Abstract
Every event and action (including thought) occurs in a particular place.1 Nevertheless, that fact is not accorded equal weight in all historical explorations. While the preferred method among economic and social historians is immersion in archival sources of indisputable relevance to a given locality, scholars who specialize in other aspects of life have less often considered attention to local variety as a sine qua non of their methodology. Whereas certain aspects of religious belief and practice, most notably saints’ cults, have been subjected to local or regional analysis,2 scholarship on another key facet of religious experience, namely the liturgy, has been relatively impervious to the importance of local and regional specificity. Rather than looking for variety, historians of Christian liturgy have generally been primarily interested in the construction of regionally undifferentiated emplotments of change over time. With specific reference to the history of baptism, a common trajectory runs as follows: Augustine of Hippo’s doctrine of congenitally transmitted Original Sin soon leads to the universal introduction of infant baptism occurring soon after an individual birth, a practice that strips ethical content from the baptismal rite, rendering it an operation performed on a passive baby, as well as a ceremony primarily concerned with the reation of fictive kinship bonds among the active adults.3
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Notes
Thomas F. Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Sharon Farmer, Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Arnold Angenendt, “Taufe und Politik im frühen Mittelalter,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 7 (1973): 143–68.
Felice Lifshitz, “Gender, Exegesis and Exemplarity East of the Middle Rhine: Jesus, Mary and the Saints in Manuscript Context,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 325–44.
Felice Lifshitz, “The Persistence of Late Antiquity: Christ as Man and Woman in an Eighth-Century Miniature,” Medieval Feminist Forum 38 (2004): 18–27.
Gabriel Ramis, “La iniciaciόn cristiana en la liturgia hispánica,” Studia Anselmiana 105 (1992): 192 [189–206].
Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Das Taufritual der Merseburger Hs. No. 58,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 8 (1877): 217–20.
Stefan Sonderegger, Althochdeutsche Sprache und Literatur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), p. 63.
Katrien Heene, The Legacy of Paradise: Marriage, Motherhood and Woman in Carolingian Edifying Literature (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997).
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© 2007 Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz
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Lifshitz, F. (2007). A Cyborg Initiation? Liturgy and Gender in Carolingian East Francia. In: Chazelle, C., Lifshitz, F. (eds) Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12305-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12305-3_6
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