Last year, a few weeks after the Coronation of Charles III, I attended an installation service at our church, when our new vicar formally took up her post. It was led by our local bishop, Jane, Bishop of Hertford, and I also attended her, serving as the bishop’s chaplain for the occasion. This didn’t involve any theological duties, as with a permanent bishop’s chaplain, though I did get to wear a cassock..
Instead, I was responsible for the liturgical objects that Jane needed: bringing and taking away her mitre and crosier and the anointing chrism, holding her service sheet when she needed both hands for blessing, and that sort of thing.
I’ve taken part in many different types of church service over the years and I’ve even led a few of them. But this was a different experience, concentrating less on the service itself or even my specific part in it, than on a single person. For that evening I was the Bishop of Hertford’s minion, coming back repeatedly to the question: what does the bishop need to do? What does she need me to do?
It was nowhere near as complicated a service as a royal coronation or funeral, but it was still a complicated and unfamiliar service, with dozens of people needing to play their specific role within it. Seeing such a service from the inside, as it were, got me thinking in a different way about medieval rituals.
There’s a German term, of course, for organizing such rituals: Inszenierung. It means staging, but it’s more than that, involving the whole organizing and putting on of a ceremonial event. I’ve always tended to understand it in terms of negotiations between the key players: who is going to sit where? Who is going to submit ritually to whom and with what words/gestures? It’s being part of the installation service that has got me thinking in a new way about the role of subordinates in such ceremonies.
The point about coronations, installations and similar ceremonies is that they’re not familiar rituals, but occasional ones, often adapted from previous models for a particular set of circumstances. We had a rehearsal for our installation the previous day and I’m sure there were many for the Coronation, (although there was only a single chaotic rehearsal for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral). But it’s very hard to get everyone together at one time: we didn’t have Bishop Jane present for the rehearsal or many of the civic dignitaries involved.
We share these problems, I’m sure with those planning medieval ceremonies, but we also had the great advantage of printed orders of service, containing the whole of the service. Medieval liturgical books, even for ordinary services, don’t normally work like that: they contain only the words for your particular role in the service and little detail about liturgical routine. I find it hard to imagine that detailed overall orders for one-off ceremonies would have been widely available. So how did participants in medieval rituals bridge those gaps and deal with under rehearsed dignitaries, and the lack of detailed service orders? I suspect they dealt with it via a whole array of minions like me.
Minions, after all, can be rehearsed, can be expected to practice and memorise series of actions and words. I was unused to concentrating on the needs of a single person, but courts have always been full of people to whom this was second nature: servants. They were trained to observe what their superiors were doing and needed, to respond rapidly to unexpected situations and to take orders verbally or by gestures from a master of ceremonies or the like. Whenever there was a ritual of deditio (submission) or similar, they would have been the ones nudging the submitter to the correct spot and helping them up afterwards if necessary or wiping the excess oil off someone who’s just been anointed and handing them their surplice/cloak to put back on. Such servants are unlikely to have been mentioned by medieval sources, or highlighted in footage of modern rituals, but if we’re thinking of Inszenierung in its full sense, we probably do need to remember the key role of all the minions involved.
Magistra et Mater 