Perspectives on Ælfric

I’m reading through the LME again for a project I’m working on. Once again, I find myself baffled concerning the place of Ælfric in the modern academy.

There’s a folktale with wide circulation—I first encountered it in its Turkish form where the Hojja (a classic wise fool figure) is staring at the ground under a street-lamp. A passer-by asks him what he’s doing and he replies “Looking for a ring I lost.” The passer-by stops to help and they search without result for a while. Finally the passer-by asks, “Where exactly did you lose it?” The Hojja replies, “Inside my house.” “Well—why are we looking for it out here then?” “Because the light is so much better here…”

This, truly, is a core story for anyone who studies medieval materials—especially early medieval liturgical materials. So often we can’t look where we want to, we have to look where the light is good. We are thoroughly restricted by the materials we have.

Ælfric is like a gem sitting under a street-lamp that keeps getting walked over and stepped upon. The LME is such an unusual document: it lays out the monastic cursus of a pre-Conquest English monastery complete with local adaptions and a clear and definite section on the Night Office—one of the thornier items to reconstruct. Put this in relation to both the pastoral letters and Ælfric’s massive homiletical output and you have a wonderful window into Pre-Conquest church life. Yet I can count on the fingers of my hands the Church Historians who know him or do anything with him. Likewise, the number of Old English readers—virtually all in English departments—who appreciate his liturgical materials is likewise minuscule.

One obvious issue is language. The majority of Ælfric’s work is in Old English—a language inaccessible to most Church Historians. By the same token the LME isn’t really in Latin, it’s in liturgicalese which is a foreign tongue to your average medievalist no matter how good their Latin.

Another is publicity. Look in church histories and you’re not likely to find Ælfric. He’s too much of a regular guy. He wasn’t a great pope, prince, or even a ground-breaking interpreter. Indeed, one of the reasons I’m so interested in him is precisely because he offers an example of a what a regular well-schooled pious abbot would write and think. But—I stumbled across him by chance and followed the lead into the English Department. I sure didn’t hear about him in the theology school.

There’s a lot of work that remains to be done on his work and that of others like him. I’m working on it as are others, but we could use some more help!

Prayer Book Spirituality: Course Correction

I keep promising that substantive writing will return. I’ll stop promising and just give you this which is far more preliminary than substantive.

I’m becoming convinced that I’ve been approaching the Prayer Book from a slightly off angle; there’s a factor that had escaped me that I’m working on fitting back into place.

I was reading Christopher’s recent piece at the Cafe when this paragraph struck me strongly and clarified something I’ve been gnawing around in one branch of my recent research:

It has often been remarked that Thomas Cranmer intended to remake the Isles peoples into a vast monastery. I think this romantic notion gets Cranmer’s intent backwards. Rather our Prayer Book reforms the basic pieces of monastic piety and life precisely because in the first instance these matters should concern all Christians, not just monastics: Daily prayer and a life lived toward God and for neighbor in all the cares of daily and national life, including disputes over gentry seizures of commons and political intrigues at court. In other words, he intends to remake the Isles peoples into more well-formed and single-hearted, that is, praising Christians at work, in their home, and in their everyday community. It is within this generous framework that the particular dedications of our monastics should be placed, not vice versa.

Christopher hits the nail on the head, and a big part of it has to do with the origins of our prayer book.

Yes, the Offices that we have inherited as the larger part of Anglican spirituality are monastic in origin and are greatly shaped by Benedictine practice. I’d be the last to deny that. However, we over-simplify and misunderstand if we think that the relationship between breviary and prayer book is overly direct. We tend to  conceptualized it as: (Sarum Breviary->Payer Book Office). Sure, if we want to be more precise then we tend to sketch it this way: (Sarum Breviary->Quignonez/Hermann Revisions->Prayer Book Office). While this does get us closer, there’s one more mediating step that we’re leaving out. I think it really works more like this: (Sarum Breviary->Prymer->Quignonez/Hermann Revisions->Prayer Book Office).

The prymer’s the key. The Prayer Book isn’t a cut-down breviary with a missal added, it’s a jumped-up prymer.

Why does this matter? It’s all about audience and in whose hands what books were found. Breviaries and missals were books for religious professionals—professed religious and the clergy. The prymers were the books of the laity, that formed, shaped and directed lay spirituality along classic monastic patterns. Cranmer didn’t try and turn the Isles into one big monastery, rather, he sought to take the monastic-flavored piety already at work among the laity and broaden its Scriptural content.

