I am slowly but surely working on getting my conference notes up. There was a lot going on at the conference, and my notes remain in a fairly rough form so the process of cleaning them up means that they’ll be appearing over the next few days.
In the meantime, the presentation that I gave to the Society of Catholic Priests on Communion Without Baptism is now appearing on the Episcopal Cafe.
Dr. Doig is from Oxford University and has published most recently in the field of liturgy and architecture. He began and ended his presentation with references to the Directorium Anglicanum. Published in 1858, this was the first work to advocate a recovery of Sarum rubrics and ceremonial for application to the Book of Common Prayer (English 1662). After presenting a bit about the Directorium itself and the—literal—trials of its author, the Rev. John Purchas, Dr. Doig described the situations in England that led up to it.
In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It brought great inequity between the rich and poor and caused major shifts in the population distribution of England. The lower classes were ill-served by the Established church and Non-conformism was on the rise. With the flood of people out of the country and into the cities, the church was caught flat-footed: there qere too many clergy in the rural areas and not nearly enough in the cities. Whereas the Established Churchneededboth houses of worship and clergy, the Baptists and Methodists were able to hire halls and provided lay preachers wherever a need arose.
In 1818, the government tried to address the problem by setting aside a million pounds for the building of 96 churches. A few years later the concept was replicated with a larger scope—but far fewer resources; half a million pounds were set aside for building 450 churches. The result was an architectural style referred to as “Commission Gothic” which was a thinly Gothicized preaching box. These measures helped, but didn’t solve the problem.
In 1833,the Tractarian movement kicked off with Keble’s preaching of the “National Apostacy” sermon. In the same year, A. W. Pugin conducted a tour of English architecture and churches. He connected the spread of modern architecture with a degradation in modern morals. Gothic architecture, on the other hand, had a higher moral structure literally built into it. The symbolism and encoded meanings built into Gothic architecture made it, Pugin believed, a greater vehicle for truth. He found the faith encoded in the Gothic buildings more compelling than what was being preached and, in 1834 as a result of his architectural study, Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church. Conversely, he associated the lack of architectural integrity in the more recent church buildings with the failures of the Established Church. Perhaps in part because of his route into the Roman Catholic Church, Pugin’s Catholicism had much in common with a medieval, Sarum perspective—it was romantic, aesthetic, and was nurtured in an environment replete with meanings.
The Tractarian Movement, on the other hand, was well under way in 1834. It had already penetrated to the rural regions and the Tracts for the Times were making their impact felt. The catholicity of the Tracts was rather different from what Pugin desired—he wished to see a return of medieval rite and ceremonial; the Tractarians had quite different goals. Nevertheless, there were some interesting intersections between the two.
John Henry Newman made his decision to swim the Tiber in 1845. Before leaving for studies in Rome, he attended the consecration of one of Pugin’s churches, St Giles, in 1846. He described the building in literally glowing terms. He called it the most splendid building that he had ever seen. Newman’s subsequent discovery of the Baroque cooled his enthusiasm for Pugin’s work. In later years when he preached at another of Pugin’s churches Newman found the altar too small for a proper Solemn High Mass, its tabernacle too small for a proper exposition, etc. Pugin and Newman butted heads on a number of occasions due to competing views on the liturgy and the architecture necessary for its performance. Pugin envisioned a medieval rite like Sarum; Newman, a Baroque Roman.
While the Oxford Movement spawn an Oxford society on architecture that offered advice on building churches in England and in the far-flung English colonies, the Cambridge Camden Society began the central architectural powerhouse of the mid nineteenth century. Founded by Benjamin Webb and John Mason Neale, their views were far more strident than those of the Oxford group. Articles in the Ecclesiologist called for a recovery of medieval practices for use with the prayer book. They wanted a more frequent and elaborate celebration of the Eucharist and were the first to point to the Ornaments Rubric and its importance. Not everyone agreed, however, and they faced significant persecution for their stances; Webb was inhibited for 16 years as a result of his ritualizing ways.
