ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the possibilities and nature of such variations and how they consistently manifest sensory preoccupations, by recounting the types of liturgical contexts, people and objects. While the social dimensions of provision are essential, this has been the objective of micro-histories. Here the aesthetic concerns of liturgical life have prominence. Liturgical provision encompassed fabric, contexts and people, but also their management. Its administration depended upon a series of books that contained prayers and the directions or rubrics that gave worship its performative shape, but also effective deployment of worship itself in a way that minimized disruptions and allowed devotion to take place unabated. Bringing liturgical texts together with devotional and theological works and the fabric of worship tells us much about the sensibilities of fifteenth-century English Christianity. Ideally laymen and women attended worship in some capacity. Lay involvement in liturgical action was minimal, but it did not mean removal from liturgy altogether.
