St Clement by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1730-1735
For the lover of the picturesque and the Romantic – that is to say, the Medieval – one’s imagination may be captured by the traditional liturgies of the Church in her various Rites, or by the Monarchical or Knightly ceremonial surviving in Britain and the Commonwealth Realms, Scandinavia, the Benelux Countries, or Spain. Even in our republics, academic ritual in the bigger colleges owes much to the Catholic and pre-modern origins of university education; the robes and chains of office, the scraps of Latin at a place like Harvard or Yale hearken back to when education meant something.
