Ex instructione manualium ... ex vera ratione: The Correction of Liturgical Errors in the Late Middle Ages

The essay takes as its starting point the complaint with which Henry of Langenstein (c. 1325-1397) opened his treatise known as the Secreta sacerdotum: contemporary priests’ flawed methods of celebrating mass differ from what they teach (or perhaps learn) because they have “learned hardly anything from their manuals.” The essay is divided into two parts. The first section considers what Henry might have meant by the term “manualia”, exploring admonitions for the avoidance of and coping with errors in ritual performance in liturgical manuals such as the Sarum Manual, the Manuale parochalium sacerdotum, the Cautelae missae, Guido of Monte Rochon’s Manipulus curatorum, and Hermannus de Scildis’s Speculum manuale. The section draws particular attention to the way in which manual literature digests scholastic sacramental theology and canon law. The second section turns to Henry’s own proposal to a different method of celebrating, based on “true reason”. Henry’s treatise is found to differ from the adduced manuals in basis, scope, and detail. Further, the author’s appeal to a kind of practitioner’s common-sense as an interior guiding principal is interpreted as a strategy for the apparently inherent ineffectiveness of the written manual.