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InSinging the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word. Where previous studies have described how writing comes to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifies relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony, Zieman shifts the critical gaze to the ritual performance of written texts in the liturgy-effectively changing the focus from writing to reading. Beginning with a history of the elementary educational institution known to modern scholars as the \"song school,\" Zieman shows the continued centrality of liturgical and devotional texts to the earliest stages of literacy training and spiritual formation. Originally, these schools were created to provide liturgical training for literate adult performers who had already mastered the grammatical arts. From the late thirteenth century on, however, the attention and resources of both lay and clerical patrons came to be devoted specifically to young boys, centering on their function as choristers. Because choristers needed to be trained before they received instruction in grammar, the liturgical skills of reading and singing took on a different meaning. This shift in priorities, Zieman argues, is paradigmatic of broader cultural changes, in which increased interest in liturgical performance and varying definitions attached to \"reading and singing\" caused these practices to take on a life of their own, unyoked from their original institutional settings of monastery and cathedral. Unmoored from the context of the choral community, reading and singing developed into discrete, portable skills that could be put to use in a number of contexts, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. Ultimately, they would be carried into a wider public sphere, where they would be transformed into public modes of discourse appropriated by vernacular writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.

Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy's past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Teresa Berger looks at liturgy's past through the lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of \"men\" and \"women\" but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men. Demonstrating what a gender-attentive inquiry is able to achieve, Berger explores both traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and also new ways of studying the past, for example by asking about the developing link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. Drawing on historical case studies and focusing particularly on the early centuries of Christian worship, this book ultimately aims at the present by lifting a veil on liturgy's past to allow for a richly diverse notion of gender differences as these continue to shape liturgical life.

This article investigates the role of hagiography as a mediating genre between Scripture and liturgy. Hagiographical readings for saints (legenda) have been featured in the office of Matins in Rome from at least the eighth century. By the early modern period, these texts came under scrutiny for a lack of historical credibility, a concern echoed in the reform of the breviary after the Second Vatican Council which pruned the office of much legendary material. Yet recent scholarship on hagiography suggests that the dominant postconciliar concern—historicity—failed to fully understand the genre. Legenda were not bad history, but forms of narrative exegesis, a means to “display to the faithful fitting examples for their imitation” (SC 111). The liturgical function of the hagiographical readings emerges clearly in four case studies comparing Matins of the Breviarum Romanum 1568 to the Liturgia Horarum of 1971 for Agatha, Cecilia, Agnes, and Lucy. These feasts demonstrate both the motivation and the result of the directive to reform the readings of the saints to accord with the “facts of history” (SC 92c). This study demonstrates the need for further work on these understudied hagiographical readings, which use the liturgical and Scriptural context to propose saints as living extensions of the Gospel, rendered concrete and attractive through narrative.

Historically, Christianity has always emphasized the embodiment of liturgical experience. Liturgy is not merely a metaphysical phenomenon, but one that is lived out and is, in turn, formative of the human being. To this end, the liturgy encompasses the totality of human experience to completely immerse the human being within itself. This includes the senses of smell, hearing, vision, touch, and, ultimately, taste. This uniting thread that runs throughout the human senses is teleologically directed toward the Eucharist. The Eucharist, being the climax of liturgy, is not a disembodied magical occurrence, but is, most fundamentally, formative of the human being. As the perpetuation of the incarnation throughout human history, the Eucharist calls people to be, most authentically, human beings, re-forming them into the likeness of God—the likeness of he who is known in the Eucharist. This paper will attempt to answer the question: How can the physical stimuli presented throughout the liturgy be understood as ‘Eucharistic’? Through a Coptic Orthodox theological hermeneutic, but drawing from a wider range of patristic and modern authors, this paper will attempt to answer this question by looking at how created things are ‘Eucharistic’ insofar as they reveal God. The paper will look at the possibility of primary knowledge—that is knowledge through experience—and the necessity of this form of knowledge within the scope of the liturgy. Finally, it will be shown how the liturgy offers a way to embody a narrative, thus immersing the human being into a way through which they are formed and experience the liturgy as Eucharist.

