The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The Play of Construction and Modification. Ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Jeremy Llewellyn, and Eyolf Østrem. pp. xii + 219. (Brepols,Turnhout, 2004, €60. ISBN 2-503-51513-4.)

Abstract

The ten essays in this volume derive in the main from papers presented at a conference held at the newly formed Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals at the University of Copenhagen in 2002. The authors are drawn from several disciplines, and their self-contained studies draw on source material from the fifth century to the sixteenth. The editors are very conscious of the book’s plurality and use their extensive introduction (virtually an essay in its own right) to explore models for understanding the compilation as a single entity. This provides an interesting excursion into epistemological frameworks, while simultaneously fulfilling all the other functions of an introduction. In particular, a substantial section is given over to a discussion of the book’s broad theme of ritual in abstract terms. In its status as a cultural event that must happen and have happened repeatedly, a ritual occupies a space within a linear narrative stretching both forwards and backwards, and also within a cyclical time-construct. Yet any ritual must have been initiated at some point, and the dynamics of authority that play into the instigation and acceptance of such events are complex. The editors construct ‘grand narratives’ of the historical processes that initiated and cultivated rituals in the Middle Ages, thus freeing their contributors from the responsibility of painting broad-brush pictures. The editors’ determination that the volume be understood as a coherent whole, rather than as a series of unrelated essays, is thus achieved through the introduction. One has no sense that contributors have been urged to push arguments relating to their materials too far in the interests of the volume as a whole; the ten tightly focused studies are the better for it.