Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion (review)

One hundred years after Adolf Franz published his monumental two-volume Die Kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1909), a scholar has dared to explore in a sustained fashion the complex meanings and anthropological import of the Latin blessings that Franz chartered. In Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion, Derek A. Rivard conducts an ambitious study of ritual blessings in continental Latin sources, especially from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries.

Rivard’s first and shortest chapter, “The History and Theology of Christian Blessing,” sketches the development of blessings from the Old Testament to the Middle Ages and introduces key liturgical books to be studied. The next three chapters constitute the heart of Blessing the World and its major contribution. Each chapter explores a category of ritual blessings as a “window through which to explore the relationship between the human and the divine in medieval religion” (p. 6). Chapter 2, “Sacred Places and Sacred Space,” analyzes blessings related to agriculture, homes, bridal chambers, work spaces, cemeteries, and churches—including consecrations and reconciliations. Chapter 3, “Sacred Persons: Blessing the Laity,” discusses how blessings instilled divine power in “the visible and tangible elements of special social status” (p.172)—namely, pilgrims’ staves and purses, and knights’ swords, standards, lances, and armor. Chapter 3 also addresses twelve sample rites of blessing related to illness, pestilence, healing, and childbirth. Rivard devotes chapter 4 to “Sacred Vessels, Objects, and Events,” including ships, nets, wells, dishes, vessels, ordeals, and judicial duels. The theological problems of and lukewarm clerical attitudes toward ordeals and duels are noteworthy.

Central to the structure and content of each section in the main chapters is a set of rituals drawn from Latin liturgical books copied between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. Rivard applies “a textual approach drawn more from religious studies than from history and focusing primarily on the broad ideas, beliefs, and trends found within” various formulae of the rituals themselves (p. 2). His translations accurately render the original Latin texts, which are consistently placed in footnotes. The conclusion highlights general themes across individual rites, including the “adaptability” of divine power, which blessings portray as capable of meeting every need (pp. 209, 214); the “ambiguity” that resulted because petitioners could only guess at how God might respond to the blessing; “belief in the deep engagement of the sacred with the natural world” (p. 271); the notion of a “contract” between God and his worshipers; and the relationship of the sacred to the demonic and profane. Rivard’s most refreshing conclusions regard the “positive perspective on the natural and social world” (p. 280) exhibited by the blessings and the extent to which they were influenced by the piety and concerns of the laity.

Rudolf Otto’s anthropological theories, and particularly his notion of the numen, exert a pervasive influence over the study. Commentators on medieval religion such as Augustine Thomson, Keith Thomas, and R. N. Swanson provide categories for Rivard’s interpretation of the rituals. Yet Rivard draws more from Franz and the primary sources than any more recent scholarship.

Desiderata include outlines of each rite to contextualize individual formulae. It is surprising, for example, to read suddenly “the seventeenth prayer” of a given blessing (p. 110). The reader also must keep in mind that the texts studied are multivalent and open to other interpretations. For example, what Rivard calls the “ambiguity” of the divinity might be better understood in terms of the subjective disposition of the faithful, even in the medieval mentalité. This study exhibits a lack of familiarity with patristics, liturgiology, palaeography, and theology, which are intimately related to the topic. For example, Rivard follows the formidable but in some respects outdated surveys of Josef Jungmann, Theodor Klauser, and Cyrille Vogel in attributing the Apostolic Tradition to Hippolytus (p. 29), despite more recent research on the document by Paul Bradshaw and...