To be religious or not to be
The fragments studied during the program all date back to the 11th century to the 15th century, therefore, they mostly embody religious texts or references. They allow us to a dive into some aspects of the medieval life, mostly concerning scholars, educated people, clerks and members of religious orders. Obviously, most of the fragments concerned Catholics topics, but we luckily could describe a fragment in yiddish dealing with Jewish liturgy. Some examples of medieval literary genres were represented among the fragments, which shall be presented.
Liturgical books fragments
Liturgy takes an important place in both Christianism and Judaism, as the public and private worships and prayers are ritualised. In order to practice the worship according to the established liturgy, books were produced to help the minister of the cult, or the believers in some cases, to follow the rituals, prayers and formulas.
In two different volumes, fragments of breviaries were found, one dating back to the 14th century, and the other to the 15th century.
Breviaries are used in the Christian word to pray the canonical hours, seven times a day. Some of them are very decorated, some contain musical notations, and some others are more simple.
Here are two examples of fragments of breviaries :
Hebraic liturgy
The hebraical extract found in a binding contains part of the liturgy for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year that starts the liturgical time of the Ten Days of Repentence.
The text runs from the end of the morning service (Shacharit) into the additional service (Musaf), as following :
~Lines 1–6: end of a liturgical poem (silluk).~
The passage is the closing section of the silluk, the final poem of the cantor's poetic cycle (qerovah) inserted into the repetition of the Amidah. Its theme is the Binding of Isaac ('aqedah), the Torah reading of the second day.
~Lines 7–9: transition to the Qedushah.~
The poem leads into the angelic sanctification. The heavenly hosts (Tarshishim, Ḥashmal) kneel and bow, proclaim and sanctify "one to another", and offer the threefold "Holy, holy, holy" of Isaiah 6:3.
~Lines 10–12: Torah reading.~
The rubrics follow the order described in the Tur (Oraḥ Ḥayyim 584)
- The full Qaddish is recited and two Torah scrolls are taken out;
- Five men read from the first scroll in the portion Vayera: "And God tested Abraham" (Genesis 22);
- The maftir reads "And in the seventh month" (Numbers 29:1) from the second scroll;
- The haftarah is Jeremiah 31, "[They] found grace in the wilderness".
~Lines 12–13: shofar.~
The shofar is sounded in its series of blasts, followed by Psalm 89:16: "Happy is the people that knows the shofar blast; O Lord, they walk in the light of Your countenance."
~Lines 14–17: beginning of Musaf.~
The congregation rises for Musaf, and the cantor begins the first blessing of the Amidah, "…God of our fathers", up to "for His name's sake". This is followed by the High Holy Day insertions: "Remember us for life, King who delights in life; inscribe us in the book of life, for Your sake, living God. King, helper [, savior and shield]…""
Turning a quill into the "sword of the Spirit" (Ephesians 6.17)
Church fathers
The Church Fathers are regognised as such by the Church to have been among the first thinkers to have established the intellectual and doctrinal foundations of christianity. Their writings, called the patristic literature, have been widely copied and commented upon across the Mediteranean see during the medieval era.
It is then no surprise to have found, among the fragments, some patristic texts.
Following the path of the Church Fathers
During the medieval times, a part of the knowledge produced by scholars was either directly tackling religious topics (gloses of Church Fathers, theology...). Through his writings, a theologian could become miles Christi, soldier of the Christ, and defend his faith with his words rather than a sword.
A scholar could do so by writing a cathechism, to spread not only the Holy Gospel, but also and sometimes mainly to disseminate the proper way (accordingly to his beliefs or those of the church and ideological movement whom he belonged) to interpretate it as well as to determin the according way to practice. To make it didactic, it could take the form of a set of questions answered one by one, as it is the case of the Liber Quare (11th century), whose name, that could be literally translated as "the book of why", directly reffers to a typical rhethorical effect used in latin, as the word "quare" was commonly used to ask rethorical questions that would stimulate the debate or the thinking.
Explaining and justifying the dogmas and rituals of the Church was something essential as christianism has known several quarels about the meaning of the Christ's words and the way to celebrate Him. Scholars would engage in disputatio, either face to face are through publication or correspondance.
The Liber Quare is among these justifying treatises. It is an 11th-century treatise about liturgy in the form of a catechism.
Glosses were a quite common mean to comment upon a text, and required a specific display : the gloss would surround the initial text, who was very often copied before the gloss by an other scribe.
In the scriptoria was the pecia system commonly used to copy faster : several scribes would work at the same time on the same manuscript, which would have been separated into several "notbooks" consisting of bifolios that would be distributed to the scribes to be copied and then compiled to form the final manuscript. It is then possible to identify several hands in a same manuscript.
Charters, a testimony of the religious life
Words to unveil a whole world
Charters were not only the solemn documents that would create universities or grant privileges to a city, but also, more simply, acts of sale, renting, contracts, and all types of notarial documents, more or less prosaic, more or less extraordinary. And as often in the Middle Ages, religion is never too far away.
In the charters, one can find different manifestations of religion and religious life.
The most obvious one may be the invocations, even on acts between two regulars, which quite commonly refer to Christianity, through symbols like cross and chrisms or formulas. It may also show the type of transactions that clerks may have taken, with other clerks or with regulars.
The charters may also directly tackle the religious life like the Urk 268., which enables us to have the insights of the election of a prior in the Monastery of