Coming at it from this angle, we realize that the prayer book even at its start had strong roots in lay practice—and that changes quite a bit for me, at least.

At this point these are claims. I have hard evidence, but it’s not assembled yet to the point where it’s fully deployable. It’s on the to-do list…

Canadian Bishops on CWOB

I’ve been away from the computer for a while or, at least not in the blogging Anglican circles. I was alerted to an interesting news item by a friend of the blog. Looking back on the various sites that I frequent, I find it interesting that none of them has made mention of the recent meeting of the Canadian House of Bishops. At their just concluded meeting they “unanimously reaffirmed that the sacrament of the holy Eucharist is to be given only to those baptized in the Christian faith.”

Read more about it here.

Needless to say, I applaud the bishops for their decision. There is a logic to our sacramental rites that moves from Baptism to Eucharist. If anything, this was greatly enhanced by the 1979 Prayer Book. The new elevation of Baptism is an innovation, but I think a positive one. Any movement to degrade the position of Baptism is a clear step away from both the logic and theology of the Christian Church throughout the ages, and a big step away from the direction our prayer book leads.

I can only hope the American House of Bishops will issue a similar statement.

Holy Week Offices

After a year and a half, I still consider the breviary to be in beta because of issues like this morning—a missing collect and, in some cases, missing lessons. They’re fixed now and part of today’s events include a check through the rest of Holy Week to make sure everything’s functioning properly.

Exactly how the Holy Week and Triduum Offices are to be celebrated is a favorite topic among Anglican armchair liturgists; the various Books of Common Prayer give no indication of changes during this time but catholic practices give a variety of options with the Roman variations being predominate but I’m sure we can find some divergences even from that among regional uses (like the 24 candles of the Sarum tenebrae hearse as opposed to the more pedestrian 15 of Roman practice). I did write a bit about this last year which covers some of the various points to weigh.

Bottom line at the breviary is this: the breviary keeps the gloria patris for the beginning of Holy Week, but gives reduced offices for Triduum. The BSG version, however, does not use reduced offices but presents a full, regular, prayer book office. This probably is something that I should build into the preferences but haven’t had the time to do.

New Breviary URLs

The latest work at the breviary has not been primarily code changes, but has been the addition of some new dedicated pages. The breviary was designed to make pray the office both flexible and easy, and over it’s evolution, I’ve been making progress in both of these directions (more flexible and easier…).

I started with the date/time of day/option-sets entry screen.

Eventually, I made the move to cookies as a means of capturing specific options. (And I do need to do some work to make sure all of the options are functioning properly in cookie form…)

One of the issues I’ve faced from the beginning is the need for a static url which will get folks right down to the business of praying. An entry page was the only way in for two reasons—1) you had to make your choices somewhere, and 2) you needed to indicate what office you wanted to do. Cookies made the first one disappear, and—at the prodding of some friends—I’ve coded a page to by-pass the second as well. It functions by using javascript to find the timestamp on your computer (the client), then passes that value to my server-side PHP code. (So—if you have javascript disabled, this won’t work for you.) This allows me to present a single static url so that, if you already have a breviary cookie/set of preferences saved, all you have to do is jump to this url and the Office as you like it, appropriate to your time of day ought to appear.

Here’s the url: http://www.stbedeproductions.com/breviary/office.php

I’m still working out the exact times for changes between the offices so there may be continued tweaks with that part of it.

In related news, I have created a dedicated page for the Brotherhood of St Gregory—the ones who provided the impetus for this change, in fact—one of our Anglican religious communities bound by rule to pray the offices, according to their set preferences: a straight-forward Rite II with the monthly psalm cycle. This page requires no cookies at all and should work for anyone if this is the kind of office you desire: http://www.stbedeproductions.com/breviary/office_selectionBSG.php

For those interested, I’m also in conversations with Fr. John-Julian concerning a similar page for the Order of Julian of Norwich which should be up and running before too long.

So, my thanks to the Brotherhood for kindling a fire under me to get this work done, and I hope these new pages provide all of you with an even simpler way to experience the offices.

