Usurpation, Acceptance and Legitimacy in Medieval Europe , in Usurping Ritual, ed. Gerard Schwedler and Eleni Tounta, section of Ritual Dynamics and the science of Ritual. Vol. III – State, power and violence (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 447-473. (original) (raw)

Review: Power and Ceremony in European History eds Kalinowska and Spangler

Canadian Journal of History, 2022

The richness and abundance of ritual, ceremony, and performance in European history continue to fascinate historians after decades of description and analysis, and this collection introduces a new series of case studies that gives the reader much to chew on and to draw from in further work. Anna Kalinowska and Jonathan Spangler have brought together a group of papers for the most part devoted to Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Scandinavia. The book is valuable for that alone, as it helps to broaden the historiographical lens away from Western Europe and to introduce students to these important areas. The chapters deal primarily with the early modern period, with much of the book occupied with the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Taken as a whole, the collection will serve readers interested in elite ceremonials and courtly rituals well, and succeeds in its goal of broadening the comparative discussion of these important aspects of European history. The book is divided into four parts, plus an introduction by Kalinowska and Spangler. The introduction lays out the rationale and historiographical genealogy of the collection. As the study of political ritual and ceremony moved, over the last decades of the twentieth century, from description to analysis, from curiosity to significance, it became widely acknowledged that the elaborate ritual life of premodern Europeans could and should be read from sociological and anthropological perspectives. All of the essays are therefore indebted to Edward Muir, obviously, but with strong influence from Elias, Kantorowicz, Duindam, Cannadine, and Stollberg-Rillinger. One will not, however, find much in the way of theory in this collection. The editors specify in the introduction that their concern is to promote the analysis of primary sources as the foremost task of historians and history students. All of the essays are, therefore, documentary studies at their core, and the collection excels at bringing forward recent analyses of ritual documents and events. Part one looks specifically at rituals and ceremonies of coronation and enthronement. In sixteenth-century Istanbul (Yelçe), eighteenth-century

"The Magic of Early Medieval Ritual", Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009), pp.111-125

Whether, and how, we ought to study early medieval rituals has been much debated recently, including in the pages of this journal by Geoffrey Koziol and Philippe Buc. This paper is intended as a contribution to this debate, and argues that rituals’ written or spoken interpretations are not a simple rendering of the ritualized actions’ ‘meanings’ in words and must therefore be analysed separately, not conflated with the possible effects of performance. Ritualized acts thus had two loci: the short-term experience of the embodied performance, and the long-term struggle over interpretation in speech and writing, both of which need to be explored with appropriate methodologies. Whilst the textuality of our sources thus needs to be taken seriously, it is proposed that we can also say something about the possible or even probable characteristics of early medieval ritualized acts as the medium of bodily postures and gestures used for demonstrative public interations between power holders.

Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe

The Judgement of Solomon. as described in I Kings. iii. verses 16-28 (centre). Solo1non being led to his royal consecration (1op left): his anointment (I Kings, i. verses 39-40) (top right).