InSinging the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word. Where previous ...studies have described how writing comes to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifies relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony, Zieman shifts the critical gaze to the ritual performance of written texts in the liturgy-effectively changing the focus from writing to reading. Beginning with a history of the elementary educational institution known to modern scholars as the "song school," Zieman shows the continued centrality of liturgical and devotional texts to the earliest stages of literacy training and spiritual formation. Originally, these schools were created to provide liturgical training for literate adult performers who had already mastered the grammatical arts. From the late thirteenth century on, however, the attention and resources of both lay and clerical patrons came to be devoted specifically to young boys, centering on their function as choristers. Because choristers needed to be trained before they received instruction in grammar, the liturgical skills of reading and singing took on a different meaning. This shift in priorities, Zieman argues, is paradigmatic of broader cultural changes, in which increased interest in liturgical performance and varying definitions attached to "reading and singing" caused these practices to take on a life of their own, unyoked from their original institutional settings of monastery and cathedral. Unmoored from the context of the choral community, reading and singing developed into discrete, portable skills that could be put to use in a number of contexts, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. Ultimately, they would be carried into a wider public sphere, where they would be transformed into public modes of discourse appropriated by vernacular writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.
Feminist, LGBTQIA+, and postcolonial critiques over the past decades have questioned the so-called “ecumenical consensus” in liturgical matters ranging from language about God to lectionaries to ...liturgical time. These developments have affected liturgical development across churches, with some (most recently, the Presbyterian Church, USA) revising their resources to address these critiques. Others are pursuing a different approach: This article will provide a case study of ongoing liturgical development in The Episcopal Church, which has chosen not to redraft its 1979 Book of Common Prayer but, instead, encourage the development of supplemental resources housed at an official church website governed by its triennial General Convention and church law. The use of such resources will be regulated primarily by local bishops and pastors; already some bishops have authorized the use of different lectionary patterns and, anecdotally, variances in the baptismal formula. This article seeks to uncover the opportunities and the risks of such an approach to liturgical reform in one church, with a view to the effect it may have on that treasured “ecumenical consensus” among the churches.
This book provides a comprehensive historical treatment of the Latin liturgy in medieval England. Richard Pfaff constructs a history of the worship carried out in churches - cathedral, monastic, or ...parish - primarily through the surviving manuscripts of service books, and sets this within the context of the wider political, ecclesiastical, and cultural history of the period. The main focus is on the mass and daily office, treated both chronologically and by type, the liturgies of each religious order and each secular 'use' being studied individually. Furthermore, hagiographical and historiographical themes - respectively, which saints are prominent in a given witness and how the labors of scholars over the last century and a half have both furthered and, in some cases, impeded our understandings - are explored throughout. The book thus provides both a narrative account and a reference tool of permanent value.
Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in ...which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy's past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Teresa Berger looks at liturgy's past through the ...lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of "men" and "women" but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men.
Demonstrating what a gender-attentive inquiry is able to achieve, Berger explores both traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and also new ways of studying the past, for example by asking about the developing link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. Drawing on historical case studies and focusing particularly on the early centuries of Christian worship, this book ultimately aims at the present by lifting a veil on liturgy's past to allow for a richly diverse notion of gender differences as these continue to shape liturgical life.
Icons and the Liturgy, East and West: History, Theology, and Culture is a collection of nine essays developed from papers presented at the 2013 Huffington Ecumenical Institute's symposium "Icons and ...Images," the first of a three-part series on the history and future of liturgical arts in Catholic and Orthodox churches. Catholic and Orthodox scholars and practitioners gathered at Loyola Marymount University to present papers discussing the history, theology, ecclesiology, and hermeneutics of iconology, sacred art, and sacred space in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions.
Nicholas Denysenko's book offers two significant contributions to the field of Eastern and Western Christian traditions: a critical assessment of the status of liturgical arts in postmodern Catholicism and Orthodoxy and an analysis of the continuity with tradition in creatively engaging the creation of sacred art and icons. The reader will travel to Rome, Byzantium, Armenia, Chile, and to other parts of the world, to see how Christians of yesterday and today have experienced divine encounters through icons. Theologians and students of theology and religious studies, art historians, scholars of Eastern Christian Studies, and Catholic liturgists will find much to appreciate in these pages.
Contributors: Nicholas Denysenko, Robert Taft, S.J., Thomas M. Lucas, S.J., Bissera V. Pentcheva, Kristin Noreen, Christina Maranci, Dorian Llywelyn, S.J., Michael Courey, and Andriy Chirovsky.
This collective volume examines the concept, theory, practice, and representations of the liturgy in the Middle Ages, including its sacramental developments, its religious and political implications, ...its forms of ritualization, and its doctrinal presumptions. It aims to create a space for interdisciplinary dialogue between history, theology, canon law, art history, political philosophy, and symbolic anthropology. It privileges the examination of the transferences between the spiritual and the temporal, the sacred and the profane, the political and the religious.
Contemporary culture is rediscovering the importance of beauty for both social transformation and personal happiness. Theologians have sought, in their varied ways, to demonstrate how God's beauty is ...associated with notions of truth and goodness. This book breaks new ground by suggesting that liturgy is the means par excellence by which an experience of beauty is communicated. Drawing from both secular and religious understandings, in particular the mystical and apophatic tradition, the book demonstrates how liturgy has the potential to achieve the one ultimately reliable form of beauty because its embodied components are able to reflect the disturbing beauty of the One to whom worship is always offered. Such components rely on understanding the aesthetic dynamics upon which liturgy relies. This book draws from a broad range of disciplines concerned with understanding beauty and self-transformation and concludes that while secular utopian forms have much to contribute to ethical transformation, they ultimately fail since they lack the Christological and eschatological framework needed, which liturgy alone provides.
David Torevell is a member of the Theology, Religion and Philosophy Department at Liverpool Hope University, UK.
Contents: Introduction; The movement of return; The movement of interiority; The movement in the image; The movement of desire; The movement towards silent mystery; The movement of aesthetics; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Liturgical Subjectsexamines the history of the self in the Byzantine Empire, challenging narratives of Christian subjectivity that focus only on classical antiquity and the Western Middle Ages. As ...Derek Krueger demonstrates, Orthodox Christian interior life was profoundly shaped by patterns of worship introduced and disseminated by Byzantine clergy. Hymns, prayers, and sermons transmitted complex emotional responses to biblical stories, particularly during Lent. Religious services and religious art taught congregants who they were in relation to God and each other.
Focusing on Christian practice in Constantinople from the sixth to eleventh centuries, Krueger charts the impact of the liturgical calendar, the eucharistic rite, hymns for vigils and festivals, and scenes from the life of Christ on the making of Christian selves. He explores the verse of great Byzantine liturgical poets, including Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete, Theodore the Stoudite, and Symeon the New Theologian. Their compositions offered templates for Christian self-regard and self-criticism, defining the Christian "I." Cantors, choirs, and congregations sang in the first person singular expressing guilt and repentence, while prayers and sermons defined the collective identity of the Christian community as sinners in need of salvation. By examining the way models of selfhood were formed, performed, and transmitted in the Byzantine Empire,Liturgical Subjectsadds a vital dimension to the history of the self in Western culture.
