Abstract
Liturgical Studies and more especially the writing of liturgical history have undergone many changes, diversions, and mutations over the course of the history of the discipline: from an early preoccupation with how Christians have celebrated the liturgy over the course of the centuries in particular places and times (and how that might be gleaned and even at times reconstructed from surviving liturgical texts, buildings, and monuments), to questions of what this celebration means and signifies, especially in theological terms, to current interests in liturgical studies which have focussed strongly on the interaction of ritual practices and liturgical celebrations which may be expressed in the question why people celebrate and continue to celebrate and ritualize even outside and beyond the contours of orthodox Christian believing and belonging. While social history and its study have made a late impact on the writing of liturgical history, it is with this study that a programme of future possibilities for the discipline is established.
In this exciting and indeed groundbreaking book, Teresa Berger, a liturgist teaching at Yale, returns to the birth of academic studies in liturgy, which she attributes to the action of a powerful woman, the Empress Maria Theresia of Austria (1717–80) and her university reforms. The author examines how liturgy and liturgical celebrations have been read by the discipline as it developed and finally found its place as an academic discipline within the study of theology. The contribution of Saint Giuseppe Maria Tomasi di Lampedusa (1649–1713) is not mentioned and it is one of the lacks in the book; there is no reference to Italian and Spanish scholarship which would have added to the study.
I found of particular interest the first part of the book, which explores the issue of methodology—those of the past and the particular ones Berger adopts in this study. She reminds us that history is always an interpretation, a construct reflecting the worldview, training, and gender of the one who is exercising the discipline of history. It is her use of gender studies and especially those interpretative tools of gender history which makes this study unique and of interest to all those concerned with the study of liturgy. It is Berger’s contention that gender differences mattered profoundly in the past of liturgy, as indeed they do today. Her question then becomes how this gendered past might be rendered visible in our present. This has not been possible in the past because the basic analytic tools were unavailable to scholars (and she reminds us that they were not just academic theologians located in universities—as often they are now—but monk scholars and parson scholars). She cautions against a simplistic view that the liturgical celebrations of the past can be easily accessed and reminds readers how difficult and indeed tentative the writing of history can be. This first part of the book is a fine and comprehensive overview of the field of gender analysis and its tools and will be helpful beyond the confines of the discipline of liturgical history.
The second part of the book is an application of Berger’s methodology as established in the first part of the study. Four detailed case studies are offered: the first looks at issues of liturgical space (Chapter three) where after a consideration of an episode in the Diary of Egeria, Berger turns her attention to a number of gender-specific elements that shaped the development of sacred space. Of interest here, is her insistence that ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are not stable and uniform categories but are also profoundly influenced by issues of class and social standing. The second case study turns to Eucharistic practice (Chapter four). These two chapters she would consider as traditional fundamentals in the writing of liturgical history. The next two chapters move beyond ‘conventional fundamentals of liturgical history writing in order to imagine alternative ways of studying liturgy’s past that are based on foregrounding questions of gender differences in worship’ (p. 35). Chapter five explores how gender differences shape, foster or preclude liturgical presence and participation. Anxieties increased in early Christian sources as issues of purity and worthiness grew. Chapter six, the last of the case studies, looks at liturgical leadership and presiding and the issue of masculinity.
In the concluding part of the book, Berger explores the consequences of her findings for current practice and how we view the liturgical past. This part of the book is perhaps the most controversial and it is certainly the one that will raise most questions in theological circles. Asking the question about how new understandings of the liturgical past ground authorizing claims to the past is one shied away from by many theologians and historians and yet is one that must be faced if we engage in a theological task and are not limiting ourselves to history. Berger asks: ‘what happens with authorizing claims to liturgy’s past when a new liturgical historiography reconfigures the contours of what this past has been perceived to be?’ (p. 155). This last part offers a summary of the previous findings of the study. It goes on to pose the theological question of tradition and history. The last part is one of practical and pastoral theology, that of practice—how does the interaction of gender and liturgy look when it is clear that these ways of interaction have a past?; that contemporary practices and indeed anxieties have a history? These are, as Berger reminds us, basic, potent, and troubling. It is surely a task for all involved in theology today, to ask the question, what happens when the past changes? A fine bibliography and general index conclude this fine study.
This book is the start of a journey for liturgical scholars, but as such, Berger points out the road that many may travel. Not only does this book offer a new perspective of how liturgical historians may go about their business; it encourages all who read it to see the vibrancy of liturgical worship, how it is rooted in the difficulties of human interaction as they strive to worship the holy mystery of God.