Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicola F. McDonald and W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge: York Medieval P., 2005; pp. 176. £45). Rites of Passage contains nine papers given at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of York in July 2001. Miri Rubin's introduction to the volume is characteristically wide-ranging, moving seamlessly from Arnold Van Gennep's three-fold definition of a rite of passage (separation, transition and incorporation) via the circumcision rites of the Ugandan Gisu, Bob Geldof on the 1985 Live Aid concert and the veiling ceremonies of medieval English nuns, to ‘Schoolies' Week’ in contemporary Australia, during which ‘in Queensland and Victoria whole beaches are turned … into a free zone of drink, sex, dance and drugs’ (p. 5). Is this a ‘suspended state of journeying, full of self-awareness’ (the latter at any rate seems questionable), or just an orgy? No matter: while they do occasionally experience some difficulty in connecting with the themes explored by Professor Rubin, all the papers in this volume have useful insights to offer. Joel Burden shows how the peculiar circumstances of the funeral of the deposed Edward II established a new tradition in royal funerary practice which would persist for two hundred years, that of exhibiting a funeral effigy of the dead king. Mark Ormrod argues that the ‘coming to kingship’ of a boy king in late medieval England was the outcome of ‘a series of acts and public statements’ which, taken together, were intended to convince the political classes of his suitability to govern. Patricia Cullum shows how by the later middle ages ‘the canon law on the process of becoming a priest was becoming distanced from actual practice’, while Sharon Wells investigates the rituals of dining and table manners to show how heads of households ‘conferred upon themselves the mantle of manhood’. Helen Phillips, in a fluent and learned article, shows how different genres portray ritual in different ways, arguing that the portrayal of ‘life-passages’ in French and English romances ‘present as many conflicts within the realm of knightly identity and ideals as in battles with external foes’. Jane Gilbert uses Chaucer, especially the Book of the Duchess and the Legend of Good Women, to examine death as a process ‘by which a deceased person is detached from the community of the living and integrated with the community of the dead’, and Isabel Davis uses John Gower's Confessio Amantis (along with Erica Jong's Fear of Flying) to show how Gower used Amans to ‘question the relevance of traditional ideals of noble manhood’. Finally, Sarah Kay examines Froissart's dits amoureux to elucidate the ‘inner change’ rather than the ‘outward rites’ of initiation. The volume as a whole shows once again the value of the rigorously interdisciplinary approach adopted at the Centre for Medieval Studies at York in recent decades, and nicely illustrates the different angles from which a disparate series of ‘transitional’ events can be approached.