In the poem known AS Solomon and Saturn I, the pagan philosopher Saturn pleads with the wise king Solomon, offering gold, even his own sons, for the one precious piece of wisdom he cannot discover in his books: the Lord’s Prayer. What he desires is not simply an obscure text to complete his library, but that “mec gebringest þæt ic si gebrydded / ðurh þæs cantices cwyde” (you bring it about for me that I am overawed through utterance of the canticle). In the poetic dialogue that follows, Solomon fulfills his request with dazzling descriptions of the Paternoster’s powerful, lively activity, meant to inspire awe in not only the pagan philosopher, but the poem’s tenth-century West Saxon readers. This riddling, scholarly, likely monastic text elevates popular belief in the Paternoster’s efficacy into sophisticated poetry.

Solomon and Saturn I can be thought of as a liturgical paratext, supplementing a prayer by instructing readers in its proper use. The most obvious liturgical paratexts include rubrics, annotations, and prologues that direct practitioners in liturgical performance: kneel, repeat three times, insert the collect here. The term may be extended to cover texts that, circulating in separate manuscripts, are nevertheless essentially secondary to the liturgy, existing to facilitate the interpretation or use of the forms of public worship. Across the medieval centuries, these include voluminous scholarly commentaries by the likes of Amalarius of Metz (c.775–c.850) and Guillaume Durandus (c. 1230–96), but also very practical vernacular pastoralia like The Lay Folks’ Mass Book. Such paratexts illuminate not only religious but reading practices, showing how religious practitioners make meaning of difficult texts and adapt them to their needs.

This chapter explores a different mode of liturgical commentary, focusing on texts that convey lessons about the liturgy indirectly, through imaginative invention and fictional narrative. Such poetic paratexts often go beyond interpretations of meaning or directions for use to address more theoretical questions, like the nature of language, the power of performative speech-acts, and the relationship between texts and the material world. In treating poems like Solomon and Saturn I as repositories of literary theory, I make use of Barbara Newman’s account of what she calls “imaginative theology” as well as Nicolette Zeeman’s concept of “imaginative theory,” which find in medieval poetry sophisticated conceptual arguments pursued in distinctively literary modes.