 |
 |
A belated response which may pull together some ideas in recent postings. First, Eric Reiter's posting about garbled Latin in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. By coincidence, Chris Armstrong, the (soon-to-be ex) vicar of Aberdaron, has been bewailing to me the amount of garbled Latin in modern fiction. Misquotations from the Vulgate, garbled memories of the Tridentine Mass - oh, deary, deary me. There must be a serious study in this. Presumably what we have is blurred recollections of an experience which was essentially aural rather than literate. This still seems to be a difference between Catholic and Anglican experience of the liturgy. I do sometimes attend Catholic Mass and it's always a challenge finding a service book. In an Anglican church you will have one thrust into your hand as soon as you get through the door, and people who could recite the service in their sleep still have their noses in the book all the way through. (I did this myself through sheer force of habit until I had a small child to hold and entertain and didn't have a spare hand for the book.) We are obviously defining ourselves as people of the book - but of the Prayer Book rather than the Bible. However, this has a very different feel from the 'prayer-book Protestantism' of the C16 and C17, which must surely have been based on the congregation knowing the liturgy by heart in order to participate. One wonders what impact this had on standardising English. Here in Wales we tend to credit the Welsh translation of the Bible with standardising the language and embedding the Reformation in Welsh cultural identity, but I wonder whether the Welsh BCP may not in fact have been more influential for the majority, at least until the C18 when Welsh translations of the Bible became more readily available. I don't know when it became normal for parish churches to have a stock of prayer books for the whole congregation or when this emphasis on the printed text became common. I can remember being given a prayer book on my confirmation, presumably harking back to days when it was a status thing to have one's own. (like the medieval primer?) Going back to the garbled Latin - the comparable Anglican experience is the confused recollections people have of the old BCP services, often mixed up with bits of the Messiah and other familiar but antique texts. And I have been told stories, which must *surely* be apocryphal, of Anglican clergy who went over to Rome during the stirs about women priests but who could be identified by their tendency to revert to the BCP wording when they got carried away during Mass. Happy hols. Maddy %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%