The Sacrament of the Altar

Sacrament an Alter ... edited by Daveth Frost ... has received my enthusiastic commendations in several recent posts. Here are one or two detailed, final, points.

I'm not sure that Frost has radically reconsidered material he has incorporated from his earlier articles. He could have enriched our enjoyment of the "pope-holy" pitlgrimage, for example!

Possibly, those wishing to engage hand-to-hand with the texts Frost cites might wish to check them. Exemplorum gratia: page 38, footnote 34: is inentum a mistake for inventum? On page 210, what does Frost mean by 'Hippolytus'? If he is referring to the document, widely popular among 'liturgists' in the middle of the twentieth century and to which they referred as 'the Apostolic Tradition', he appears not to be aware that it is not nowadays very widely, or very confidently, ascribed to Hippolytus; nor is it deemed to offer secure information about the early liturgy of the Roman Church. And my copy of Jungmann does not allude to this text on Volume I, page 51, anyway. 

And ... oops ... it has just hit me in the eye  ... see footnote 252 ... the De Sacramentis (at least as edited by Henry Chadwick) does not (I am glad to say) read Accipte or sanguis meis.

But these are the merest quisquiliae. Frost has produced one of the finest works of scholarship I have seen for a long time. I hope that other volumes in this series will boldly emerge. We have all struggled with quite early modern editions of the Ordinalia, the medieval Cornish Mystery plays; how wonderful it would be to have editions which actually discussed the interesting literary questions which so often present themselves. Nicholas Williams has done marvellously with one 'recent' text, Bewnans Ke (sadly out of print). But the queue is long.

A final point: readers of Frost will, thankfully, not be much troubled by what I have heard called the KKommon KKornish KKult; a revised account of Revived spoken Cornish invented by one Ken George. Hundreds of people may be wasting their time learning this version of 'Cornish'; they would have done better to stick with the 'Unified Cornish' which was good enough for Nance and his generation.