chapter 24 LITURGY AND PIYUT stefan c. reif and elisabeth hollender LITURGY stefan c. reif In approaching the scientific history of Jewish liturgical development in the Christian world in the eight centuries leading up to the period of the Reformation and Renaissance, one is faced with a number of obstacles. There is the general problem of attitudes to the Middle Ages. The Protestant Reformation was successful not only in theological terms but also in the gigantic impression it made on intellectual and educational progress in the Western world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It became common not only in seminaries but also in universities to think of the Middle Ages as a scholastic aberration that betrayed the fine standards of the Greco-Roman and early Christian world, and their equivalents in the early modern period. The various varieties of Muslim, Jewish, and Roman Catholic learning were downplayed and regarded as more primitive and less independent forms of thought than what evolved under the influence of the novel religious ideologies of such thinkers as Luther and Calvin. Although still found in some elements of current scholarship, this notion has in recent years been subject to severe criticism on the part of those anxious to achieve a more nuanced and better-balanced assessment of the progress made in the period under discussion. As Rosamond McKitterick has put it, “Medieval historians have an urgent obligation to see, first, that the middle ages, however defined, are not misrepresented, or worse, dismissed as an unfortunate and embarrassing faux pas, lasting for 1,000 years, that is best forgotten.” 1 What the historian should be attempting to uncover is not simply a catalogue of decadence 1 R. McKitterick, History and its Audiences: Inaugural Lecture Given by Rosamond McKitterick ... 15 May 2000 (Cambridge, 2000), 60–1; see also Stefan C. Reif, Why Medieval Hebrew Studies? (Cambridge, 2001), and the pertinent remarks of A. Burghart, “Medieval Studies in Brief,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 July 2009, 11. 648