Riddel Posts

One of the standard features that identifies a church sanctuary as “English Use” is the appearance of a particular feature called a riddel post. These are two posts that stand at the north and south horns of the altar and have curtains (the “riddels” from whence the name comes) that extend back to the dorsal, the curtain mounted on the back wall right above the altar.

Like many of the features that adorn the English/Sarum Uses, this wasn’t actually a distinctively English characteristic. Instead that which is “English” tends to be that which is 1) pre-Baroque and 2) common to many of the diocesan uses in England and parts of northwestern Europe, especially France.

Recall that the English Use people of the later half of the 19th an early twentieth century were arguing a position against two different opponents. On one hand, they rejected the opinion of their Romanizing Ritualist colleagues that proper “catholic” expression should mimic the aesthetic of the Roman churches of the day which were Baroque or Rococo. On the other hand, they were arguing against the Low Church party who decried any ornamentation as a form of Popery. The English Use position was that, contra both the Romanizers and the neo-Puritans, they were the only ones who were holding properly to the rubrics of the Prayer Book since they were conforming their chancels to the Ornaments Rubric of the BCP which stated that chancels and vestments should be as they were in the second year of Edward the Sixth. So, they were in essence reviving a Renaissance (perhaps even early Mannerist?) aesthetic.

What prompted this post was the new background at the Breviary. For Lent, I’ve chosen to shift away from the leaves from the Little Office of the BVM that I’ve had up and I substituted some pages from the Office of the Dead. During today’s collect my attention was somehow caught by the image of the funeral mass and I realized that the altar in the picture had a nice set of riddels and riddel posts. As a point of reference, this image was taken from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and is probably the work of the Dutch Limbourg brothers or someone in their workshop from around 1416. (It’s from the WikiMedia Commons and is believed to not be under copyright.)

Here’s the image. Notice two things: first, the riddels and their posts. Second, note the directions that the angels are facing atop the riddels. Normally they face outward towards the congregation whereas here they face one another. A friend and I had been discussing whether angels facing were an authentic pose and, if so, what that indicated in terms of the classical authenticity of Dearmer’s “open position” where the deacon and subdeacon face both the celebrant and one another. This image is indeed a period attestation of both inward facing angels and, presumably, the open position.

Early Medieval Expectations for Laity

Posting will be quite light in the near future. I’m not giving up blogging for Lent or anything, but—as is usual—have way too many irons in the fire…

I warn you now, not only will posting be sporadic but it may also be both research intensive and potentially cryptic. I’m chasing several quite specific hares—and today’s led me into something I knew some of you would be interested in.

In Old English circles there are two main homileticians and two major anonymous collections: Ælfric, Wulstan, the Blicking Homilies and the Vercelli Homilies. Then there’s the mass of random anonymous stuff into which very few individuals go, myself included.

While trawling an old tome I found a reference to this interesting passage which shows up in an anonymous homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent (i.e., old Passion Sunday):

Us is ðonne swiðe gedafenlic, þæt we gelomlice ure circan secan and ðær mid micelre eadmodnysse and stilnysse us to urum drihtne gebiddan and godes word gehyran. And se ðe on oðrum ðingum abisgad sy oððe to ðam ungehænde, þæt he dæghwamlice his circan gesecan ne mæge, he huru ðinga on ðam sunnandagum and on oðrum freolsdagum þider cume to his uhtsange and to mæssan and to æfensange and na to nanum idelum geflite, ne to nanum woruldlicum spræcum, ac to ða anum, þæt he his synna gode andette and hira forgifnysse bidde and ðære halgan þenunge mid micclum goddess ege gehlyste and siððan mid ælmæsdædum gange him to his gereorde and mid micelre syfernysse and gemetfæstnysse his goda bruce and na mid nanre oferfylle, ne mid oferdrince, forði ðe Cristenum men nis nan ðing wyrse, ðonne druncenscipe. (Assmann, BASP3, 144: [Assmann 12] B3.2.16)

It is very proper for us that we should frequently visit our church and there pray to our Lord and hear God’s word with great humility and silence. And the one who is busy with other things or is overcome and cannot visit his church daily, he at the least should come on Sundays and on feastdays to morning-song* and to mass and to evensong and not pass them in idleness nor in worldly speech, but in this only: that he confess his sins to God and pray for their forgiveness and that he hear these holy services with a great fear of God and afterward, with almsgiving, go to his meal and partake of his food with much sobriety and moderation and not with any overeating or overdrinking for there is nothing worse for Christian men than drunkenness.

