As a result of the great advances that have been made in liturgical scholarship in the last few decades, we now know much less about early eucharistic worship than we once thought that we did. Indeed, it sometimes appears that if things keep on at their present rate, it is possible that we shall soon find that we know absolutely nothing at all; for a large part of what current research has achieved has been to demolish theories that had been built on unreliable foundations. As this paper will demonstrate, the older consensus that there had existed a large measure of continuity between the eucharistic practices of the various early Christian communities is slowly giving way to the acceptance that there are considerable gaps in our knowledge of the period, and that what evidence there is points more towards variety than towards uniformity of practice.

Jerome and Ambrose often quote from the Song of Songs in their ascetic treatises. The writings of Ambrose on virginity contain no fewer than 130 quotations from or allusions to the poem. Jerome’s letter 22 to the young virgin Eustochium includes around thirty references to it. It seems paradoxical for the Fathers to use the erotic images of the Song of Songs to encourage young women to keep their virginity. How can we explain this phenomenon?

Were the Fathers simply seduced by the nuptial images of the poem? If so, Ambrose and Jerome were not the first. Before them Methodius of Olympus and Athanasius had already applied the Song of Songs to virginal life: Methodius in his Symposium and Athanasius in his letters to virgins. Another possibility is that Ambrose and Jerome quote from the Song of Songs because the poem was used in the consecration of virgins in their day. This is the question which is discussed below.

The Carolingian Liturgical Experience’ may well seem, and indeed is, a recklessly broad topic for a single paper. ‘Experience of the Liturgy in the Carolingian Period: some questions and not many answers’ might be truer but not necessarily better. So I stay, uneasily, with my original title.

The eleventh-century core of the church at Wittering, Northamptonshire (Fig. 1a), is typical of the type of church which served local communities in the Anglo-Saxon period. It has a rectangular nave and a short, square chancel. Kilpeck, Herefordshire (Fig. 1b), is an equally typical example of a post-Conquest, twelfth-century local church. It also has a rectangular nave, but it has a longer, apsidal chancel. Such early twentieth-century authors on the development of English parish churches as A. Hamilton Thompson and Alfred Clapham suggested that the use of apses for smaller, post-Conquest churches is an example of French/Norman influence overriding the existing English/Anglo-Saxon forms. They cite the widespread use of apses after the Conquest not only for smaller churches, but also for virtually every major church built in the wake of the Conquest, and the use of apses for churches of all sizes in France in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. The use of square ends for later medieval parish church chancels such as those at Polebrook, Northamptonshire (Fig. 2a), or Linton, Herefordshire (Fig. 2b), Clapham suggested, marked a return to native English forms after the immediate impact of the Conquest had passed. But is this actually the case? Or are the rectangular, square-ended chancels so typical of later medieval English parish churches a response to new demands being placed upon these buildings? This paper will explore this issue, and ask whether the use of square-ended chancels represents a continuity with, or a change from, older forms.

One of the apparent pillars of consistency in the medieval Latin liturgy is the divine, alias daily, office. Although scholars convincingly postulate forms of the office that both antedate the specific provisions for it which bulk large in the Rule of Benedict and reflect an urban secular (the so-called cathedral office) rather than a monastic context, in terms of actual books out of which the office was performed, not a great deal survives until roughly the eleventh century. By that time, if not before, thought is clearly being given as to how to present the contents of the office - given that much of it consists in the recitation of psalms - in a way that, while clear, minimizes repetition. This can most readily be done in the long stretch of the weeks after Pentecost and the shorter stretch (sometimes very short indeed, depending on when Easter falls) of the weeks between the octave of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent or pre-Lent (that is, from Septuagesima on). Although the structure of the office in this, to use the current phrase, ‘ordinary time’, remains the same as in the more exciting seasons of Advent, Christmastide, Lent, and Eastertide (plus, of course, the individual feasts of the Proper of Saints), the content of the various services is not driven by a particular time or saint, and so there is a somewhat abstract quality about it quite lacking from the great seasons and occasions of the liturgical year.

The Church of Christ, whether congregation, building, or organization, demands at all times continuity in the expression of its message to reinforce the faith of believers and in its purpose to spread the Word among non-believers. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the growth and development of liturgical drama assisted in the expression of a corporate faith, not only that of well-established communities of monks and cathedral clergy, but also that of the laity for whom dramatic presentations could provide the necessary stimuli to worship. On the frontiers of Christendom too, where missionary endeavour was crucial, the dramatization both of the liturgy and of biblical events helped to lay the foundations for a projected continuity of worship amongst neophytes and those whose faith was not yet secure. Problems inevitably arose as new situations provoked liturgical changes. It thus became essential to ensure that neither the central faith nor the purpose of worship were weakened, diminished, or lost in the face of such change.

