IN POPULAR speech, to speak of something as “medieval” used to be to speak in derogatory terms. The term became shorthand for saying that something was corrupt or, worse, barbaric. In the past, the medieval period was generally dismissed by liturgists; but, today, several prominent medieval historians are turning their attention to liturgy, and here we have a liturgical scholar focusing on medieval material.

The book is divided into ten equal chapters, roughly arranged chronologically. Each chapter focuses on the work of liturgical and devotional writers, and ranges from those who modelled their writing on early hymn-writers such as Fortunatus, through the writing of the delightfully named Notker the Stammerer, and the Benedictine visionaries Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Shonau, to the devotional poetry of Passion written in the High Middle Ages. There are extensive quotations from these poets of God, and these are illuminated by Blakesley’s very readable commentary.

The unifying thematic thread running through the book is the Benedictine principle that, in the offering of our prayer and praise, the heart and mind should be in harmony with the voice. This repeated principle effectively highlights the character of medieval religion, namely, of engaging the whole person through the five senses in the drama of worship. In the context of daily prayer and the eucharist, the “voice” here is the singing voice, and this book centres on the tropes and the longer sequences that embellished the regular chanted texts of the mass.

A trope was a devotional verse inserted into the Kyrie and other liturgical chants, and the sequence was the extended prose added to the singing of the Alleluia that heralded the reading of the Gospel on Sundays and feast days. Blakeley shows how these compositions followed classical hymnody, such as that attributed to St Ambrose. And, far from simply parroting scripture, this classic hymnody is rich in biblical allusions. Perhaps this is the point that may speak more to a wider readership.

It has been said that a crass literalism not only restricts our religious sensibilities but fails to do justice to Bible texts themselves. As Blakesley argues in the penultimate chapter, allegory is not just a literary device of medieval writers, but is embedded in the Bible itself. Jesus tells of his fate by invoking the figure of Jonah, who was three days in the belly of the whale; Paul sets out the allegory of the slave and the free; and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of some Old Testament events and figures as prefiguring the good things that were to come.

So, scripture, as well as the medieval texts presented and discussed by Blakesley, is multi-layered. This would suggest that our words for worship need to be richly textured, resonant, and easily voiced.

The Revd Christopher Irvine teaches at St Augustine’s College of Theology and the Liturgical Institute, Mirfield.

“With Angels and Archangels”: Sharing the worship of heaven — Bible, poetry, liturgy and devotion in the Middle Ages
John Blakesley
Gracewing £15.99
(978-0-85244-719-2)
Church Times Bookshop £14.39