The Sacramentaries of Saint-Amand as a Case Study in the Processes of Liturgical Change in the Ninth Century

• Applicant: Arthur Westwell, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology ; Medieval History
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442030444

In the second half of the ninth century, ten beautifully ornate and genuinely innovative manuscripts were produced at the monastery of Saint-Amand-Les-Eaux in north-eastern France. These manuscripts belong to a genre of liturgical book called the Sacramentary or Liber Sacramentorum, which provides the Latin formulae for the president of liturgical ceremonies, particularly the Mass. Because of the Sacramentary’s ubiquity and the central importance of the Mass to medieval life, there was constant experimentation with the book format. This process responded primarily to local or personal needs. The ten Sacramentaries of Saint-Amand represent a unique opportunity to study how one pioneering and wealthy monastic centre gradually refined the potentials of the Sacramentary format. This gives us unparalleled insight into the methods applied to liturgical material at the cutting edge. This project intends to create a monograph which takes the ten Sacramentaries of Saint-Amand as a case study in the methods by which Carolingian scriptoria changed and transmitted liturgical books. A 1969 article by Jean Deshusses remains the only in-depth study of these manuscripts. It gave a supposed chronology with reference to imperial patronage of the monastery, but this was highly speculative and it requires updating. Most traditional histories of medieval liturgy have focused on reconstructing overarching “reform” movements, according to modern views of what liturgy is supposed to look like. They presumed that medieval liturgists wanted uniformity, and focused on what they saw as the official books which supplied this. The later ninth century, which is a period of intense individual creativity around the Sacramentary, has been almost entirely neglected because of these scholarly priorities. One study dismissed the efforts of scribes from this period as an inexplicable “compiling mania”. Recent scholarship has moved away from this framework, and instead attempts to take each manuscript as a witness in its own right. Nevertheless, there is still a difficulty in how to talk about liturgical change in this period, when diversity was an essential and inescapable reality. This project intends to apply some of the techniques recommended by new scholarship to the ten Sacramentaries of Saint-Amand. They witness to an ongoing series of experiments. A thorough description of this process will supply a new way of describing liturgical change, that begins from the mechanisms of an individual scriptorium. This process can then be tracked out from there, since each of the ten Sacramentaries can be traced subsequently to an important ecclesiastical centre in France, where they each were further developed. Intense study of each of the ten witnesses, contextualized by their historical circumstances and the particular context of Saint-Amand, will allow me to create a new narrative of liturgical change that is more sympathetic to the realities of the available sources.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants