Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History

Lifting a Veil on Liturgy's Past

Teresa Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351934664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy's past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Teresa Berger looks at liturgy's past through the lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of "men" and "women" but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men. Demonstrating what a gender-attentive inquiry is able to achieve, Berger explores both traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and also new ways of studying the past, for example by asking about the developing link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. Drawing on historical case studies and focusing particularly on the early centuries of Christian worship, this book ultimately aims at the present by lifting a veil on liturgy's past to allow for a richly diverse notion of gender differences as these continue to shape liturgical life.

PART I

Gendering Liturgy’s Past: The Trouble, the Task, and the Tools

Part I of Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History lays the methodological groundwork for the case studies in Part II by establishing the fundamental working presuppositions of the book. Among these is the core conviction that gender differences mattered profoundly in past liturgical life and practice, even if conventional liturgical history writing did not possess the interpretive tools to render visible this fundamental marker of liturgy’s past convincingly. To substantiate my claim, I trace the development of historical inquiry in the field of liturgical studies, and argue that, with the gender-analytical tools now available, a fresh look at the writing of liturgical history is imperative (Chapter 1). The following chapter highlights the development of gender history and its key interpretive strategies, with a focus on their bearing on liturgical historiography (Chapter 2).

Chapter 1

Gender History in Liturgy’s Past—Why Not?

It was the year A.D. 1114. A church in Menat, Auvergne, opened its doors to an aging itinerant preacher, Robert of Arbrissel. Robert, who had founded the mixed monastery of Fontevraud, was on a journey together with ascetic companions, both male and female. The people of Menat warned Robert that females were forbidden to enter the church, explaining that a saint, revered in the region for centuries, had barred women from this house of God. A woman who defied this tradition would surely die. Robert of Arbrissel responded promptly. He entered the church, together with the women around him. In vain did the doorkeepers of the sanctuary invoke the local saint to intervene.

Inside the church, Robert began to preach. He justified his defiance of the centuries-old tradition of Menat by insisting: “do not continue in vain such foolish prayers! Know instead that the saints are not the enemies of the brides of Jesus Christ.”¹ Robert went on to argue his point from the biblical precedent of a woman boldly approaching Christ (“the blessed sinful woman who kissed the feet of the Redeemer”), and from eucharistic practice: “If a woman takes and eats the body and blood of Jesus Christ, think what folly it is to believe that she may not enter a church!”² Robert’s argument had the desired effect: the church in Menat, so his biographer tells us, was never again closed to women.

In the story of the church in Menat and of the brave women around Robert of Arbrissel who risked their lives by entering the sanctuary, liturgical practice, gender, and tradition form a complex and contested web of relationships. The story of the church in Menat allows us to introduce a crucial set of distinctions that underlie the scholarly inquiry that follows.

Liturgy’s Past: History, Historiography, Tradition

For the scholarly argument that constitutes this book, it is imperative to differentiate between four distinct, albeit intricately related, categories of historical analysis. Since in much of the literature these four categories appear muddled, I begin by parsing them here. Historical analysis starts with the past itself, that is, the “things that happen to have happened.”³ For liturgical life this means the liturgies, processions, holy day rituals, fasts, feasts, and liturgical devotions that Christians have engaged in from the earliest beginnings until now.⁴ In the story of the church in Menat, this historical level would be the very moment in A.D. 1114 when Robert of Arbrissel arrived at the doorway, discovered that his female companions were barred from entering, defied the ban by walking into the sanctuary together with the women, and then justified their daring entry in a sermon. It is essential to acknowledge that this moment, like all worship life of the past, simply is no more. We have no direct access to this past. None of us can slip back into Menat’s church to observe the women walking past the local doorkeepers into the sanctuary, just as surely as none of us can join an early Christian house-church at worship, take part in a medieval Corpus Christi procession, or be present at the funeral of Blessed Pope John XXIII. Our only access to these past liturgical practices is a mediated one, as indeed is every perception of reality, past and present. What we perceive as real is shaped by how we perceive and know in the first place. Mediated access to the past happens through a wide range of primary sources, among them liturgical texts, hagiographic or autobiographical accounts, imperial edicts, gravestone inscriptions, vestments, images, and musical scores. As crucially important as these sources are, none of them grants direct access to the past. Like all mediations, these too are “troubled” [Jon L. Berquist]. The story about the church of Menat tells its tale in textual representation, in a traditional historiographic format, centered on a male, named figure and his daring acts, while the truly daring women around Robert remain nameless, unnumbered, and dependent on the master narrative [he “led” them in].

