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Prayers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

John Bossy
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Extract

In 1945, which is beginning to seem a long time ago, Dom Gregory Dix published The Shape of the Liturgy. In the last two chapters of the book he expressed a view about the devotional and liturgical practice of the late Middle Ages which will provide a convenient starting-point for my subject. He said that the trouble about the medieval Mass was its separation of the ‘corporate offering’ assumed to have occurred in the primitive liturgy from the ‘priesthood of the priest’; the notion of worship it expressed, like the doctrine of the eucharist it exemplified, was ‘inorganic’. The effect of this was to let in, especially during the fifteenth century, non-liturgical, individualist forms of devotion which were unparticipatory and obsessed with historical facts about the life of Christ, notably with the facts of his Passion. ‘The quiet of low mass afforded the devout an excellent opportunity for using mentally the vernacular prayers which they substituted for the Latin text of the liturgy as their personal worship … The old corporate worship of the Eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind.’ Liturgical doing had subsided into inactive seeing and hearing, on the way to being engulfed in a miasma of private thinking and feeling. The Protestant reform of the liturgy amounted to pickling this pre-Reformation devotional tradition while dropping the ritual performance to which it had been loosely attached.

Type
Christian Life in the Later Middle Ages
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 1 , December 1991 , pp. 137 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1991

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References

1 Dix, Gregory, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), esp. 594–608Google Scholar. If we may judge by Jones, C., Wainwright, G. and Yarnold, E., The Study of Liturgy (1978), 36 fGoogle Scholar, most of these views still flourish.

2 Jones, et al. , The Study of Liturgy, 383 fGoogle Scholar.

3 Mirk's Festiall: a Collection of Homilies, ed. Erbe, T., i (E[arly] E[nglish] T[ext] S[ociety], extra series 96; 1905), 282–288Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 299–300; Rhodes, Jan, ‘The Rosary in Sixteenth-Century England’, Mount Carmel, xxxi no. 4 (1983), 180–191Google Scholar; xxxii no. 1 (1984), 4–17.

5 Ibid., 185.

6 The Prymer or Lay Folk's Prayer Book [1420–30], ed. Littlehales, H. (E.E.T.S., nos. 105, 109Google Scholar; 1895, 1897; repr. as 1 vol., Milwood, N.Y., 1973): the introduction to vol ii contains, at xi–xxxviii, Edmund Bishop's ‘On the Origins of the Primer’. Littlehales had published another version, of c. 1400, in The Prymer or Prayer-Book of the Lay People in the Middle Ages, i (1891)Google Scholar. (I describe the other as Primer II) Reinburg, Virginia, ‘Popular Prayers in Late Mediaeval and Renaissance France’ (Princeton University Ph.D. thesis, 1985Google Scholar; University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985, and due to appear in print shortly), 25–172. Wieck, Roger S., Time Sanctified: the Book of Hours in Mediaeval Art and Life (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, with piece by Reinburg 39–44. Eamon Duffy, ‘Prayer, Magic and Orthodoxy in late mediaeval Devotion’, unpublished paper. Rhodes, Jan, ‘Private Devotion in England on the Eve of the Reformation’ (University of Durham Ph.D. thesis, 1974)Google Scholar, does not deal with primers, but is otherwise indispensable.

7 Reprinted as vol. 262 of English Recusant Literature, 1558–1640, ed. D. M. Rogers (Menston, Yorks, 1975); I refer to it as Primer III.

8 My guides to the psalms have been the article by Synave, P. in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. Vacant, A et al. , xiii (1936), 1094–1149Google Scholar; and the introduction to the psalms in the Jerusalem Bible. Both seem, to my uninformed judgement, over-pious. The main objections to my description would seem to be: (i) that the psalms are not to be taken literally; and (ii) that the praise in them is gratuitous not, as I suggest, instrumental, that is, intended to persuade God to effect the results prayed for.

9 Reinburg, , in Time Sanctified, 39–40, and figs. 1 and 7Google Scholar.

10 Wieck, , Time Sanctified, 97–101Google Scholar.

11 Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 111–126Google Scholar: text ofObsecro te, 376–380; Wieck, , Time Sanctified, 94–96Google Scholar: texts of both, 163–4.

