The recent winner of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Momentum Prize reveals a tradition that shapes our modern lives more deeply than we might think: medieval rites simultaneously shed light on the roots of our European identity, the functioning of communal experiences, and the hidden symbolic patterns of modern society. The liturgical database Usuarium, created by his research group, is a unique tool that puts the past of European culture on a map – and also answers why we cannot live without rites. We spoke with Dr. Miklós István Földváry, associate professor and head of the Department of Religious Studies, about his Lendület research.
You have been awarded the first-ever Lendület Prize for the Humanities and Social Sciences by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Were you surprised by the recognition?
Of course. In the past two years, three of my applications have failed, and one I was unable to submit due to formal reasons. I had almost given up all hope. Then, quite suddenly, all sorts of grants and awards came. I don't know what could have guided the committee, but I would like to hope that in addition to the professional performance – which is obviously at least at this level in many other research groups – they realised that we also didn't stop working due to lack of money.
The past two years have not been about idle waiting, but about completing the previous research under difficult circumstances. This required the trust as well as the dedicated work of many people, and not least the support of voluntary donors. I launched a campaign with the slogan “Adopt a Missal!”, within the framework of which more than 5,700,000 forint (ca. €15 000 / $17 000) was raised and used to acquire and process the remaining sources. Among the adopters, in addition to renowned domestic and foreign scientists, there were also many generous layfolk who recognized the significance of the project.
Two other aspects could be altruism and raising the next generation. We do not jealously guard either the expensively acquired materials or the information we produce. All of this is free for grabs, which is perhaps unusual in the world of competitive researchers. Of course, there is some competitive altruism in this, as anthropologists call it.
A Hungarian research group can truly break out of isolation by offering useful things,
as easily accessible and as affordable as possible. We do this, and it brings us widespread international recognition and a network of contacts. As for future generations, about forty young people have gained experience in the research group in the past decade. This was justified by the magnitude of the work to be done, but also by the fact that in today's conditions there is no more effective way of education than involving students in responsible work. We also come into the sights of allied sciences most effectively through colleagues from different fields.
Why is it important to study medieval liturgy today?
I would like to highlight two factors. One is the question of European identity. While we study ancient or distant cultures with great respect, we often fail to love what is ours. Of course, we preserve, restore, make catalogues: but all this only leads to forgetting, to building a cemetery of memories, if we do not find a living, personal connection with our own past.
Europe is not limited to the otherwise respectable level of prosperity, security and civilisational values we represent. It is also a symbolic reality, which means preserving, creatively carrying and being touched by a fascinating tradition.
The other is the discovery of ritual. While ritual has long been synonymous with a sort of primitive vacuity, the impersonal, the inessential, it also has been gaining popularity for quite some time. Several trends in the humanities have also demonstrated the importance, even indispensability, of ritual, or more broadly, symbolic modes of action. This turn is evident, on the one hand, in the appreciation of the rich ritual life of ancient or exotic cultures, and, on the other hand, in the recognition of the non-goal-oriented, repetitive, communal practices of the modern world, and even in the development of pseudo-rituals.
Just think of familiar concepts like thoughtful branding of companies and products,
group dynamics and identity formation in sports, the press, public life or social media, the almost mythical possibility of archetypal representation and grand narratives offered by movies and series. All of these are the path-seeking, but fragmented, uncoordinated manifestations of a deeply hidden human tendency. Compared to this, we are lagging behind when it comes to our own organic ritual heritage.
What message does a centuries-old rite convey to modern man?
Europeanness and ritual meet in the medieval liturgy of Latin Christianity. This is the ritual mother tongue of Europe, founded in late antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and has not completely ceased to function and influence since then.
There was nothing in pre-modern Europe that mobilized such resources, was so persistent and so comprehensive in every corner of the continent, and encompassed such a broad social spectrum. This is true even if one does not necessarily identify with either Christianity or the Latin, or Roman, tradition. We are all the heirs to this tradition.
