Miklós István Földváry
THE LITURGY IN MEDIEVAL HUNGARY
I.
“Every Church, indeed, has her own established and hitherto preserved sacramental rites, which in no way prejudice the unity of Catholicism, and this has been true of our Church of Esztergom, too, since it was founded under prosperous auspices.” Among others, these were the words used by Miklós Telegdi, the last Hungarian prelate to publish service books specifically for Esztergom, the primatial see of Hungary, introducing his Agendarius in 1583. His statement not only sides with the value of local or national liturgical variants but also makes clear that, at the end of the 16th century, the Use of Esztergom was supposed to be contemporary with the very Kingdom of Hungary. Hence, when it ceased to exist in the 17th century, it was about 600 years old.
Until recently, this bold assumption was unjustifiable. Methods capable of identifying the distinctive traits of a tradition were only available for the analysis of chants, primarily of the Divine Office. In the light of these, we have not looked earlier than the 13th century. New methods and source types were required to extend the horizon to the period of the kingdom’s foundation. These, however, verified Telegdi’s words: the Esztergom tradition proved to be a remarkably lasting and extensive form of worship, even measured to pan-European standards, and was triggered by a single foundational impulse. The research of its evolution led to a double outcome: in the domestic context, it made accessible and even partly revitalized one of the most significant and enduring cultural achievements of the Hungarian Middle Ages, and, in an international context, it enabled us to study in an exceptionally telling context what the liturgical peculiarities of an archdiocese, and later of a whole nation, meant and how they developed in the High Middle Ages.
However peripheral from a Western European point of view, Hungary is ideal as the opening field of medieval liturgical studies in many respects. Outstanding philologists and musicologists prepared the ground in the past century. Unlike other Central European countries, Hungary had comprehensive catalogues of its service books (Radó) with special emphasis on musical sources (Szendrei) since the 1970s and 80s. It has full editions of liturgical poetry (Holl, Dankó), and worldwide the only overarching editions of chant genres like hymns (Rajeczky), antiphons, responsories (Dobszay-Szendrei), and sequences (Kovács).
Paradoxically, there are also negative circumstances that make Hungary an ideal starting point. There, the 16th century marked the end of a culture of the highest medieval standards. The Ottoman occupation of the country’s largest part demolished a host of ecclesiastical institutions, their service books included. Simultaneously, Hungary became a battlefield of Protestant and Catholic fractions, of which both took part in the desolation. Some Protestants methodically destroyed service books, while Counter-Reformation Catholics discarded them for new, uniform Roman prints or used their parchment as binding material. Lamentable though they were, these developments reduced the number of surviving sources to a reasonable quantity that was neither too small to be desperately defective nor too large to discourage scholars from large-scale projects.
Historically, the Hungarian church and its ritual establishment were founded at just the right time. The early 11th century was neither too early to disappear in an undocumented past nor too late to represent an age when liturgy-making meant no more inspiration for medieval intellectuals. Geographically and chronologically, Hungary was an exceptional land where a convergent and distinctive stock of liturgical variants survived from the 11th to the 17th century, covering the whole territory of the medieval kingdom. This could happen due to the effective central power and the harmony of ecclesiastical and secular authorities in the formative period when the common features of the country’s worship were designed. None of these circumstances holds for other regions. The Balkans or the Baltic have too few sources, while Germany or Poland have too many. France is too early to understand the situation when its liturgies were devised; Lithuania is too late to have liturgies of its own at all. Spain and Italy are too fragmented, Czechia and Britain, in their high medieval state, are too uniform.
II.
Since the early 2000s, I have been interested in restoring the medieval Hungarian liturgical culture. Accordingly, I initiated two parallel projects. From the scholarly side, I edited or supervised the editions of thousands of pages of texts and scores (Missale, Ordinarius, Psalterium, Breviarium, Graduale, Obsequiale, Agendarius). Thanks to these, the use of Esztergom, once the centre and even today the ecclesiastical capital of my homeland is one of the most thoroughly reconstructed traditions, probably only third to Rome and Salisbury. In this editorial plan, the demands of the academic realm approach to the needs of practical celebration, a concept most manifest in the series Monumenta Ritualia Hungarica and its Series Practica subseries. The other project was the reinvigoration of this medieval tradition in actual practice. Inspired by field experiences in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Ukraine, I started to revive what we know of our ancestors’ worship, founded a plainchant ensemble, and acquired training in solo singing. Thus, I became a living informant of the culture I studied, parallel to its survey through the written media of manuscripts and early prints.
