Public Ritual

Basic to any study of ritual in Western culture is the understanding that its history is qualified through linguistic distinctions between ritual (derived from the study of liturgical rites, ritus) and ceremony (derived from the stages of the celebration, caerimonia). Thus, the modern etymological basis of ritual is rightly sited within the upheaval of the sixteenth century and the rise of Protestantism, yet its history from classical antiquity through modern culture is posited on the importance of public rituals enacted in early medieval communities. For example, the cultural performance of ritual at the close of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian West was predicated on the importance of liturgical rites that were performed by members of monastic communities in order to promote and to maintain the hierarchies of rulership that bound ecclesiastical and lay communities into a "body politic." The embodied celebration of ritual was, in turn, founded on an ethos celebrating the omnipresence of the sacred. The elaboration of the adventus novi episcopi (the ceremonial entry honoring the appointment of new bishops) established the eternal model for the reception of royalty in Western kingdoms. The rituals of Visigothic kingship included the sacral elements of unction, the ecclesiastical ritual of coronation, and the swearing of a royal oath to protect property. By the tenth century, the most frequently enacted rituals were religious processions staged to honor the holy feast days and the solemn celebrations of the Church liturgy, which drew the attendance of dignitaries of the royal and Church courts. A more political use of early ritual enactment soon extended to the reconciliation of communities after a king's subjects had suffered the trespass of war and violence. Both the frequency of war and the gravity of insurrection in the early Middle Ages influenced the protocol surrounding the presentation of royal regalia. Medieval rituals of lordship that were centered on restoring peace first incorporated the regalia of sword into the enactment of truce. Such ceremonies of peace then influenced the history of royal ritual. The incorporation of the sword of justice, spurs, and the enactment of the kiss of peace into the royal coronation ritual are testimony that the divine providence of ordained authority that was increasingly celebrated in terms of "natural" realities.

If initially the celebration of royal ritual was performed to burnish regal authority, early commentators on such ceremonial enactments recognized how the symbolic enactment of the sacred promoted an ideology of power that ultimately lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Texts that recorded the liturgy of raising prayers and the celebration of Mass were central features in the corpus of historical scholarship that examined the liturgy of coronation rituals. In general, the records of such rites underscore the intrinsic association of regnum and sacerdotium based on the exaltation of Judeo-Christian models of kingship within a rapidly changing dynastic basis of medieval territories of power. In general, the multivalent history of the early medieval rituals of royal advent attests to the primacy of symbolic dramatization in the history of world culture. For anthropologist Clifford Geertz and modern scholars, the past dynamics of social order are linked to two sources, charisma and the authority vested in a ruler's body. To this end, throughout the history of medieval and early modern Europe, religion provided a Christological basis that promoted ritual associations of the sacred and profane.

A parallel corollary, the consolidation of sovereign prerogative over civic resources, also requires the same cultural frame in order to define the rites of constitutive power and the (mystical) ceremonial attributes of bodily actions. Evidence supporting Geertz's observations extend throughout the Middle Ages, when both royal and Church officials began to shape commentary on Church liturgy into a discourse that promoted the viability of a "political theology" predicated on ritual and the construction of holiness. The writings of men in orders, canon lawyers, and later royal publicists promoted the celebration of royal advent enacted through dramatic parallels drawn between the Majesty of Christological kingship and the Dignitas of the king's body on display, vested with royal regalia and the insignia of spiritual authority. The annual rites commemorating Christ's Birth and Passion were incorporated into the history of dynastic states. Failures derived from dynastic or territorial ambitions were atoned through recourse to rites of royal penance and the solemn display of relics in public processions. Imagery of coronation ceremonies was recorded in texts that enhanced the parallels of the lives of kings with the lives of the Biblical kings of the Old Testament. As contemporary culture articulated the spiritual basis of royal authority in terms of obligations and prerogatives of office, the resources of community life visualized the extended nature of this kingship with recourse to the sculpture that framed church portals. To summarize, members of civic communities who sought salvation through ritual enactment of Christ's Majesty increasingly honored the thaumaturgical elements of royal Majesty as they crossed the liminal space of sanctity.

By the twelfth century, the history of royal advent had achieved an element of codification that proved essential to the emerging theory of political theology now associated with the celebration of late-medieval ritual and ceremonial traditions. First, the historical understanding of the sacred rites of unction and coronation was articulated through the invocation of the gravitas of anointing medieval rulers. With recourse to historical texts, commentators grafted the legacy of eleventh-and twelfth-century Capetian ceremonial onto the stemma of the early-medieval royal dynasties of the Merovingian and Carolingian rulership. The transmission of one legend became the impresa of French ritual practice, and ultimately influenced the history of other national rituals of advent. The search for mystical provenance led to a premise of divine communication: the origins of Christian kingship were traced to the conversion of Constantine the Great and the baptism of the Frankish king, Clovis. The royal legend was familiarized in texts and the subsequent performance of the French ritual of consecration with holy oil increasingly celebrated the sacramental basis of political power achieved through hereditary rulership. Thus, the ritual elements of elevation and investiture that had once dramatized the elective principle of monarchy were effaced in the course of the High and Late Middle Ages in order to stress the primacy of royal power in a fully hereditary monarchy. The history of enthronement was addressed with recourse to ceremonial elevation, the display of royal insignia, and the incorporation of heraldic and dynastic emblems in the historical accounts of the Capetian dynasty. Jurists and publicists who wrote extensively on behalf of royal prerogative promoted royal authority over matters of church and state. Artists captured the primacy of such argument by depicting royal enthronement in manuscripts, liturgical texts, and coinage. In each medium, the representation of royalty was achieved through the dramatization of divine presence that extended to new participants, foremost the increasing large cadre of officials who promoted royal interests and the rise of civic communities that were steadily brought under an invigorated model of royal prerogative.

