medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> >> i know less than nothing about Winchester, John, but processions at
> Chartres will be one of the many liturgical topics discussed by Margot Fassler
> in her forthcomming book on Chartres
>
> > OK, how early are these processions, and how extensive (how far do they go),
> and how often (more than just Palm Sunday)?
I know much less about processions than Christopher claims, but a distinction
certainly needs to be made between liturgical processions and extra-liturgical or
para-liturgical processions. Christopher is certainly right that the city and environs
of Chartres formed a "processional landscape", but the liturgical sources for
Chartres don't extend back any earlier than the mid-12th century, and the
development of the liturgical processions there, that took in churches both within the
city walls and in the immediate vicinity (as well as a farther-ranging annual
procession, on foot, to Orleans and back, 40 km away!), is unknown before that
time. The stational processions of Rome are sometimes invoked as a sort of
"model" for such processions elsewhere, but how this early tradition of processions
might have connected up with later ones all over Europe lies outside of my
superficial knowledge of the subject. Also unknown to me is when extra-liturgical
processions began to develop. At Chartres, the most high-profile of these was the
Grand Procession, in which the principal relics of the cathedral and most of the town
clergy, together with a large lay contingent, processed out to the abbey of Josaphat
(a 12th-century foundation, as Christopher says) for a mass and then back again,
usually in order to invoke the Virgin's aid in obtaining needed rain for crops. The
problem with these extra-liturgical processions is that they were recorded on an ad
hoc basis, and little evidence that I know of survives for them before the 16th, and
even more so, the 17th centuries. Plagues provoked innumerable votive
processions in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period. The earliest one I
know of is "la Grand Procession" at Tournai, which began in 1089 in relation to the
Mal des Ardents, but the great age of this, as far as the patheticly poor sources for it
go, was the 17th century (in Catholic Europe, obviously). Many small shrines and
religious houses on the continent, conveniently located within an easy walk of
towns, became the goals of such "local pilgrimage" processions. Dealing with
England is doubly difficult, not only because so little survives of such local shrines
in the wake of the Reformation, but because of the "arrested development" of them
from that time. Nevertheless, I'd be very surprised if they hadn't existed earlier.
The question of when they arose, in this difficult case, may just be impossible now
to answer. Outside of a few Holy Wells, there is little physical evidence for such
local shrines in England. One of the best sources for such local shrines in England
that I know of are wills, which mention such local shrines often in the 15th century. I
don't know what survives in the way of Winchester wills, but they would be worth
consulting in this respect. Even without sources, it might be legitimate to conclude
that, where there are local shrines, there are processions (although I would welcome
discussion of such a proposition).
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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