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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Marjorie Greene wrote: >Many thanks for all the information about the >Harrowing of Hell. Your generous responses have been >duly forwarded to my colleague. In addition to Tom's and Otfried's excellent book-length suggestions, a possibly more readily available if much shorter treatment can be found in J. N. D. Kelly's _Early Christian Creeds_, in his chapter on the Apostles' Creed (pp. 378ff in the 3rd edition). >I'm curious about the name "Shrove Tuesday." The verb >"to shrive" means "to forgive," no? Does the name come >from the fact that one will eventually have to be >shriven of all the activity of the day? Also, is >"shrove" not simply the past tense of the verb and >inappropriate in that grammatical usage? Although I don't have the revised OED and therefore don't know whether recent (i.e., from the last 80 or so years) research has turned up any new information, the original article on shrovetide (whence Shrove Tuesday) says on the etymology: Of obscure origin. The first element is undoubtedly related to shrive and refers to the custom of being shriven in preparation for Lent. An OE *scra/f, shriving, confession, from scri/fan, to shrive, would account phonologically for shrove-, but, if the form actually existed, the absence of evidence for this group of words until the 15th century is remarkable. (Other early names for the season were FASTENS-EEN, FAST-GONG, FASTINGONG.) (end quote) The "gong" element is a variant of "gang," going. I hope that the above on-topic response will permit an indulgence to post a link to a less-than-serious discussion of Shrove Tuesday rituals extracted from the Liturgy-l list from some 8 years back. http://www.neiu.edu/~ghsingle/shrove.htm John ******* John McChesney-Young ** [log in to unmask] ** Berkeley, California, USA ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html