Winner of the Haskins Medal

Richard William Pfaff's magnum opus, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), represents the sum of a life's work dedicated to the recovery and analysis of the sources for the first comprehensive account of the liturgy in medieval England, from early Anglo-Saxon origins right up until the Reformation. Based on prodigious knowledge of primary sources, the book combines a sovereign overview with penetrating forays into the particularities of specific periods, regions, religious orders and liturgical uses. Although focused on medieval England, Pfaff never loses sight of parallel and contrary developments in Continental Europe, without which a history of the liturgy in the British Isles cannot be written. To the extent that a history of English politics, literature, art and music in the period is impossible without taking the liturgy into account, Pfaff has provided a new footing and standard point of reference for innumerable colleagues. Writing in the tradition of distinguished predecessors such as Henry Bradshaw, Edmund Bishop, John Wickham Legg, and Walter Howard Frere, the book is steeped in tradition, yet nonetheless offers valuable critiques of previous approaches to its topic in the context of a steady historiographical retrospective. Far more than a synthesis, his book provides a new foundation. The author is equally at home in Bede's England as he is in Wycliffe's; as comfortable in a monastery as in a parish church. In addition to a vast compendium of information, much of it gleaned from primary sources, the book also offers a primer in the possibilities and limits of liturgical scholarship. Reviews repeatedly refer to the book's "magisterial" command of the sources, its quality as a "masterpiece of liturgical and historical scholarship," "prodigious and masterful," and, not least, to its lasting value as a standard work of reference for scholars across a wide range of historical disciplines. Historians of all of medieval Europe, not just medieval England, will have reason to be profoundly grateful to Richard Pfaff, not only for his learning and long labor, but also for his humor and, equally important, his reticence in not going farther than the sometimes scanty evidence permits. In the words of one review, The Liturgy in Medieval England represents "the crowning achievement of a long and influential career." In recognition of Pfaff's achievement, the Haskins Committee is honored to adorn that crown with the Haskins Medal for 2012.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Chair
Dyan H. Elliott
Jennifer Summit