The Feast of Corpus Christi (review)

In the twentieth century six names are associated with the historical and liturgical study of the feast of Corpus Christi, namely Peter Browe (1928), Cyrille Lambot (1942), L.M. J. Delaissé (1950), Pierre-Marie Gy (1980), Ronald Zawilla (1985), and Miri Rubin (1991). To this impressive list of scholars we now must add three more names: Barbara Walters, Vincent Corrigan, and Peter Ricketts. The present volume represents a collaboration of perhaps what will remain the definitive work on the subject dealing with multiple dimensions of the feast, treating the multiple versions of the original Latin liturgy, complete transcriptions of the music associated with the feast, and a set of poems in Old French with English translations. In part 1, Walters provides a well-researched historical essay starting with the hagiographic vitae of Juliana of Mont Cornillon, the thirteenth-century religious leader of Liège whose vision of the moon missing a quarter of its form led to the invention of the feast—first in the Lowlands and later in the universal Latin Church. The historical chapter moves beyond the legendary to give an honest and scholarly appraisal of Juliana's role in Flemish society and the Church of her day. The feast of Corpus Christi owes its origins to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which established the doctrine of transubstantiation in its attempts to resolve the eucharistic disputes of the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries. Yet the feast was not added to the universal calendar of the Church until 1264 after an interesting period of reception. The most striking alterations happened after 1261 when St. Thomas Aquinas turned to shaping the liturgical Office and the Mass for the feast, including the composition of several eucharistic hymns. Part 2 consists of an introductory essay to the musical component and critical editions of seven late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-century manuscripts from the period of 1269 to 1320. Vincent Corrigan, using the critical tools of musicology, traces the transmission of three major offices associated with the feast: Animarum cibus (the original office associated directly with Juliana), Sapiencia edificavit (found in a manuscript preserved in Prague at the Abbey of Strahov), and Sacerdos in aeternum (attributed to Aquinas and the basis for the contemporary liturgical books). Although the team has uncovered additional manuscripts since the appearance of the book, the critical edition of the seven manuscripts represents state-of-the-art musicological research, classifying each musical item by genre, manuscript, incipit, mode identification, identification of concordances between manuscripts, and liturgical usage for each item. Part 3 consists of an introductory essay dealing with vernacular poetry and a critical edition of twenty Old French poems of Mosan Psalters that are associated with the feast of Corpus Christi and that are in a dialect associated with Liège. Ricketts studied thirteen manuscripts dating roughly from 1230 to 1330 that contain poems intended largely as metric psalms for lay breviaries and as prayers to be recited at Mass like a lay missal. The origins for such vernacular settings aimed at the béguines who in their vernacular fashion imitated the Divine Office that was recited in Latin by clerics and in monastic communities. The inclusion of Corpus Christi material in such vernacular poems attests to the growing popularity of the feast and the desire of the Church that this feast be received and disseminated at a popular level. Beyond the content of this book that is stellar, this volume distinguishes itself as a monument to collaborative research and a must-have for any serious scholar of the liturgy.