Speaking of other cultures, such as the ancient Greeks or Egyptians, it would also seem absurd to separate religious-mythological-ritual tradition from culture.
Xenophanes could not free himself from Homer, whatever he thought about myths and polytheism.
There are many past circumstances on which we depend, whether we like it or not. There is no pure past or pure present. Culture is always like a performance: the creative re-experiencing of things created by others; the attribution of new meanings to objects, texts, gestures that we have received ready-made but which cannot survive without us, and indeed, with every re-enactment, we add something to them.
You have been researching liturgy since 2003, forming a research group in 2013, and your topic is huge, with most source material unprocessed.
The topic is really huge, but it would be presumptuous to say that it is unprocessed. For a long time, in many scientific fields, others have done enormous work. What is new for me is the demand for completeness and the methodological insights that make completeness approachable. My vision is to examine liturgy as a whole, not in parts. But obviously I do not understand everything that this objective requires: text, music, objects, buildings, history. I am originally a philologist, so I understand texts to some extent, but fortunately for me, the primary witnesses of medieval liturgy are books, and everything else is somehow connected to the texts.
The other aspect is that liturgy is a code similar to language, not completely closed, but consisting of definable values and interpretive ranges, operating as a system. This means that the use of spaces, objects, movements, melodies can be functionally grasped and described even if one can only superficially address them as an archaeologist, choreographer or musicologist. Thus, I can base my research on direct textual sources, the ritual books. Not the least aspect is that there are quite a few of these, so in contrast to all other types of documents, they enable quantitative analysis assisted by digital tools.
The third aspect is that I attach special importance to variety. Liturgy was not performed by everyone, always and everywhere in the same way, but it was done in a similar enough way for common origin of the variants to be obvious. Thus, both agreements and differences are telling. The agreement is because it highlights the ancient, solid, consensus-like elements of the system. The difference is because it is tied to an institution, place, and era, making it identifiable afterwards, and it developed a close attachment in contemporaries to the form of the common heritage that they represented.
How are you getting along? What have you found so far?
This research is so comprehensive that it is actually difficult to talk about results in the usual sense. Rather
It's like discovering the periodic table or the taxonomy of living things.
It creates a framework against which a source, a rite or an institution can be effectively and correctly analysed and interpreted. Studies could be written from almost every query in our database, and doctoral dissertations could be written from every item in our drop-down list of categories. This is partly the case already: among my doctoral students there was one who dealt with the Codex Pray, an influential early Hungarian Sacramentary, others chose baptism, penance, royal coronation, the liturgy or agricultural rites as their topics.
But we do not want to monopolise the opportunity, and indeed, more and more people are recognizing the usefulness of the approach and tools outside the research group. Wherever we go, the case studies that are prepared in the spirit of this concept and in the context of the knowledge we have accumulated open up new horizons in the research of the given topic.
And not to avoid the question, so far we have managed to form a complete picture of the material of the liturgy of the mass. Its main result is the survey of tendencies characteristic of regions and eras. I explained the basic outlines in the manual related to the Usuarium database, but we are currently working on a Missale synopticum that presents the overall picture in a structured and clear way: a manual-like edition of the missal that shows together the similarities and differences of 250 traditions.
What exactly does the title of the second Momentum project, which is now underway, mean: “The culminating points of the church year and human life”?
A rite is deeply engraved in us either because we perform it regularly, or because we perform it rarely, but then it takes hold of us, making a deep sensual, intellectual, and emotional impression on us. The daily routine of the liturgy consisted of masses and services. Their text and melody come from a vast collection, but their structure is constant, and in the Middle Ages they were preserved both spatially and socially in the inner spaces of churches, separated by partitions with some being accessible only to clerics.
