Continuing on a theme….
Well, here’s some good news. Okay, you probably don’t care. So – here’s some news.
So, for some of us…that’s fun!
This means I’ll be boring you even more upping my game, bringing you even more nuggets from the past which I will, in convoluted ways, tie to the Present Moment. Hopefully one a day for a while.
Oh….great….
Y’all are just….thrilled.
This one doesn’t require convolution, though.
See? I told you this would be fun!
It’s a chapter from a book – the entirety of which is available. Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy – which I’ll be digging into tonight.
Abstract:
This essay examines the ritual of the plague procession as a response to the problem of collective sin, using as the focal point a series of well-documented processions held by Carlo Borromeo, the Archbishop of Milan, during the city’s outbreak of 1576–78. It will first explore the ways in which music, as a central component of the procession, interacted with other elements of the ritual to facilitate corporate worship while strengthening the civic bonds of the processional community. However, large congregations of people in processions exacerbated the very real threat of contagion and contravened medical and civic rules for isolation. The second half of this essay will investigate how Borromeo coped with this struggle between piety and public safety by relocating the procession off the public streets and into private homes when parishes were placed under quarantine.
Gee…maybe things don’t change so much.
Let’s sum this up quickly and point you to reasons why you might care. There’s much conversation these days about the shape of public religious observance now and in the near future. My concern has always been – as I articulated here – that this be a moment of evangelization, not fear. It is quite possible to say, “For your safety, take these precautions which might even include not attending large gatherings” without also giving the impression that what we are really saying is “STAY AWAY! WE PROBABLY WON’T VISIT YOU EITHER! OBEY THE GOVERNOR! DON’T MAKE OUR PRIESTS SICK! DON’T SUE US! BUT STILL GIVE US MONEY!”
This, you will not be shocked to hear, was not the case in Milan where, indeed, there were serious discussions about safety and prudence.
- You know the drill: Time of pestilence calls for processions to express penitence and encourage social solidarity. Borromeo led three during this particular outbreak.
- The processions had a structure – Psalms, antiphons, and a Litany of Saints.
Special pamphlets containing the prayers of plague processions were sometimes issued, and they can help us flesh out the liturgical programme of a given procession. For the ritual in Milan, Borromeo published a palm-sized booklet…that could easily have been carried in procession. The book opens with a selection of seven antiphons and the seven Penitential Psalms, to be performed ‘pro arbitratu’. Three additional Psalms (94, 87 and 90) and two biblical readings (Jonah 2 and Isaiah 38) follow, again to be performed as the participants see fit. The Litany of the Saints comes next, followed by a reprint of Psalm 50 and then a set of five short prayers, the first of which is merely a rubric instructing the supplicants to perform a prayer to the saint in whose church they find themselves (‘de Sancto, in cuius Ecclesia supplicationes fiunt’). The rest are prayers for mercy and protection
- What follows is a very nice discussion of the litany of the saints, both from a musical point of view and with respect to the ease with which the litany includes general participation.
- And then a discussion of the tension between health and safety and spiritual needs. Very pertinent to the present moment. People did have these discussions in the past.
What interests me is the author’s exploration of the role of imagination and “virtual” procession and pilgrimage.
A piece of advice from Borromeo is pertinent here; to those who could not attend mass in the midst of plague, he said, ‘Go to church in spirit’, making viable the substitution of physical presence with an imaginative attendance. While the harrowing plague-tide factors motivating Borromeo’s solution in this instance may be extraordinary, such virtual devotional acts themselves were not. Popular meditation guides of the period, for example, encouraged their readers, with the help of visual aids, to imagine themselves with Christ as he suffered his Passion. The sacro monte in Varallo just outside Milan – financially supported and frequented by Borromeo, who called the complex a ‘New Jerusalem’ – sent visitors to the Holy Land with chapels arranged to tell a Christological narrative, made even more vivid by thousands of statues and painted figures. In an even more direct parallel to our quarantined Milanese, cloistered nuns were encouraged to go on pilgrimages imaginatively, since travel outside their convents was impossible. For such an exercise, they relied on pilgrims’ diaries and narrative travelogues, maps, images of landmarks, and souvenir relics to imagine the visual and affective experiences of a journey, and they even made use of ‘scripts’ in devotional literature (say certain prayers while walking a certain distance, for instance) to verbally and somatically act out a pilgrimage.
