The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

Laura Varnam

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526121820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book places us at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what it meant to them and why. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it examines the interplay of vernacular literature, ritual and material culture at the centre of parish life.

1

The church consecration ceremony and the construction of sacred space

The church consecration ceremony was the chief ritual expression of sanctity in the Middle Ages, and the symbolism and practice that the ceremony established were the foundation for all subsequent encounters with sacred space. Despite this fact, surprisingly little research has been done on the ceremony. The most illuminating recent studies are Dawn Marie Hayes’s discussion in Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe and Brian Repsher’s The Rite of Church Dedication in the Early Medieval Era.¹ Repsher’s monograph also includes a translation of the Carolingian Ordo ad benedicandam ecclesiam, which he describes as the fullest expression of the consecration ceremony and its significance, and the immediate source of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Roman Pontificals.² My discussion of the ceremony in this chapter will be drawn primarily from the influential description and interpretation in William of Durandus’s Rationale officiorum divinorum, but I will also have recourse to the Ordo and to sermons for the dedication of churches, principally that of Jacobus de Voragine in the Legenda Aurea and two Middle English examples, from John Mirk’s Festial and the Speculum Sacerdotale.³ The consecration ceremony remained virtually unchanged through the later Middle Ages and there is neither the room here nor the need to provide a liturgical history; rather my aim is to draw out the major strategies and performative practices through which the ritual created and shaped the medieval understanding of sacred space.⁴ Writers such as Durandus established what Hayes calls a ‘learned concept’ of sacred space, and this is crucial for understanding a community’s subsequent sacred practice.⁵ The themes, images, and methods of construction delineated here will, therefore, be a touchstone throughout this book.

The meaning and purpose of the consecration ceremony

In his sermon for the dedication of a church, Jacobus de Voragine declares that there are five purposes behind the consecration ceremony:

The first is to drive out the devil and his power […] Secondly, the church is consecrated in order that those who take refuge in it in may be saved. […] The third purpose is that prayers offered in the church be surely heard. […] The fourth reason for the consecration of the church is to provide a place where praises may be rendered to God. […] Fifthly, the church is consecrated so that the sacraments may be administered there.⁶

The practice of consecration ensured that the church truly was God’s house on earth and that his eyes and ears would have attendance upon the building and its congregation (1 Kings, 8.29; 2 Chronicles, 6.40). The consecration ceremony enabled the community to ‘communicate with and about’ the divine.⁷ It facilitated access to God but it also constructed a space in which the congregation could represent, understand, and talk about God among themselves. The consecration of a church was simultaneously the consecration of a new community and an opportunity to establish social order, focalised through a building that was the centre of the social world. Brian Repsher asserts that the liturgy was the place where ‘society was made, restored, and nourished towards moral perfection’, and the consecration ceremony ensured that the liturgy could be performed, and society sustained, within a sacred space.⁸

For most late medieval communities, the consecration ceremony had not been performed in living memory, but traces of the ritual and its meaning remained. Many parishioners would have witnessed the ceremony for the reconciliation of a church, for example, which closely mirrored the original consecration rite, and was often required as a result of violent bloodshed in the church, as Daniel Thiery has shown.⁹ Parishioners may also have been aware of the need to consecrate newly acquired items of church plate and vestments, and the altars of chapels added to the church.¹⁰ More importantly, on the annual feast day of the consecration, the dedication sermon would have specifically reminded the congregation of the continued relevance of the original ceremony to their experience of sacred space. The potency of consecrated space was frequently employed in the literature of pastoral care as a deterrent for lay misbehaviour. ‘O Lord, what this place is gretely to be a-dredde! For the place is holy’, declares the Speculum Sacerdotale dedication sermon, instilling a fear of the place because of its great sanctity.¹¹ The physical imprint of the ceremony was often still visible both inside and outside the church, as consecration crosses on the walls reminded parishioners that the material fabric of the building had been anointed and set apart.¹² The ceremony established a paradigm for constructing and encountering sacred space that left traces in the visual, textual, and material culture of the medieval church.

In his influential interpretation of the church and its symbolism, the thirteenth-century Rationale divinorum officiorum, William of Durandus identified three types of Christian space: sacred space (sacra), holy space (sancta), and religious space (religiosa).¹³ He distinguished between these categories as follows:

Those that are sacred have been dedicated in a ceremony by the hands of a bishop, and are sanctified by God […] Holy places are those that have immunity or privileges, and they are assigned to the servants and ministers of churches; places which, lest anyone presume to violate them, or seek a legal remedy or special privilege to violate them, carry the threat of certain punishment. Among these places is the atrium of churches, and in some regions, cloisters, within which are the dwellings of the canons; in these places, anyone fleeing from a crime, if he is received there, is given protection […] Religious places are those where an intact human cadaver, or at least a head, is buried.¹⁴

The distinction rests upon the way in which the space is constructed and its subsequent use. Christian bodies are buried in religious places, holy places have certain privileges and are used by ministers of the church, and sacred spaces are ritually consecrated by a bishop and, most importantly, they are sanctified by God. Durandus explains later in the Rationale that the bishop alone is able to consecrate the church because he ‘bears the figure and image’ of Christ, who dedicates the church spiritually while the bishop consecrates the building physically.¹⁵ Without God, Christ, and his representative, the bishop, sacred space cannot exist.

As I discussed in my introduction, Mircea Eliade defines sacred space as ‘qualitatively different’ to the quotidian space that surrounds it, and the ritual of consecration both constructs and accentuates that difference.¹⁶ Jonathan Z. Smith argues that ‘ritual is, above all, an assertion of difference’, and the consecration ceremony demonstrates the singularity of the church building publicly.¹⁷ The consecration itself consists of a ritual performance centred upon the physical structure of the church. The building is a fundamental requirement for constructing sanctity because it acts as a visible sign and concrete embodiment of the sacred. As Emile Durkheim puts it, ‘collective ideals can only be manifested […] by being concretely realised in material objects that can be seen by all, understood by all, and represented to all minds’.¹⁸ The church building becomes the material sign of sacred space, but a sacred space cannot be sustained by architecture alone; it requires performance in order to be actualised within the material frame. Performance theory can usefully sharpen our understanding of the way in which the ceremony produces sacred space as it directs our attention to the ability of ritual to constitute rather than merely express meaning.¹⁹ As Richard Schechner argues, performative rituals not only ‘symbolise’, they ‘actualise’ a change in space.²⁰ The act of performing the consecration ceremony transforms the material building and its coordinates into a sacred space.

The ritual of consecration is characterised by what Manfred Pfister calls ‘multimediality’: it is made up ‘not only of verbal but also acoustic and visual codes. It is a synaesthetic text.’²¹ The consecration ceremony ‘activates all the channels of the human senses’, employing visual display, liturgical recitation, ritual censing, gesture, procession, and collective response to construct sacred space.²² This multimediality contributes to the efficacy of the ritual because of the powerful emotive effect that it has on the participants and its consequent ability to function as a tool for social cohesion. Lawrence Sullivan suggests that the ‘symbolic experience of the unity of the senses enables a culture to entertain itself with the idea of the unity of meaning’.²³ The multisensory experience of the consecration ceremony enables it to be emotionally effective and to produce a holistic experience that unites the community in a harmony worthy of heaven itself. The ritual also exploits the ability of sensory practices to represent God. The candles emit the light of divinity and the incense pervades the space with the presence of God. Sensory experience is thus heightened and sounds, sights, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Reading sacred space in late medieval England
• 1 The church consecration ceremony and the construction of sacred space
• 2 The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church: Consecration, restoration, and translation
• 3 Sacred and profane: Pastoral care in the parish church
• 4 What the church betokeneth: Placing the people at the heart of sacred space
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index