This chapter focuses on a group of Christian elites both well represented in the necrosima and unique to Syriac Christianity: the so-called Sons and Daughters of the Covenant. These communities of male and female ascetics assumed responsibility for the practical and liturgical functioning of the churches, including, most prominently, the task of chanting psalms and hymns at ecclesiastical gatherings, including funerary processions. The necrosima contains a number of madrāshê designated for the burial of male Covenanters – as well as, this chapter suggests, one addressing the death of their female counterparts. The hymns provide readers with an intimate glimpse at the grief and anxiety that attended these community’s loss of one of their members, as well as insight into the strategies by which the bereaved sought to maintain ties “across the threshold.” This chapter accordingly examines the ways in which expectations of mutual prayer – by the bereaved on behalf of the dead, and by the dead on behalf of their surviving brothers and sisters – could serve to construct visions of continuity and hopes for eventual reunion.

The book’s conclusion draws together the hymns and themes addressed in previous chapters to reflect synthetically on the visions of death and the afterlife that emerge from them, and to examine their affective, social, and theological resonances in conversation with other, roughly contemporaneous traditions, including those attested by Orphic Hymns and by funerary poetry preserved in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. The chapter both presents a concise review of the material covered in earlier sections, and encourages next steps in the study of ritual sources across different communities.

While previous chapters have focused on the deaths of Christians under roughly ordinary circumstances, this chapter turns to deaths precipitated by pandemics and natural disaster. The necrosima accordingly features a number of poems that address instances of mass death due to pandemic and pestilence. In both form and context of preservation, these hymns were manifestly part of their communities’ ritual repertoire. At the same time, however, they witness to periods in which ordinary ritual pathways had broken down. In the midst of sickness and bereavement, the hymns suggest, churches stood empty, clergy mourned the loss of their brothers, even burials had ceased in light of death’s relentless onslaught. This chapter examines the madrāshê in question as spaces for reconfiguring communities’ ritual practices. The necrosima’s pandemic hymns and other, roughly contemporaneous liturgical sources thus point to communities’ embrace of lament, petition, and penance as models for engaging the divine.

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.

In the genre of images known as the Mass of Saint Gregory the central drama is the living body of Christ on the altar. To one side of that drama, if one looks closely, can be found a single book, opened but not legible (Plate 6). By the fifteenth century, depending on the church, one might find a range of different kinds of books for the liturgy in its library, its choir stalls, or sacristy: antiphonaries, graduals, psalters, hymnals, or breviaries. Only one liturgical book, the missal, the book for the celebrant of the Eucharist, would have been found on the altar. That object is the focus of this chapter.

In rejecting allegory, Martin Luther rejected far more than a verbal technique of biblical interpretation. He rejected a conception of the nature of revelation and the modes by which God communicated with humankind. He rejected William Durand’s sense of the interreferentiality of Scripture and Creation. Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Martin Bucer, Uly Anders, and Claus Hottinger all rejected an understanding of revelation as mediated through the made world. In so doing, they also rejected Durand’s sense of the made world mediating time. And in doing that, they reconceived just what worship was and what it did.

The second part of this book opens with a title page (Figure 21). In itself, a title page marks one of the many changes that lie between William Durand’s Rationale and the sixteenth century. It belongs to book markets: something that a passer-by might see in a printer’s shop and decide to purchase. Durand’s Rationale was first a manuscript; it, too, came to be printed – in 1459 – one of the earliest medieval works to be printed using moveable type. Print, as we shall see, is also very much a part of our story.

This chapter addresses the evidence for the burial of moneyed laymen. The latter are, perhaps not unexpectedly, both ubiquitous and largely invisible in this collection. The necrosima includes only one hymn specifically addressing the death of a husband and father. By contrast, the majority of its forty “generic” hymns contemplate a male lay Christian subject, mourned by his children, anxious about abandoning his family, and plagued by anticipation of the harsh judgement he might receive. These hymns become a site for working out the necrosima’s theology of possessions – a topic that appears explicitly in some of the collection’s most paraenetically focused hymns, including, for example, madrāshâ 28 (“In funere principum, & Divitis cuiusque”/“On the burial of a prince or some kind of rich man”), but is a prominent theme in much of the corpus. This chapter accordingly examines anxieties about wealth and poverty, and the ethical pedagogy inherent in the necrosima, including its emphasis on charity.

This chapter introduces the project of the book: an examination of a selection of funerary hymns collected in the so-called “Roman Edition” of the writings of Ephrem the Syrian, assembled under the auspices of Pope Clement XI, and known as the necrosima. The chapter accordingly seeks to locate the work ahead against a number of different backdrops: the life, work, and study of Ephrem the Syrian; the transmission, celebration, and eventual neglect of the necrosima; and the value of attending both to ritual sources and to works of uncertain attribution. The concluding section also outlines the remaining chapters and the plan for the book itself.

The image in Plate 13 is now housed in the City Museum of Münster. The museum dates it to 1491. On the back, their website informs us, is the name of an otherwise unknown painter, Seewald. The museum lists it as “Faces without Eyes,” in which the eyes of all but Christ and two others have been “carefully removed such that one can often see the wood beneath.” The online description glosses the removal of the paint designating eyes as “destructions,” evoking “the immediate association” of “iconoclasts of the Reformation period.” As the Museum’s website suggests, there is a long tradition of using the word “iconoclasm” to name a part of what happened in the sixteenth century and a rich and dense body of scholarship on “the destruction of art.” But, as the painting materializes, the word has never fit as a name for what Evangelicals did.

Children and youths account for five of the hymns in the collection: four for children, and one for youths. These, discussed in this chapter, nevertheless comprise an impressive and impressively diverse body of reflections on the death of those who had failed to reach adulthood. They variously narrate the anticipated fate of the departed and the experience of bereavement for families and communities, and discuss a range of pious postures by which they ought to encounter loss. These hymns also provide a site for examining the intersection between the necrosima’s funerary hyumns and Syriac literature more broadly. The madrāshê accordingly reflect themes prominent in the writings of Syriac’s most celebrated authors, including Jacob of Serugh and Ephrem’s genuine writings, and translate these authors’ theological reflections into concise, personalized hymnic epitomes.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.