medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
This is a powerful - and dauntingly well-informed - disagregation, but doesn't seem to damage the central point (for my immediate purposes) which is that a great many of the quotes are from consecration services or other liturgical practises/sermons directly relatable to them in some way.
Your last paragraph, however, is the most important point of all. I am sadly up against a BBC who are saying (understandably in some ways) 'it's too fluffy' when I make points like that. Dearies, in this case fluffy *is* the point!
Jon
> Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:20:54 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [M-R] Consecration rites and the 'heavenly Jerusalem' ... supp. question
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Jon Cannon wrote:
> >
> > Just to thank everyone again for such a stimulating and useful
> > discussion. The Gesta article - which seems pretty solid to me - has
> > dug me out of a deep and urgent hole, for which I am most grateful.
>
> It's along the right lines, but his handling of sources is distinctly odd.
> Hans Sedlmayr and Joseph Sauer are cited in German, but Durandus is only
> cited in English, and from a Victorian translation. Martène is used as a
> source for Egbert's Pontifical, which is a trifle odd, as there are better
> editions, and Martène only prints extracts. Recourse therefore has to be had
> to "Jerome's Vulgate." (It is not mentioned that Durandus himself
> "standardised" the Pontifical - not that it needed much standardisation - so
> his own Pontifical might have had some relevance.) Attention switches to the
> Mass of the Feast of the Dedication, which ought to be extremely similar to
> the Mass that concludes the Consecration Service (the Feast of the
> Dedication is the annual commemoration of the consecration, but one service
> only occurs only in the Pontifical, and the other in the Missal - leaving
> the opportunity for structural variations...) But this is cited from the
> Sarum Use, and the edition of the Missal by Wickham Legg. This is an
> excellent edition, but one that needs to be used with care, as it is
> essentially a variorum edition. We then switch to the Office of the Feast of
> the Dedication, but this time from a Roman Breviary of 1946! The hymn "Urbs
> Jerusalem beata" (in Latin only) consequently has to be printed from a more
> reliable edition, as it was butchered in 1632. Suger is quoted only in the
> English of Panofsky's translation. Bernard of Cluny is cited in English, and
> when Thierry of Chartres and Abelard are referenced, it is by what von
> Simson said (in English) that they said!
>
> > I was struck in the course of our discussion by how thin the
> > documentary evidence is for what has become a widely-held orthodoxy -
> > that the HJ was perhaps the dominant among the many 'images'
> > informing the imaginations of those who designed and conceived
> > medieval great churches.
>
> Stookey (in the Gesta article) makes the excellent points that the medieval
> mind didn't distinguish between Jerusalem and Sion, or between the Jerusalem
> of the Psalms and the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation - or between the
> physical building and the spiritual church. He might have added that if
> church building is the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Consecration Service (if
> that is what it is), then it is the Biblical Jerusalem of the Palm Sunday
> procession. Or that the medieval mind didn't necessarily distinguish the
> literal, the allegorical, the tropological and the anagogical.
>
> John Briggs
>
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