* Uhtsange looks to be the aggregated Night Office of Matins and Lauds which was said at the hour of “uhta”–the first glimmer of light.

Note on the Lenten Suppression of the Te Deum

As most Anglican liturgy buffs know, one of the few changes to the classical Anglican Morning Prayer is the suppression of the Te Deum during Lent (and Advent). The rubrics of the 1549 BCP direct:

After the first Lesson shall follow Te Deum Laudamus, in English, daily throughout the year, except in Lent, all the which time, in the place of Te Deum, shall be used Benedicite omnia Opera Domini Domino, in English as followeth

This direction was suppressed in the 1552 book and the Te Deum and the Benedicite were simply both given as options with no direction as to their use.

I’ve recently discovered that there was a bit of a backlash against this practice around the turn into the 20th century on the part of the learned Anglican liturgists of the English Rite party. Vernon Staley spends a bit of time on this matter in his book on the Church Year:

We have said above, that the rubric in the First Prayer Book of 1549 is to a certain extent in accord with ancient precedent; for whilst the direction to omit Te Deum in Septuagesima and Lent was general, if not quite universal, the mediaeval custom was not to substitute Benedicite. This later canticle, considered in itself, is even more inappropriate to penitential seasons than the Te Deum; for it consists of “one unbroken song of jubilant adoration,” whilst the Te Deum has “mingled with its triumphant praise the tenderest pleadings for mercy, the acknowledgment of human weakness, and the memories of the humiliation of the ‘King of glory’ when He took upon him to deliver man.” That the Te Deum should be omitted in Septuagesima and Lent is one thing: that the Benedicite should take its place is another thing altogether. The omission of the former canticle is in accordance with sound precedent; the substitution of the latter is not: for, as we have already noted, in the Sarum rite, Te Deum was a canticle of Sunday and festival Matins; whilst Benedicite was a canticle of another service, Sunday Lauds: neither canticle was for week-day use. What is really needed is a third canticle for penitential seasons and days, and perhaps ordinary week-days, less joyous than either Te Deum or Benedicite. Neither of these latter canticles was sung or said on ordinary week-days; both having a festival character and use, in the Sarum rite. (Staley, The Liturgical Year, 74-5)

This passage may have been inspired by the tear upon which John Dowden, Bishop of Edinburgh, proceeded in his The Workmanship of the Prayer Book (1899, 2nd ed. 1902/4) from which Staley quotes. Dowden’s Appendix E is on the form and use of the Benedicite in the prayer book tradition and he presents the liberty of the 1552 and subsequent books as a very good thing in this case. Here’s the context of the quote Staley pulls:

The opportunity may be taken here of pointing out the real gain of the liberty afforded since 1552 of using either the Te Deum or the Benedicite at any time of the year as the canticle after the first lesson. . . .
A moment’s consideration makes clear that, while Benedicite is one unbroken song of jubilant adoration, the Te Deum has mingled with its triumphant praise the tenderest pleadings for mercy, the acknowledgment of human weakness, and the memories of the humiliation of the “King of glory,” when He took upon Him to deliver man. Setting aside a false antiquarianism and looking at things as they are, I think few will be found to claim Benedicite as, in itself, more suitable than Te Deum for a penitential season. The reader will remember that in the mediaeval use Benedicite was not substituted for Te Deum in the penitential seasons, but Te Deum was omitted. The rubric of the Prayer Book of 1549 is not a continuance, even in an imperfect form, of the ancient rubrical directions. If Benedicite had continued to be sung every Sunday at Morning Prayer, the omission of Te Deum would have a significance which is not attained by the substitution. In my opinion the rubric of 1549 was a lame and wholly inefficient attempt to effect a very laudable object.
It seems to me to be a matter much to be regretted that our Reformers, in their desire for simplicity, abandoned altogether, with the one exception of Benedicite, the use of the several Scriptural canticles which had a place at Lauds on successive week-days. Much more suitable than Benedicite for Lent and Advent would have been the choice, from the Sarum Lauds for Monday, of the exquisitely beautiful Song of Isaiah (xii. 1-6) with its mingled sense of sin and gratitude for God’s mercy. . . .
Should a canticle yet more marked by a penitential character and by the tearful pleadings of fear and sorrow be preferred, the Song of Hezekiah (Isa. xxxviii. 10-20), which was sung in the Sarum Lauds for Tuesday, supplies what is needed.
If the time ever comes when the Church of England will attempt to revise and further enrich her Book of Common Prayer, it is to be hoped that consideration will be given to the treasury of sacred song which lies ready to hand in the canticles for Lauds not only in the Sarum rite, but also in the great store of the Cantica of the Gothic Breviary, and in the old Paris Breviary, which is marked by a number of noble canticles drawn from the Apocrypha. (Dowden, Workmanship, 244-7)

