James Bugslag wrote:
A quick search in the index of Dominique Iogna-Prat's La Maison Dieu, which contains quite a lot of useful analysis of church dedications, turns up Brian V. Repsher, The Rite of Church Dedication in the Early Medieval Era (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter, 1998), which sounds helpful on this issue.
Well, that depends what exactly the issue is! (I'm losing track...)
As the imprint suggests, this is a PhD thesis published by the Edwin Mellen Press - with all that that implies. It consists of an English translation of the church dedication rite in the PRG, and of an Amalarius-ish commentary upon it, together with rather tedious 'analyses' of both. Somewhat oddly, the Latin texts (available elsewhere in standard editions) are not included. I have suggested previously that it could have made a reasonable journal article.
The Tridentine Pontifical which Stan Metheny cited gives a ritual for laying the foundation stone of a church. Such ceremonies undoubtedly existed in the Middle Ages (the ceremony for laying the foundation stone of Salisbury Cathedral may be the best-known example) but I am not aware of their inclusion in any medieval pontifical - it seems to be a simple ceremony which any bishop would be competent to improvise. (Bishops found their hands tied by the Tridentine Pontifical - the Roman Curia had exceeded the authority given them by the Council in issuing it.) Even in that pontifical the specific issue - asperging the foundations of the church, or their outline if they had not been completed, is only mentioned in the rubrics in passing. Presumably, such a ceremony was optional.
In case the issue is really that of "consecrated ground" (a concept firmly embedded in the English psyche), this is discussed by Helen Gittos in her Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England, where she points out how anthropologically unusual it is.