Papers by David Stancliffe
Richard W. Pfaff
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, p... more Richard W. Pfaff
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593
ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7
Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions.
Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar
In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless.
Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size?
But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers.
After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries.
Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive.
But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded.
This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter.
Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson.
Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore.
David Stancliffe
Stanhope
1232 words
Studia Liturgica
L'article est consacre a la serie de volumes (The Common Worship) qui contient la liturgie re... more L'article est consacre a la serie de volumes (The Common Worship) qui contient la liturgie revisee de l'Eglise anglicane. L'A. relate l'histoire de la revision de ce livre dans le contexte de l'influence oecumenique par la Commission liturgique. Il decrit les modeles theologiques, l'heritage du Prayer Book et les differentes parties du livre.
Anglican Theological Review, 2000
Apres avoir presente la liturgie de la Parole et la liturgie sacramentelle eucharistique comme de... more Apres avoir presente la liturgie de la Parole et la liturgie sacramentelle eucharistique comme des dynamismes a ne jamais tenir dans l'immobilisme, l'A. offre l'exemple liturgique de son diocese en lien avec l'ensemble de la Communion anglicane. S'il maintient la tradition comme racine vivante indispensable, il preconise l'attitude creative devant le Dieu vivant qui partage notre vie, puis la transforme.
Ecclesiology, 2013
Richard W. Pfaff
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009,... more Richard W. Pfaff
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593
ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7
Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions.
Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar
In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless.
Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size?
But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers.
After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries.
Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive.
But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded.
This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter.
Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson.
Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore.
David Stancliffe
Stanhope
1232 words
This article distinguishes between ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ of music and worship, of life itself,... more This article distinguishes between ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ of music and worship, of life itself, to stress that it is not what we do but how we do it that reveals what we are being shaped to become. Good worship is what happens when we try out – rehearse – what we are really supposed to be. ‘Christian’ is not a what that we are but a way (a how) we are becoming what we are destined for. Taking communal singing as an example, I illustrate how music-making can help us ‘get’ divine harmony.
Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 1994
House of Bishops, 2001
A survey of the pracice and theology or ordination into the orders of bishop, priest and deacon i... more A survey of the pracice and theology or ordination into the orders of bishop, priest and deacon in the Church of England
Drafts by David Stancliffe
The Advent Antiphons, 2021
I have long pondered the key question of Advent-just what is it that is coming? I was brought up ... more I have long pondered the key question of Advent-just what is it that is coming? I was brought up on the relatively modern (as I now discover it to be) concept that there are always four Sundays in Advent and that the Church's year begins on the first of them. On these Sundays you wear purple vestments (blue in the Use of Sarum and rose-pink on Advent III), and sing the Kyries, but not the Gloria. These days the four-Sunday Advent is powerfully reinforced by Advent Calendars (that always begin on December 1 st) and the Advent Wreath, with its five candles-three purple ones, a rose-pink one for Laetare Sunday and a central white one to be lit on Christmas Day. As a young, liturgically-minded priest, I became an Advent purist, scornful of Christmas Carols sung before December 25 th , and a cheerful upholder of the twelve days of Christmas, running the season on through Epiphany, The Baptism of the Lord and finishing only with Candlemas on February 2 nd , after which you could pack away the crib and take down the Christmas decorations.
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Papers by David Stancliffe
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593
ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7
Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions.
Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar
In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless.
Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size?
But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers.
After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries.
Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive.
But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded.
This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter.
Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson.
Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore.
David Stancliffe
Stanhope
1232 words
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593
ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7
Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions.
Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar
In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless.
Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size?
But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers.
After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries.
Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive.
But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded.
This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter.
Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson.
Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore.
David Stancliffe
Stanhope
1232 words
Drafts by David Stancliffe
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593
ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7
Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions.
Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar
In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless.
Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size?
But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers.
After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries.
Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive.
But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded.
This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter.
Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson.
Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore.
David Stancliffe
Stanhope
1232 words
THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593
ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7
Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions.
Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar
In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless.
Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size?
But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers.
After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries.
Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive.
But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded.
This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter.
Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson.
Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore.
David Stancliffe
Stanhope
1232 words