385 Richard W. Pfaff, the Liturgy in Mediaeval England

Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 9 (2013) 367–412 385 Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Mediaeval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) xxviii + 593 pp. £75.00/$120.00. ISBN 978- 0-521-80847-7 (hbk). Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensable guide to the texts in this field, that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth- or early twentieth-century editions. Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work (notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England [1970], Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England [1998]) explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar. In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians – nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless. Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts, as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship, nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writ- ing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury Cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size? © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/17455316-00903015 <UN> 386 Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 9 (2013) 367–412 But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and to their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers. After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving books from nunneries. Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provides the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the Cathedral, whose sub- stantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might endure. But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us to evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, aco- lytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unifi- cation, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that, for all the muddles and diversity, it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this <UN>.

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