What does it mean to experience and engage in religious ritual? How does liturgy structure time and space? How do our bodies move within liturgy, and what impact does it have on our senses? How does the experience of ritual affect us and shape our emotions or dispositions? How is liturgy experienced as a communal event, and how does it form the identity of those who participate in it?Welcoming Finitude explores these broader questions about religious experience by focusing on the manifestation of liturgical experience in the Eastern Christian tradition. Drawing on the methodological tools of contemporary phenomenology and on insights from liturgical theology, the book constitutes a philosophical exploration of Orthodox liturgical experience.The Orthodox emphasis on living tradition and lived experience make the Orthodox liturgy especially fertile ground for a phenomenological investigation into religious experience more broadlyBrings together the philosophical tools of phenomenology and the theological tools of hermeneutics to examine the experience of Eastern Christian liturgy

The article examines a selection of hymns of potentially Byzantine origin in the eighth-to-tenth-century manuscripts of the New Tropologion, which was the hymnal of the Anastasis cathedral of Jerusalem and in churches that followed its rite. Such adoption in the rite of Jerusalem represented a Byzantine influence before the wave of liturgical Byzantinisation that started in the late ninth and tenth centuries. For the first time, three versions of the New Tropologion are studied together: the Greek original and the Syriac and Georgian translations. The Greek Tropologion Sinai MS NE MΓ 56+5 is the primary material, compared with Sinai MS Syriac 48 and several Georgian New Iadgari manuscripts from Sinai. The study identifies one certain Byzantine element in the New Tropologion: parts of the feast of St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, and several probable Byzantine elements: the interpolation of the second ode in three canons by Kosmas of Jerusalem and one by John, and parts of the stichera series Aἱ ἀγγελικαὶ προπορεύεσθε δυνάμεις attributed to Romanos the Melodist. By contrast, the interpolated ode 1 in Kosmas’ canon for Great Saturday seems to be of Palestinian origin, and therefore not a Byzantine loan, contrary to traditional views. The article shows that there is considerable variation between the different versions of the New Tropologion.

Whereas medieval liturgy has often been presented as a specialized and complex but well-defined area, gradually and to a high extent bound by tradition, modern scholarship has increasingly shown how difficult it is to define or circumscribe what the notion covers, or what may be the margins of the notion, even in later medieval centuries. In this article, I propose to shed light on the notion of medieval liturgy, framing the notion, as it were, by analyzing ceremonies that by many would be considered to belong to the fringes of liturgy, ceremonies which even—problematically—have been understood as biblical and liturgical theater. I shall focus on two twelfth-century Easter ceremonies, which in their theological contents are traditional and uncontroversial, and hardly were thought of as theater by contemporaries. In their form, however, they show an acute interest in experimenting with (and thus changing) traditional liturgical procedures. These examples underline how, even on one of the holiest of feasts, Easter Day, at least outside the most central and sacrosanct liturgical elements, such as the Eucharist and the overall structure of the mass, liturgy was innovative and flexible. Although innovation was not principally seen as a positive quality at the time, and justification of changes would normally be given by reference to tradition, changes were indeed made, theologically, for instance in the understanding of sacraments, and—as proposed in the article probably at least partly connected to such changes—also in liturgical practices. The broader perspective of the article also concerns methodology, in terms of the importance of interdisciplinarity and intermediality, for future research in medieval liturgy.

This article deals with the description of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in the Byzantine liturgical book known as the Typikon of Mâr Saba. This description is well preserved from its oldest known Greek testimonies until at least the 13th century. It is notable that this liturgical celebration is the only one depicted in the book that involves the Eucharist. In the article, some partially unedited fragments of the Greek text of three testimonies are presented and analysed, and some reflections and questions are collected at the end in an attempt to shed light on the historical development of this text, which is crucial to our understanding of the history of Byzantine liturgy.

The liturgy of the Catholic Church adopts and reframes passages from Scripture in manifold ways. At times a passage is proclaimed or sung in the liturgy exactly as it appears in the Bible; at other times, a prayer or antiphon draws from one or more verses of the Scripture for inspiration. In order to demonstrate this twofold practice, this article presents a single example of a random day on the liturgical calendar, the Second Sunday of Lent. It will explore the uses of Scripture in the revised entrance and communion antiphons, the restoration of long-neglected ancient presidential prayers, the composition of a new collect and preface, the three-year cycle of readings, and the intersection of biblical references between the Roman Missal and the Liturgy of the Hours. By examining a single example, the reader will come to a deeper appreciation of the depth of the interplay between the Bible and liturgy on every day of the calendar. This article will cite the present and previous Roman Missals, the Roman Gradual, the context for the structure of the Lectionary for Mass on this day as the revisers conceived it, and unique features from the Liturgy of the Hours. It will also show how particular biblical references on one day reappear in other liturgical celebrations, expanding the reader’s appreciation of the specific application of biblical texts to a variety of liturgical events.