A Monastic Death Ritual from the Imperial Arrey of Farfa

A MONASTIC DEATH RITUAL FROM THE IMPERIAL ARBEY OF FARFA By SUSAN BOYNTON Lengthy and complex rituals surrounding illness and death were an important part of the collective experience of medieval monastic communities . In manuscripts from as early as the eighth century, the texts for Christian death rituals consist of prayers, readings, and chants for the visitation of the sick, unction, communion, the funeral mass, and burial.1 Even though many of the early medieval formularies were copied in monastic scriptoria, the texts could be performed in secular or monastic settings.2 The earliest death rituals that are explicitly written for monastic communities and contain extensive prescriptions for the actions that accompanied a monk from his final hours of life to his grave are transmitted in monastic customaries of the eleventh century. The first fully developed Cluniac customary, the Liber tramitis, appears to contain one of the oldest preserved explicitly monastic death rituals.3 1 On death rituals in the early Middle Ages see Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1990), and Damien Sicard, La liturgie de la mort dans !église latine des origines d la réforme carolingienne (Münster, 1988). I am grateful to Frederick Paxton for discussing the Farfa ritual with me. The following abbreviations are used throughout: CAO = Réné-Jean Hesbert, Corpus antiphonalium officii, 6 vols. (Rome, 1968-79); Mohlberg = Liber sacramentorum romanae aeclesiae ordinis anni circuli (Cod.Vai. Reg. lat. 316jParis. Bibl. Nat. 7193, 41/56, Sacramentarium Gelasianum), ed. Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, 3rd ed. (Rome, 1981); SG = Jean Deshueses, Le sacramentaire grégorien: ses principales formes d'après les plus anciens manuscrits , 3rd ed., 3 vols., Spicilegium Friburgense 16, 24, 28 (Fribourg, 1992). 2 The present discussion does not address death rituals intended for the secular clergy, although some survive from the eleventh century. As described by Sarah Hamilton in "The Rituale: The Evolution of a New Liturgical Book," in The Church and the Book: Papers Read at the 2000 Summer Meeting and the 2001 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson (Woodbridge, 2004), 74-86, at 79, an early eleventh-century manuscript from Rome (Vat. MS Archivio San Pietro H. 58) contains two different ordines for the visitation of the sick, including one that, according to Hamilton, seems to be intended for use within a clerical community rather than a monastic one. I am grateful to Julian Hendrix for bringing my attention to this study. 3 On the death rituals in the three Cluniac customaries from the eleventh century, see Frederick Paxton, "Death by Customary at Eleventh-Century Cluny," in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 297-318; see also Paxton's forthcoming reconstructive edition, The Cluniac Death Ritual in the Central Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2010). 58TRADITIO Although compiled at Cluny in the second quarter of the eleventh century, the Liber tramitis was intended for the imperial abbey of Farfa, where the earliest extant manuscript of the customary was produced around the middle of the century.4 Thus the Liber tramitis reflects not only the customs of Cluny, but also their reception and assimilation by the community at Farfa.5 For most of the liturgical practices described in the Liber tramitis, one can only hypothesize a direct influence on the ritual life of the community at Farfa; the textual and manuscript evidence to prove this supposition beyond a doubt is usually lacking. However, in the case of the death ritual it is possible to demonstrate the influence of Cluniac usages on Farfa's own traditions, by comparing the description in the Liber tramitis to the ritual found in three liturgical books from Farfa, all copied between the middle of the eleventh century and the early twelfth; the edition below presents this text for the first time. The earliest of these three manuscripts, C (Vatican Library, Chigi C.VI. 177), is roughly contemporaneous with the oldest witness to the Liber tramitis (copied at Farfa). The latest of the three Farfa manuscripts, V (Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, F 29) is the base manuscript...