines late medieval and early modern books of hours with special attention to images of David's legendary penance (found more often in earlier books) and David peering at the naked Bathsheba (found more often in later books). King'oo works to denaturalize the connection between the Penitential Psalms and images of David's voyeurism (31) to consider more carefully this trope's development. Invoking Foucault, she explains this change as a part of a larger campaign, namely, the organization of confession and other penitential practices around sin and sexuality (52). King'oo's discovery that David's sin came to be coded as sexual fruitfully complicates her argument when she turns to explaining its illustration in the New England Primer , which was used to teach in colonial America how to read. She describes the cultural contexts in which this suggestive image circulated, concluding that it was not perceived as inappropriate for innocent children until the 19th century. For its meticulous attention to the complicated textual history of David's penance in the Penitential Psalms and their associated illustrations, this chapter stands out as the strongest in an excellent book.For its study of the Penitential Psalms' endurance in early America, the first chapter sets up how Miserere Mei will likewise appraise early modern revisions of these conventional medieval texts. Chapter 2 (The Conflict over Penance) analyzes two early sixteenth-century theological commentaries: John Fisher's This treatise concernynge the fruytfull saynges of Dauyd in the seuen penytencyall psalms (1504) and Luther's Die sieben Buspsalmen (written in 1517, revised in 1525). …

Le palimpseste hagiographique de la Pologne du haut Moyen Âge : l'espace et le temps du culte de saint Stanislas de Szczepanowo.

The Hagiographical Palimpsest of Early Medieval Poland: Spatial and Temporal Points of Reference in the Worship of Saint Stanislas of Szczepanowo From the example of the Medieval worship of Saint Stanislas of Szczepanowo, an eleventh-century martyr, the article aims to evoke the symbolic value of time and space in the advent of the first local hagiographical cults in Poland before the end of the 13th century. Referring to the hagiographical file about that bishop of Cracow, the approach consists in relating the evolution of his worship, the official one and the popular one, so as to emphasize the spatial and temporal points of reference allowing to prove the continuation of the ancient autochthonous myths under Christian veneer. Considering the symbolic dimension of two liturgical commemoration dates dedicated to Saint Stanislas of Szczepanowo may lead to a few significant mythological dues. Such examples show some ways taken by Christian acculturation on the ground occupied by former Indo-European pagan religion.

Book Review: Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Change and Continuity in Religious Practice

Book Review: Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Change and Continuity in Religious Practice

Karin Maag and John D. Witvliet, eds. Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. index. illus. tbls. $60.00 (cl), $30.00 (pbk). ISBN: 0-268-03474-5 (cl), 0-268-03475-3 (pbk).

Karin Maag and John D. Witvliet, eds. Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. index. illus. tbls. 30.00 (pbk). ISBN: 0-268-03474-5 (cl), 0-268-03475-3 (pbk). - Volume 59 Issue 1

:Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice

Traditional surveys of Christian worship have not only stressed the profound changes that occurred in the fragmenting Reformation churches of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but have also primarily focused on the theological understanding, rather than the practice, of worship. Contributors to this unique collection underline the complexity and diversity of late medieval and early modern Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed worship practices in Europe. They examine a range of rites (baptism, marriage, and the Eucharist), elements of worship (visual art, music, prayer texts, rituals), geographic locations (Spain, Geneva, England, Sweden, Germany), and settings (home, school, and church). To illustrate the experience of worship by medieval and early modern laity and clergy, each essay is preceded by selections from key primary source documents being discussed. Contributors reveal that, contrary to the artificial separation of these two time periods by the modern academy, there was actually a great deal of continuity between medieval and early modern liturgical practices.

Review: Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Review: Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Worship in Medieval and Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice (review)

Worship in Medieval and Modern Europe. Change and Continuity in Religious Practice. Edited by Karin Maag and John D. Witvliet. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 353. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.) In introducing this immensely important collection of eleven essays John Witvliet asserts what has become something of a truism regarding the study of liturgy, namely, that it is worship practices are of interest to a variety of scholarly disciplines: cultural anthropology, visual art and architecture, music, rhetoric, theology, and cultural and social history, its study is inherently interdisciplinary task (p. 2). But few have demonstrated as well as these authors how at least some of these disciplines can be brought to bear in order to refine an appropriate method for studying liturgy-both in the past and in the present. The book's subtitle-change and continuity-reflects well the thesis of the symposium at which these papers were delivered. Each is a case study in liturgical change brought about in the late medieval period as a result of the work of the reformers and the Council of Trent. This is not a book for beginners. The level of scholarship requires some grounding in the political, cultural, theological, and ecclesiastical climate of these times. But anyone with such familiarity will benefit greatly from this inherently interdisciplinary treatment of worship in this period. Each essay is similarly structured: (brief) introduction by the editors, a selection of primary texts which are the material to be commented upon in the essay, and then the essay itself. The reproduction of such primary source material itself makes an important contribution simply because much writing about worship practices in this period can be over-generalized and not based in specific sources. The accompanying essays almost always offer important nuances and critique to conventional wisdom about the changes that occurred in liturgy during this period. The authors almost always note that change accompanied continuity and that even within each liturgical tradition represented here (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, etc.) there was significant variety in the liturgies celebrated. The essays are helpfully divided into five sections. The first, starting points for assessing change and continuity, contains essays about daily devotion by lay people in the diocese of Rheims (by Margot Fassler) and a glimpse into worship in Geneva before and after the Reformation (by Robert Kingdon). Each of these essays deals with a small piece of the late medieval tapestry and yet in doing so the authors offer important nuances tried and true presumptions from an older generation of authors (e. …

Review: Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice

Review: Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice

The Eyes of the Body and the Veil of Faith

Liturgical allegory, as a genre of medieval writing, is often thought to indicate dramatic or theatrical tendencies in medieval worship practices. This article compares the liturgical allegories of Amalarius of Metz (ninth century) and Honorius Augustodunensis (twelfth century). The comparison shows that medieval ideas about theatre operated very differently in the writings of Amalarius and, three centuries later, Honorius. These differences suggest both different modes of representation in medieval ceremonies and the transformation of ancient theatre from a negative to a positive model for Christian worship.

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access The Art of the Book: Its Place in Medieval Worship. Edited by Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir. University of Exeter Press, 1998. 337 pages. $80.00. Margaret Kim Peterson Margaret Kim Peterson Eastern College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 69, Issue 1, March 2001, Pages 248–251, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/69.1.248 Published: 01 March 2001

The Art of the Book: Its Place in Medieval Worship. Edited by Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. xiv + 337 pp. $80.00 cloth.

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The art of the book. Its place in medieval worship. By Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir. Pp. xvi+337 incl. 98 black-and-white plates+8 colour plates. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. £45. 0 85989 566 1

<i>The art of the book. Its place in medieval worship</i>. By Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir. Pp. xvi+337 incl. 98 black-and-white plates+8 colour plates. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. £45. 0 85989 566 1