IMC 2022: Sessions
Session 1604: Visions of Authority, III: Looking for a Synthesis - Authoritative Traditions and Local Practices
Thursday 7 July 2022, 11.15-12.45
| Sponsor: | Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen |
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| Organiser: | Riccardo Macchioro, Fondazione Ezio Franceschini (FEF) - Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL), Firenze |
| Moderator/Chair: | Sarah M. Hamilton, Department of History, University of Exeter |
| Paper 1604-a | Tracing the Border of Authority: Paul the Deacon's Homiliary and the Performance of Orthodoxy (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Language and Literature - Latin, Liturgy, Sermons and Preaching |
| Paper 1604-b | Cultural Hybridity in the Cordoban Calendar at the Border between Christian, Arabic, and Jewish Traditions (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Liturgy |
| Paper 1604-c | Singing with Authority: Liturgical Booklets and Visions of Authority in the 10th Century (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Language and Literature - Latin, Liturgy, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Abstract | The 'Visions of Authority' series investigates how medieval scribes and compilers manipulate the authority of their material. The focus is on genres connected to religious history, which are traditionally imbued with significant authority, but simultaneously exhibit strong instability and malleability in their transmission. This tension makes them interesting cases to study how authority is established, which practices can strengthen it, and how it influences the impact of a text. Medieval liturgical practices have always been deeply concerned with authoritative issues, suspended between keeping to well-established general traditions, and being influenced by historical circumstances and local usages. In the meanwhile, the compilers of liturgical instruments (calendars, hymns, and sermonaries) were confronted with the need to identify the sources able to grant authority to their production. In this session, we explore the cultural processes that led them to achieve a synthesis: from the selection of the most suitable chants to celebrate local saints in the Ottonian age, via the need for adapting the readings of the Church Fathers by removing anti-Jewish statements in Paul the Deacon's Homiliary, to the accomplishment of an unprecedented balance between Arabic, Jewish, and Christian heritages in a Mozarabic Calendar. |