The highlights of the church year are the special, memorable rites of the Easter and Christmas holidays. Holy Week is full of these, above all, but also Candlemas and Ash Wednesday. On the one hand, they have a specific structure: things happen and are said in a way that is characteristic of that day, and not at other times. On the other hand,
these rites leave the closed clerical spaces, they seem to inhabit the entire church space,
They even go out into the world. They often feature blessings of objects and processions, which establish a direct connection between the clergy and the laity. These have made the great narratives of Christian salvation history tangible to the widest possible audience in European cultural memory.
The special highlights of the year are those that are not so much about the grand narrative as about medieval society’s relationship with nature and farming. In an agrarian world, every harvested crop was blessed, and every crisis or risk was neutralised with rituals. Even if many people today find such things strange, they say a lot about the perception and feeling with which the ancient European man related to the weather, the land, animals, and plants.
The Christian tradition is today criticised for being purely transcendentalistic: it places the sacred beyond everything, objectifies the world, and is one-sidedly anthropocentric. We are experiencing an almost renaissance of animism in intellectual circles, while we hold Western culture with its Christian roots responsible for the exploitation of nature. The agrarian rites show how much traditional Christianity is – if I may say so – animistic, that is, how much it respects the created world as a spiritual reality.
The high points of human life are what Arnold van Gennep called the transitional rites of the life cycle in his classic work. Birth, adulthood, marriage, illness, death. Of course, the relationship between Christian sacraments and sacramentals and life cycle rites is complex, but it is a fact that in the Middle Ages, when we can already count on an essentially completely Christian society, sacraments almost automatically accompanied significant changes in biological life and social situations. Even today, these are the situations in which the widest circles of society have a need for church rites.
This is no small complication, since the circle of people who behave religiously at these turning points is much wider than the circle of people who do so regularly. The phenomenon exists: as a researcher, it is not my job to judge, but it shows how difficult it is to experience these peaks or turning points without rituals.
How do these things interconnect?
Partly practically: they are contained in the same ritual books, rituals, or as they were called in the Middle Ages, agendas, or manuals. Clearly because these are rituals with movements that could not be performed from a large and heavy book placed on the altar or on a lectern. They required a light, portable carrier. Our previous project was based on large and heavy books, missals, or mass books; now we have switched to small ones. On the other hand, it’s because of the above. These rites are connected by their relative rarity, intensity and deep memory imprint, the crossing of spatial boundaries and the involvement of broad strata of society. The differences between cleric and layman, noble and peasant, man and woman, adult and child, which were still extremely sharp in the Middle Ages, are temporarily suspended here. That is perhaps why this is the least specialist section of liturgical history. It is easy to see that
Here we are researching something that touches almost all humanities and social sciences.
Why do you think it is important to examine liturgical rites not only from a religious but also from a socio-historical perspective? What connections do you see between liturgy and other social, legal or cultural practices?
In a liturgical setting such as the European Middle Ages and most societies based on strong public consensus, these are inseparable aspects.
Consensus-like realities are still created today by public, strictly bound words and actions: let us think of beatification, doctoral inauguration, or the swearing-in of a president. What fluctuates is the degree of formality, one might say its aesthetics. In the Middle Ages, too, it can be observed that some rites are more pragmatic, more attentive to validity and efficiency, such as penance or marriage.
But these same acts sometimes become attracted to ritual elaboration: spectacular movements, objects, captivating texts and songs are attached to them. The legal act develops into a performance, a social drama. This tendency is general and contributes greatly to the fact that the representation, presentation and staging of a value or concept effectively imprints the desired meaning in the minds of the participants. It is not theories but actions that create, interpret and consolidate the fundamental elements of society, law and culture. This is especially true in times when
There was no other way to communicate information: public events made it relevant.
And if someone wanted to manipulate the system, they could use the tools of ritual to mobilise new meanings and push old ones into the background. This is a popular and fruitful topic for research into political or power rituals today, but I must note that it is more aimed at “selling” the topic to the general public. The Middle Ages are much more characterised by permanence, that is, the maintenance of public agreement through rituals, than by the pursuit of their transformation. But we can observe slow changes in attitudes, and this is sometimes extremely exciting.