The central medieval touchstone for the Cambridge Camden Society was the writings of Durandus of which they released a translation in 1843. Inspired by his work, the society promoted “architecture with an agenda.” They won and the Cambridge Camden Society, later known as the Ecclesiological Society , and its aesthetic concepts became the norm for Anglican church buildings. With the renewed vigor of the English Church through the Oxford and Cambridge Movements, some 4,000 churches were built or reconditioned between the 1830s and 1870s. The great majority of these followed the precepts of the society. While Pugin had converted to the Roman Church, he was not in principle a Romanist and shared much in common with the Ecclesiologists.
It is at this point—with the maturity of Pugin, with the success of the Ecclesiological Society—that Purchas’s Directorium Anglicanum appeared. The Directorium insisted that the rubrics of the BCP were incomplete as they stood—some other information was needed to complete them and that the answer lay in the pre-Reformation era. The section “Of Ceremonies” in the 1662 BCP gave some hints and nods towards late medieval practice, Purchas believed. As a result, the Directorium cites medieval precedents, appealing to contemporary Roman ceremonial when a medieval source could not be found. Whenever possible, though, he preferred a medieval Sarum source.
What the Directorium did was to give directions for ceremonial that fit the shape of the buildings that the Ecclesiologist Society had prepared. The shape was there—Purchas provided the ceremonial that worked in them. As a result, the Directorium became the main authority for rite and ceremony in the Church of England for the next half-century.
This presentation is harder to describe because so much of it was based around the PowerPoint presentation of photographs of the liturgies from Salisbury Cathedral. As a result, I won’t be able to do it true justice in a written format.
He began with the question of how a diverse modern community inhabits, uses, and worships within a medieval building—how do they go about being good heirs of a medieval structure? Peter Brook, an English theatre director, wrote against the newly rebuilt Coventry Cathedral—the building was constructed first, then the church considered how to use it. This is backwards: the ceremony has to come first.
In the medieval world, this was the case. The ceremony did come first and the cathedrals were built to enable and to shape it. When Richard Poore began the construction of the current cathedral at New Sarum, he brought more than a new ground plan; he had studied at the University of Paris and brought back the new theology, a new mindset, and the desire to create something innovative. Just as he brought back the new Scholastic theology, he brought the new Gothic architecture to replace the old monastic styles. The Sarum Rite was first of all rooted in the Roman Rite of the Western Church. While the Roman Rite progressively simplified, the Sarum Rite remained elaborate. [I believe this was a reference to the liturgical reforms along Franciscan lines eventually leading to Trent and the Tridentine forms but I’m not positive of that…] Poore knew that the ceremony had to come first and would dictate the shape of the space; he had the advantage of having experienced the Old Sarum cathedral first.
At this point, the presentation moved into a lengthy presentation of the conduct of the modern Easter Vigil in the Salisbury Cathedral space. Processions remain an important part of the liturgy at Salisbury and the Easter Vigil is no exception. The description that he gave seemed to show a negotiation between a medieval space and a standard Liturgical Renewal Movement ceremony (complete with a recently-added LRM fountain-style font that looks quite out of character with the rest of the building).
The day concluded with cocktails at the nearby house of a member of the parish. The finger-foods were delicious , and the setting delightful. We met a number of interesting people, including a number of folks who read the blog, and caught up on doings back in Atlanta with Bishop Whitmore, the assisting bishop of the diocese.
The day’s events opened with a sung service of Morning Prayer. As you can imagine at a conference of Anglican musicians, the singing was wonderful. The psalms were well-chanted by all; standing in the midst of the congregation singing the hymn was a great experience. Morning Prayer occurred and God was duly worshipped.
It was a perfectly acceptable prayer book service, but I was confused at some of the choices made. The psalms were chanted with the cantor singing the first half of the verse and the congregation singing the second half—I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced that before and found it unusual. The canticle following the single reading was the Te Deum. While I would have chosen the Benedictus on principle, the Te Deum is a perfectly legitimate choice—but the Suffrages were set A. Our current Suffrage B is the set that the West has historically appended to the Te Deum. The ’79 BCP detatched them from the Canticle and appointed them as an option, making them the natural choice when the Te Deum is used.
