Abstract
Concluding a meticulously researched chapter on oleoculture in the early church, Nathan Chase asserts a principle impressively demonstrated across this entire volume: “sacramental symbols depend on mundane economic and material technologies, which reminds us that liturgy is always shaped by the context in which it is celebrated. Ultimately, inculturation is a historical fact of Christian ritual tradition, not an exception” (86). This collection of essays from a 2023 liturgy conference at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music is dedicated, in part, to the memory of the brilliant young scholar Chase, who succumbed to leukemia in 2025.
The book’s four sections are organized thematically, while also tracking chronologically from Christian origins to the present. The first three chapters of “Part One: Bread, Oil, Water, Waste” examine the ecclesial fabrication and use of those materials amidst late antique culture, finance, and politics (imperial power and subversion), while the fourth is a rangy historical survey of the discarding and reuse of liturgical objects. Part two treats the reader to three studies on the production and possession of church manuscripts in the medieval east and west, with special attention to how their economic and cultural-status values interacted with their religious meaning and functions. One author focuses on neglected modest liturgical books from small towns and churches to yield a better, comprehensive sense of church life and society in medieval Europe. One of the four chapters in “Part Three: Reformation and Early Modern Economies” addresses a similar lacuna by studying “the musical organization of parishes in small or medium-sized towns without significant political, economic, or religious power” (302). The other three examine the costs entailed in the material reordering of Protestant churches, the subtle influence of monastic timekeeping on Reformed Swiss society’s commerce and labor, and religion’s role in the slave economies of British colonies. Part four rounds out the collection with two explorations of church music production, mediation, and practice, Protestant and Catholic, as well as a study of two differently conceived enslavement museums in Alabama, expertly applying the work of leading ritual theorists to interpret “dark tourism” as pilgrimage.
Broad in scope, the volume comprises a worthy library resource for research on specific topics and relevant essays in courses.