Interpreting Medieval Liturgy, c. 500 - c. 1500 AD: Text and Performance

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The medieval world is widely recognised as one in which ritualized actions played an important role in religious, social and political life. Liturgical rites constitute an important yet understudied part of the medieval record, largely because the study of them has become highly specialised and compartmentalised as different academic disciplines have developed their own approaches to this form of evidence. Liturgical rites pose particular problems for modern scholars because often the only surviving evidence for them is written texts which are very imperfect guides to what was actually performed. This network will focus on the evidence for occasional services (rather than those for the Mass and the Office), that is personal rites such as for baptism, penance, and burial, as well as annual processions including Palm Sunday and the Rogation Days; these were rituals which lay at the heart of church life for all medieval Christians, lay and clerical. These services structured the course of individuals' lives, but also bound them to the wider community, and helped articulate community identities. The network will bring together international scholars from a variety of different disciplines -- history, musicology, theology, English literature, theatre studies, art and architectural history -- in order to resolve the tensions and to break down the barriers which currently exist to the interdisciplinary study of these medieval liturgical rites. Scholars drawn from the USA, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Israel and the UK will create a framework for an exchange of research methods. The network will focus on the problems of studying the texts of the rites themselves, the contexts in which they were produced, and the relationship between texts and the environment in which they were performed. It will combine formal papers with a re-enactment of a late medieval rite for the reconciliation of penitents in a late medieval church, St Teilo's, recently re-erected and re-furbished at St Fagans, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. In order to guarantee the continuity of the network and to maximise the dissemination of its research findings, we will produce an edited book and an interactive website. The contributions to the edited book will discuss different methodological problems and are intended to help scholars new to liturgical material. The interactive website will include a published summary of each meeting, a publicly-viewable discussion forum, and a film of the liturgical re-enactment. There will also be links to other websites, including St Fagans', in order to ensure the dissemination of the filmed re-enactment to school teachers and children, for whom medieval religion is part of the national curriculum in history, and to the general public interested in what went on inside medieval churches.