Echoes and Silences of Liturgy

Vincent Debiais (1)

1 CRH (UMR 8558 CNRS / EHESS) - Centre de Recherches Historiques (CRH) _ Unité Mixte de Recherches (UMR 8558 CNRS / EHESS)

On the west portal of the Romanesque church of Usson-du-Poitou, a small priory 20 miles south of Poitiers (France), a short, flawed inscription is engraved underneath the sculpture of a lion. It gives the Latin order Letare (“Rejoice!”) to whom enters the church through the west door. The very simple combination of text and image in Usson-du-Poitou proposes a complex visual discourse based on Easter liturgy, making the ritual resound and endure outside the church. Starting with the Letare example, this paper aims to specify 1) the function of epigraphic inscriptions in the expansion in space and time of medieval liturgy, both in its content and effect; and 2) the sacramental persistency of liturgical quotations outside the liturgical context.

Mots clés: epigraphy; medieval art; liturgy; iconography; silence

Domaines: Art et histoire de l'art; Histoire; Religions

Vincent Debiais. Echoes and Silences of Liturgy: Liturgical Inscriptions and the Temporality of Medieval Rituals. Bissera V. Pentcheva. Icons of Sound. Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art, Routledge, pp.116-134, 2020, Music and Visual Culture, 9780367440879. ⟨halshs-03135038⟩