Previously, the chief achievement of Hungarian plainchant studies manifested itself in the study of the Divine Office. As its first musically readable sources come from the 13th century, the earliest ones, Pontificals and Sacramentaries, fell out of the scope of in-depth research and formed a sort of terra incognita. I, however, first edited an Ordinal and wrote my doctoral thesis on the genre, its wider context, and its surviving Hungarian representatives. Ordinals are primarily lists of textual items arranged according to the annual cycle of a specific tradition, and their most (or maybe only) exciting parts are the descriptions of extraordinary rites: Candlemas, Ash Wednesday, and, first of all, Holy Week. Yet even their tedious character is telling. It confronts the researcher with the overwhelming textual aspect of the liturgy, and this was indeed the lens through which medieval worshippers primarily conceptualized the diversity of traditions.
One of Hungary’s earliest manuscripts provided an analogy for both aspects, namely textuality and extraordinary rites. It is a Pontifical, opening with an Ordinal-like chapter and continuing mostly with regulations of the extraordinary rites. Neither the Pontificals nor the rites included had been subject to comparative analysis as they have no such strictly defined generic skeletons as the Mass or the Divine Office and their books. To assess the relationship between an 11th-century Pontifical and its successors, references from all over Europe were needed with a methodology to define the functions and structures that could serve as a basis of comparison.
Thus, I began to collect and describe digital copies of service books. Systematic description meant a uniform terminology about origins, book types, and ages, and the indexing of the actual contents so that ritual analogies might emerge. This method provided a solid ground for the comparative analysis of rites with perplexing structures and components. Thanks to it, I could write several articles and two monographs on the two earliest Hungarian Pontificals which became widely accepted in domestic scholarship. They proved promising experiments of establishing a typology for rites of these kinds and unfolding the historical circumstances of their making.
The success of this methodology induced me to base my work on professional information technology. The result was the Usuarium database which I estimate as my greatest scholarly achievement. It is now the only liturgical database enabling quantitative analysis on a big-data scale. With more than 1,500,000 records from thousands of service books and a sample covering at least one early printed Missal from every documented ecclesiastical institution of late medieval Europe, it yields reliable statistics and maps for each liturgical text or gesture under the scope of any specialized research. Beyond the prints, it comprises all the early Mass books of medieval Hungary and several of its Rituals and Pontificals as well.
These two perspectives, a solid knowledge of the primary sources and the ceremonies they describe on the one hand and a skill in approaching every piece of local information from a pan-European perspective on the other, offer the possibility of revisiting the findings of the previous generation. However impressive, 20th-century scholars were limited by disciplinary, generic, geographical, and historical constraints. First, they came from the field of musicology and thus mostly neglected the extensive prosaic corpora of liturgical texts: prayers and readings. Second, they were concerned with book types that contained easily comparable structures: the Propers of the Divine Office and the Mass. Third, they considered the liturgical terrain as hierarchically arranged sets and subsets of regions; for them, Hungary was an integral liturgical entity, consisting of three main traditions within and being part of an assumed Central-European landscape from the outside. Fourth, they were preoccupied with sources which had decipherable musical notation. The bulk of such comes from the late Middle Ages and thus greater emphasis was laid on the mature state of the rites; the earliest evidence, albeit thoroughly studied, was dismissed like the witnesses of an archaic, undeveloped stage of the process of Hungarian liturgical history.
With due respect for such foundations, I aim to widen the scope from all four aspects. The analysis of prosaic, or more properly, recited genres and ceremonies beyond the Mass and the Office makes it possible to compare the earliest books, Sacramentaries, Benedictionals, and Pontificals, to their domestic descendants and equivalents abroad. This has already demonstrated a much higher degree of continuity between the 11th and the 16th centuries than ever assumed. The shift from a Central European perspective to a pan-European one yields two basic insights. One is the unexpected interrelatedness of institutions and regions far away from one another which sheds light on the astonishing mobility and intellectual horizon of medieval liturgy-makers. The other is a non-territorial perception of political and cultural space, consisting of dispersed, point-like local centres that may be interconnected over extensive lands untouched by their influence. Finally, there was indeed a sort of media change in the 13th century, rendering entire book types, scripts, and systems of musical notation obsolete. Media change, however, does not necessarily imply a fundamental change in liturgical practice. Different source experiences not only lead to evolutionary narratives on liturgy but also deploy political history as the interpretational framework of liturgical change. Worship was surely an arena of power and social display, too, but recent scholarship tends to overemphasize this perspective. It is high time to evaluate ritual phenomena in their own right as lasting and pervasive activities where unconscious anthropological foundations, well-established and meaningful traditions, and vigorous human creativity interact.
III.