The combination of these choices made me wonder—if the conference is on American Sarum, why not do a more Sarum-style Office? Why not use the Benedictus, and if the Te Deum is used, why not use the suffrages sung with it at Salisbury? Why not use Sarum practice in chanting the psalms? The implication is that the Sarum Use is exclusively a Mass use. And it may be at this particular church—I haven’t seen any references to public Offices. But it needn’t be and shouldn’t be; a use that consciously engages the Sarum tradition is missing a significant piece of that tradition if it omits the Offices.
The first session was by Fr. Cody Unterseher, a priest associate of the parish who is finishing a PhD in Liturgics at Notre Dame, and a member of the Pray Tell blogging team. This session was focused around the notion that, contrary to the oft-repeated parish phrase, no—we haven’t always done it that way. Thus, as a theory-based introduction to the conference as a whole, it served as a reminder that there has always been diversity in Christian liturgy. Drawing on the work of Paul Bradshaw and others, Fr. Unterseher noted that discontinuity is as much a feature in Christian liturgy as continuity. No—we haven’t always done it that way. While I do have some quibbles with some of his historical points—particularly around what level of continuity did exist and an overly hasty dismissal of the Ornaments Rubric—the presentation did a good job of introducing non-specialists to the legitimate discontinuities in the liturgical past. The purpose of this historical introduction was make the point that discontinuities are not uncommon in our liturgical record—and we now live in a situation of much change and turbulence. We should’t let how we’ve done thing in the past hold us back from what we could be doing and how we can leverage our historical resources to help us in this new situation.
This session was one of the reason I came to this conference and Dr. Harper did not disappoint. In a fast-paced and data-rich hour, Dr. Harper walked us through the key points grounding the medieval Use of Sarum. He began by reminding us that there was a clear and distincive Ecclesia Anglicana that authorized the Sarum Use between 1534-1549. During this fifteen-year period between Henry the 8th’s definitive break with Rome and the introduction of the first Book of Common Prayer, England was a church apart from papal domination that authorized the Sarum Use as the official use of the realm. Homing in on the word “Use,” he challenged the typical protestant equation of Use with texts and suggested that we gain a fuller sense of the term is we understand a Use to be the confluence of:
He then explicated these four factors with a wealth of detail and a fantastic set of slides which included the two cathedral sites at Old and New Sarum and the major stages in the construction of New Sarum. This was coupled with a discussion of the major individuals—mostly bishops—who saw the growth and expansion of Sarum and how the community of canons likewise grew until it reached a stabilized number of 52 canons on a quarterly rotation in New Sarum.
Regarding the spread of the Sarum Use he noted that it was one of the earliest coherently codified Uses in England; due to the cathedral’s shift to New Sarum and Richard Poore’s compilation of the customary and ordinal for the new building, Sarum offered a clearly defined system which other dioceses could borrow for use and adaptation. Furthermore, Sarum Use was frequently adopted by parishes in diocese which retained a monastic cathedral. Since parishes couldn’t use monastic uses without significant adaptation, the secular Sarum Use was a natural substitute for writing/compiling their own.
Dr. Harper’s final point was to return to the concept of a Use as something very much more than just a text. Medieval liturgy was very much a “sensory polyphony” where a variety of sights were overlaid by a variety of sounds and a variety of smells. Texts, actions and movements were also layered with the various parts of the worshipping body participating in different activities at the same time and only coming together at the main cofluences of the liturgy like the Great Elevations.
We were left with a sense of the wealth and richness of the liturgical environment and the possibilities that existed for us in appropriating even a bit of these for our current context.
M and I arrived at the conference late Friday afternoon and have been on the run until now. I’m stealing a moment between arriving for coffee and heading up to Morning Prayer. As a result, I’ll be putting out a few thoughts now that I may go back and fill in later. (Do let me know if there are specific points you’re interested in.)
The conferece is very well attended—indeed, I think that there are more participants than the organizers initially expected and there are moments when the logistics seem clearly scaled to a smaller crowd. There are about 100 participants; I’d guess that about two-thirds are musicians, the other third being clergy. Among the clergy there’s a nice group representing the Society of Catholic Priests.
The main activity of the night was a concert by the Trinity Wall Street choir singing medieval English music. The first half was music from the thirteenth century to the Eton Choirbook (c. 1500). The second half offered selections from composers during Queen Mary’s restoration of the Sarum Rite between Edward and Elizabeth. The music was glorious.
MP calls… More later.
Time and leisure being what they are, this post will be far more a set of pointers than a properly-researched orderly exposition. I’ll loop back and hit Late Sarum later—I think it more important for the purposes of the coming American Sarum conference to consider a key step in the Sarum story: its leap to the modern day.
I choose the somewhat unwieldy “Englishing” quite deliberately because I want to highlight two of its sense, both of which are fully at play. The first is that, for the Sarum materials to have an impact on the England the America of the modern day, they had to leave the language of Latin and enter the tongue of English. This is the simplest meaning of the term.
However, something else is going on here as well. As a recent commenter pointed out in regard to another topic, you can never go back again. Bringing something forward from a past time into a present gives it a whole new set of meanings based on the new context, how the present context views the past, and the purposes and ideologies involved in selecting and reviving this particular slice of the past (and not others). There was a very deliberate program of “Englishing” at work in the 19th century revival of Sarum.
One of the key movements in 19th century, particularly Victorian, England was Gothic Revival. This was a confluence on romanticism, medievalism, and nationalism that found expression in a variety of ways. The term is most commonly associated with architecture, but it stands at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) and became a major cultural force.
Pause for a moment to consider King Arthur. Unless you’re a trained medievalist, your chief exposure to King Arthur and the Round Table is fundamentally rooted in Gothic Revival forms of romanticized medievalism lavishly illustrated by some of the great painters produced by the philosophy of the PRB. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is a classic example of how these movements filtered into the broader English consciousness.
Catholic expressions of Anglicanism (i.e., Anglo-Catholics and other folks) typically trace themselves back to the Oxford Movement—and this is correct in a general theological way. The Oxford Movement was not Anglo-Catholic, though, and readers of the Tracts are often surprised at the amount of weight given to topics like bishops and the relationship between Church and State rather than ritual or ceremonial. The movement that had more impact on the daily practice and perception of the Church of England was the Cambridge Movement which birthed the Cambridge Camden Society which would become the Ecclesiological Society and exerted a disproportionate influence on how churches were built, decorated, and appointed. The Cambridge Camden Society, founded by Blessed John Mason Neale and comrades, was explicitly and fundamentally medievalist in orientation. The majority of Neale’s hymns are translations of medieval texts and even his original compositions—like Good King Wenceslaus—are medieval in character.
It’s within this context that a renewed interest in Sarum sources began. If you check back to the previous post on editions, you’ll note that the Victorian period—the second half of the 19th century—is when the publishing really took off. Because of the ideologies surrounding the revival, “Victorian Sarum” is both more and less than “historical Sarum.” Translations and syntheses of “Sarum” practice became an odd amalgamation of 1) historical sources, 2) contemporary Roman Catholic practice, and 3) the authors’ fancy. The balance of these three components varies by author and by work, some being more grounded, some being more fanciful.
Sarum becomes a cypher for a host of things. Sarum becomes directly equated with English. Thus other regional uses like Hereford, Lincoln, Exeter, and York were both plundered for raw material when there were Sarum gaps, and were downplayed in order to keep Sarum front and center. (Christopher, Pfaff’s chapter 14 is entitled “Regional Uses and local variety” and covers the English non-Sarum material quite well.) When Sarum is equated to English then it was given a natural antithesis: Roman. Now, a more objective view will recognize that in the heyday of the Sarum Use there was no strictly “Roman Use.” The sense I get from what little I do know of late medieval Continental uses is that many of them had their own local customs and traditions. There was no monolithic “Roman” practice from which Sarum diverged, and it was probably as unique as its neighbors. My sense is that when Rome did move to standardize, it relied on the liturgical uses of the mendicant orders—particularly the Franciscans because the orders were already trans-regional (due to the whole “wandering” bit implied in “mendicant”).
Thus, if you wanted to espouse catholic practices but still keep a certain distance from Roman Catholicism and all that stood for in pre-Victorian and Victorian England, an appeal to “Sarum” was your key. It was both medieval and catholic but conceptually not Roman Catholic. It was native and English, and not a foreign imposition. Too, there’s the “Ornaments Rubric” which deserves a massive post of its own for the role it played—or was given to play—in grandfathering in Sarum appointments and ceremonial.
There’s quite a lot more to say here. Actually, there are probably several book-length studies that could written here. I don’t know if any have and would love to hear if you know of any…
In any case, given the current concerns, I want to point to just three resources. These are what I consider to be the three central works on Sarum/English ceremonial from the end of the 19th century and that have done the most to create what is referred to variable as the Sarum or English Use:
Each of these is available for download from Google Books and each deserves a post in their own right.
I’ve been busy with work stuff so some hoped-for posting hasn’t happened yet. Maybe later… In lieu of new content, here’s some old content!
I stuck a few of my presentations from some conferences out there and may be adding more items soon.
Ok, back to Sarum and picking up Richard Pfaff’s The Liturgy in Medieval England where we left off at chapter 11 (“New Sarum and the spread of Sarum Use”).
Pfaff lays down at the start that, contrary to the previous block, we have a partial map for this period; while we have no secure starting place, we do have a more definite ending place:
Two hundred or so years later [after the change from Old Sarum to New with the new cathedral in 1225 and after], by the end of the fourteenth century, a high degree of both elaboration an standardization seems to have been reached, and the very full rubrics which reflect what we study as the New Ordinal are widely copied into missals. When books with unambiguous titles like Missale as usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum begin to be printed at the end of the fifteenth (the two earliest are 1487 and 1492), the relevant material from ordinals has been thoroughly incorporated into the text of the missal. (Pfaff, 365).
This chapter shoots to establish what picture we can establish around the year 1290. By this time, the cathedral has been established for well over a half-century, the main recognizably “Sarum” sanctoral occasions have been added to the kalendar, and we have some actual manuscript sources from which to work.
Richard Poore, dean of the Old Sarum cathedral from 1197 (succeeding his brother Herbert who had been elected bishop) later bishop of Chichester (1214-1217) then of Salisbury (1217-1237, again succeeding his brother), both shepherded the move to New Sarum directed in 1218 and appears to have been responsible for codifying the new practice in conjunction with his dean, William de Waude (precentor from 1218, dean 1220-1245).
In his tentative reconstruction of the period, after going through quite a bit of technical data, Pfaff sketches a helpful overview of the time from Old Sarum to the end of the fourteenth century and the Risby text printed by Frere. Old Sarum probably started out with a Gregorian + Young Gelasian missal like the Leofric missal with similar adaptations for a secular context. “The ordinary would likewise have contained no striking divergences in wording from that used elsewhere throughout the kingdom—or, for that matter, in most of western Europe—and would have been supplied with a minimum of ceremonial rubrics, if any at all” (Pfaff, 384). So—our starting place with Osmund and Old Sarum is what I’m used to from my early medieval days, a regular mixed missal and the Romano-German Pontifical for directions.
By the middle of the twelfth century, two changes occurred: a growth and formalization of the cathedral chapter (so, more folks and a more hierarchical arrangement of them [i.e., the “rulers” for the choir?]) and a revision of the massbooks at the cathedral containing more extensive and elaborate rubrics. Thus, in William de Waude’s 1220 visitation (before New Sarum, remember), he speaks of “new” massbooks and “old” massbooks reflecting the slow spread of the Old Sarum revision filtering into the parish churches of the diocese.
With the move to New Sarum and, consequently, new spaces and dedications to new saints, a revision of the Old Sarum revision was necessary. The completion of this revision and its attending customary and ordinal is what we now consider to be a distinctly identifiable “Sarum Use” and began to be referenced as such by the directives of other bishops.
This period should probably be brought to a close by the year 1319 in which the feast of the relics of Salisbury was officially changed; it had been on September 15th—not a good day as it’s the Octave of the Nativity of the BVM—and was changed to the Sunday after the Translation of Becket (July 7th). This shift will become a key litmus test later on for answering the “Sarum or Not” question.
So, at the end of this stage, our direct evidence are the missals printed by Legg, the Consuetudinary and the Ordinal printed by Frere (but not the Customary…), and the two mass ordinaries with some ceremonial directions in Legg’s Tracts on the Mass.
Pfaff’s next chapter looks at the work of Bishop Grandison of Exeter (1327-69) who uses and adapts Sarum for his own purposes and is quite interesting for how Sarum was used as a base from which to make further changes in the fourteenth century. It’s really cool stuff (for a liturgy geek) but not directly relevant to the over-all condensed Sarum story which is what I’m trying to present here. Thus, I’ll pick up next time with his chapter 13.
I’m taking a quick break from Sarum to jot down some thoughts that I’ve been having after Dean Knisely’s post on study plans. He notes that he’d like to do some thinking about hermeneutics, particularly any native Anglican form of hermeneutics, and brings up the issue of pre-modern forms of reading that tend to loosely travel under the label of “allegorical.”
This is kinda my *thing*; it’s what my dissertation was on. (Actually, if he’s not careful, I’ll send him a copy of it…)
In pondering what resources I should refer him to, I think back to my fundamental findings and to discussions about basically all pre-modern forms of reading that I had with my dissertation director. One of the points that he made (fairly constantly) and that I found to be concretely true in my research is that too many who are interested in this topic completely miss the forest for the trees.
The problem is context. The great grand-daddy of the modern study of figural interpretation is Henri De Lubac who, living in a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic world, writes with some unconscious assumptions about contexts that it seems never occur to him to make explicit. Most medievalists (Beryl Smalley, I’m looking at you…) are interested in “interpretation of the Bible” and, in pursuit of what they think their focus is, so narrow that focus to the point where the context fundamentally disappears or is regarded as a layer that gets in the way.
The danger that everybody likes to get hyper about is the fear that if you go down the allegorical road, you can make any text say anything. Suddenly, the unbinding of Lazarus is actually about the sacrament of confession; the injunction about not eating weasels in Deuteronomy is actually about 0ral s3x (no, seriously, and that’s one from the late first/early second century Epistle of Barnabas…). Thus, the chief question becomes: what are the controls? What prevents you from plowing into totally crazy, over-the-top readings? Or, alternatively, how do we know when an OTT reading must be reined in? In a word, context.
Figural interpretation happens within a structure of communal liturgical practices. In the patristic and early medieval periods in particular, interpretation was done by people who were enmeshed in their community’s liturgical cycles and it’s these fundamental communal practices that gave them a grounding. Constant repetition of the Offices, and constant contact with the Mass, presented a daily repetition of the Christian core practices and beliefs: the Creeds—the Canticles—the Gloria—the Canon. This grounding, in turn, gave them a flexibility for play in both their interpretive and theological musings. The playing field was marked off by the creeds, the goal was the edification of the Church centered in charity, defined by Augustine as the cultivation of virtue and the restraint of vice.
(As a side-note, this is always one of the problems with many modern readings of medieval mystics. You can be way more “out there” and have it not be a major threat to fundamental Christianity if it’s set within the grounding practices.)
The major change with Reformation biblical interpretation, I’d argue, is the jettisoning of the context. I think it could be argued that with the rise of the Schoolmen, the mendicant orders, and the turn into Nominalism the liturgical context had already lost its important restraining function making it appear to the Reformers that they were pruning away the bad rather than losing a key component. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. Suddenly biblical interpretation was not and could not be an act of play. It was serious business. Without the grounding practices of Mass and Office, how each text was read suddenly mattered a lot more because the interpretive act was transformed into the grounding practice of the faith.
So—the liturgy was the context. But that’s not all. Particularly in the early medieval church and most especially in my world of the early medieval monastics, the liturgy was not simply the guiding context but was the fundamental tool through which Christians were inculturated into the hermeneutics of the Church. They learned to read through the liturgy.
