Both editors and reviewers face the same problem when it comes to festschrifts: how to make coherent what is usually a disparate collection of essays. This book, which honors the career of the Canadian historian Roger E. Reynolds, follows one of the conventions of the genre; its title contains nouns denoting broad categories of the subject's scholarly interests under which also the different contributions may be arranged. Reynolds is a textual scholar interested in ritual (specifically liturgy) and law, which the main title Ritual, Text, and Law reflects. The book itself is divided into two parts, the first devoted to ritual and the second to canon law. Both deal with texts. Each of the two editors introduces a part, Kathleen G. Cushing writing about law, and Richard F. Gyug about liturgy, thus giving the book greater coherence. This reviewer, however, lacks the necessary skills to do likewise and will content himself with summarizing each of the articles. Suffice it to say about the whole that it is a collection of interesting, sometimes important contributions to the fields of medieval ritual and canon law. Of the eighteen articles, three are in German and two in French. The book is well produced (nary a misprint caught my eye), honors its recipient suitably, and reflects well on the efforts of the editors. It concludes with Reynolds' bibliography and an index.
Paul De Clerck pursues the pleasantly named "angel of peace" who is mentioned by Pope Gelasius I in his Deprecatio . He finds the origins in the Book of Enoch, and he concludes that this angel was charged with helping the human sojourner reaching his or her goal, including on the last journey after death.
After the fall of the Visigothic kingdom through the Arab conquest of much of the Iberian peninsula in 711, fleeing clerics brought their important books with them east of the Pyrenees. Thus, many Mozarabic liturgical texts are partially transmitted in non-Iberian manuscripts. A previously unnoticed text survives only in two Italian manuscripts, one having been copied from the other. This is the Ordo in susceptione presbiterorum , a ritual for the bishop's examination of his priests, who were obliged to congregate each year after Pentecost at the bishop's see. Herbert Schneider edits and discusses this text.
Eric Palazzo explores the history of hyssop and especially its use in the liturgy. In Antiquity and during the Middle Ages, the plant was used medicinally to cure respiratory ailments. In the Old Testament, hyssop was used for cleansing rituals; Leviticus 14 recommends hyssop in purifying lepers, and Psalm 51 has David asking to have his sins cleansed with hyssop after his affair with Betsheba. The parallels between such spiritual use and the medical use are obvious. The use of hyssop in the medieval church is analogous; it was used at the dedication of churches and the consecration of altars.
Roger Reynolds has explored the development of the order of the subdiaconate in theological, liturgical, and legal literature, showing that it began to be counted as a major order in the eleventh-twelfth century. Charles Hilken has began the work of examining the historical evidence for this shift. His contribution focuses on the 226 entries for subdeacons in the Montecassino necrology first laid out at the middle of the 1160s. He is working on an edition of the necrology, which was used for the rest of the Middle Ages. His examination shows that subdeacons were honored as belonging to a major order from the late eleventh century through the end of the Middle Ages. His results are, thus, consonant with what Reynolds has found in the more theoretical literature.
Jonathan Black focuses on three among the hundred or so quodlibetal questions that Guerric of St.-Quentin (d. 1245) devoted to liturgical problems. Such questions are unusual in the quodlibetal literature. Black compares the answers given with the relevant discussion in liturgical commentaries and finds that Guerric's treatment was largely independent of that tradition.
In a contribution that moves between William Durand (the author of the Rationale divinorum officiorum ) and Thomas Moore, Timothy M. Thibodeau argues for the centrality of the symbolism of the liturgy for medieval and early modern culture. He compares Moore's last work, written while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting execution, to the medieval tradition of liturgical interpretation.
Until recently, only eight manuscripts written in Beneventan script in the sixteenth century were known. Virginia Brown now presents a ninth manuscript, a prayerbook that was sold at Sotheby's in 1994 to a private collector. The book is unique in containing two prayers in Italian, which is the only known instance of longer non-Latin texts written in Beneventan. The study includes a listing of the prayers contained in the book with editions of previously unprinted texts as well as reproductions of nine openings.
When Ambrose was elected bishop of Milan, he was a layman who was not even baptized. The early church did not prescribe any particular sequence through the various holy orders, until the council of Sardica (342 or 343) prescribed in its canon 13 that only priests could become bishops; priests would have had to first be lectors and then deacons. John St. H. Gibaut follows the transmission of this canon in (printed) canonical works until the High Middle Ages. The most interesting aspect of this history is that Roman tradition from Dionysius Exiguus (early sixth century) changed a single word in the canon (et became aut ), with the consequence that both priests and deacons could become bishops. This was consistent with local practice. Gratian still reproduces the text of Dionysius in his Decretum (c. 1140).
