Liturgy as history: the origins of the Exeter martyrology
Hamilton, S
Date: 5 November 2019
Article
Journal
Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Through an Anglo-Norman case study, this article highlights the value of normative liturgical
material for scholars interested in the role which saints’ cults played in the history and
identity of religious communities. The records of Anglo-Saxon cults are largely the work of
Anglo-Norman monks. Historians exploring why this was the ...
Through an Anglo-Norman case study, this article highlights the value of normative liturgical
material for scholars interested in the role which saints’ cults played in the history and
identity of religious communities. The records of Anglo-Saxon cults are largely the work of
Anglo-Norman monks. Historians exploring why this was the case have therefore
concentrated upon hagiographical texts about individual Anglo-Saxon saints composed in and
for monastic communities in the post-Conquest period. This article shifts the focus away
from the monastic to those secular clerical communities which did not commission specific
accounts, and away from individual cults, to uncover the potential of historical martyrologies
for showing how such secular communities remembered and understood their own past
through the cult of saints. Exeter Cathedral Library, Ms 3518, is a copy of the martyrology by
the ninth-century Frankish monk, Usuard of Saint-Germain-des-Prés , written in and for
Exeter cathedral’s canons in the mid-twelfth century. Through investigation of the context in
which it was produced and how its contents were adapted to this locality, this article uncovers
the various different layers of the past behind its compilation. It further suggests that this
manuscript is based on a pre-Conquest model, pointing to the textual debt Anglo-Norman
churchmen owed to their Anglo-Saxon predecessors.
History
Collections of Former Colleges
Item views 0
Full item downloads 0