Duffy 2005

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

tension between religious holidays and need for work to get done;

"Hence considerable variation was the rule in the degree of solemnity of particular days, some requiring the cessation of all work (except activites such as milking cows, feeding livestock, or the saving of crops in harvest), other days requiring only women to abstain from work. Both secular and ecclesiastical authorities througout the Middle Ages showed considerable sensitivity to these sorts of questions, and a tendency to seek to limit the number of holidays. This trend achieved its starkest and most drastic expression after the break with Rome, when in 1536 the Crown abolished most of the local and national festa ferianda occurring in the Westminster law terms and in the busy summer months, on the grounds that the excessive numbers of holidays were impoverishing the people by hindering agriculture. Widespread resentment of this action was a contributory factor in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and subsequent anti-reform feeling." (42-3)

seasons: Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Easter, and Whit; attached to the Whitsun season, the feasts of the Trinitty and Corpus Christi (46)

laity's calendar linked to liturgical calendar, lunar calendar (46)

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)

some historians argue for an increasing polarity between laity who worshipped communally and literate gentry who spent services reading and in private prayer; however, Duffy argues that this division is simplistic: "the illiterate gazing during Mass on a cheap indulgenced woodcut of the Image of Pity was not necessarily worlds away from the gentleman reading learned Latin prayers to the wounds of Jesus, and both of them would have responded in much the same way when summoned to put aside book or block-print to gaze at the Host" (123)