Walking the Cycle – Liturgies II
In my last blog entry, I shared what I’ve learned about some of the ways the Christian religion functioned in early medieval western Europe. In short, there are different ‘liturgical rites’, each being used in different places – by different people.
I’m interested in these different rites because the main focus of my research is an individual saint, called Saint Christopher. I mostly work on how different manuscripts tell his story in different ways, but of course just reading the texts only gives me a tiny insight into what a saint actually meant to people in the period; like trying to understand how amazing Jürgen Klopp is by only looking at end-of-season league tables.
What I most often discover is that different groups of people thought quite different things about Christopher. The evidence I’ve found in the liturgies is no exception. He wasn’t even included in the Roman Rite until too late to be of interest to me, and as far as I can see there isn’t enough evidence to say whether he was or wasn’t in the Gallican or Celtic forms. But he does definitely appear in the Ambrosian Rite (centred on Milan) and the Hispanic Rite (centred on Toledo), in quite different forms.
The liturgical rites are just one way of remembering a saint: if people in a church service are reflecting on a story, you can bet that they hear and think about that story in other places and in other ways. So finding stories about Christopher in these two rites is pretty big news in terms of my understanding of how people thought about him in western Europe. It gives me traditions – of which these rites might now be the only visible part – based in Spain and northern Italy reaching back to about the sixth century. And the ways in which they understand him are quite different.
Who cares? Well, if you’ve read this far then you’ve probably found the story interesting (or are eagerly looking forward to correcting me; please do). So you might just find it interesting in its own right (ha ha), which I think it is, too. I find it humbling (perhaps also humiliating) to discover such immense fields of information about the lives lived by vast numbers of people about which and whom I still know more or less nothing. Church liturgies sound arcane and irrelevant, I get that. But this is the rhythm of daily life, the tv soaps and football matches, for the vast majority of people who have lived in Europe for the last two thousand years. It’s always fascinating to see that Things Were Not As They Are. No-one practising the Gallican Rite in Lyons on a Tuesday in 703 AD would imagine that it would ever change, just as many today struggle with the idea of their church (or soap, or newspaper, or social media platform) changing. And the effort of finding out about these things has also been humbling. I’ve had to (try to) read things in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek translated into Latin. I’ve looked at loads of websites of individuals and institutions that I never knew existed. I’ve remembered – again – that to understand early medieval England, I’ve got to try to understand early medieval Europe. I’ve felt connected. I’ve felt tiny.
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And, just as I’ve started to feel that I’ve got some sort of grip on the outlines of what this particular vasty vista is all about, I’m going to have to turn away from it and work on something else, with the knowledge that this world lies in wait, with huge potential for future research and understanding.
Next time I blog, I might share some of the different forms that Christopher’s story seems to take in these different places – or move on to talking about another area I’ve researched and half-understood!