13 - Corpus Domini: ritual metamorphoses and social changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Genoa

Summary

The Genoese staged civic-religious processions in celebration of two eucharistic feasts: the first took place on Holy Thursday and the second on the feast day of Corpus Domini. On Holy Thursday, a number of confraternal processions made their way towards the cathedral of San Lorenzo where the sepulchre which housed the Holy Sacrament was to be found, but on Corpus Domini only a single procession carried the Eucharist in triumph through the city, one in which confraternities had a secondary role. The liturgical reforms which were introduced in the wake of Vatican II modified the feast of Corpus Domini since it was regarded as a mere replica of Holy Thursday. During the middle ages, however, so many rituals and services marked Holy Thursday (the Reconciliation of Penitents, the Blessing of the Holy Oils, the Pedilavium), that a new liturgical feast day was created in order to celebrate the Eucharist with greater and more appropriate ceremony: this was the argument of Urban IV's 1264 bull Transiturus de mundo which promulgated the celebration of Corpus Domini throughout Christendom after its beginnings in the diocese of Liège. This article will trace the development of the two feasts, and seek to demonstrate how the evolution of religious norms, political institutions, and the brotherhoods themselves made confraternities central to the public celebration of one feast, while they had no influence on the other.

Despite the fact that it was not originally part of the liturgical office for the day, the procession became, in the course of the fourteenth century, the distinguishing event of Corpus Domini, and for many cities in western Europe the most important religious and civic occasion of the year.