This welcome collection of essays, derived from papers delivered at a conference in Oxford in 2000, covers a wide range of topics relating to the practice of liturgy in late Anglo-Saxon England. The writers' contributions testify, as Helen Gittos justifiably claims in her Introduction, to the "vitality of the liturgy" and give us "tantalizing reminders" of the people who compiled and performed it. What emerges from this collection is, on the one hand, the great complexity of the liturgy itself, and, on the other, the huge gaps in the extant record. Nevertheless, these essays show how much can be learned, not just about liturgy per se, but about the many other areas of Anglo-Saxon intellectual, ecclesiastical, politcal and literary life which it touches. Diversity and idiosyncrasy are recurrent themes: indeed, a suitable sub-title for the book might have been "Anglo-Saxons do it their own way".
Nostalgia and textual pluralism could be said to be the subjects of Mechthild Gretsch's "The Roman Psalter, its Old English Glosses and the English Benedictine Reform". Gretsch focuses on the Royal Psalter (BL, Royal 2. B. V), which carries the Romanum text of the psalms. Its Old English gloss is associated with Aethelwold, and Gretsch asks why, when on the continent the Gallican text has long replaced the Romanum (except in Italy), Aethelwold should turn to a psalter with the older version. The choice, she asserts, was predictable, for three main reasons. First, there was as yet no institutionally approved superiority for the Gallican text in England, which might have suppressed the "venerable tradition" of the Romanum; second, the well-known continued use of the Romanum in Rome itself will have influenced the choice; and third, Aethelwold's attachment to the Romanum text is shown elsewhere, as in his use of it in quotations in the Old English version of the Regula S. Benedicti and in a quotation in his prologue to the Regularis concordia, where he follows a phrase from the Romanum with its Gallican equivalent, clearly showing is familiarity with both.
Diversity of liturgical practice within the apparent uniformity imposed by regulation is the theme of the next two chapters, by Susan Rankin and Joyce Hill. Rankin's "Making the Liturgy: Winchester Scribes and their Books" starts from the reasonable proposition that, to the extent that the liturgy must "live and breathe" with the community of people performing it, it must be "in some way malleable". Most of the chapter is then taken up with showing the huge difficulties of using what evidence there is of such diversity. She compares the two "Winchester Tropers", the later one of which (mid-eleventh century) appears to contain tropes with pre-date the earlier (made in the 1020s or 1030s). Rankin establishes that analysts have erred in assuming that single exemplars were used for these books: in fact the scribe probably faced the problem of having to use several. Thus the dating individual repertories of tropes cannnot simply therefore be based on content.
Hill, in her "Rending the Garment and Reading by the Rood: Regularis concordia Rituals for Men and Women", finds her diversity a fragment of an Old English version of the Concordia in Corpus Christi College 201 which reveals modifications made for the practice of female religious. Derived, Hill believes, from a copy in which the male-oriented language had already been adapted for female use--revealing "female religious striking a blow for visibility, for ownership of text and ritual"-- the extract shows us two modified rituals. First, in the collatio (a ritual reading) for Maundy Thursday, where the Concordia calls for a deacon to read from the gospel, the Corpus fragment provides for a lectrix to read (though not from the gospel) as she stands by the cross in church. Far more dramatic is the modified ritual for Easter Day. As a deacon reads from the gospel of John and comes to the passage partiti sunt uestimenta mea (19.24), the Concordia requires two deacons to strip from the altar the cloth which has lain beneath the gospelbook. In the modified version, two nuns remove the cloth and actually tear it apart: it apparently consists of two halves which been tacked together loosely in advance to facilitate the tearing. There are parallels for this dramnatic reenactment from the continent, but none from England.
Archbishop Wulfstan complained that public penance was little practised in England in his time, and Sarah Hamilton evaluates this claim in her "Rites for Public Penance in Late Anglo-Saxon England". Wulfstan had in mind the ritual by which bishops expel serious sinners from the church community on Ash Wednesday, and then, after they have used the Lenten period to atone, readmit and absolve them on Maundy Thursday. In fact, an examination of the twenty-one surviving Anglo-Saxon pontificals produces compelling evidence that some form of public penance was available at most of the important centres of the English church by Wulfstan's time; certainly the rite was already being practised. Though the liturgy for public penance derived ultimately from the early medieval Gelasian-Gregorian traditions, England developed its own varying local traditions. "Public penance," Hamilton finds, "was a live issue, encouraging invenitiveness amongst the scribes who copied, and perhaps composed, its rites."