On one hand, this is a literal truth: new monks or child oblates learned how to read through the memorization of the Latin psalter, then learning to match the words on the page with the texts they already had in their heads. They literally learned how to read from reading the liturgy. On the other hand, they also learned how to interpret the Bible from the liturgy and this happened in two ways, the first explicit, the second not so explicit. The explicit is that readings from the Fathers in the third nocturn of the Night Office gave them examples. They learned to interpret through what they heard and what was modeled for them by the patristic teachers every Sunday and feast day in the early morning. And again at Chapter. And again at Mass. The not-so-explicit is the way that the liturgy introduces under-determined interpretive possibilities through the use of scriptural antiphons and responsories in the Mass and Office. When an antiphon taken from the Gospel of the Day is appended to the Magnificat it makes you hear it in a new way, as you are using new lens. When a Pauline snippet is paired with a psalm, the mind begins working at it to find what the implied logical connection must be between the two. The hymns held together Scripture and Season for mutual reflection. (As it happens, the first paper I gave at the big medievalist meeting in Kalamazoo was on this topic. I’ll try and put it up on Scribd for those who are following me there.)
So—where does all of this bring us? Back to the notion of a distinctively Anglican way of reading and interpreting the Scriptures. Is there one? Maybe… Is there the potential for one? Most certainly, because we of all of the Western Non-Roman ecclesial bodies have retained in theory that which was most important in the heyday of figural reading: the Mass and the Office.
What we have to realize, though, is that our Mass and Office is not theirs. While we have inherited the structures of the early medieval pattern, we have deliberately shorn ours of the richness through which catholic biblical interpretation was learned. We have no appointed patristic readings into which we are formed. We have no cycle of antiphons and responsories that shape our readings. We have divested our Mass of the minor propers that complemented and guided the public proclamation of the Word.
Sure, I’d like to recover these things. That’s one of the key reasons why the St Bede’s Breviary puts back into place traditional or traditionally-shaped patterns of antiphons and the old Office hymns. But can we recover them? I honestly don’t know and I honestly fear not. We have a hard enough time getting people to come to Mass on Sundays let alone Holy Days that don’t fall then. (Epiphany, anyone?) Our clergy lac a familiarity with the Office, let alone those upon whom they—and we—are relying for our biblical interpretation.
I don’t know.
I’d like to hold up the old model as the possibility for a vibrant new model—I just fear that we lack both the will and the discipline to make into what it could be.
Before we continue much further in the discussion of Sarum history, we need to take a quick survey of the texts themselves. The key issue, of course, is that most interested parties approach the Sarum materials not through the manuscripts but through the printed editions. Most of these were done in the latter half of the nineteenth century by British Anglican scholars with an agenda, but that doesn’t suggest that the scholarship is faulty—it simply means that we ought to be aware that the agenda exists. In this post we’ll consider the Latin texts. English-language editions are part of the later story which we’ll save till then…
Mass Texts (in order of publication)
First, note the dates on the missal publications: the historically later missals were printed first, the historically earlier ones were printed last. The latter point is perhaps the most important as it means that all of the compilation of the customaries and ordinaries were not done with ready reference to the earliest forms of the text. This may, in part, explain some of the confusion since there was indeed confusion…
Second, Frere’s Use of Sarum is a key book that requires closer examination. Pfaff notes that it “is almost impenetrably difficult to use” (Pfaff, 373). [I’m glad he said this—I thought it was just me!] The two volumes contain four main texts which Frere entitles the Consuetudinary, the Customary, the Ordinal, and the Tonary. The Tonary is the simplest—it gives the psalm/canticle tones. The next three are more complicated. Frere explains the difference this way: “…the Ordinal defines the character, contents, and method of the Services while the consuetudinary defines the persons who are to conduct them; in other words, the Ordinal deals with the Rite, and the Consuetudinary with the Ceremonial” (Frere, II.vii). That’s clear enough. However, Frere attempts to describe the Customary as an intermediate term between the two:
