The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (review)

There was no liturgical uniformity in the Middle Ages; instead a hundred uses co-existed, drawn up by local churches, regular or secular, to suit their own needs. Faced with a plethora of 'liturgies' purists have argued tiresomely against the definite article, but it stands proudly on the title-page of Richard Pfaff's magisterial over view, proclaiming the continuum of effort that underlies the varieties of liturgical practice across two Christian millennia. This is the book that it has been Richard Pfaff's to write, and it has grown out of forty years of work on the primary manuscripts. It should find a hungry audience since liturgy is often seen as a difficult subject for the non-specialist to dig into, reliant hitherto on A. A. King's now outdated Liturgies of the Religious Orders (1955) supplemented by Andrew Hughes's erudite but opaque handbook Medieval Manuscripts For Mass and Office (1982). Pfaff's history is truly an evidence-based approach, its conclusions drawn at all points from the surviving manuscripts, buttressed by architectural evidence, and by the documentary witness of councils and synods, visitation records and the statutes of collegiate churches and secular cathedrals.

It begins in early Anglo-Saxon England and travels into the second quarter of the sixteenth century and, at all times, the account is set in the appropriate political, ecclesiastical, and cultural contexts. The Anglo-Saxon period is treated chronologically and with a judicious weighing of the sparse evidence. After the Conquest when sources become more available, the account turns to separate treatments of the liturgies of regular and secular communities. The Benedictine liturgy is treated in two richly detailed chapters, that of the Cluniacs, Cistercians, and Carthusians in another. The Augustinians, the mendicant orders, and the Brigittines also receive individual attention, but for female houses, a subject about which one would wish to know more, only the nuns of Barking are represented by sufficient evidence to allow their practices to be examined. There are interesting final sections on late developments and the arrival of print. Otherwise the chief object in the foreground is the origin of the Sarum rite and its spread outwards from Salisbury in the mid thirteenth century to become the principal form of ecclesiastical worship in the southern province. Interestingly, rather than at Salisbury Cathedral itself it is at Exeter where the expression of the Sarum liturgy can be most fully comprehended, by nature of the building itself and by the well attested activities of that magnificent Bishop of Exeter, John de Grandisson. Pfaff examines this expression of Sarum at its most elaborate, before turning to consider other prominent secular uses in England, those of York and Hereford, together with St Paul's, Lincoln, and Wells.

The organization of the book is generous, recognizing that most readers will focus on the historical period that interests them. The chapters are therefore self-contained and thoroughly cross-referenced so that the reader can, if needed, follow the thread of technical exposition into earlier chapters. Pfaff's aim of producing a reference work that will suit general users as well as specialists is made clear in a preliminary explanation of 'What the Reader is Presumed to Know', and in the five excursuses, in which needful technical information is concentrated; Pfaff invites the knowledgeable reader to avert his eyes from these sections. Another valuable feature is the interwoven historiographical sidelights, which weigh the products of the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for 'liturgiology' and the editions it produced in the same historical balance as the medieval sources themselves. Many of these editions remain current, but Pfaff shows them to be products of their time and temperament that contribute to an erroneous implied teleology that medieval uses were converging on one liturgy, as ultimately represented in the Book of Common Prayer. In his 'Preface', Pfaff acknowledges the omission, for economies of space, of three large areas of interest: episcopal liturgies as contained in pontificals, pastoral...