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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