Duffy 2005

Encountering the Holy

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)

The Saints

virgin martyrs; "the English laity looked to the saints not primarily as exemplars or soul-friends, but as powerful helpers and healers in time of need, whether bodily need or the last spiritual extremity of death and the pains of purgatory" (178)

the saint desired pilgrimage to his shrine; offer of candle or coin the best way to get his help (183)

ways to gain protection of saints: coin-bending; holding coin over afflicted body parts; semi-contractual character of saints' cults (183-5)

direct relationship between saint and saint's image (186); didn't believe they were the saints, but closely connected

saints "perceived as part of the economy of grace" (186); "often portrayed as embodying ... tenderness and compassionate humanity" believed to be held by Jesus (186-7); gentle, loving, merciful; appealed to as loving friends (187)

link between saint's healing and the restoration of the Eucharistic community (190)

pilgrimage: seeking the holy embodied in a sacred place, relic or image (191); often undertaken as penance; "temporary release from the constricutions and norms of ordinary living"

ex votos, offerings left

decline of pilgrimages, neglect of shrines on the eve of the Reformation

Prayers and Spells

"Lewed and Learned": The Laity and the Primers

late medieval prayers surviven in large numbers, "jotted in the margins or flyleaves of books, collected into professionally commissioned or home-made prayer-rolls, devotional manuals, and commonplace books, above all gathering into the primers or Books of Hours", which on the eve of the Reformation were reproduced in thousands (209)

primer (Book of Hours): 15 gradual Psalms, 7 penitential Psalms, public liturgy of the 7 monastic Hours; also absorbed Little Office / Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary (210); offered the lay devotee "some approximation to the order and tranquillity of monastic piety" (210); relatively uncomplicated, varied little with liturgical seasons; after print, books varied more as competition increased

• among the first books to be efficiently mass-produced (211)
• from Caxton's first printed Horae to appearance of first Protestant primers in 1530s, 114 Latin Horae were published for lay English use, probably more like 500 -- so 57,000 copies in circulation before the Reformation (212)

mostly Latin primers in circulation (English ones suspected of Lollardy) (213); how, then, did lay people say their prayers and read these texts?

• "primers were both more and less than texts (213);
• ornamented as sacred objects, pictures had special character, rubric text and use of cross symbol tied them to books used in church (214);
• masses offered "microcosm of the liturgical year" (215) and the Gospels "carried an element of the numinous" (217);
• intrinsic value to Latin prayer words, even if not understood (218)
• Office of the Dead most familiar to most (220-221)
• with a little Latin, some literate readers could use the text to launch them into prayers knwon by heart (different kind of reading) (221)

supplementary devotional material copied directly into primers by owners; devotional pictures stuck into them

"a wide spectrum of lay people using and supplementing the latin devotions of the primers with familiarity and freedom. Their Books of Hours, in which they copied the details of births and deaths just as later generations would do in the family Bible, were very much their own, and the devout scrawls which embellish or disfigure so many of the surviving 'Horae are eloquent testimony to their centrality in the devotional lives of their owners." (225)