In any case, we are the heirs of this tradition. Only in comparison with distant cultures does it truly become clear how much the aesthetics, language of gestures, and time management of Christian ritual determine the attitude of modern Euro-Atlantic culture to almost every public, artistic, ceremonial, or action perceived as effective or valuable.
What do the occasional rites, the objects of your current research, have to say to us? What does the way baptisms, marriages, or funerals are celebrated reveal about medieval man?
Medieval man did not create his own rites. He inherited their most basic elements from late antiquity. The framework of occasional rites is already present in the sacramentaries of the 7th century, and even in some patristic texts. So what I said about the reliving of patterns inherited from the past was also valid for medieval man. He was not the subject, but the object of his own rites. When he was baptised, married, buried someone or was buried, he rather actively appropriated the meaning of the situation he was going through at that time.
These were moments of cultural acquisition.
The words spoken, the gestures performed, integrated him and those around him into the interpretive tradition they inherited and carried forward. All changes, whether in theoretical emphases or in dramaturgy, occurred almost involuntarily, slowly, with respect for the antecedents.
And how did liturgy serve as a tool for dealing with community conflicts?
The same thing was dynamically realised in rituals designed to deal with crises and conflicts. Saying things, acting them out, and reliving them are still a defining element of the toolbox of psychotherapy today. A problem cannot be solved simply by reflecting on it theoretically. In pre-modern society, it was important, and perhaps it would still be important today, that the frustration that develops in critical situations find a controlled channel, and that conflicts are resolved not only with words of power, but without the final humiliation of the losing party, by taking advantage of the healing effect of time and distance, i.e. in a sustainable way. Ritual is of course not a panacea, and it did not always work in the Middle Ages either. But it probably meant security that everyone could see themselves as part of a meaningful and organic system. The sinner was also a character in the drama and enjoyed the protection of a well-defined status.
You work on medieval texts, using modern methods. The unique Usuarium database has been under construction for a decade. What discoveries has the use of databases and quantitative methods led you to?
I mentioned earlier that the novelty of my approach is the demand for completeness. But completeness cannot mean processing tens of thousands of manuscripts or printed materials. Three insights helped make them manageable. One is that ultimately
I'm not interested in books, but in the practice of the past:
in liturgy as an activity, regardless of whether it is documented by a single book or a hundred.
The second is that I consider human communities as the subject of liturgy. These communities formed institutions and were usually closely linked to a church and its territory. In practice, they can therefore be equated with geographical coordinates, and all the variations that distinguish them can be projected onto a map. This often designates liturgical landscapes, regions.
The third realization is that there is an era whose source material is exceptionally useful. This is the early printing era, from Gutenberg to the Council of Trent, that is, from roughly the 1470s to the 1560s. At that time, almost every institution that considered itself a legitimate subject of the liturgy (diocese, monastery, religious order) sought to publish its entire liturgy, that is, its missal, its service books, and its ritual, in representative prints. By processing each of the printed books, at least
a complete and proportionate panoramic picture can be created for this period.
The characteristics extracted from it now need to be followed into the past or the future, that is, to determine their continuous transmission or lack thereof.
So, for me, the questions and the ideas that could answer them came first, and only then did the technology come. Usuarium started from my own digital collection. I had collected copies of several hundred liturgical books available online, which naturally brought about the need to store them safely and to review their contents. This led first to me inventing a description and content indexing system that serves as an catalogue to the content of the sources, and then to me developing a flexible code in which my expectations do not determine what I can digitally record from a source, but rather the content of the sources forms the markup language. The basic rule is that what is there, you must also be able to code. The point is that
unusually for the humanities, we have moved into the realm of data sets of millions,
and we have developed the syntax that makes this mass of data statistically interpretable and mappable. The keywords are therefore large, proportional and thus representative sampling, consistent coding language, and statistical and map-based evaluation. The result must then be analysed in a narrative way, but the trained eye will discover recurring formulas in certain proportions and geographical patterns.