*Short break to say that this interests me because one of the digs on pre-Vatican II liturgical practice was the popularity of this sort of thing for the laity to pray during Mass – imaginative prayers that might or might not be directly related to what was going on at any particular moment. Put all that away and pay attention was the command. Participate. *
But, as the author points out, the Milanese were not just told to do this. They were given assistance – they were guided and not just by someone saying, Feel the presence of God inside you. Better now?
….the clergy are told to prepare each household for the devotional activities devised for the extraordinary circumstances by teaching them a variety of prayers, litanies, and Psalms ahead of the quarantine. During the quarantine, bells across the parish were to be rung seven times a day, approximately every two hours, to call the households to prayer. Once begun, the bell would be rung again every quarter hour, until the fourth bell signals an end to the hour of prayer. While the bell rings,
litanies or supplications will be chanted or recited at the direction of the Bishop. This will be performed in such a way that one group sings from the windows or the doors of their homes, and then another group sings and responds in turn.
To ensure that these prayers are carried out properly, the decree continues, a member of the clergy or someone trained in these prayers (possibly the head of the household) should also come to a window or door at the appointed times to direct the prayers and stir up enthusiasm for this devotion. To further facilitate these devotional activities, Borromeo instructed the parish clergy to be supplied with books ‘that contain certain prayers, litanies, and oration, which will be made freely available, in order that he may go and distribute them to his own or other parishes’.
… Borromeo’s directive to sing at doors and windows was evidently put into practice and impressed a number of chroniclers. In his Relatione verissima, Paolo Bisciola reports:
[W]hen the plague began to grow, this practice [of singing the litanies in public] was interrupted, so as not to allow the congregations to provide it more fuel. The orations did not stop, however, because each person stood in his house at the window or door and made them from there […] Just think, in walking around Milan, one heard nothing but song, veneration of God, and supplication to the saints, such that one almost wished for these tribulations to last longer.
Giussano likewise remarks on the harmonious piety of Milan, even going so far as to describe the plague-stricken city as heaven on earth on account of the pious singing:
It was a sight to see, when all the inhabitants of this populous city, numbering little short of three hundred thousand souls, united to praise God at one and the same time, sending up together an harmonious voice of supplication for deliverance from their distress. Milan might at this time have been not unfitly compared to a cloister of religious of both sexes serving God in the inclosure [sic] of their cells, an image of the heavenly Jerusalem filled with the praises of the angelic hosts.
We can imagine the astonishment of these chroniclers, hearing the disembodied voices emerging from isolated homes all around, aggregating and blanketing an entire parish in song. Borromeo’s transference of the public procession from the street and into the home depended on – and was regulated by – sound. The ritual began with the sound of church bells, which not only signalled the times of the prayers, but also, as Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer describe, intruded into domestic spaces from without, ‘denoting the lordship and dominion of a particular house [of worship] over its territory.’ The bells thus extended the sacred spaces of the parish into the homes. There, led by stationed liturgical leaders, the Milanese sang together. The litany, which so effectively encouraged participation and stitched together the processional body, became even more useful in suturing together members of segregated households; its musical simplicity and short-range call-and-response structure were essential when isolated neighbours could not even see each other. With their voices comingling, the penitents breached the walls between each other’s houses, and between their homes and the streets, eroding the conceptual boundaries between public and private worship
In conclusion, she writes:
Then, as now, the management of disease was not a straightforward project. In times of plague, civic and religious leaders had to carefully balance the demands of spiritual and biological health, both communal and individual. When faced with the obstacles posed by the threat of contagion, pre-modern Christians found new ways to carry out their spiritual duties as a community. Within this picture, singing served as an essential tool for maintaining a continuity of devotional practice in the challenging conditions of plague. Whether performed publically or behind doors and windows, music brought the prayerful thoughts and spirits of the penitents together to fight against the communal scourge. The devotional activities during the outbreak in Milan can teach us many lessons on the texture of ritual practices in this period. Those activities can reveal to us, in turn, the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of the devout in the face of crisis. As Randolph Starn writes, ‘[the] chronic presence of disease suggests that we should not think of medieval and early modern societies as caught in the grip of plague-year panics or as waiting passively to be delivered by modern medicine. The newer accounts [of plague history] speak of “experienced populations,” of well-organized institutional responses, of resourceful strategies for survival’. Our history of Milanese devotion in times of pestilence is precisely such a narrative of organisation and resourcefulness.
Most Catholics don’t live in communities like that any more, at least in the United States. But what’s the spirit at work here? It’s a sense of we will do what we can, we will do what we must to make sure the people stay connected to God during these times – because they need him, and it’s our duty.
Charlotte was Both 