Keeping Time through Prayer Liturgy in the Middle Ages An Exhibition in the Vatican Film Library 13 February 31 August 2015 VFL MS 4, folio e verso Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections Pius XII Memorial Library, Rm. 105 Free and open to the public Monday Friday, 9 am 5 pm
Introduction To what extent do we see the world today, without knowing it, through medieval eyes? This exhibition aims to answer that question by exploring the relationship between Catholic liturgy and the passing of time. Throughout the middle ages of Western European history, the celebration of Mass was seen as an essential function of society. It provided order and structure to each day and set the boundaries of humanity s interaction with God. And yet, many of us know very little about the system that organized Masses across the continent into a coherent Church Year. The medieval and Renaissance manuscripts on display introduce viewers to medieval liturgy, as practiced in a wide variety of regional and theological contexts. They include liturgical calendars, manuscripts related to the cult of saints, and manuscripts with instructions for performing ritual worship. As a whole, these texts illustrate the numerous ways that prayer influenced the daily lives of religious and lay people. Development of Christian Worship: Change and Continuity from the Ancient to the Early Medieval Periods How did the worship of God change as Christianity spread across Europe? The story is one of both continuity and development. From the earliest times, Christians practiced their faith with two types of liturgical services: Masses and Offices. Masses typically occur on Sundays, and are distinguished from Offices by the celebration of communion (Eucharist). By contrast, Offices are recited at intervals during each day or night and do not include communion. Valuable information about liturgical traditions in the Early Church (ca. 70 476) can be found in the writings of Egeria, a fourth-century pilgrim who traveled from Spain to Jerusalem to record practices handed down from the Apostles. For example, she described morning and evening services that were performed daily in the Temple of Jerusalem. These services were open to lay people and included activities like processions, hymn singing, Scripture reading, and ritual lamp lighting. Scholars now call these types of services Cathedral Offices. -2-
As time passed, Cathedral Offices waned in popularity. They eventually disappeared, with Monastic Offices emerging as the new trend for daily worship. Instead of being open to the public, these monastic services were restricted to special communities. The monks in these communities saw it as their duty to pray as much as possible. They chose to omit flashy rituals such as processions, lamp-lighting and hymnsinging, which seemed to detract from the desired meditative atmosphere. Monks were also concerned with reading through the entirety of the Scriptures. Where Cathedral Offices drew from the same passages over and over again, Monastic Offices substituted a progressive and dynamic system of readings. St. Benedict of Nursia (480 547) was an innovator in this area. He created a reasonable and balanced rule, or guide, for monastic living, which was widely adopted during the liturgical reforms of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 476 1000). The primary goal of these reforms was to unify the worship practices of Western Europe. Due to differences in culture and custom, this was an extremely difficult task. To contextualize the struggle for liturgical uniformity, we will now examine the Church s worship calendar. The basic structure of this calendar remained constant throughout Christian history, but the rituals and celebrations used to mark its events varied from place to place. -3-
Structure of Christian Worship: Celebrations and Feasts in the Church Year The Catholic Church Year is a calendar of important events that repeats itself every twelve months. There are ten central celebrations in this calendar year, and they retell the basic narrative of the Catholic faith: God moves to redeem humanity through Christ and establishes the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit. These ten celebrations are called the Temporale, an abbreviated form of a Latin phrase meaning The Time of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The Temporale comprises: 1) Advent, anticipating Christ s birth 2) Christmas or the Nativity of Christ 3) The Circumcision of Christ, a celebration of Christ s appearance to the Jews 4) Epiphany, a celebration of Christ s appearance to the Gentiles 5) Lent, anticipating Christ s death 6) Palm Sunday 7) The Three Days (triduum) The Last Supper Good Friday or Christ s Betrayal Holy Saturday or Christ s Descent to Hell 8) Easter, or the Resurrection of Christ 9) The Ascension of Christ 10) Pentecost, or the coming of the Holy Spirit Seasons of the Catholic Church Year The events of the Temporale coincide with four special seasons in the Church Year: Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. All other times are simply labelled Ordinary (see diagram at right). It is important to note that the Church Calendar changes slightly, year by year. Its dates fluctuate because the date of Easter is not static. The celebration of Easter, as we well know, falls on a different Sunday each year. This is because its date is calculated based on lunar and solar cycles. If Easter is later, ordinary time will be shorter over the summer and longer in the winter. If Easter is earlier, then the opposite is true. -4-
Before we move on from this topic, we need to explore the history of the counterpart to the Temporale: the Sanctorale or Time of the Saints. The events celebrated in the Sanctorale are feasts honoring apostles, martyrs, virgins, and saints. The feasts fall on set dates throughout the year. For example, the feast of Saint Valentine always occurs on February 14th. The origins of the Sanctorale can be traced back to the first martyrs of the Roman Church. In the medieval period, monks introduced the reading of saints lives to daily offices. Lay people became acquainted with these saints through feast days, which provided time off from the labors of the field. Finally, priests depended on various liturgical books to celebrate the feasts at the proper time and in the proper way. We now turn to the liturgical manuscripts themselves, with the goal of exploring their development over time and their many uses in both religious and lay contexts. Liturgical Books for Christian Worship: Change and Continuity in the Late Middle Ages How did liturgical manuscripts dictate medieval worship practices? First, uniformity in worship is only achievable if the same texts are available in every place. This was impossible to realize during most of the Middle Ages, because the texts needed to perform