Some of the phenomena were known before, but the context was missing. It is not unimportant what percentage of European institutions followed which of, say, three possible variant items, where they were located, and why they decided in favour of a given version. To mention just one example: I used this method to analyse the liturgical proposals of the late 11th century treatise Micrologus at the beginning of the Codex Pray, assessing which recommendations found a favourable response in the codex itself, which ones proved to be permanent in Hungary, and in which parts of Europe decisions were made similarly or contrary. The Micrologus was the liturgical program of the so-called Gregorian papacy, so assessing its impact is an important contribution to the long-standing debate among medieval historians about how Hungary in the Árpád era related to the movement.
What has it enabled you to do so far, and what new perspectives does the current project open up?
The biggest challenge for the new project is that
we have to encode rituals with a much less uniform structure and text base,
in which non-textual elements play a prominent role. Life cycle rituals are also far more variable in space and time than anything we have dealt with so far. Although we have many experiments and solution ideas, we have only tried a few of them in production. However, if we manage to develop the description language and create the digital tools necessary for efficient queries and visualizations, it will make Usuarium suitable for handling all types of rituals, and it may even be a guideline for other digital humanities enterprises that want to process large quantities of complex, but codeable actions.
You are on a sabbatical this academic year, writing a monograph on the liturgy of medieval Hungary for Brill.
The book is not primarily about new discoveries. In some respects, it is a summary of a school and research tradition that has been operating for decades, only this time it is presented abroad. In Hungary, primarily the research of Gregorian chant has been at the forefront since the 1970s, but it has also given inspiration and a new direction to other areas in contact with liturgical culture. I myself am heir to this tradition. In other respects, I have always tried to keep the “global” and “local” aspects together. One is the research of large-scale connections. Usuarium corresponds to this. At the end of the previous grant project period, I wrote a book about the approach, method, and main lessons.
I think this book is a breakthrough in perspective, but it will probably take decades for the profession to start believing what I am formulating there in summary fashion. Tellingly, the book cover has on it the symbol of the Usuarium concept, a map. To quote the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti in the translation of Thomas Ország-Land, “The pilot cannot help seeing a war map from the sky” (let’s now take the plane here as the database), but I still know, and I would like to know, “[to] tell below the home of Vörösmarty Mihály” (let’s take this as the details of the practices of the individual communities). My work and personal involvement started from the specific sources of the Hungarian Middle Ages. I was not interested in the map and the machine, but in the context of Hungarian intellectual history.
So now I am writing a book on Hungarian liturgy as a case study for the larger Usuarium book. This is an application of the previous book to a specific example, and I am sure that the international community is likelier to believe what I write here. I could have chosen any other country, even a cathedral or monastery, but I want to love what is mine and to encourage others to work with a similar method and interest in what is theirs.
Can you see how unique the tradition of Central European or Hungarian rites is within Europe? And have these ceremonies changed significantly throughout history, or was continuity more typical?
The Hungarian liturgy proves to be exceptional in that its uniform features apply to the entire medieval core territory of the kingdom, that is, to the church organization that was consolidated roughly up to the time of Saint Ladislaus. There is no other liturgy with such extensive, uniform features. The other exceptional feature is that most of these peculiarities already appear in sources from the 11th–12th centuries. At the same time – and this is what the Usuarium was needed to establish – these features cannot be demonstrated together anywhere outside Hungary.
All this leads us to conclude that an extremely creative intellectual workshop, well acquainted with and respectful of foreign traditions, created the basic features of the Hungarian liturgy already in the time of King Saint Stephen, the era of the founding of the state. In the favourable, centralised and concordant ecclesiastical-political environment, this spread successfully.