By the late thirteenth century, the articulation of the sacred in rituals enacted to dramatize obedience to ordained authority served to define communal practices inherent in the administration of law and justice. And, to exactly the opposite effect, the celebration of ceremonies and rituals that elevated the doctrine of political theology into a nascent form of constitutional thought were also enacted to manifest the "natural" realities of sacred rites and public ceremonies. Few scholars have influenced modern scholarship on the essence of ritual symbolism in the late medieval and early modern state as fully as Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895–1963). In his seminal work, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Kantorowicz schematized the interplay of ritual, symbolism, politics, and law that flourished from the late Middle Ages well into the seventeenth century. Ultimately, Kantorowicz posited an integrated model of power that incorporated the full history of antiquity with that of Byzantium and the Western world. Central to the argument is the history of Roman law precepts addressing questions of majesty and authority; the development of laws of community, ius commune, were treated as empirical models of an ethos supporting civic authority within an integral community of divine providence. The model was antique and universal, but its application favored the northern monarchies of France, England, and the comital states of Burgundy.

As charted by Kantorowicz, in the course of the fourteenth century, as the Capetian royal house began to falter and the Valois dynasty was elevated to the throne, the drama of royal bodily metaphor achieved the status of public law pertaining to royal succession and the inalienability of royal domain. One effect of this emerging constitutionalism was to promote anew the fully hereditary title of the Valois to the crown of France. A second was to encourage representational models of kingship. The image of the sovereign as embodiment of both qualities of Majestas and Dignitas is one of the most striking features of late medieval kingship in both France and England. For France, modern scholars have elucidated how the pictorial traditions of representation were adapted to exceptional effect in the coronation book of Charles V of France and Jeanne of Bourbon. Executed at the king's request in 1364, the fully illuminated manuscript records the image of majesty with the presentation of the king and queen's authority during the royal ceremonial of coronation and their joint enthronement that concluded the ritual.

Although modern historians celebrate the articulation of Majesty through image, the constitutional implications of the subsequent ritual enactments staged during the reigns of Charles VI and Charles VII revived the drama of protecting the sempiternal basis of the crown of France within the context of war and trespass. Neither the French nor English monarchy exhibited the necessary vigor to assert dynastic preeminence and power. Yet, the effect on the French rite of royal coronation was to mark a liminal stage in articulating the abstract legal precepts of the early modern state. On the one hand, the rite of 1364 fully articulates the conscious and voluntary submission to the symbolic presentation of a king's body. Yet, the later inclusion of two oaths of office that bound successive kings to protect the full resources of the Church and the property of the royal domain produced the fictional ritual of royal marriage of the king to the kingdom. From this remarkable articulation of the duty of office, Kantorowicz was one of the first scholars to expand the constitutional meaning of ritual symbolism within the cognitive grammar of symbolic ritual. For both France and England, the subsequent elucidation of the legal fiction of the corporate soul influenced the tenor and protocol of ceremonial festivities, foremost by focusing on the presence of the "royal" body in politico-legal culture.

Following Kantorowicz's research, modern scholars have found considerable evidence attesting to a shared belief among contemporaries of late medieval Europe regarding the sempiternal nature of ordained rulership. The gravities of the Hundred Years War did little to efface belief in the mystical corpus of the realm, the body politic, and did much to promote the understanding of the king's authority as "living law," (Vivat lex). Royal piety attested to the sanctity of office and royal prerogative increasingly framed the duties and obligations imposed on subjects. The public display of the king's body was increasingly framed by extensive preparations that bound civic communities and the officials of the royal court who were charged with overseeing the enactment of power that was predicated on ideology and the control of social groups.

The symbols and rites associated with royal authority in the northern monarchies—foremost the crown, rite of unction, and the presentation of the scepter—were common attributes of other kingdoms. Variations in the rituals, however, reveal an issue innate in the classification of ritual. The development of a "functionalist" approach to celebrations of royal prerogative encourages the association of repetition with the emergence of new models of power. Yet, the English and French models cast a long shadow over the history of ritual celebrations of advent in other communities. Before the reign of Alfonso XI in 1312, Spanish kings rarely resorted to the full ritual of unction, coronation, and investiture. Yet, his dramatic gesture of self-coronation did not inspire subsequent kings who ruled over the regions of Spain and the Netherlands to repeat the gesture. Both Philip II and Philip IV were adamant promoters of royal prerogative and vigilant defenders of the primacy of Catholic ritual, yet the ritual of Habsburg advent is rarely celebrated within the model posited by Kantorowicz. Moreover, the perception that sites of power are defined through repeated enactment of ritual and secular ceremonies honoring the king's authority detracts from a full appreciation of the gravity of imperial authority in the late Middle Ages. For example, Emperor Charles IV of Bohemia established Prague as the center of empire but he remained a pivotal figure in the formation of French dynastic interests in the early fourteenth century. A second imperial figure, Frederick III, promoted a Christological depiction of Habsburg rule that marked the recovery of the vitality of German kingship. His magisterial enthronement in Rome in 1452 has not been studied as an impresa of ordained ritual; yet the liturgy, the drama of enactment by the presence of Pope Pius II as officiant and the vision of ordained rule shared with the Empress Eleanor of Portugal touch directly on the character of Renaissance rulership: the coronation accounts emphasize the imposition of a humanistic model of kingship that scholars now associate with the monarchies of Renaissance France and England.