The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History
Cambridge University Press, 9/24/2009
EAN 9780521808477, ISBN10: 0521808472
Hardcover, 622 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 3.3 cm
Language: English
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.
1. Introduction
2. Early Anglo-Saxon England
a partly traceable story
3. Later Anglo-Saxon
liturgy for England
4. The Norman conquest
cross fertilizations
5. Monastic liturgy, 1100–1215
6. Benedictine liturgy after 1215
7. Other monastic orders
8. The non-monastic religious orders
canons regular
9. The non-monastic religious orders
friars
10. Old Sarum
the beginnings of Sarum use
11. New Sarum and the spread of Sarum use
12. Exeter
the fullness of secular liturgy
13. Southern England
final Sarum use
14. Regional uses and local variety
15. Towards the end of the story.
'This is a very impressive achievement. It is the product of decades of work: reading liturgical manuscripts, discussing them, teaching them. Its strength is not only in many historical insights into the religious culture of medieval England, but in its assured usefulness as an essential reference book for medieval historians of religion, Anglo-Saxonists, historians of music and liturgy. Early Reformation scholars will also find it a necessary tool in evaluating English religious life on the eve of Reformation.' Miri Rubin, Queen Mary, University of London