These same features remained until the end of the 16th century. There were changes, of course, but they did not affect the basic features of the pan-Hungarian liturgy. It is also obvious that the liturgy of Central Europe is, on the whole, of German origin, fits into the Eastern or Germanic landscape, and, with the exception of Poland, adapted to the principles of the Gregorian papacy. However, this did not mean either a lack of creativity or a rejection of more distant, Western European influences. In the evaluation of Central Europe as a liturgical region, the result is rather the separation of layers, rather than a categorical answer to the question of belonging here or there. I do not hide the fact that there is a current message in all of this. It has provided me with an example – a very attractive and telling one to me –
what Hungary's dependence on Europe, the West or Latin identity mean,
and what its independence, autonomy, and initiative mean.
How can these research results be made public – for example in education, church practice or for the wider public?
As I mentioned, the research group itself is an educational institution. It is like a kind of dual training: the students start working with me and find themselves learning Latin, getting to know palaeography, coming into contact with music and ritual. Since they do not come from the same place, the latinist gets to know the art historian, the ethnographer the theologian. The new project has not yet officially started, but a doctoral student colleague of mine is already forming a group of enthusiastic volunteers who are learning the digital processing of rituals.
Fortunately, the religious studies program at ELTE starts with a broad input, so every liberal arts student attends one or two of my introductory lectures, where Old Europe and ritual inevitably come up. I find that students from a wide variety of backgrounds leave these courses much more receptive than they were when they went there. This is not the research itself, but its most lasting effect. The impact on the wider audience is analogous.
The scientific results will probably remain with the experts, but the image or feeling that the Europe of liturgical uses evokes may in time become public domain. And as I said at the beginning, it is not indifferent today whether we can connect with this heritage and whether our interest in the rite finds an authentic object.
Church practice is a more delicate issue. From the Church's perspective, mainly because the uncertainty that characterises the relationship of Old Europe and its old rites is also present in the Church. Catholicism today is trying to appear globally, and therefore, as it were, consciously separate itself from European heritage. In church discourse, to be called a Cultural Christian is practically an insult, but I believe that the cultural, that is, the formal, aesthetic side of Christianity is not something inferior.
Without this, the “essence” is just a lifeless X-ray image that is difficult to connect with.
It is not very credible for the Church to encourage the Eastern communities, i.e. Byzantine, Slavic, Coptic, Syrian, Armenian, to cherish their own heritage, and even to encourage inculturation, i.e. for newly converted non-European peoples to preserve the valuable elements of their past, if the majority of Catholicism is almost ashamed of everything that ties it to Rome and Europeanness. This division and uncertainty was completely understandable in the generation after World War II, then with the dissolution of the colonial empires, and especially since peoples outside Europe have begun to make up the majority of Christianity. But every tradition is made up of layers, and just as the European tradition incorporated the biblical and then the classical Greco-Roman layer, we can consider the medieval layer as a similar, if not necessarily final, layer.
From a secular perspective, the issue is delicate because, as educators and scholars, we must maintain a certain distance from religious institutions. Christianity still exists, the rituals we research have modern equivalents, and it is clear that most people who are interested in the Christian past are no strangers to the Christian present. This requires caution and tact. We cannot expect the citizens of a disestablished state, most of whom are not religious, to finance church projects. At the same time, the internal, practical experience of rituals, and even their revival, is also a significant source of knowledge from a scientific perspective.
Without it, we would be like the armchair anthropologists of the 19th century, now looked down upon.
I also make no secret that as a publisher of practical books, an organiser and a singer, I have been supporting and performing the traditional Roman liturgy and – as far as the framework allows – its Hungarian, Esztergom version for about twenty years. We also have bilingual and musically notated publications for practical use, and anyone who visits St. Michael's Church on Váci Street in Budapest can encounter the old liturgy and its medieval Hungarian singing tradition live. But I do not advertise this in a university or scientific environment. Anyone who does not do his research on me will not even know about it. I do not expect or require my colleagues or students to be committed and to what extent. Of course, there are those who start from a religious background and those who do not. This is also the case in study groups of the profession outside of Hungary. Church practice can be a catalyst, an experimental field and a beneficiary of scientific work, but it is in their mutual interest not to mix them up.