Latin Service at St Teilo's Church: An Invitation
, 17 June 2010
A medieval Latin service will be held at St Teilo's Church next week.
Numbers are very limited so let me start off by encouraging anyone interested in attending to ring our education booking office on (029) 20 57 3424 to reserve a place. It will take place on the 24th of June, at 11.00.
It will be the first Latin service to take place in St Teilo's Church since it was moved 50 miles down the M4, from near Pontarddulais, to the Museum. Part of a wider conference exploring worship in the Middle Ages, the service will be open to the public, but booking is absolutely essential. The conference is a meeting of experts from around the world, who study the nitty-gritty of everyday life, Latin texts, architecture, archaeology and visual history, to build a fuller picture of what life was like over 500 years ago. We will be testing their theories out, and you are welcome to come and help us!
In a way, the performance will help us at the museum to see whether our reconstruction of the Church - a lengthy process of research, archaeology and good ol' Vitamin Compromise - is right. We'll also be able to help researchers to see whether current theories about the performance of liturgy actually work when you try them out. We've yet to find a real Tudor priest we can phone to check these things out: so the only way to learn, really, is by trial and error. That's until I find a flux capacitor in the collection somewhere, obviously.
Comments - (2)
You pose a very interesting question. I suppose I've got used to calling rites of this kind 'performances' as this is the way they're referred to in most academic writing on the subject. So apologies for that!
Of course, there are layers of meaning to what's going on at St Teilo's this week - a 'performance' is only one way of describing it. We are very careful not to 'play at worship', and the service itself will be carried out by multidenominational ordained clergy. We do however have some ethical puzzles to solve because the church is part of the national collection now, as well as a religious building, though it was de-consecrated (on paper) in the 1970s.
As a brief example, the kind of ritual we will be performing/enacting/iterating* will be a Tudor one, taken from Catholic manuscripts from the period. These rituals are no longer sanctioned by the modern Catholic Church - and the building itself is not a modern Catholic church either (in fact, it was donated to us by the Church in Wales). It is a reconstruction of a 1500-30 interior in a church which has been moved 50 miles, which dates from between 1100 and 1700. We chose to pick this particular point in history to re-create due to the age of the murals we found, and the age of most of the masonry.
All the reconstructions, if they cannot be based on physical examples from the building, are the result of informed compromise between a network of academics, clergy, curators and archaeologists. This 'enactment' of a Latin service is devised in a similar way, following informed debate and very detailed research.
The conference really aims to address these strange questions, with academics coming from all over the world to discuss the ethics and practice of studying liturgy. We only really learn by doing - by trial and error - whether something really 'works' and so this performance (if that's what you want to call it) will question and test the academics' theories about how exactly the service would have happened.
If you're interested in attending, please do let us know on the number above as we only have a limited number of tickets. Thanks for your question - hope it wasn't a rhetorical one, considering my long answer!
*take your pick!