The Customary seems to be based entirely on the Consuetudinary; . . . to this there are joined some further additions not drawn from the Consuetudinary, which may be taken either as ‘general rubrics’ and therefore supplementary to the Ordinal, or as additional liturgical customs and therefore supplementary to the Consuetudinary. The Customary is thus a link between the two. (Frere, I.xi-xii)
There are two problems here. The first is, according to Pfaff, the Consuetudinary and the Customary are properly differentiated by time and not by genre. The Customary is later than the Consuetudinary. The second, is that Frere has committed contextual damage with his arrangement: the base texts of both the Ordinal and the Consuetudinary come from the same manuscript. Here’s Pfaff to clear things up:
What is printed on pages 1-207 of [Frere’s] second volume as “Ordinale Sarum” is, with very considerable elisions, the Risby ordinal (BL Harley 1001) text—without folio references. In that manuscript folios 1-83 contain the office ordinal, 84-116 that for the mass, and 117-55 the consuetudinary (as described above). So in printing the first two sections of this manuscript in his volume II and the third in volume I Frere has split his main witness: one which, though apparently the earliest surviving of its kind, was in any case written in the early fourteenth century, several decades into the story we are trying to trace here, and belonging to a parish church in Suffolk, a long way from Salisbury. (Pfaff, 374)
So, at the end of the day, Pfaff dates the roots of the consuetudinary to the last period of Old Sarum, between 1173 and before 1220, but finds the Risby Ordinal to be from about a century later as it “represents practices codified for the new cathedral” (Pfaff, 376). The point here isn’t to try and pick up the historical narrative again, rather it’s to show the complicated and convoluted state of the sources as we have received them and which we’re still in the process of trying to figure out despite more than a century of additional work since these first editions were made.
Now it’s time to turn to the “Ordinal” for a second (remember, the ordinal is how to fit the service books together, not the ceremonial) . We begin with Pfaff’s emphatic statement: “no manuscript witness to what can fairly be characterized as a Sarum ordinal dates from earlier than the fourteenth century” (Pfaff, 379). The two items in Legg’s Tracts on the Mass supplement what appears in Frere’s volume II and reveal some further differences in the evolution of the Rite. The most important is the fact that Legg’s ordinal from the Crawford Missal has some minor differences from what is preserved in the Risby text. Pfaff concludes from these that “it is plain that the missal with which the Risby rubrics correspond is of a strain somewhat independent of the three edited or collated by Legg” (Pfaff, 380). The pay-off is that, once again, the evidence and therefore the Sarum story is more complicated than it may first appear.
The next issue is that Frere prints only the “Old Ordinal” and not the “New Ordinal” on the grounds that the New Ordinal is the text incorporated into the later printed missals and, since they have been reproduced so many times, they are not worth collating and printing together. The real shame here is when we realize (by way of Pfaff’s comments, of course [414]) that the New Ordinal is the Ordinal text in the four sources from which Frere edited his “Customary”; the Customary and the New Ordinal are complimentary documents but we’re unable to view them that way in Frere’s text!
Office Texts
To clarify just how useful these printed editions are to bringing order to the wild world of Sarum breviaries, I’ll turn it over entirely to Pfaff:
With few exceptions, it is next to impossible to state exactly what the totality of the Sarum office is for any specific day. [While the structure is fairly stable, the rubrics, contents, and texts themselves show an increasing state of flux.] In short, anything like a critical edition, in the sense of one which establishes a base text and records variants from it, is with the breviaries that concern us almost a contradiction in terms. (Pfaff, 429).
With a situation like this, the need for something like Maydeston becomes that much more important since in his day the clergy were working from these manuscripts rather than printed versions.
So—to summarize as briefly as possible, the access to Sarum Mass materials are in a far better state than the Office. We have printed versions that shed light on both our earliest surviving (Legg) and latest (Dickson) missals. On the Office side, there is one major representative(Procter and Wordsworth) which is just that—representative—and which can not and should not be regarded as “The” Sarum Office but an example of “A” late Sarum Breviary.
The breviary is having a rocky couple of days. This is the first year-transition since the new date calculation system has been installed and the inevitable errors are occurring, in part due to the odd way the BCP does the days between Christmas and the first Sunday after Epiphany.
We currently have readings but no collect; I’m working on getting it back…
Things seem to be functioning now.
