Overview

This volume presents a complete reconstruction of the ritual response to terminal illness and death at the monastic community of Cluny at the height of its development in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Based on the best manuscript of the customary of Bernard, the only account of the abbey's customs written at and for Cluny itself, the reconstruction contains not just Bernard's Latin description of the ritual process, but also the full texts of the prayers and chants that accompanied it, gathered, in the absence of suviving ritual books from Cluny itself, from contemporary sources with clear ties to the Cluniac customs. Facing-page English and French translations make the results available to readers with little or no facility in Latin. The author places the Cluniac death ritual in the context of religious responses to death, dying and the care of the dead in medieval Latin Christianity as a whole. He also explicates the origins, development and meaning of the Cluniac death ritual's myriad elements as they were spoken, sung and performed within the sacred spaces of the monastic complex-cloister, chapter house, infirmary, church and cemetery.

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9782503550107

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Reviews

This is a volume that has much to offer everyone from to beginning students of religion, interested in ritual performance, to advanced scholars of liturgical life at Cluny. Paxton is to be commended for finding a way to speak to both extremes of his audience without losing either. [...] In this way, he is able to make the death liturgy of Cluny live for the modern reader. -- Lucy K. Pick, The Medieval Review As Paxton points out, 'the Cluniac death ritual is about as close to a perfect expression of Benedictine spirituality in the central Middle Ages as one could imagine' (177). We are all indebted to him for writing this book. --Barbara H. Rosenwein, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, January 2015, Vol. 90, No. 1

""This is a volume that has much to offer everyone from to beginning students of religion, interested in ritual performance, to advanced scholars of liturgical life at Cluny. Paxton is to be commended for finding a way to speak to both extremes of his audience without losing either. [...] In this way, he is able to make the death liturgy of Cluny live for the modern reader."" -- Lucy K. Pick, The Medieval Review ""As Paxton points out, 'the Cluniac death ritual is about as close to a perfect expression of Benedictine spirituality in the central Middle Ages as one could imagine' (177). We are all indebted to him for writing this book."" --Barbara H. Rosenwein, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, January 2015, Vol. 90, No. 1

This is a volume that has much to offer everyone from to beginning students of religion, interested in ritual performance, to advanced scholars of liturgical life at Cluny. Paxton is to be commended for finding a way to speak to both extremes of his audience without losing either. [...] In this way, he is able to make the death liturgy of Cluny live for the modern reader. -- Lucy K. Pick, The Medieval Review

Author Information

Frederick S. Paxton is Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College, in New London, CT, USA. He is the author of Christianizing Death: The Making of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (1990), Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony: the Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim (2009) and numerous articles and essays on sickness, death, dying and the dead in medieval Europe.

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