Good God! what a pomp of silk vestments was there, of golden candlesticks.’ The dismissive satire of Erasmus’s pilgrim on looking down on Canterbury Cathedral not only brought traditional piety into disrepute among significant sectors of the educated, both clerical and lay, in early sixteenth-century England, but has also helped to colour the views of historians of the later medieval Church until recently. The work on parochial, diocesan, and cathedral archives since the 1960s, undertaken and inspired by the publication of A. G. Dickens’ The English Reformation, has refined that view, which saw traditional piety as something of a clerical confidence trick designed to impoverish a credulous laity, and recovered the reputation of the early sixteenth-century Church. The most recent, and most eloquent, account of the strength of traditional piety among the people is that by Eamon Duffy. His work has concentrated on the parochial context, where he has shown how intercessory prayer, through gilds, obits, and chantries, remained at the centre of a liturgical tradition which commanded great loyalty from the laity up to and, in some cases, beyond the dissolution of those institutional expressions of that devotion in 1547. The place of such devotion within a cathedral context has largely been ignored, despite the recently published histories, and this paper sets out to fill that gap a little by looking at the minor altars of York Minster and the clergy which served them.

Demands for the reform of public worship followed rapidly upon the outbreak of religious disputes in Germany in 1517. This was scarcely surprising, since some of the most important aspects of late medieval worship and devotion, including the mass, had become the focus of criticism. The reform of worship presented many difficulties to both spiritual leaders and secular authorities. In many cases they found it easier to identify the failings of Catholic worship than to devise new services which would be acceptable to all. It was also apparent that worship had not only to reflect the ideals and aspirations of the Church but also those of the wider community, and therefore worship impinged upon social and political life. This paper will look at how one community, the city of Augsburg, dealt with these issues. In particular it will consider the forces which shaped evangelical liturgy, and the reception given to the new forms of worship.

Iconoclasm, rather than liturgical formulation, usually springs to mind when one reflects upon the events in Zurich in the mid-1520s. Indeed, historians of the Swiss Reformation have hardly interested themselves in liturgy, and one searches in vain the most recent and comprehensive treatment of Zwingli’s theology for a discussion of the subject. Ignored by both historians and theologians, the study of liturgy in the Swiss Reformation cuts the figure of the unknown guest at a party who everyone assumes is being entertained by someone else. The consequence has been that liturgy has not been allowed to inform our understanding of Swiss religious change; historians have preferred to leave it in the safe keeping of liturgists who, for the most part, have attended to the history of worship as a separate and distinct act of the community controlled by the clergy. This, surely, can only form part of the picture, for liturgy was perhaps the most inclusive act of the Church: worship was experienced by all levels of society, even if the people brought and took away a panoply of varied levels of comprehension and acceptance. As the central, public act of the Church, the early liturgies of the Reformation articulated the tangled web of convictions, needs, and requirements of communities in transition. Liturgies cannot be separated from either the beliefs which created them or the physical space in which they were performed. The ordered rhythm of words and actions in a particular locality was intended to engage the intellect and senses, drawing out responses at once emotional and cognitive. If we can glimpse something of the experience of worship, whether positive or negative, we shall have an insight into the mental world of the early Reformation.

In his now classic work, The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945, the Anglican Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix, was concerned to demonstrate that in the origin and development of the eucharistic liturgy, and underneath the verbal differences, the cultural diversity, and the growth of the centuries, a particular unchanging core shape could be identified. His study was primarily concerned with the eucharist from its institution in the New Testament to the sixth century, and it was not his intention in that work to survey in any depth the later medieval developments, East or West, or the Reformation. Nevertheless, as an Anglican in the Anglo-Catholic tradition Dix felt obliged to use his findings of the earlier period to embark upon a not too subtle criticism of the sixteenth-century Reformation liturgies, and particularly those revisions of his own denomination instigated and presided over by Thomas Cranmer. For Dix, the later medieval liturgical development saw a shift of emphasis to an unhealthy preoccupation with the Passion, and was brought to its logical unfortunate conclusion in the rites of the Reformation. With reference to Cranmer, Dix could thus write: ‘With an inexcusable suddenness, between a Saturday night and a Monday morning at Pentecost 1549, the English liturgical tradition of nearly a thousand years was altogether overturned.’ We should note the phrase, ‘inexcusable suddenness’. When combined with rhetoric such as ‘a horrible story all round’ and ‘enforcement by penal statutes of a novel liturgy’, it is clear that Dix was using a different set of criteria from earlier Anglican apologists. Compare Jeremy Taylor in 1658, who wrote: ‘the Liturgy of the Church of England hath advantages so many and so considerable as not onely to raise it self above the devotions of other Churches, but to endear the affections of good people to be in love with liturgy in general.’

