Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.
- Book of Daniel 12:2
Creation
From
MS Harley 334, Image du Monde, 2nd quarter of the 15th century
Courtesy of British Library
Medieval man
understood time differently from how we do. We tend to think of time
as linear and divided into successive epochs. We recognise to a great
extent that these epochs are constructs which help us navigate and
make sense of history, but they are nonetheless an inextricable part
of the way we understand the past. For learned people of the Middle
Ages, men and women, things were different. They likewise had
successive epochs, like the six ages of man as formulated by Saint
Augustine or the four kingdoms expressed in the Book of Daniel, but
history had a teleological nature which to many historians these days
is alien.
This difference makes it sometimes very difficult for
modern historians to faithfully represent medieval people in their
research. Often, historians run the risk of focussing on one
particular aspect of, say, a medieval monk's literary output, while
ignoring some other parts that may be just as significant. The
Norwegian medievalist Dr. Sigbjørn Sønnesyn has recently argued
that the historiographical output of William of Malmesbury must be
considered in conjunction with his theological work, and his office
as historian should not be separated from his office as cantor and
participant in the monastic liturgy at Malmesbury Abbey. By pointing
to these two aspects of William of Malmesbury's life as a monk, Dr.
Sønnesyn points to one of the significant problems often encountered
in medieval studies: the frequent neglect of the omnipresent
liturgical rites so fundamental to the monastic life.
To be
precise: there are many medievalist scholars, and not all of them
musicologists, who have done significant research which includes
liturgical sources. However, the tendency, addressed by Dr. Sønnesyn,
to divorce William of Malmesbury the historian from William of
Malmesbury the liturgist, has resulted in a failure to consider his
historiographical output together with his theological work.
The last three days of Creation
MS Egerton 1894, Genesis picture book, England, 3rd quarter of the 14th century
Courtesy of British Library
In this
blogpost, I want to follow up on Dr. Sønnesyn's remarks on the
relationship between liturgy and history, and argue that this
relationship is only natural to a medieval mind because of the
multi-layered nature of medieval time, or perhaps rather times. These
musings are also informed by a one-day colloquium held at St Mary's
College in London and papers given by Emma Dillon, Nils Holger
Petersen and Beth Williamson.
First of all, in
medieval historical thought there were two major strands of the
movement or progression of history. Both of these were formulated
around the eve of the Western Roman Empire, both of these were
founded upon Jewish history as presented in the Bible and both of
them were expressively Christian. The oldest strand was that
formulated by Augustine, and which in German scholarship is referred
to as Heilsgeschichte, the history of the salvation of mankind (with thanks to Nathaniel Campbell). In this
presentation of history, Augustine sought to express the progression
of time from Creation unto Judgement Day and was concerned with the
work of holy men and women and God's intervention in mankind's life
and work.
St Augustine in his study
Sandro Botticelli
Courtesy of Wikimedia
The second strand to
be considered here was formulated by Augustine's disciple Orosius and
was concerned with the passing of earthly empires, for the most part
modelled on the historical books of the Old Testament, in particular
Kings and Chronicles, but perhaps also heavily informed by that
famous dictum of Ecclesiastes: There is no new thing under the sun.
This approach by Orosius, called Weltreichslehre
by German scholarship, was often placed within the overarching
narrative of Heilsgeschicte.
Both
these strands of history are linear in the sense that they have a
clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined end. At the same
time, both these strands have cyclical aspects to the way history
progresses. In Augustine's Heilsgeschichte,
we encounter men and women who imitate Christ in their lives and
works and sometimes deaths, and although each life and death has a
beginning and an end, this succession of imitations has a certain
cyclical aspect to it. In a similar way, Weltreichslehre
describes the cyclical rise and fall and ultimate demise of kingdoms,
empires and princedoms in their progression through history towards
Judgement Day. In this sense we see that to a medieval
historiographer, history had at least two layers of time, two
parallel lines of historical progression.
Christ in Majesty
Courtesy of British Library
A
similar multiplicity of layers can be found within the yearly cycle
of monastic life. I do not claim that these layers correspond with
those of historiography, for that would imply that historiography and
liturgy are separate spheres of historical progress. Rather, these
layers come in addition to those presented in historiographical
writing and help to illustrate how thoroughly medieval life was
permeated by multiple layers of historical progress.
In
the liturgical year we also find an overarching narrative of linear
progression, as the liturgy recreates the temporale,
the life and times of Christ, beginning at Advent, reaching a climax
at Easter and then coming to its close around All Saints. Of course,
this linear narrative in turn becomes cyclical since it is reenacted
every year, but within the structure of the liturgical year it is
linear in a way similar - but not identical to - Augustine's vision
of the history of the holy.
However,
within this overarching structure of the temporale,
the liturgical year is also marked by the daily cycle of the divine
office, in which saints are celebrated in a series of communal
prayers and meditations known as the hours. The office begins at
Vespers, around six in the afternoon, on the day before the saint's
day and concludes with the Vespers of the saint's day, an hour known
as the second Vespers. Similar to Orosius' everchanging yet
neverchanging succession of earthly realms, the catalogue of saints
celebrated in the divine office, the sanctorale,
was continuously emended with new saints being added and old saints
receiving new days as their relics were moved. Additions occurred,
but these additions were celebrated in the same way as the older
saints. There were differences in celebration, of course, depending
on the time of the year and the importance of the saint at a
particular monastery. For instance, St Edmund had a more significant
position at Bury St Edmunds than he had at, say, Westminster Abbey.
Despite these differences, the daily celebration of the divine office
nonetheless was a liturgical wheel within the greater liturgical
wheel of the temporale.
Day of Judgement
Triptych by Hans Memling, fifteenth century
Courtesy of Wikimedia
The
liturgical year as a recreation of the life and times of Christ
points to one interesting difference between medieval historiography
and literature pertaining to the cult of the saints, i.e. hagiography
and liturgy. While historiography - through the Orosian approach -
was largely modelled on the Old Testament, hagiography and liturgy
were chiefly concernced with the imitatio Christi
of the saints. This does not mean that historiography did not employ
motifs from the New Testament or that liturgy did not refer to events
of the Old Testament, but we see that historiography and liturgy
focus on different parts of the Bible. In this way we can sense that
historiographical writing and liturgical celebration form a kind of
unity in the way that they each emphasise different parts of the
Bible and together create a whole within which medieval men and women
navigate their way towards Heaven.
When
we consider the multiple layers of time that permeated the life of a
medieval monk or a nun, there is little reason to separate the monk
as a writer of history from the monk as a partaker in the daily
rhythm of the liturgical year. Consequently, when we consider a
medieval monk's historical oeuvre, like that of William of
Malmesbury, we would do well to remember that his writing must have
been heavily informed by liturgical ritual and the theology espoused
at the monastery at which he worked. Taking this into consideration,
we must also, as Dr. Sønnesyn wisely exhorts us to do, look at
points where the liturgical background bleeds into the arrangement of
historiography. What implications this has on the presentation of
morality of history or the interpretation of worldly events are
aspects that must be examined on an individual basis, but must be
included in order to represent a medieval monk's literary production
as faithfully as possible.