a liturgy were dispersed into many different books. For example, the liturgical Rules of Aelfric (written in England, ca. 1000) required a Psalter, a book of songs, and a book of readings. Such books were extremely expensive to produce. By the thirteenth century, however, conditions began to change. Pope Innocent III Ratifying the Franciscan Order A powerful Papal Court headed by Innocent III (r. 1198 1216) ensured that resources were not lacking for manuscript production and distribution. Under this leadership, Roman worship customs spread through Europe very quickly. The trend toward Roman liturgical practice was successful largely because fewer texts were now required to celebrate Mass or recite an office. For Mass, priests needed only a Missal, which combined instructions for celebrating communion with Scripture readings and music. For offices, a Breviary was used. It included collects, chants, the Psalter, hymns, and even sermons. A missal leaf is on display in Case B (VFL MS 16), while a breviary leaf can be found in Case A (VFL MS 18). -5-
Men and women of the religious orders were not the only ones to benefit from innovative liturgical trends. During the late middle ages the Book of Hours a personal prayerbook for secular use became the bestselling and most widely-produced manuscript of all time. What is a Book of Hours, and What Purpose Does It Serve? First and foremost, a Book of Hours was a family possession, passed down from generation to generation for the worship of God in daily life. These living documents were genealogical repositories, emblems of cultural status, and primers for teaching children to read and pray. A wealthy patron could customize pages of the book to include personal portraits, or prayers to her favorite saint. The less well-off, by contrast, purchased shop copies that were created in bulk as demand exploded around 1400. These books were largely free from religious censorship until the mid-sixteenth century, when Popes began to sanction specific publishers and versions. As such, Books of Hours serve as a window into the popular beliefs and practices of the average medieval European. Books of Hours encouraged lay people to unite their prayers to those of monastic communities. In a sense, they resolved inherent tensions between the Cathedral Office and the Monastic Office (see Development of Christian Worship, above). Liturgy could now structure each moment of a person s day whether that person was a monk or not. Books of Hours typically began with a liturgical calendar, which established the passing of time as a communal function of a wide Church community. The texts discussed in this section represent the climax of centuries of liturgical development and growth. The Structure of a Day Ordered by a Book of Hours: The Latin names each represent one service or office. -6-
Calculating the Date of Easter This exercise will teach you how to calculate the date of Easter, just like a medieval cleric. Easter can fall on any Sunday between March 22 and April 25. Once its date is ascertained, the rest of the liturgical calendar falls into place. Determining the correct Sunday, however, is no easy task. The calculation requires complex knowledge of both solar and lunar cycles. Thankfully for us, medieval astronomers developed simple formulas so that even relatively uneducated parish priests could lead worship services on the right days, thus celebrating universal feasts with the universal church. Examining a medieval liturgical calendar, the first thing you might notice is a perplexing group of numbers and letters near the left margin. These columns list a golden number and a dominical letter for each day of the month. To find the date of Easter in any particular year, we need to use these two variables. Each year has one golden number. The appearance of this number on a calendar marks the new moon. Hence, the golden number repeats itself approximately every fourteen days. There is an even clearer pattern in the dominical letters: they repeat every seven days from a through g. This is because they represent days of the week, with a beginning on Sunday also called the dominical day or the Lord s day. All you need to calculate the golden number and the dominical letter is the year as long as that year is before 1583 and two simple formulas. We will work through these formulas below, assuming that the year is 1470, a probable date for VFL MS 03 (on display). VFL MS 35, Leaf a, detail Calculating the Golden Number: 1) Add 1 to the current year 2) Divide by 19 3) The remainder is the golden number Step 1: 1470 + 1= Step 2: 1471 19 = Step 3: Remainder = Determining the Dominical Letter: 1) Add the year to ¼ of itself (ignore remainders) 2) Divide by seven 3) Subtract the remainder from 10 4) You will get a number between 1 and 7. #1 corresponds with a, #2 with b, etc. Step 1: 1470 + (1470 4) = Step 2: 1837 7 = Step 3: 10 - Remainder = Step 4: Name the dominical letter = If you did your math correctly, you should have gotten 8 for the golden number and g for the dominical letter. The final steps for finding Easter would involve looking at a complete medieval calendar. First, you would locate the number 8 between March 1 and April 12. Next, you would count thirteen days forward from that day. Finally, the next appearance of g would mark Easter! Are you tired yet? Perhaps we now see why calculating the date of Easter was one of the first issues to divide Christianity, and why Roger Wieck calls this system one of the most confusing ways of reckoning time ever devised (Time Sanctified, 158). -7-
For Further Reading: *Paul Bradshaw et al., eds., The Study of Liturgy (New York, 1992) Justin Clegg, The Medieval Church in Manuscripts (Toronto, 2003) Margot Fassler and Rebecca Baltzer, eds., The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography (New York, 2000) Edward Foley, Ritual Music: Studies in Liturgical Musicology (Beltsville, Md., 1995) *George Guiver, Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God (New York, 1988) John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld, eds., Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance (Burlington, 2004) *Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982) Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400 1600 (Cambridge, 2012) *Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning Today (Collegeville, 1993) J.B.L. Tolhurst, Introduction to the English Monastic Breviaries (Rochester, 1993) *Roger Wieck, Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art (New York, 2014) Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997) Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, 2001) John Wilkinson, ed. and trans., Egeria s Travels (London, 1971) Jeremy Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe (New Jersey, 1989) Brochure produced by Ben Winter and Susan L Engle -8-