When one turns to the Deposited English 1928 book, you’ll find in the Alternate Morning Prayer that after the Te Deum and the Benedicite comes the Miserere, Ps 51. (The Song of Isaiah referenced above is included in the American ’79 BCP, minus the first verse that gives it its major penitential punch…)

So, to recap,  the Te Deum includes language that recalls the humiliation of both God and the church as well as praise. The Benedicite is basically all praise. As such, the Te Deum seems preferable between the two. However, since the Te Deum is used as the Church’s song of joy, it does seem inappropriate for Advent and Lent and there are better options out there.

To return to the point raised by Dowden in particular—where the heck did the Benedicite come from? Let’s recall the received wisdom on the formation of Morning Prayer. That is, it’s essentially a shortened form of the old Morning Offices said in aggregation–saying Matins, Lauds, and Prime one right after the other which was a not uncommon practice particularly for secular clergy. Hatchett’s Commentary on the ’79 BCP has a table laying this out on page 92 (EP is on the facing 93). The Te Deum was used on Sundays and on Feasts of 9 Lessons; the Benedicite is the appointed Lauds canticle for Sundays. So, is this why these were chosen—Cranmer and the boys decided to use the canticles from Sunday because it was the start of the weekly cycle?

I don’t think so.

My research on the Prymers may be bearing some interesting fruit here… When you look at both the Sarum pre-Reformation prymers and the Reformed English prymers, both contain the Te Deum and the Benedicite for daily use. The Sarum Matins of the BVM uses the Te Deum everyday without regard for season, and—likewise—the Sarum Lauds of the BVM uses the Benedicite daily. In the so-called “Marshall Hours” that replace the Offices of the BVM in the Reformed books (first appearing around 1535—almost 15 years before the first BCP comes on the scene), the “Matins” office already aggregates material from Matins and Lauds and—again—contains both items for daily use. Thus, if one looked at the Marshall Hours, they contained three canticles for the morning: the Te Deum, the Benedicite, and the Benedictus. If, in following the directions of the Sarum Breviary (not the prymer), the Te Deum were to be dropped in Advent and Lent, there would be two canticles left: the Benedicite and the Benedictus. And there, I suspect is the real rationale of why the Benedicite appears as an alternative to the Te Deum. It has nothing to do with being a real replacement or substitution. Instead, there were three morning canticles that people knew in English and were used to saying in English from the prymers—and these happen to be the three that appear in the Prayer Book’s Morning Prayer.

Again, I’ll be saying more about this in coming days, but I do believe that prayer book historians would be well to give the prymers a bit more attention. I think their role in the shape of the Prayer Book offices has been significantly underplayed especially in current narratives of Prayer Book origins.

Artist Missing the Point

So I’m flipping through an online Book of Hour in the Library of Congress’s collection. One of the standard items is the seven penitential psalms. Traditionally, these were ascribed to David as part of his remorse over the seduction of Bathsheba, the killing of Uriah the Hittite, and the subsequent death of David’s son.

The introductory image to the seven penitential psalms is a full frontal nude of Bathsheba in her bath with David looking on.

Call me crazy, but it seems like the illustrator is kind of missing the point and, were this my devotional book, I might have some trouble staying focused on my psalter…

Illuminated Angelus Card Download

We’ve started doing public Evening Prayer at our parish. Like a lot of A-C shacks, we like to start with the Angelus but don’t have any Angelus cards around. So, with the assistance of some nice files from this art site with quite a lot of high quality public domain images, I sat down with Word and after an hour or so of fiddling came up with:

a basic Rite I angelus card

It prints off onto a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper (I’d recommend photo paper, of course) which will then need to be trimmed to the appropriate size. I think if I spend a little more time with it, I ought to be able to come up with a two-column layout that has the Angelus on one side and the Regina Coeli on the other for Eastertide.