Political Liturgies In The High Middle Ages

Innovative collection about the interaction of liturgy and politics in high medieval Europe.00Although as long ago as the 1940s Ernst H. Kantorowicz exhorted medievalists to make greater use of liturgical sources, historians largely continued to ignore the "magic thicket of prayers, benedictions, and ecclesiastical rites" that comprise the liturgy. Instead they left liturgical sources to specialists interested in the development of individual rites through time. This volume, inspired by Kantorowicz?s insights, builds on the work of a new generation of scholars, who see liturgical sources as integral to understanding medieval politics and society. The individual essays focus on different polities and regions of medieval Christiana Europe, but all concentrate on the high Middle Ages, a period in which the importance of liturgy to political cultures has traditionally been seen as being in decline. Together the essays demonstrate how a careful reading of liturgical sources can shed new light on political cultures and practices, how liturgical rituals shaped politics and how political realities influenced liturgical ceremonial. They demonstrate the interrelationship between liturgical scholarship and political theory, and challenge the paradigm of the desacralization of kingship and politics in this period.

Although as long ago as the 1940s Ernst H. Kantorowicz exhorted medievalists to make greater use of liturgical sources, historians largely continued to ignore the magic thicket of prayers, benedictions, and ecclesiastical rites that comprise the liturgy. Instead they left liturgical sources to specialists interested in the development of individual rites through time. This volume, inspired by Kantorowicz's insights, builds on the work of a new generation of scholars, who see liturgical sources as integral to understanding medieval politics and society. The individual essays focus on different polities and regions of medieval Christiana Europe, but all concentrate on the high Middle Ages, a period in which the importance of liturgy to political cultures has traditionally been seen as being in decline. Together the essays demonstrate how a careful reading of liturgical sources can shed new light on political cultures and practices, how liturgical rituals shaped politics and how political realities influenced liturgical ceremonial. They demonstrate the interrelationship between liturgical scholarship and political theory, and challenge the paradigm of the desacralization of kingship and politics in this period.

This volume seeks to address the needs of teachers and advanced students who are preparing classes on the Middle Ages or who find themselves confounded in their studies by reference to the various liturgies that were fundamental to the lives of medieval peoples. In a series of essays, scholars of the liturgy examine The Shape of the Liturgical Year, Particular Liturgies, The Physical Setting of the Liturgy, The Liturgy and Books, and Liturgy and the Arts. A concluding essay, which originated in notes left behind by the late C. Clifford Flanigan, seeks to open the field, to examine liturgy within the larger and more inclusive category of ritual. The essays are intended to be introductory but to provide the basic facts and the essential bibliography for further study. They approach particular problems assuming a knowledge of medieval Europe but little expertise in liturgical studies per se.

This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in different disciplines (history, literature, architectural history, musicology and theology), time periods (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and intellectual traditions, this collection demonstrates the great potential that liturgical evidence offers for understanding many aspects of the Middle Ages. It includes essays that discuss the practicalities of researching liturgical rituals; show through case studies the problems caused by over-reliance on modern editions; explore the range of sources for particular ceremonies and the sort of questions which can be asked of them; and go beyond the rites themselves to investigate how liturgy was practised and understood in the medieval period.

This volume contains a collection of essays in honour of the late Professor of Comparative Literature, C Clifford Flanigan, who died suddenly in 1993 at the age of 52. The scholarship of this book constitutes an example of the interdisciplinary approach to the study of ecclesiastical history which is the aim of the newly established Centre for Christianity and the Arts at the Theological Faculty at the University of Copenhagen.

Originally published in 1997, Medieval Liturgy is a unique and interesting collection of nine essays that explores medieval liturgy from three distinct perspectives: historical, liturgical, and theological. The book includes contributions from eminent scholars of the time and discusses the development of 9th to 11th century ordines, the meaning of the Mass in the 12th and 13th centuries, medieval preaching, ordination practices, popular penance practices, marriage rites, the role of music in Eucharistic liturgy, and the relationship between liturgical architectural space and theology.

This book aims to provide new historical and theoretical perspectives on political theology with an interdisciplinary approach, from political philosophy and theology to art and history. After a comprehensive introduction and three introductory chapters on both the theory and the concept of "political theology" (based on the works of Schmitt, de Lubac, and Kantorowicz), this volume explores the transferences between the temporal and the spiritual experimented on the past. It interprets some historical events (medieval crusades, royal wisdom, and early modern idea of tolerance), examines some philosophical and theological narratives (John of Paris, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Toqueville), and deciphers some rites (royal coronations) and representations (the Holy Crown, royal banquets, royal coats of arms).

This collective volume examines the concept, theory, practice, and representations of the liturgy in the Middle Ages, including its sacramental developments, its religious and political implications, its forms of ritualization, and its doctrinal presumptions. It aims to create a space for interdisciplinary dialogue between history, theology, canon law, art history, political philosophy, and symbolic anthropology. It privileges the examination of the transferences between the spiritual and the temporal, the sacred and the profane, the political and the religious.