Red Altar

The article discusses the role of the altar in some representational Passion and Resurrection enactments prescribed – and described – in the English monastic agreement, Regularis Concordia, the outcome of the Winchester synod in the early to mid 970s, and a major source to the English monastic reform movement of the tenth century as well as to the beginning of what in modern times often has been called ‘dramatic liturgy’. The role of the altar in these ceremonies corroborates, emphasizes and to some extent supplements and narratively plays out main elements of traditional altar symbolism.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, the forms of moving processional liturgy were vividly fixed to the pages of a Processional manuscript belonging to the clerical community of the Hospital of St. Giles in Norwich. On folio 57r of British Library, Additional MS 57534, the reader-viewer encounters the lighting of the paschal candle during the Vigil of Easter, one of the liturgical year's great events (see ). 1 This liturgical moment is presented in a visual mode that conjoins diagrammatic schematism and attentive mimesis. The delicate painting dominating the page is framed above by liturgical song, below by a lengthy rubric, and laterally by two imposing, fanciful pink columns terminating in crenellations and blue pinnacles. At the center of the grey step marking the threshold of the chancel, a pink architectural paschal candlestick is depicted with care. Three vexilla, red pennants hanging from spears, project outward from the candlestick's elaborate capital. Above them, the ruddy form of the paschal candle extends upward, disappearing behind the last word of the Inventor rutili dux hymn only to reappear in the upper margin, topped by a bright red flickering flame. Four additional liturgical objects inhabit this pictorial space. Two candlesticks glitter subtly against the ruled parchment by virtue of the shellgold paint applied within the meticulous rendering of their external contours, chamfered feet, annular knops, and concave upper terminals. Painted on the right side of the page, a golden thurible surpasses the two candlesticks in the intricacy of its feigned metalwork form. Stippled with minute touches of red and black, suggesting a complex, pierced metalwork surface, the incense burner is equipped with golden chains, rendered by the painter's brush as a faint quartet of golden rays extending from the vessel below to an inverted, cuplike form, set with a ring above. This upper element of the thurible hovers in space, tilted away from the viewer as if grasped by an invisible hand just beginning to set it in arcing motion. 470 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.3 / 2014

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 2018

Abstract:This introduces a special issue looks at shrines and altar-rooms simultaneously as places that manifest and generate spiritual power, and as places to access, negotiate, and garner that power. Contributors explore how shrines and altar-rooms, more than being spaces that contain and display an assemblage of objects with symbolic and esthetic value, "live" and "work" in transforming the significance of the things and people that interact with them. As such, altars and shrines are dynamic points of spatial and temporal convergence and conversion, a feature that facilitates spirit manifestation and transformation.

Ecclesia orans, 2019

Pilgrimage accounts provide an important witness to the intersection of time, space, and ritual within the Christian tradition. This interaction can best be seen in the accounts of pilgrims to the Holy Land. This paper looks at how time and space are ritually constructed in the Holy Land, by tracing the origins and development of the votive Masses used by Western pilgrims at the shrines. Beginning with Egeria’s comment that the rituals at the shrines were «apta diei et loco», this paper then surveys Medieval pilgrimage accounts, and concludes with a description of the votive Masses collected in the Missae votivae in Santuariis Custodiae Terrae sanctae published by the Custodia Terrae Sanctae. It is argued that the rise of the votive Masses in the Holy Land is the result of the prioritization of space over time in the pilgrimage experience. More broadly, this study points to the way that shrines and other material objects that occupy space create a more maximalist ritual experience that enhances the performative nature of the liturgy, diminishing the amount of work required of the ritual.

Journal of Biblical Literature, 2023

The position of the prescriptive unit regarding the construction of the incense altar (Exod 30:1–10) has been identified in previous scholarship as problematic. In support of Julius Wellhausen’s diachronic solution to this problem, several additional irregularities in this unit can be adduced, as well as indications in the larger Priestly texts in the Pentateuch that an independent altar for incense was not in use. An explanation for the entire array of irregularities is based on the suggestion that the incense altar was meant to replace another vessel, the menorah. The current command regarding the function of the menorah (Exod 25:37b) raises doubts regarding its originality. Based on other features in the menorah unit (Exod 25:31–38) an alternative, original command designating the menorah for burning incense can be reconstructed. When the incense altar replaced the menorah in that role, the author of its prescriptive unit had to argue in favor of its legitimacy through direct polemics with the menorah’s function, and through the incorporation of it in the highly esteemed annual ritual of atonement.

(with Victor Schmidt) "Introduction", in Justin Kroesen and Victor Schmidt (eds), The Altar and its Environment, 1150-1400 [=Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, 4], Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 1-10, 2009

Introduction to an edited volume on altars and their spatial environment in medieval churches across Europe (see also the section Edited Volumes).

2017

Performative expressions of grief are enacted and reenacted in all of the world's major religions. This essay will discuss how we might understand a different function of the ritualized mourning practices that accompany the prayers from the Second Temple period. We propose that prayers from this time strategically arouse grief in order to generate first-hand perceptions of foundational events and in effect, to create presence from absence. This type of study falls under a larger category of embodied cognition which understands experiential frames to assist in the imaginative enactment of new experiences.1 Second Temple prayers are often situated in a narrative context that describes practices of self-diminish-ment: fasting, sackcloth, ashes, depilatory acts, anguished weeping, collapsing, and hands opened in supplication. The prayers themselves also contribute to the diminishment of the prayer through the enactment of petitions, confession of sinfulness, and confession of God's greatness. The effects of these practices and prayers can predispose one to experientially reenact grief, which can in turn, lead to rumination, a cognitive state in which presence is made from absence. Such experiences, while they are not predetermined to happen, can help us to imagine how prayers and mourning practices functioned in the generation of apocalyptic visions in the Second Temple period. The first topic that I will explore is how the cultivation of the emotional state of grief and rumination are natural cognitive processes that are designed to produce experiences of presence from absence. By this I mean a sensory perception of the presence of otherworldly beings, either as a perception of alterity, or as an experience of a vision or voice. Secondly we will consider how such ritual experiences might be understood as social mechanisms that assisted in generating an awareness of God's presence during a period in which the deity's absence was especially felt during times of political uncertainty.

JUGAAD: A Material Religions Project

For it Stands in Scripture: Essays in Honor of W. Edward Glenny. Edited by Ardel B. Caneday. Saint Paul: University of Northwestern Berntsen Library, 2019