The chapter by Christopher A. Jones, "The Christian Mass in Later Anglo-Saxon England", is a tour de force of analysis and deduction. By the early Middle Ages, of the three main types of annointing oils, the chrism (usually a mixture of olive oil and balsam) had assumed the greatest importance as "a crucial part of Western pontifical rites for ordaining clergy, consecrating new churches and inauigurating monarchs". What is extraordinary, however, is the sheer variety of Chrism Mass ordines in use in England. Jones distinguishes four main types, one of them associated with Christ Church, Canterbury, and it is this house which attracts his attention. From the period 975 to 1050 there is evidence that Christ Church in fact drew on several of the traditions and often mixed them. This was evidence, Jones concludes, not of a relaxed approach to the chrism ceremony, but of its unusual importance: and it was dissatisfaction with what was available which eventually led to the production of a new distinctive Canterbury ordo. Why this intense interest in the Chrism Mass? Jones notes the coincidence of the evolution of the parish system. There were elaborate regulations for the collecting and distributing of the chrism oils (lower clergy would collect them, usually on Maundy Thursday, from the bishop), and the maintenance of these affirmed episcopal authority over lower churches. Thus, "[a] heighening of of liturgical and canonical emphasis on the consecration of the oils can be seen as a kind of episcopal insurance policy, or guarantee of sustained control over prolferating smaller churches."
Sarah Larratt Keefer's contributon, "The Veneration of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England", is based round an edition of a previously unprinted version of a Latin ritual for the Veneration of the Cross, to be celebrated during Nones on Good Friday. Her chapter is in effect a substantial historical introduction to this. The text, a late eleventh-century addition to Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422, reflects in outline the order for the ritual set out in the Regularis concordia (in several varying recensions); in addition, a form of it occurs on a binding leaf in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 120. These are our only evidence, however, for the Veneration ritual in Anglo-Saxon England. Its absence from the extant record is curious, in view of the apparent importance of the cult of the cross to the Anglo-Saxons, and Keefer points out various opportunities for the introduction of such a ritual. This is an enlightening chapter, even if it poses as many questions as it answers. However, I would have liked to see a more explicit comparison (in the appendix, perhaps) of the text of Bodley 120 with the Corpus text; this can only be made (incompletely) by extracting information dispersed in the main discussion.
As Helen Gittos points out in the Introduction, we hear much about monks but little about secular canons in Anglo-Saxon England. Ursula Lenker's contribution, "The Rites and Ministries of the Canons: Liturgical Rubrics to Vernacular Gospels and their Functions in a European Context", is thus of especial interest. Lenker begins by noting the remarkable similarity between the eleventh-century manuscripts of the Old English Gospels and slightly later Old High German manuscripts in the way that they have been marked up for apparent liturgical use. Accepting that such liturgical rubrics do not, and cannot, mean that these verrnacular books were actually used as mass lectionaries, Lenker explores instead the idea that their use was complementary to the mass, as prompts in the composition of vernacular exegetical homilies; these characteristically begin (as we know so well from those of Aelfric) with a pericope in Latin from the Vulgate, which is then translated. Seeking a context for such use, Lenker notes that her main Old English Gospels witness was prepared at Exeter in Bishop Leofric's time (1050-72). Crucial in his organisation of the new community of canons was the adoption of the Rule of Chrodegang, and among its prescriptions two possible contexts for the insertion of the rubrics may be found. First, there is a chapter office scheduled to take place after Prime in which, on certain days of the week (precisely those days for which pericopes are marked in the manuscripts), readings from homilies are prescribed. Second, the Rule empahsises the importance in canons' duties of preaching to the laity; there were Old English homiliaries available for such a purpose but, suggests Lenker, if a canon wanted to deliver something more specific for a particular audience or occasion, then the rubricated Gospel mansucripts would have been of great help. Lenker even makes the suggestion that Lotharingians following Leofric to Exeter could have found the translations indispensable for preaching in a foreign language: that is a possibility which begs to be explored. Lenker's article is full of fascination for anyone with an interest in venarcular scriptures in the early medieval period.
