Table Of ContentThe Dangers of Ritual
BETWEEN EARLY MEDIEVAL TEXTS
AND SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC THEORY
Philippe Buc
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buc, Philippe, 1961-
The dangers of ritual: between early medieval texts and social
scientific theory / Philippe Buc.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-01604-6
1. Ritual—History. 2. Europe—Religious life and customs. I. Title.
BL600. B76 2001
390/.094'0902—dc21 2001021156
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Janson
Printed on acid-free paper.°°
www.pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Late Antique and Early Medieval Narratives 13
Chapter One
Writing Ottoman Hegemony: Good Rituals and Bad Rituals
in Liudprand of Cremona 15
Chapter Two
Ritual Consensus and Ritual Violence: Texts and Events in
Ninth-Century Carolingian Political Culture 51
Chapter Three
Rites of Saints and Rites of Kings: Consensus and Transgression
88
in the Works of Gregory of Tours
Chapter Four
The Late Antique Matrix: Martyrdom and Ritual 123
Part II: From Theology to the Social Sciences,
ca. 1500-ca. 1970
Chapter Five
Rites, Rituals, and Order, ca. 1500-ca. 1800
Chapter Six
Medieval History and the Social Sciences, ca. 1800-ca. 1970
Chapter Seven
Epilogue
Index
The Bibliography for this book can be found in its entirety on the
Princeton University Press website, www.pup.princeton.edu/biblios/buc.
PREFACE
This essay was long in the making. I presented its first fruits starting in
1994, but I began working on it in 1990, as I was reading tenth-century
sources in preparation of a lecture course comparing France and Germany
between 800 and 1300. Noticing the high density of what one calls rituals
in these documents, as well as the peculiar nature of the narrative patterns
in which these rituals were embedded, I decided to explore further. Interest
had much to do with intellectual biography. I had studied with Jacques Le
Goff and Gerard Caspary, two men deeply interested in, widely cognizant
of, and influenced by anthropology, especially of the structuralist sort.
Among other mentors, Karl Leyser and Jean-Claude Schmitt utilized as
well this social science, the one more Manchester school neo-Durkheimi-
ans, the other ethnology and literary studies of folklore. Close friends and
contemporaries, then and later as the project evolved, drew effortlessly
on anthropology. I think of Patrick Geary, Amy Remensnyder, and David
Nirenberg. I too, I hoped, would come to understand what ritual was, and
communicate this gnosis.
A seminar experiment convinced me that I had to investigate. I supplied
my students with, on the one hand, several late antique and medieval texts
containing what to some historians would have been rituals, and, on the
other, several anthropological and sociological theories. The first set in
cluded coronation ordines, ordines for the ordeal, a chronicle featuring an
ordeal, another depicting a royal accession, yet another with an imperial
funeral and apotheosis, and a martyr’s passion. The second set included
Maurice Bloch, Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Victor
Turner, and Max Gluckman, Renato Rosaldo, Georges Markus, and James
Fernandez. There were two options for the written assignment. The one
consisted in taking one primary source (or several from the same narrow
era) and exploring it using a plurality of models, the other in using a single
model to analyze a plurality of primary sources. The result was telling.
Specific source-genres, and not all sources produced by a given culture, or
not all sources bearing on a same sort of ritual, had a surface affinity with
an individual theory. The literary texture of the source, that is, the mode
in which it presented the ritual, led one to pick a social scientific model as
opposed to another. A troubling conclusion, for it suggested that it is not
the actual practice of the historical agents but the source genre that leads
a scholar to employ a model. A priori, though, a given culture should be
approachable through a single theory.
viii PREFACE
The inquiry now ends on a more destructive than constructive tone. No
doubt I shall be criticized for refusing to put forward a new theory of
ritual. Friends have already done so privately. They have deplored as well
the somewhat lachrymose tone (to use Nirenberg’s term) with which I
engage existing scholarship. Is it enough to overturn (or attempt to do so)
a model that one thinks produces more confusions than positive results,
and not to propose a fully constructed alternative? I think so. The absence
of an alternative or rival does not entail that a model is true or logically
sound. Why should one wait for a mature new thesis to invalidate the ex
isting one?
The administration of Stanford University deserves my special thanks
for having convinced me over the years, along with many other junior
members of the faculty, that research is more important than teaching.
Without its relendess pressure I might be a different human being.
Several other institutions have supported research and writing. I must
thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (Wassenaar), where I
was a fellow for 1997-98, as well as the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte
(Gottingen), where I finalized the introduction and the conclusion in July
1999. Stanford University Libraries and its staff (especially John Rawlings),
the Leiden Royal University Library, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de
France despite the dismal crisis that the hubris of Pharaoh Francois Mitter-
and (r. 1981-95) threw it in. My colleagues in the Department of History
read drafts and commented on them, both owing to the tenure process and
at the occasion of a faculty seminar in March 1999. No man being an island,
I benefited gready from many discussions and suggestions from individual
colleagues across America, Western Europe, and the East. I acknowledge
them in the relevant chapters, but want to give special mention to Alain
Boureau and Mayke de Jong, as well as to Kathryn Miller and Brad Greg
ory. The latter named, as colleagues, have vasdy enriched my self-aware
ness in this enterprise and provided fertile feedback. Some of Bou
reau s critiques of ritual anticipate my own; De Jong has been a valiant
guide and sparring partner in my itinerary through the Carolingian world.
No intellectual being self-made (contrary to the fictions of this age of indi-
\ u ua s) edicate this book to my two old mentors, Jacques Le Goff in
rans and Gerard Caspary in Berkeley.
Paris, August 1999
