Thank you that I can be a fellow of the IKGF for a whole year which is just so fantastic,

you have no idea.

Okay, I'm going to talk about Revelation, the promulgation of Christ and prophecy of

the past as a memory of the future and reports of Deutz which might sound a bit mysterious

and I hope I will reveal a bit more about it so it doesn't appear that mysterious in

the end anymore.

Let me start with a preliminary remark about the ideas presented here.

They are the first foray into a new project and are therefore more of a methodological

kind and restricted to a very small segment of the source.

I will be speaking about Rupert of Deutz' commentary on the liturgy or to put it in

a different fashion, an interpretation of the liturgy which he wrote between 1108 and

1112 which will be very interesting, remember the date, 1108-1112.

His commentary on the liturgy belongs to a genre that has more or less been overlooked

by historians and church historians alike till quite recently, liturgical exegesis.

By exegesis here I mean just interpretation.

It is Rupert of Deutz' special place in the history of ideas and the uniqueness of his

commentary De Divines Oficis which make him a good starting point to develop a new perspective.

Rupert's commentary is unique as it is the first of its kind after the Carolingian period

and it is often to be understood as a venture into new methods of interpretation.

For the new perspective my project wants to develop, looking at a liturgical commentary

is a good starting point since liturgy is the medium in which Christianity ritualized

its beliefs.

The fact that liturgy is an imposing system of rituals in which every medieval Christian

should take part makes it a socially far-reaching instrument.

Even if we know very little about how much of it was understood by the lay participants

there is no way around the fact that it played a crucial role in everyone's life and that

it communicated however rudimentarily the Christian way of life to everyone.

Given the importance of the liturgy it is worthwhile to look at how it gets interpreted.

This allows us insight into the complex spirituality of the Middle Ages and also into medieval

methods of interpretation as well as perceptions of time.

It is especially the last point that makes the commentaries on the liturgy interesting

for historians.

Since the commentaries on the liturgy interpret the present in a temporal fashion they are

evidence for how society understood itself in the flow of time and ultimately the workings

of the cosmos.

My paper will be divided into three parts.

First I will give a very short overview about Rupert of Deutz as an author, his self-understanding

as a visionary and prophet and the historical circumstances in which he was writing.

To analyze the way in which Rupert interpreted the liturgy we not only have to understand

him as an author but we also have to understand his method of interpretation.

Therefore in the second part of my paper I am going to have a closer look at his model

of interpretation with a special focus on how his etiodetical model embraces revelation

and the promulgation of Christ.

In the third part I will have a closer look at parts of Rupert's commentary on the liturgy

to show how his understanding of revelation and the proclamation of Christ were linked

to prophecy and how in his understanding the liturgy became a tool to memorize the past

of the future.

I will begin by considering Rupert as an author, visionary prophet and his historical circumstances.

Rupert was born in 1070 in or somewhere near Liège.

There he was given to the monastery of Saint Laurent in 1082 where he became a monk in