Duffy 2005: Difference between revisions
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== Seasons and Signs == | == Seasons and Signs == | ||
dancing, vernacular prayers, plays: "the introduction of a ''''folk' element''' ... serves to warn us against underestimating the links between liturgical observance and the 'secular' celebratory and ludic dimensions of lay culture at the end of the Middle Ages" (22) | |||
:"It is not difficult to undersatnd the importance of the liturgical calendar for late medieval people." -- legal deeds, anniversaries, birthdays all reckoned by religious festivals; rents/leases fell in at Lady Day, Lammas or Michaelmas; marriages couldn't occur during 4 wks of Advent or 6 weeks of Lent | :"It is not difficult to undersatnd the importance of the liturgical calendar for late medieval people." -- legal deeds, anniversaries, birthdays all reckoned by religious festivals; rents/leases fell in at Lady Day, Lammas or Michaelmas; marriages couldn't occur during 4 wks of Advent or 6 weeks of Lent | ||
Revision as of 18:04, 6 September 2010
Seasons and Signs
dancing, vernacular prayers, plays: "the introduction of a 'folk' element ... serves to warn us against underestimating the links between liturgical observance and the 'secular' celebratory and ludic dimensions of lay culture at the end of the Middle Ages" (22)
- "It is not difficult to undersatnd the importance of the liturgical calendar for late medieval people." -- legal deeds, anniversaries, birthdays all reckoned by religious festivals; rents/leases fell in at Lady Day, Lammas or Michaelmas; marriages couldn't occur during 4 wks of Advent or 6 weeks of Lent
fasting: almost 70 days in the year when adults were obliged to fast (41); fasting during saint's days
seasons: Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Easter, and Whit; attached to the Whitsun season, the feasts of the Trinitty and Corpus Christi
laity's calendar linked to liturgical calendar, lunar calendar
historians say late June to late November was calm time in Christian liturgical calendar (only feasts of saits "break the unspectacular procession of Sundays after Trinity," 46) (secular half), with Advent through Paschal tide the busiest (ritualistic half); but this is an "oversimplification" -- "to fifteenth-c and early sixteenth-century sensibilities the liturgical year was spread over 12 months, not 6 , and none of it was secular" (47)
The Mass
"sight of the Host ... linked instinctively with the solitary communion of the deathbed, and the lonely journey into the other world for which it was preparation" (120)
- communal experience; community paid to decorate altar, was one moment in Mass when everyone came together
- yet individualistic -- reflection on one's own lonely journey
- "Communal and individual experience could be held together without tension as the rhythm of the Mass, from procession to prayer to rapt gaze and outwards once again to the bustle of offertory or pax. As we shall see, the solitary character of the medieval experience of the deathbed may itself be questioned. The hour of death was one not of isolation, but itself an experience of community." (120-1)