In 1614, Geverhard Elmenhorst printed an anonymous early-medieval homily, which has achieved some minor notoriety since it contains a Creed in question-form associated with the baptismal ritual. Such texts are unusual in the Early Middle Ages. No manuscript of this text has been known until now, when Giles Constable edits the text on the basis of a Copenhagen manuscript. He summarizes ably the historiography on this interesting homily. It shares some characteristics with the Scarapsus attributed to St. Pirmin of Reichenau and with a diocesan statute from before 813. The still- anonymous homilist draws heavily on the work of Caesarius of Arles.
The wittily entitled "Quod si non emendent, excommunicetur" by the now late Hubert Mordek deals with a particularly vexed textual problem to which the author contributes some emendations with support of a previously unnoticed text. Charlemagne's 802 Aachen capitulary is known from a single manuscript containing a very corrupt text. The text is in fact so corrupt in such peculiar ways that Mordek questions whether some Lombard scribe (or his employer) wished to thus protest the Frankish conquest of Northern Italy. A few of the chapters in the capitulary also appear excerpted in the canonical Collection in Five Books , which assisted the MGH-editor Alfred Boretius in editing an emended text in 1883. Chapters 14-15 do not appear in that collection, but Mordek has discovered their text inserted into a twelfth-century Italian manuscript of Burchard of Worms' Decretum . The new text is very close to the previously known text, which in any case does not appear to have any more difficult textual cruces. Its contribution is mostly to confirm some of the conjectural emendations of Etienne Baluze.
Susan Ann Keefe is in the process of compiling a catalogue of commentaries on creeds in Carolingian manuscripts. Such manuscripts usually contain some set of excerpts from works of various authors. In her article, she lists almost 300 such texts that she has found, in varying combinations, in 80 different sets. She examines how compilers of such collections drew on collections of canon law as their sources, as they often did.
Martin Brett's contribution raises some important questions for readers of medieval collections of canon law (and what he says certainly has relevance for other genres as well). Brett is an experienced editor of such texts who has long been working on two collections from c. 1100: the Collectio Tripartita and the Panormia (usually ascribed to Ivo of Chartres; Brett cooperates with Bruce Brasington on the edition). He warns the modern researcher not to treat the specific collections as separate and static works. The manuscripts of each of them exhibit much variety. They are "the work of a living community of scribes, readers and editors" (219), who felt free to change, add, delete, even pervert their texts to suit their purposes. Brett illustrates his reasoning with well chosen examples from his wide experience. This should be required reading for anyone working seriously with canon law collections.
Several eleventh- and twelfth-century collections from Burchard to Gratian contain sections de penitentia , treating penitential rules. In the collection of Anselm of Lucca, book 11 is devoted to this theme. Kathleen G. Cushing examines Anselm's sources for this section. Burchard's collection is, as could be expected, an important source, but Anselm must have had at least one other source, and it is less clear what that source might be. Cushing identifies the Capitula iudiciorum as another source, and discusses the possibilities that some other collections, including one represented by Kynzvart MS 75, may also have played a role. A useful table indicating parallel occurrences in relevant collections for the 152 canons of Anselm's book 11 ends the article.
The manuscript Vatican lat. 1339, produced in central Italy in the mid-eleventh century, contains the canonical Collection in Five Books , which is illustrated with over 50 images. In addition to depictions of six early councils, the images portray authors who are cited in the collection. Richard F. Gyug compares the images to the textual content of the collection and concludes that they well illustrate the text. He suggests the illuminations in this manuscript fills a function similar to that of prefaces in early medieval canonical collections in promoting the usefulness of the specific set of authorities contained in the collection.
Peter Landau searches for the immediate sources of the Collection in Seven Books (composed in the late 1110s in Italy), about which earlier scholars have had differing opinions. He finds that the Polycarpus of Cardinal Gregory of Grisogono is the collection's main source, from which the anonymous compiler sometimes copied title rubrics and excerpted sequences of canons. Among other utilized sources are the collections of Anselm of Lucca and Burchard of Worms.
Linda Fowler-Magerl's contribution focuses on an important pre-Gratian canonical collection that should be better known, the Collectio Caesaraugustana . The work was probably produced in Valence in Southern France, and its transmission is closely associated with the St. Ruf order of canons regular. Fowler-Magerl studies the relationships between the five complete medieval manuscripts, most of which contain quite different versions of the collection. She shows that the collection draws on some sources available only in Northeastern France.
An important source of the Caesaraugustana was the compilation of Cardinal Deusdedit, and Fowler-Magerl warns her readers from underestimating the influence of this work, which survives in a single complete medieval copy, since fragments of several other manuscripts have survived. In his contribution, Robert Somerville describes another trace of Deusdedit's collection, namely a series of excerpts found in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 399.
Uta-Renate Blumenthal's contribution deals with a canonical collection found in the manuscript Paris, Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal 721. The work comes from the library of St. Victor and may very well have been produced there, some time after 1110. Blumenthal shows that its author was interested in the heritage from Pope Gregory VII. He might have used the Codex Udalrici or its source in compiling his own collection.