The traditio instrumentorum is the ceremony in the rite of conferring holy orders in which an object or objects symbolizing the office to be conferred is handed to the candidate with an appropriate accompanying form of words. This ceremony grew in importance through the Middle Ages, to the extent that in Catholic theology it came to be seen as the essential act of ordination. Eucharistic doctrine and the role of the Church in salvation were key areas of conflict in sixteenth-century Reform movements. The Church’s ministry, therefore, being both intensely bound up with ecclesiastical structures and intimately concerned with the appropriate conduct of worship, was profoundly affected by these fundamental debates. A continuing need for some form of structured ministry was widely felt, though often understood as simply the appointment (for a time) of appropriate persons to the ministry of Word and Sacrament whose sacramental qualification for ministry was their own baptism, by which they entered into the priesthood of all believers, which was different from the unique high priesthood of Christ and completely replaced any sense of a sacrificing priesthood, which was tied up with the Old (and superseded) Testament. Looking to their Bibles for this, as for so much else in their ecclesiologies, the Reformers found only the apostolic laying on of hands with prayer in the conferring of ministry.

The origins of the most senior office in the Church of England open to a layman, that of lay reader, are obscure. Sir Robert Phillimore confined himself to the observation that the office was ‘one of the five inferior orders of the Roman church’, adding only that

But when and how did it become ‘usual? There are no references to readers in Edward VI’s Royal Injunctions of 1547, presumably because those holding inferior Roman orders were still legally entitled to exercise their functions. Although the Protestant advances of the next six years removed all such from office there is no sign that the Edwardian regime made any attempt to appoint readers as an emergency or auxiliary measure. Probably there was no immediate need to do so: with the abolition of the chantries in 1549 most chantry priests went on to serve as ‘stipendiaries’, effectively slipping into the ranks of the unbeneficed as ‘curates’. If anything there was a glut in the clerical market between 1549 and the restoration of Catholic orders in 1553.

As well-known, humour - by juxtaposing like with unlike - can make a serious point, concisely and memorably, and this quip, too, has a serious import. To begin with, the source for this joke was an Oratorian priest As will become clear, this is of more than passing significance - aside, that is, from the fact that their founder, St Philip Neri was well-known for his use of humour to mortify the spirit of his favourite disciples. For my principal concern in this paper is with ecclesiastical erudition (something of an Oratorian speciality during this period) and its relationship to the shape, content, and practice of Christian worship.

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing has been described as one of the greatest contributions made by dissent to English worship. Yet, with the exception of specialist studies by hymnologists, church historians have largely ignored eighteenth-century hymns and hymn-singing, though it is clear they represented a powerful and popular source of contemporary religious expression. Hymns, that is compositions which depart too far from Scripture to be called paraphrases, have been one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence. The only recent academic studies have been in English Literature, where hymns have been examined as literary texts for their poetic value. As a consequence neither the historical context of the development of the hymn in the decades following the 1689 Toleration Act, nor the liturgical significance of their introduction to public worship, has been addressed.

In reforming Christian worship radical change often follows from the attempt to restore what was ancient. Nowhere is this more clear than among the liturgical scholars of the early seventeenth century, when advances in critical scholarship made it possible for some to believe they could restore the Church’s worship to that of apostolic times. This is well illustrated in the work of Thomas Rattray (1684-1743), a Scot of great learning, and among Scottish Episcopalians of lasting influence. Rattray was a Non-juror, one of those expelled or withdrawn from the churches of England and Scotland after 1689 for refusing obedience to the new regime. They pinned their hopes, and the survival of what they perceived as the true Catholic Faith, on the Roman Catholic House of Stuart in exile in France. Their hopes perished in blood on the field of Culloden in 1746. That was three years after Rattray’s death. The Episcopalians hold Rattray’s name in honour, both because of the part he played in fixing their Church’s constitution, and because of one book of learning and ingenuity, called The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem.