Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England
By (author) Matthew Cheung Salisbury
A challenge to the conventional narrative about the fixity of the medieval English liturgy and its manuscripts, encompassing a new and comprehensive study of their contents, and a multi-faceted resource for all those interested in the practice of medieval liturgy.
Until recently, research on the late medieval English Office liturgy has suggested that all manuscripts of the same liturgical Use, including those of the celebrated and widespread Uses of Sarum and York, are in large part interchangeable and uniform. This study demonstrates, through detailed analyses of the manuscript breviaries and antiphonals of each secular liturgical Use of medieval England, that such books do share a common textual core. But this is in large part restricted to a single genre of text–the responsory. Other features, even within manuscripts of the same Use, are subject to striking and significant variation, influenced by local customs and hagiographical and textual priorities, and also by varying reception to liturgical prescriptions from ecclesiastical authorities. The identification of the characteristic features of each Use and the differentiation of regional patterns have resulted from treating each manuscript as a unique witness, a practice which is not common in liturgical studies, but one which gives the manuscripts greater value as historical sources. The term ‘Use’, often employed as a descriptor of orthodoxy, may itself imply a greater uniformity than ever existed, for the ways that the ‘Use of Sarum’, a liturgical pattern originally designed for enactment in a single cathedral, was realised in countless other venues for worship were dependent on the times, places, and contexts in which the rites were celebrated.
- By (author) Matthew Cheung Salisbury
Other Titles in this Series
Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe
Diverse Imaginations of Christ's Life
Volume 31
Power of Words in Late Medieval Devotional and Mystical Writing
Essays in Honour of Denis Renevey
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Crusading in Frankish Greece
A Study of Byzantine-Western Relations and Attitudes, 1204-1282
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‘God Wants It!’
The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and its Jewish and Christian Background
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Inwardness, Individualization, and Religious Agency in the Late Medieval Low Countries
Studies in The 'Devotio Moderna' and its Contexts
Volume 43
Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378-1536
Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership
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