From Baumstark to Bell: Methods in the Study of Christian Liturgy

Graduate / Professional

This graduate seminar examines the development of methodological approaches in the study of Christian liturgy, attending both to premodern liturgical interpretation and to the emergence of liturgical studies as a modern academic discipline. From its earliest centuries, Christianity generated sustained reflection on the meaning, history, and authority of liturgical practice, as mystagogues, canonists, and commentators interpreted ritual action, shaped traditions, and narrated change long before the rise of modern historical scholarship. In early modernity, Reformation and Counter-Reformation polemics intensified attention to the historical origins and theological legitimacy of rites, laying groundwork for the discipline’s later critical formation. Liturgical studies emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with the historical-comparative work of Anton Baumstark and other foundational figures, we examine how modern scholarship constructed its categories, methods, and narratives of development, and how intellectual commitments and institutional contexts shaped its assumptions. Alongside major figures such as Gregory Dix, Josef Jungmann, Robert Taft, and Catherine Bell, the seminar also considers methodological developments that have expanded the field in recent decades, including the material and sensory turn, gender and embodiment as analytic lenses, and historiographical reflections that question inherited frameworks. By placing classical comparative and historical-critical models in conversation with these new approaches, students assess the strengths and limits of competing methods and develop a critically informed methodological positioning within the study of Christian worship. T 1:30pm-3:20pm