21 - Commemorating the Rotunda in the Round: The Medieval Latin Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and its Performance in the West

Summary

Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land aspire to see the places of Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. The many round churches erected in Western Christendom during the Middle Ages stress the prominent role that visual signs played in evoking the experience of Jerusalem and of pilgrimage. Seeing, however, is only one facet of pilgrimage. Round churches in the West were not just symbols of Jerusalem; they were also settings for the re-enactment of the spiritual drama that pilgrimage to the East made possible. Ritual was an integral component of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and its performance made accessible the spiritual target of redemption; only after experiencing the anamnesis of Mass were indulgences obtainable for those pilgrims who reached the shrines of the Holy Land. Participation in the transformative powers of liturgical ceremony articulated medieval experiences of Jerusalem. From the very act of taking up the cross, the crusades called for performance. No less than pilgrims, crusaders physically enacted their faith. While scholars have for many decades discussed the meanings that conspicuously circular churches communicated in the West, their ritual functions remain poorly understood; and these functions were as integral to the buildings as their form. In London the Hospitallers were based at Clerkenwell, the Templars first in Holborn and then at the New Temple between the river and Fleet Street. All three sites were distinguished by their round churches. Taking these churches as a point of departure, this chapter adumbrates the performative role that these distinctive rotundas might have played in bringing the ritual experience of Jerusalem to the West.

Liturgy In The Temple Church

All Hospitaller commanderies uniformly celebrated the medieval Latin rite of the Holy Sepulchre. The brothers at Clerkenwell will every day have recreated the services concurrently held in Jerusalem. It is probable that the Templar priests in London were celebrating the same; from the moment of the Templars’ official recognition in 1129, brothers were instructed to observe in their churches the liturgy of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. (In Jerusalem the links between the Sepulchre and the Templars were very close: the earliest extant ordinal of the Latin patriarchate was made c. 1175 for the Templars’ central convent.) In practice, we must for the Templars qualify this general rule.