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4. Sacred Vessels, Objects, and Events
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217 Chapter4 sACred vessels, objeCts, And events sacRed things: a BRief suRvey In the study of the blessings of places and persons, we have already noted how frequently medieval Christianity blessed objects and particular times,imbuing them with a power beyond their mere physical presence.But inallof theseblessings,theobjectsortimesbeingblessedwereof secondary importance,because the rituals in question were designed primarily to bless and assist the persons and places and the instruments of their consecration. There is,however,a group of blessings that elevate objects or events to a primary position.Many of these rituals deal with items associated with particular moments in the church’s liturgical calendar:the blessing of palm fronds on Palm Sunday and candles on the feast of Candlemass are two of the bestknown examples of such rites.1 Others focus on items that play an important role in the daily liturgy of Christian worship:blessings of altars,chalices ,bells,and clerical vestments being but a few of these numerous rituals.2 While these blessings undoubtedly are worthy of analysis in their own right, they will not be discussed in this work because of their close association with, and physical proximity to, the formal liturgy and the physical structure of the churches in which they were employed.In keeping with the focus on extraliturgical blessings outside the formal sacramental system of the high and late medieval church,this chapter examines ritual blessings of 1.For an excellent study and commentary on these rituals,see Franz,1:445–55,470–507. 2.Examples of all these diverse kinds of blessings may be found within the printed critical editions of the Roman pontifical tradition that I have used extensively in this study; for a sample,see PWD ordos 2.3–4 and 2.7–22. z 218 sACred vessels, objeCts, & events items and events that mattered greatly to the laity but did not have a place within the formal sacramental liturgy of the church:blessings of ships,their crews, and nets; blessings of wells, dishes, and vessels; and blessings of ordeals ,trials,and judicial duels. shiPs, nets, and MaRitiMe equiPMent The sea has always been a place of great ambiguity and mystery for humankind .In the imaginations of cultures around the world the ocean represents both the fear of an awesome unknown and the challenge, adventure, creativity,and romance of exploring distant lands.A source of life and livelihood for mariners,it is also a realm of death,where the turning of a tide or a slightshiftinthewindcouldportendthecomingof violentstormsanddangerous currents that could steal away the lives of unwary sailors and fishermen .3 This danger so impressed itself upon the mind of mariners that the forces of marine nature have consistently been attributed a malicious personality in Europe since ancient times, the sea thought of as one manifestation of the waters of Chaos,the enemy of universal order that ever threatened to cover the earth and revoke the authority of the gods who formed the cosmos from its waters.4 The Israelites called the ocean Tehom,the “face of the water”over which God moved in the creation story of Genesis,and early secular written sources of this culture attributed an evil and dangerous nature to the waves, with Hebrew epic poetry portraying a constant war between Yahweh and Yam (the sea) and its monsters.This view was supported by biblical texts, which affirmed the existence of sea monsters, the greatest of which was the monstrous Leviathan.5 Apprehension of similar ma3 . Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 192; Elisha Linder,“Human Apprehension of the Sea,”in The Sea and History, ed.E.E.Rice (Phoenix Mill, UK:Sutton Publishing,1996),15. 4.Linder,“Human Apprehension of the Sea,”15,19;Mollat du Jourdin,EuropeandtheSea, 193.One common belief that reflects the death and evil that the sea could represent was that the cries of seagulls expressed the wailing of the souls of the dead who were lost at sea and thus deprived of a proper burial (Mollat du Jourdin,EuropeandtheSea, 194). 5. Linder, “Human Apprehension of the Sea,” 15, 19 (see Gn 1:2, Is 27:1, 51:9, Ps 75:13– 14, Jb 7:12); see also C. H. Gordon, “Leviathan: Symbol of Evil,” in Biblical Motifs, ed. A. Altman (Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard University Press,1966),1–10.In the later biblical prophetic texts,the struggles of Yahweh and the sea’s monsters turns into the struggle of Israel against itsenemies,acaseof cosmogonychangingintohistory(Linder,“HumanApprehensionof...