Liturgy's Imagined Pasts: Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today

This book calls attention to the importance of scholarly reflection on the writing of liturgical history. The essays not only probe the impact of important shifts in historiography but also present new scholarship that promises to reconfigure some of the established images of liturgy’s past. Based on papers presented at the 2014 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference, Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s seeks to invigorate discussion of methodologies and materials in contemporary writings on liturgy’s pasts and to resource such writing at a point in time when formidable questions are being posed about the way in which historians construct the object of their inquiry.

Teresa Berger is professor of liturgical studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School where she also holds an appointment as the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology. She is the author, most recently, of @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2018) and editor or co-editor of three previous volumes from the Yale ISM Liturgy Conferences from Liturgical Press.

Bryan D. Spinks is the Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and Pastoral Theology at Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School, and Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. A priest in the Church of England, his most recent book is Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day. He is editor and co-editor of two previous volumes from the Yale ISM Liturgy Conferences.