Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe

Abstract

In this volume, Nicholas Howe has assembled a valuable collection of essays, each one of which contributes to our understanding of ceremonial culture. Margot Fassler grounds her general insights into the working of medieval processions in a full discussion of the processional life of twelfth-century Chartres. Liturgical processions, she argues, were often forms of the adventus ceremony, but this did not restrict the range of possible meanings which individual processions, on different feast days, were intended to convey. We may lack evidence for the impact of processions on the population at large, but the rich liturgical sources for Chartres allow Fassler to establish a strong case for the presence of an intense processional life in the city, how often every-day streets must have been transformed into sacred routes. They also permit insights into the intentions behind processions, in particular the importance of inspiring individuals at a personal and spiritual level through liturgical commemoration. Michael Flier's evocative analysis of processions in Muscovite Rus, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is able to make use of sources that provide better evidence for the interaction between the processional form and the locality in which the form took shape. The power of ceremony to inscribe sacred history into the local terrain (and thereby simultaneously lifting the local onto a universal plane) is strikingly evident: the Palm Sunday ceremony turns the Moscow river into the Jordan; the willow is the local substitute for the palm leaf. At many levels, whether performative or symbolic, the ceremony reveals the Muscovites as the Chosen People and their ruler as messianic in destiny. But interpretations of ceremony were not static or uncontentious: the place of the ruler in this heavenly scheme of things would become a matter of discordant debate.

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