With this distinction between the past itself, and witnesses to the past, we have already identified a second category of historical analysis, namely the sources for any knowledge of the past. These sources (including autobiographical materials, with their semblance of immediacy⁵) are shaped by those who created them, with their particular lenses and blindspots, as well as by those who authorized their creation and/or transmission. Our knowledge of these authors and their contexts is never exhaustive. We cannot know all we need to know about them, especially when the texts are pre-modern. The story about the church in Menat illustrates this complexity. Its textual source has come down to us in a sixteenth-century Middle French translation, derived from a medieval Latin original.⁶ The author of the original text in all likelihood was Prior Andreas of Fontevraud, a contemporary and follower of Robert of Arbrissel.⁷ Prior Andreas’s story may, at first sight, appear to be written with a traditional androcentric focus: the daring male at the center, unnamed women around him. Yet as a whole this particular vita of Robert of Arbrissel highlights Robert’s women-identified actions in ways that an earlier vita had not. Only the vita of Prior Andreas tells the story of Robert’s act of defiance at the church of Menat. This vita had been commissioned by the abbess appointed by Robert himself to rule the mixed monastery of Fontevraud, Petronilla of Chemillé. Abbess Petronilla had decided to complement the earlier vita she had also commissioned, written by a local bishop who had downplayed Robert’s pronounced women-centered actions.⁸ In short, the politics of gender are, in more ways than one, at the heart of the transmission of the story of Robert of Arbrissel at the church of Menat. As the sources for the life of Robert of Arbrissel show, troubles with the mediation of the past through textual representation are multiple. Such representation never maps neatly onto reality, especially not in hagiography. Hagiographic texts are not transcripts. To complicate matters when it comes to the particular vitae of Robert of Arbrissel, we have parts of the original two texts in translation only; the original texts are lost.

Further, and more general difficulties with the mediation of the past through textual representations include the (gender-specific) filtering of texts; the politics of documentation (also gendered) that made these texts, rather than others, available; and, finally, the narrator of the past and his or her patron in writing, neither of whom are gender-neutral either. Thus, it is no coincidence that we have no description of what happened in the church of Menat when Robert of Arbrissel arrived there from a woman who was present, nor from one of Menat’s townsfolk. Historically, far fewer texts exist written by women than by men; and elite males have left far more writings than the “millions of men who were only men.”⁹ Because of Robert of Arbrissel’s appointment of an abbess to oversee the mixed monastery of Fontevraud, however, a woman authorized Prior Andreas to write his vita of the founder. Whatever the specifics of this particular case, on the whole our materials for reconstructing the history of worship are gendered in their very basis, and this gendering is asymmetrical in a number of ways.

A third category in the writing of liturgy’s past—and one shaped by the asymmetries inherent in the second category—is historical research and the kind of historiography it produces. Especially if this historiographic knowledge production is gender-oblivious it will duplicate uncritically the gender asymmetries inherent in its sources. Such uncritical mirroring becomes especially pronounced if the one who produces such historical knowledge, on the basis of a set canon of sources and of received categories of analysis, remains oblivious to the role gender has played in transmitting some sources and not others. To go back to the story of Robert of Arbrissel in Menat: It took the development of gender analysis to set historians wondering about the women who accompanied Robert of Abrissel on his journeys, about the tradition of men and women cohabiting in ascetic renunciation, and about why we know so little of this form of life apart from negative stereotypes. Furthermore, it took sustained scholarly inquisitiveness about the exclusion of women from the sanctuary at Menat to unravel the complicated evidence for this centuries-old tradition, and more than textual analysis to render intelligible how the townsfolk of Menat gathered for worship. In particular, the witness of material culture played an important role here, namely the analysis of an architectural peculiarity in the form of an enormous entryway to the Menat sanctuary, which explained how local women may have “attended” church without in fact entering it.¹⁰

A last category in the writing of liturgy’s past is concerned with authorizing claims to the past. In the life of the church this is the level of theological recourse to tradition. For the story about the church of Menat, such recourse becomes visible in conflicting claims to liturgical tradition at the moment when the gendering of this sacred space is questioned and contested. The villagers of Menat invoke an authorizing past in the form of an order from a local saint. Robert of Arbrissel counters with an alternative notion of sanctity [“saints are not the enemies of the brides of Jesus Christ”] and appeals to biblical precedent and to eucharistic practice to ground his defiance of Menat’s tradition of excluding women from the sanctuary. To put my point more generally, traditioning happens when elements of the liturgical past take on an authorizing role for the present. In the Roman Catholic Church at least, such authorizing moves, when rendered decisively, are not made primarily by historians and scholars, but by the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church. This magisterium clearly is not gender neutral by any means, since it is tied to episcopal ordination, reserved to men. This fourth level is thus constituted more forcefully by gender than any of the other levels outlined here, since priestly ordination requires a particular gender identity, namely maleness.

So much for four distinct though interrelated categories of historical analysis. With these distinctions in place, my primary question in the chapters that follow is this: what consequences are there for liturgical history writing when gender is not only a fundamental marker of worship life in the past but also a crucial element in the formation of the sources for the study of the past, and by that very fact an ingredient in every narrative of the past? And what consequences are there for liturgical tradition when gender continues to play such a fundamental role in constituting authorizing claims to the past? And, finally, what happens in liturgical traditioning when this power of gender is not only asymmetrical but also unacknowledged?

Of the four categories of historical analysis identified above—the past of liturgical practices, the documentation of this past, the historiography of the past, and authorizing claims to this past—intervention and reconfiguration are not possible on every level, nor do they take the same shape for each level. On the first level, that of the past of liturgical practices, no intervention or reconfiguration is possible. The “pastness of the past”¹¹ simply puts it out of our hands, irrevocably so. On the second level, that of the witnesses to this past, historians confront a number of basic limitations and imbalances in documentation that also cannot be undone. This holds true even as new sources continue to be unearthed, the canon of sources expands, and witnesses to the past continue to be identified,¹² read, and interpreted afresh.¹³ Fundamental imbalances in the sources remain. We will in all likelihood never have more than a dozen texts written by women during the first thousand years of Christian history. We will not suddenly be able to read, in the words of eunuchs or male serfs, how they practiced their faith and how they worshiped. We will not find many written sources revealing how priests in rural areas negotiated liturgical life and the practice of gender in their parishes. The contours of the record and the politics of documentation, as themselves a part of what happens to have happened, are out of our hands no less than the past to which they witness.

On the third level, namely the study and writing of history through analysis of the witnesses to the past, intervention and reconfiguration not only become possible but are intrinsic to its very existence. The writing of history—the making and remaking of a historical narrative—is after all the proper task of this level. Here, the intervention of Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History finds its focus, even if its historiographic work gestures toward a fourth level, namely that of authorizing claims to the past, in the sense of liturgical tradition. The last two levels, the narrating of the past and authorizing claims to that past, are intimately connected. This connection is apparent not least when it comes to the occlusion of gender in a history of worship. But the gendered nature of liturgy’s past is not the only matter where theological recourse to liturgical tradition is based on a problematic historiography...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Gendering Liturgy’s Past: the Trouble, the Task, and the Tools
• Part II Tracing gender in Liturgy’s Past
• Part III Gender, History, and Liturgical Tradition
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• General Index