The art and architecture of medieval churches was inextricably linked with the rituals that inhabited them: the Christian liturgy. Every year on November 25th, churches and monasteries across the country resounded with plainchant and polyphony dedicated to the saint that England had come to claim as its own: St Katherine of Alexandria.
Much of the groundwork for St Katherine’s late medieval popularity was laid by a plainchant liturgy composed in England in the late eleventh century and ultimately disseminated throughout the continent—a rare example of an English liturgical composition supplanting continental observations.
What was a liturgy for a saint, and why did it matter? What made these particular chants, and through them, St Katherine herself, appealing to singers and communities?
In this lecture Dr James Blasina proposes that the English liturgy for St Katherine reveals an alternative model of medieval womanhood that valorised women’s speech and political participation. With St. Katherine as a case study, attendees will discover the workings of the medieval Christian liturgy, its centrality to both spiritual and every-day life, and the ways it could be customised to meet local needs.
Dr. James Blasina, Ph.D is Assistant Professor Music at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA. His research currently focuses on the medieval cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria, with a focus on music in England, and the links between saints’ cults, gender, and identity.
The rite of exorcism, a formal casting out of Satan and his demons, was once part of everyday life in the English parish - not only in the liturgy of baptism, but also in formulas used for the exorcism of pests from crops, and even as a cure for toothache. More dramatic exorcisms sometimes took p...
In medieval Europe, relics of dead martyrs were the ultimate must-have, venerated by princes and paupers alike. And the associated market for them was big business; a huge industry with an infrastructure to match. Crumbling bone, ravaged human hair, withering chunks of flesh, and the blood-soaked...
This talk will investigates some of the spooky artefacts found in, and ghostly tales centred around, Britain's churches. From the ranks of macabre funeral effigies lurking in Westminster Abbey to the flaming black hellhounds of Suffolk, from human hearts hidden in pillars to sightings of ghostly ...
