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| Communities of Practice; Who was present for this liturgy? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 13 2015, 04:02 PM (300 Views) | |
| Kati Ihnat | Feb 13 2015, 04:02 PM Post #1 |
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We were fortunate to have the eminent Professor Wendy Davies come to Bristol yesterday to talk about the provision of priests and books in early medieval Iberia (the northern kingdoms of Leon and Pamplona). It was a rich and fascinating talk (entitled 'Local Churches, Local Priests and Books in Northern Iberia, 800-1000') that provided a whole new perspective on our research. Some things I came away with: - Prof. Davies works largely on charters, legal and notarial culture - these give us tremendous insight into life 'on the ground', so to speak, particularly with respect to church structures and networks of individuals; they also reveal a great deal about what individuals and churches owned, and what they gave away; she has looked at about 2700 charters from the areas of northern Iberia we're interested in - while in the area around Leon (which was as close to a bustling metropolis as you would get in northern Iberia in this period - there was very little urban development, generally) there were quite a few large monasteries (up to ten) that developed largely in the tenth century, in the areas further West, in Galicia especially, churches tended to be local institutions run by families or groups of priests; it was not uncommon for lay families to own churches and appoint priests for them; in the family-run cases, these little communities may have looked a little like hippy communes (our analogy, not Wendy's!), with parents perhaps devoting themselves to a religious life and educating a son who might become a priest; we seem to be talking about a hereditary learned class: relatively wealthy peasants who would own books and teach their children to read - these small local churches also tended to own books (they appear in about 3% of charters); there were two categories: 1) the ones that contain the liturgy for the performance of services in the church and 2) spiritual books for study and contemplation; we tend to get far more of the former and a lot fewer of the latter (these are generally found in monastery libraries rather than local churches) - there were an average of about 4.5 books per institution, and these are often found in charters where individuals donate them to religious institutions or take stock of what the church owns - they often come up in lists of possessions that include vestments, liturgical objects like chalices and such; when a layperson owned a church and bequeathed it, you'd often get the list of items associated with the church in the bequest (and these can include books) - the 4-5 books that tend to come up in the charters are: psalters (which often have chant incipits), books of ordines (special services, for example for the dead or sick or for praying for rain, etc.), antiphoner (contains all the chants of office and mass), prayer book (these are for office and mass prayers, not so much private prayer), 'commicus' (not comic book, rather books that contain the readings for the mass, sometimes found together with sermons) - note there are no Bibles! These are almost entirely limited to monasteries, again. - it seems pretty striking that you get THAT many books in the standard pack (it's quite a lot when you think just how expensive books were: an antiphoner would have been worth 3 solidis - that's about the equivalent of one ox) - so can this tell us that they were probably using them? Difficult to tell, but if these were educated/literate individuals and they had so many books, each providing one bit of the liturgy, then maybe this suggests they were in fact providing regular religious services - churches were hubs of the local community; so many charters were recorded and kept in churches, with priests acting as notaries, that it's likely churches were acting like village halls or community centres on some level and involved in local administration; this increases the chance that people would have been present for the liturgy - at least something like the Sunday mass - even in rural communities, because they would have been going to church for other reasons, like getting their sales of goods recorded and notarised So combining our work on the liturgical manuscripts with Prof. Davies' work on charters that mention some of these kinds of manuscripts, we can start to build a better picture of what actually might have been performed and the kinds of individuals involved. Edited by Kati Ihnat, Feb 13 2015, 04:02 PM.
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| Emma Hornby | Feb 13 2015, 08:46 PM Post #2 |
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Extra things I gleaned from her lecture: - There was little political machinery in 9-10c Leon and Castille. E.g. there was no coin till the late 11th century - it was a barter economy. There were few bishops, no diocesan structure, and no "parishes" in the sense we know from the Roman church. - The survival pattern on the Meseta (around Leon) is very different from Northern Portugal/Galicia and Castille - around Leon, there seem to have been many more established monasteries rather than these local churches. - The charter evidence suggests that there was lay piety. Since churches seem to have been meeting places for all sorts of transactions, it seems highly likely that people also visited them for their primary liturgical function. - The books would most likely have been copied at the bigger monasteries (although it's only from about 925 onwards that the big important monasteries get really large and established with what we might describe as a "scriptorium") - we only know of these priests using charter hands not book hands (totally different sort of handwriting). |
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8:26 PM Jul 11