4 - The English Premonstratensian Liturgy

Summary

During the rationalist age of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, many of the older religious orders felt compelled to justify their continued existence within the Catholic church. The Premonstratensian canons, for their part, offered the following reasons as a vindication and characterisation of their canonical lifestyle since the Middle Ages: ‘Laudes Dei in choro; cultus eucharisticus; cultus marialis; spiritus jugis paenitentiae; zelus animarum’. The presence of the liturgy is prevalent in each of these elements, which were shared in varying degrees with most of the other religious orders of the Western church. Despite this fact, the liturgical observances of those orders who maintained their own liturgical ‘Rites’ or ‘Uses’, in many instances exemplified the origins, purpose and identity of each order concerned. The importance of accounting for the liturgical activities of the religious orders has been neglected by many historians in the past. This is understandable, because liturgiology is a technical field with its own nomenclature. While Knowles made an invaluable contribution towards the understanding of monastic liturgy, he stated that, ‘The liturgy of the monasteries of the medieval Church … is a subject altogether remote from the interests and experience of the general reader and of the majority of historians in this country, [and] is peculiarly the province of specialists’. Happily, steps have been taken to remedy the divorce between liturgical and monastic studies.