Ceremonies of the Sarum Missal: A Careful Conjecture by R. J. Urquhart (review)

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the literature about the Sarum Use is aware that it is field of variable quality. It contains undoubted treasures—F. H. Dickinson's Missale Sarum or anything compiled or edited by Walter Frere, for example—yet, from the nineteenth century onwards, attempts to co-opt the liturgy of pre-Reformation Britain to the cause of this faction or that in the Anglican Communion, and the remarkably fertile imagination of Percy Dearmer and others of his ilk, mean that much of what has been produced relied as much on the "wish being the father of the thought" and "making the evidence fit the case" as it did on scholarship. Within the communion of the Catholic Church, attempts (ultimately, predictably and inevitably unsuccessful) by the medievalist Ambrose Phillips de Lisle to persuade the nascent English hierarchy to resume the pre-Tridentine use, were hardly any better grounded in a dispassionate study of the sources, although, Fr Daniel Rock's The Church of our Fathers displays sufficient sober judgement and scholarly thoroughness to still be of use.

Antiquarianism vied with the fanciful in a recognizable genre of literature that often lacked rigor or any real attempt to read out of the existing sources what was going on in this dialect of the Roman Rite, rather than an attempt to read back into those same texts contemporary preoccupations. In the early twentieth century, the presumptions and prejudices of the main proponents of Liturgical Movement betrayed an explicit anti-medieval prejudice that hardly encouraged the study of Sarum to move into the mainstream of liturgical studies. From the late 1980s onwards—perhaps in reaction to the by-then all too obvious failure of the post-conciliar liturgical changes to deliver the new springtime of the Church it was confidently asserted they would—there were further flickers of interest in all things Sarum, including celebrations of Solemn Masses in Oxford's Merton College Chapel and even the public celebration of Mass according to the Sarum Use by a Scottish Catholic Bishop. The early twenty-first century has brought John Harper's "The Experience of Worship" project, in which both the parochial and cathedral liturgy of late-medieval Sarum were studied, reconstructed, re-enacted and reflected upon, and with it, arguably, the first robust shoots of a proper modern academic engagement with the material in Late Medieval Liturgies Enacted, ed. Sally Harper, P.S. Barnwell and Magnus Williamson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016; reissued in paperback, 2019).

The arrival of R. J. Urquhart's Ceremonies of the Sarum Missal: A Careful Conjecture confirms that the field of what might reasonably be called Sarum studies is now firmly in the hands of those who are committed to the painstaking and thoroughgoing textual and archival work, accompanied by a proper epistemic modesty—neither mistaking the absence of evidence for evidence of absence nor yet boldly asserting that what was done elsewhere, in later periods and in different uses can be taken as normative when seeking to fill such evidential gaps. Urquhart's book is exactly what it says on the cover: a careful conjecture. The lengths to which the author goes to justify his claims and the sheer range of sources upon which he relies are mightily impressive. The care with which he considers conflicting and competing authorities reveals a keen liturgical sensibility, one conscious of the physical limitations and practicalities of ecclesial life. The footnotes are a delight. A favorite, n.10 on p.118, runs for fully three pages beginning with the lapidary "The whole matter of the incensation of the offerings, altar, celebrant, choir and ministers is very confusing" before proceeding to lay out meticulously the various possibilities with limpid clarity.

To be sure the book is not free of a certain eccentricity—insisting on the name "Bibliokaiallography" for the book's bibliography is surely unnecessarily, albeit harmlessly arch—yet it is throughout entirely free of the...