Liturgical Renewal in Two Eleventh-Century Royal Spanish Prayerbooks

In recent decades, transformations in medieval Christian liturgical practices have been explored for what they can tell scholars about cultural change.¹ Shifts in ritual can indicate changing values and beliefs as well as mark the power of external influences. One relatively momentous shift in liturgical practice was the decision of Alfonso VI, king of Castilla-León at Burgos in 1076, after years of pressure from Pope Gregory VII, to begin the transition from the use of the Old Spanish liturgy (also called the Mozarabic, Visigothic, or Hispanic rite) within his domain in favor of the Roman liturgy used in the rest of Latin Christendom.² This innovation is viewed as but one manifestation of a much broader “Europeanization” of medieval Spain that took place in the eleventh century, a movement that began in other Iberian Christian kingdoms, but reached its culmination in the reign of Alfonso VI, with his French brides, Cluniac monks, and receptivity to papal influence.³

Spain was seen traditionally as the submissive partner in this moment of cultural and political exchange, passively accepting Roman liturgy, Romanesque art, Carolingian script, French monasticism, knights, and townsmen, and the political influence that went with them whole cloth without modifications or adaptations to fit them to the local situation.⁴ Concentrating on the liturgical evidence for this transformation nuances this view, however, uncovering evidence for creative adaptation on the part of those exposed to the new rituals from the north. Roger Reynolds’s examination of the ordination ritual in the peninsula revealed a high degree of creative adaptation of Roman and Catalan forms well before the Council of Burgos, and this hybrid Roman-Catalan rite can be found in Castilian pontifical manuscripts dated long after the transformation to the Roman ritual is supposed to have been complete.⁵

Two royal prayerbooks that contain unmistakable traces of processes of adoption and adaptation bear further witness that the prehistory of the adoption of the Roman rite in Castilla-León saw an openness to Roman forms and an adaptation of them within an Old Spanish liturgical context. Both books were created at the impetus of Queen Sancha of León (d. 1067), one for her husband Fernando I of Castilla (1037–65), and the other for her own use.⁶ Fernando’s prayerbook has received copious and frequent attention, including a complete transcription of its contents, due to the art-historical interest of its decoration, while Sancha’s little-decorated prayerbook has been largely ignored. Where the manuscripts have been studied for their liturgical textual contents, especially the text of the nocturnal office which they share, scholars have been interested in the manuscripts as a window onto the Visigothic origins of the Old Spanish liturgy.⁷ This quest for origins fails to explain the genesis of these two prayerbooks with their very particular contents and does not answer what use the royal couple would have for the diverse texts they contain.

The two books are unquestionably Old Spanish at their heart, but also reflect strong Romano-Frankish and, in the case of Sancha’s book, Cluniac influences added after her death by her daughter. Fernando’s prayerbook, now in the library of the University of Santiago de Compostela (BU MS 609 [Res. 1]), contains an original core built around the psalter and the canticles that dates to 1055, and which was expanded with additional prayers and other texts shortly thereafter. Sancha’s book, now in the collection of the University of Salamanca (BU MS 2668), dates from 1059 and comprises mainly the canticles, but also contains an addendum reflective of Cluniac spirituality that was added by Urraca Fernández, their daughter, during the period when Alfonso VI was inviting Cluniac influence into the peninsula.

Influence from beyond the Pyrenees affected both the structure and content of these two manuscripts. Normally in the Old Spanish liturgy, the psalter and canticles appear either alone or with each other in manuscripts, without other texts, but Fernando and Sancha’s manuscripts both add a litany, the Old Spanish nocturnal office, the Athanasian Creed, and penitential prayers...