In two further chapters, Karen Louise Jolly and Catherine E. Karkov examine aspects of the interplay between liturgy and non-liturgical Old English texts. In "Cross-Referencing Anglo-Saxon Liturgy and Remedies: the Sign of the Cross as Ritual Protection", Jolly seeks to redraw the line between formal and popular religion by investigating the overlap between liturgy and remedy in the use of the cross. She examines in detail those medical recipes from Lacnunga and Bald's Leechbook which involve an invocation of the cross, and specifically those in which the remedies are protective. As Jolly shows, the specific effects of signing oneself as a way of warding off the devil were regularly promoted by the homilists, including Aelfric. It is then a short step to using this same remedy against the evil of illness. Jolly concludes that the use of prayers invoking the power of the cross as medical remedies leads to a "blurring" of the distinction between the two genres, but I would see it simply as a ready (and one might even say entirely logical) transference of a specific mechanism from one area to another. True, the user of the the prayer as remedy may lose sight of the spiritual dimension, but the prayer's integrity as prayer (i.e., an invocation to ann abstract power to intercede on our behalf) remains intact, or it is valueless.
Karkov, in her "The Sign of the Cross: Poetic Performance and Liturgical Practice in the Junius 11 Manuscript", examines the function of the acts of blessing described in the Junius poems. She argues that they are to be interpreted as the making the sign of the cross, and sees them as integral to the thematic unity of the volume. There are some fifteen uses of (ge)beltsian or bletsung in three of the poems, and several of these occurrences can be linked directly to illustrations which show God with his hand raised in the act of blessing. Jolly makes a reasonable case that this would automatically have been taken by an Anglo-Saxon audience to mean giving the sign of the cross (and some of the blessings, such as God's "crescite et multiplicamini", are used also in the liturgy). More persuasive in this respect, perhaps, is the use of (ge)segnian twice in Genesis and once in Christ and Satan; this verb does surely invite visualation of the cross gesture. Jolly reinforces her case by pointing to the representation of God with a cruciform nimbus in several illustratiions, and, in Exodus, the well-known description of the guiding column of cloud in diction which can be shown to symbolise the cross. I quibble with some of Jolly's statements--for instance, that "Biblical history was conceived as being part of Anglo-Saxon history": surely (and logically) the opposite is the case? It is a little odd, also, to criticise Paul Remley for leaving discussion of the Junius 11 illustrations out of his historico-textual analysis of the poems, especially when Karkov herself accepts that these were in existence before those illustrations were made.
Richard Gem's "How much can Anglo-Saxon Buildings Tell us about Liturgy?", was an eye-opener for me, with first its interpretation of a detailed and (luckily for us) well labelled contemporary plan of the church at St Gallen, and then a survey of the structural developemnt of the Anglo-Saxon church. I had hoped for more: perhaps some explicit relating of Anglo-Saxon practice to the design of some specific buildings, but Gem's aim is, rather, to set the stage for further study. Most importantly, he reminds us that church buildings cannot simply be intrepreted in functional terms: what starts as a response to practical need develops as a vehicle for ideological statement and artistic expression.
Finally, M. Bradford Bedingfield's "Ritual and Drama in Anglo-Saxon England: the Dangers of the Diachroinic Perspective" gives as lucid a review of the history, and historigography, of medieval drama as I have read. Bedingfield notes the consensus view that the drama's beginnings may be traced to elaborations of the liturgy, above all the Visitatio sepulchri (with the quem quaeritis trope at its heart), but then castigates critics who approach liturgical performance anachronistically, evaluating it with reference to the dynamics of the representational mode and trying to fit it into a structure of diachronic development. Liturgical drama is ritual, Bedingfield reminds us, designed, as the compilers of the Regularis concordia make clear, to arouse compunction: the participation of the audience is its essence, and in this resides its dramatic quality.
This volume, full of interesting and stimulating insights, shows us that 'liturgy' is (as it were) a broad church. I was particularly pleased to find, and use, a good overall index--an essential feature, yet all too often denied us in collections of essays.