12 Primer III, ff. 218v–220r; cf. Wieck, , op. cit., 164Google Scholar.

13 Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 287–300Google Scholar; also discussed in Duffy, ‘Prayer, Magic and Orthodoxy’.

14 Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 296–299Google Scholar.

15 Text in Tudor-Craig, Pamela, Richard III (Ipswich/Totowa, N.J., 1973), 96–97Google Scholar; the prayer-book described, 26–27.

16 Primer II. The second half of the verse seems to have been re-translated in the Clementine Vulgate of 1592, which has convertantur instead of avertentur retrorsum; hence Primer III, f. 174f has ‘let them be converted’, where the Douai version has ‘let them be turned back’. Both are found in medieval texts.

17 Franz, A., Die Messe im deutschen Mittelaller (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1902Google Scholar; repr. Darmstadt, 1963), 204–217; and Bossy, J., ‘The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700’;, Past and Present, no. 100 (1983), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 The Lay Folk's Mass Book, ed. Simmons, T. F. (E.E.T.S., no. 71; London, 1879Google Scholar); ‘The Mass as a Social Institution’, 54–55. Scarisbrick, J.J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), 43Google Scholar. For Richard, III, Tudor-Craig, Richard III, 96Google Scholar: ‘Et tu domine qui genus humanum cum patre in concordia restituisti … et inter homines et angelos pacem fecisti, dignare inter me et inimicos meos stabilire et firmare concordiam …’;, which seems an obvious echo of the expositions of the Mass. Rosalind, and Brooke, Christopher, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages (1984)Google Scholar, accept the tradition that the Lay Folk's Mass Book was originally written in French, though in England, in the 12th century, but I should be surprised if it pre-dated Innocent III.

19 Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 227 ff.Google Scholar

20 Tracts on the Mass, ed. Legg, J. Wickham (Henry Bradshaw Society, xxvii, 1904), 19–29Google Scholar; Rhodes, , ‘Private Devotion in England’, 337–341Google Scholar, and n. 97, for the authorship; she is not greatly impressed by the work.

21 Lay Folk's Mass Book,36 f; Smith, H. Maynard, Pre-Reformation England (1938; London, 1965 edn), 100Google Scholar.

22 Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 235–239Google Scholar.

23 O[xford] D[ictionary of the] C[hristian] C[hurch], 2nd edn. by Cross, F. L. and Livingstone, E. A. (1974Google Scholar), s.v. Anima Christi; Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 197, 225Google Scholar; The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, trans. Corbishley, T. (Wheathampstead, Herts., 1973). 35, 54. 84 fGoogle Scholar.

24 Bossy, J., Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), 69Google Scholar; O.D.C.C., s.v. Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament; Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Blume, F., ix (Kassel, etc., 1961), col. 176Google Scholar & Figure 13; Reinburg, , ‘Popular Prayers’, 196Google Scholar; Wieck, , Time Sanctified, 107Google Scholar.

25 Since this paper draws heavily on the work of Virginia Reinburg, it is appropriate to note that the views expressed are my own. Professor Reinburg's reactions are set out below.

26 Duffy, E., ‘Devotion to the Crucifix and Related Images in England on the Eve of the Reformation’, in Bilder und Bildersturm in Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Scribner, R. (Wiesbaden, 1990), 21–36Google Scholar. Reinburg, V., ‘Prayer and the Book of Hours’, in Time Sanctified, ed. Wieck, R. (New York/Baltimore, 1988), 39–44Google Scholar; ‘Les pèlerins de Notre-Dame du Puy’, Revue d'Histoire de I'Église de France 75 (1989): 297–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Praying to Saints in the Late Middle Ages’;, in Sancta, Sanctus: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sticca, S. (Binghamton, N.Y., forthcoming)Google Scholar; ‘Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France“, Sixteenth Century Journal (forthcoming); ‘Hearing Lay People's Prayer’, in Society, Sex, and the Sacred in Early Modern Europe, ed. B. Diefendorf and G. Hesse (forthcoming); and a forthcoming book on the social history of prayer in fifteenthand sixteenth-century France. See also the work of Christian, William Jr, which Bossy has not cited in his article: Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981Google Scholar ); and Person and God in a Spanish Valley (New York, 1972)Google Scholar (the latter treats twentieth-century villagers).