Liturgical scholarship used to be an insider’s playing field. One typical wave was the activist interest in the earliest source material, deeply interwoven with 20th-century liturgical claims to reform Catholic worship with a back-to-the-sources attitude. Another was the antiquarian immersion into the past of certain local institutions or the quest for old curiosities, fostered by national pride and medieval romanticism in ancien régime France and Victorian Britain. Meanwhile, however, ritual came to the fore in anthropological studies, and, more recently, historians began to acknowledge its fundamental role in constituting, expressing, and transforming cultural systems. Liturgy was one of the costliest enterprises of medieval life, and its remnants still provide the most powerful monuments of Europe’s built, written, and chanted heritage. Understanding the mentalities of our forebears, their different styles per landscapes, countries, and regions, and the shifting emphasis throughout history from the Early Middle Ages to the present day is unimaginable without an intimate knowledge of what and how they celebrated. Due to the vast and diverse source material, this desire can only be fulfilled by the cooperation of experts from different countries and disciplines, but this fact must not distract one from comprising the results and communicating them to a non-specialist audience.
Concluding from a case study on liturgical continuity, I suggested that biographies of liturgical uses – i.e. lasting and consistently transmitted local codes of worshipping – should be written. An inspiring example is Richard Pfaff’s monograph on the liturgy in medieval England. Hungary, another thoroughly examined liturgical landscape from the other end of Europe could aptly feature as a further item in such a mapping project. My intended book would address a broad audience of researchers of Central Europe, liturgists, anthropologists, medievalists, and experts dedicated to cultural heritage by combining in-depth source study and liturgical experience with a synthesizing approach never lost in dispensable details.
The book could serve the double purpose of a monograph and a handbook. In the first capacity, it would work as a logically built-up introduction of the components of medieval liturgical life, its preserving documents, its variation in time and space, and its specific Hungarian manifestations. In the second one, it could be consulted as a source of information about distinct fields like liturgy-related literature, codicology, music, architecture, and arts, as well as genres and ceremonies like homilies and hymns or the recitation of the Psalter and the performance of Holy Week rituals. This end should be facilitated by the structure of the narrative which may provide a model for other biographies of liturgical uses on the one hand and, on the other, by an articulate table of contents highlighting the relevant topics and their interrelatedness. Admitting my professional limitations in fields like ecclesiastical history, hagiography, archaeology, or musical palaeography, I plan to invite some of my most renowned colleagues as advisors of certain chapters.
PROVISIONAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Historiography
Research concept and methodology
I. Framework conditions
1. Geography, borderlands, and institutional network
a) The core territories and their hierarchies
b) Monasticism and religious orders
c) Frontier zones and expansion
2. Service books
a) Periodization: source types and survival rates
b) The extant prints from 1480 to 1596
c) Top manuscripts of the High Middle Ages
d) The earliest evidence
e) Fragments
3. Other sources
a) Historical records
b) Music and notation
c) Architecture and sacred space
d) Objects, vestments, sculptures, and paintings
4. What was special about Hungary?
a) The Roman Rite around the first millennium
b) Geographical range and the time frame
c) Types and fates of rituals
d) Impacts and inspirations
e) Internal diversity and evolution
f) The international context of the formative period
g) The international context of the pre-Tridentine era
II. The ritual fabric
1. The calendar
a) The temporal cycle
b) The sanctoral cycle
c) The common of saints
d) The votives
2. The Mass
a) The Ordo Missae
b) The Sacramentary
c) The order of pericopes
d) The Mass Antiphonary
e) Sequences, tropes, local compositions
3. The Divine Office
a) The Psalter
b) The Office Ordinary
c) The cycles of chants
d) The Hymnal
e) The Office Lectionary
f) Tenebrae, Easter Vespers, Marian Offices, Office of the Dead
g) Local compositions, versed Offices
4. The Processional
a) Christmas Eve
b) Candlemas
c) Ash Wednesday
d) Palm Sunday
e) Maundy Thursday
f) Good Friday
g) Easter and its Octave
h) Litanies major and minor
i) Corpus Christi
j) Agricultural blessings throughout the year
5. The Pontifical
a) The Benedictional
b) Confirmation
c) Ordinations
d) Dedication
e) Crowning
f) Consecration of virgins
g) Monastic wows
h) Lesser sacramentals administered by bishops
6. The Ritual
a) Baptism
b) Matrimony
c) Deathbed and burial
d) Minor processions and blessings performed by parish priests
Auxiliary material
Conclusion
Bibliography
Primary sources
Manuscripts
Incunabula and early prints
Secondary literature
Online resources
Indices
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