Medieval Christian Liturgy

Author(s):  
Joanne M. Pierce

The liturgy of the medieval Christian West (ca. 600–1500) provided the structure around which life in Western Europe was structured for almost a thousand years. Rooted in Christian antiquity, in the early central liturgical structures of Initiation and Eucharist, the private and public observance of daily prayer, and the development of a liturgical year, the long medieval period that followed saw a broadening elaboration and expansion of the liturgical life of Christians in many different directions. By the year 1200, theologians had defined seven of the Church’s liturgical rites as primary sacraments: Baptism and Confirmation (from the ancient initiation sequence); Eucharist; Penance (with the emphasis on private confession of sins); Ordination (through various minor orders to the three major orders of deacon, presbyter, and bishop); Extreme Unction (anointing of the sick, now reserved for the gravely ill); and Matrimony (as the liturgical rites for the originally domestic rituals of marriage become more elaborate and set in the church rather than the home). A more fulsome cycle of the liturgical year developed around the ancient feasts of Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, and Epiphany, augmented by an elaborate calendar of commemorations and feasts of saints. Monastic influence resulted in a daily round of liturgical prayer, the Divine Office, in which various “hours” of prayer during the day and night were marked by liturgical “offices” of psalmody and scripture—some longer, others more brief. One of the major ways this liturgical growth and diversity can be studied is through an examination of the various liturgical books compiled and used during these medieval centuries, books used for the celebration of the Eucharist (the Mass), for the Divine Office, and for other liturgical rites. In addition to the volumes containing rubrics and prayers for liturgical celebrations, a separate cluster of books contained music to be used during these rites, in a style known as chant; Gregorian chant became the dominant form. The full impact of medieval liturgy as it was experienced in the Western Europe, however, extended far beyond the “bare bones” contained in these books, intertwined as it was with the development of art and architecture, law and commerce, and the political/socio-economic developments that would take Christian society and religion from the twilight of late antiquity to the dawn of early modernity.

Vox Patrum ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 393-402
Author(s):  
Ilona Skupińska-Løvset

Dura Europos, or as proposed today Europos Dura, was a fortified settlement on the border between the Roman Empire and the East. The archeological dis­coveries reflected the character of the settlement – the fortified agglomeration grouped at the military camp. After its fall Europos Dura was covered by desert sand only to be discovered in the XXth century. Archaeological research has dis­closed documentation of its multicultural character. This paper points to the fact of coexistence of various religions in late antiquity Europos Dura. Paintings and sculptures discovered in situ indicate that scene of offering was a favorite subject in the sacral art of Europos Dura, independent of religion. The ceremony of in­cense burning constitutes the dominant form of offering regarding visualizations of this important ceremony.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.


Author(s):  
Derek Attridge

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.


Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christopher Paolella

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This study focuses on human trafficking patterns from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Era. I argue that while slavery, as a means of compelling agricultural labor, disappeared across much of Western Europe by the middle of the twelfth century, the commercial sex industry grew. As slavery died out, the slave trade withered across Western Europe and gradually reoriented itself around the Mediterranean basin. Yet, human trafficking networks remained in Western Europe, if in attenuated form. They continued to supply a smaller, but no less persistent, labor demand that was now fueled by brothels and prostitution rings instead of agriculture. I argue further that the experiences of women link the sex trade and the slave trade, and that twelfth-century socio-economic development linked the earlier long-distance slave trade and the local and regional trafficking networks of the later Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....


Author(s):  
Krešimir Matijević

This chapter examines archaeological evidence that demonstrates literacy/illiteracy in the Roman Empire based on the ancient written documents available, including stone inscriptions. It first considers the level of education amongst the Italian population in ancient Rome, particularly in the Roman provinces, along with the level of literacy prior to Roman provincialization in Western Europe. It then turns to other documents such as books, wooden tablets, small inscriptions, and pictorial representations, and the Roman military’s ability to read and write. Finally, it discusses the level of literacy in late antiquity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Hediger

Hydropower activities must increasingly be evaluated from a sustainable development perspective. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the principle frequently applied to evaluate corporate contributions in this regard, though there exists no conceptual and theoretical basis that is common to the various approaches. With the present work, we fill this gap and provide a generic model that formally integrates the corporate and societal perspectives of hydropower activities within a welfare-economic framework that encompasses both externalities and distributional concerns. Building on this background and focusing on the current situation in Switzerland, the water tower of Western Europe, we particularly address the issues of water rights, resource rents and governance. This is crucial when analyzing investment projects of hydropower companies with shared private and public ownership; i.e., if external stakeholders are also sensitive shareholders who grant, at the same time, the company the right to operate. Altogether, this contribution shall support better informed decision making on both corporate and policy levels, especially regarding new and retrofitting investments in hydropower when social concerns are at stake.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document