I should start this review by insisting on the impact anthropology has had on medieval/early modern European studies. Medieval anthropology has challenged the traditional, institutional, and even social historiography of the Middle Ages; in this day and age, it is surprising to hear a dissenting voice in the middle of what may seem consensus.[[1]]
From the moment one picks up Philippe Buc's book, one recognizes a challenge. The "hellish" book cover -- and this is my understanding of the cover's fire -- announces "the dangers of rituals," and ultimately where ritual is leading us. The impression materializes when one starts reading. Ritual studies and anthropology have hypnotized, trapped, blinded, charmed and manipulated us into fallacy. The book's ending pages "To Forget the Devil," (pp. 237-247) targets this reliance on social-scientific models for the analysis of medieval sources. Hence, Philippe Buc's daunting task is to rescue us from the satanic social-scientific grip.
Buc's narrative has a certain "Eastwoodian," "make my day punk" attitude, the verbal acrimony of a boxing match weigh-in, and the arrogance of Eminem. Buc is argumentative, controversial, and states early on that he has an agenda (5). But one should reproach him from the start with what he reproaches others. Post-modernist studies have often fallen into "Lacanian" linguistics that makes reading them as pleasurable as a toothache. In short they sometimes verge on the unintelligible because of their overly ambitious academic eloquence. The choice to leave readers on their own, with sentences such as "Creationist monotheism injected into the European tradition a correlation between Genesis and Geltung that lasted well into the nineteenth century," (145) can be questioned. The reader is constantly challenged to (re)interpret and (de)construct what the author is saying. What Buc says is important and it is unfortunate that it cannot be said with more clarity. In addition, author and editor chose to leave all quotations and terms in their original language, hindering and limiting the book's audience. While most scholars are equipped with enough methodology and foreign languages to follow his argument, I doubt that average college students will. Some readers may also find offense in the admonishing tone of the book. While I agree, "Intellectuals have a disposition toward fancy collages and castles in the air. The theological inheritance has cast a mantle of legitimacy on this propensity, empowering anthropologists and historians to tinker, cut, and paste and imagine mentalities that do not actually recoup native culture," (226) may not please all.
Ritual, or rather what modern social scientists call ritual and what original sources interpreted as ritual is at the core of this book. Buc suggests that the bias of the medieval or ancient authors manipulated the rendition and narrative of the ritual. The book eschews issues of narrative and performance because, according to the previous statement, we cannot really perceive or infer the actual performance of the ritual because we can only discover it through the prism of the ritual's narrator. And, this is an important point to remember. The biggest flaw of modern political theorists, it seems, is to de-contextualize sources and narratives from their specific culture and propel them onto another. Buc then offers to enlighten us by investigating native, implicit anthropology of how medieval authors understood rituals as opposed to our modern, explicit views. He will investigate why medieval authors used rituals in their narratives -- we have to acknowledge that medieval anthropology is narrative and cannot be animate. The book's premises may paralyze the faint-at-heart. The deconstruction is total. Medieval narratives were biased and their modern analysis is reductive, which leaves us in post-modernist nihilism.
Still, the book offers reconstruction -- and safety -- in tracing the origins of sociology in theology. Sociology is the heir of theology. Both, for example, used "beginnings" as heuristic fiction; Augustine's models of force, dogma and religiones parallel sociology's coercion, intellectual, cultural or emotional consensus, and ceremonial practices. Augustine's double doctrine (a creed for the elite and one for the controlled masses) led to functionalism and functional religious doctrine. Still, if we consider Buc's own words, that medieval narrators "considered any instrumentalization of religion, even outward, a devilish perversion," (240) then sociologists and anthropologists are agents of the devil.
According to his own words, Philippe Buc began working on his book in 1990 when, reading tenth-century sources, he noticed "the high density of what one calls rituals" (vii). Buc quickly questioned the "modeling" reliance with which one approaches this type of research. In ahistorical fashion historical-anthropologists advanced and forced their models on their sources. The introduction highlights the ambivalence of writing a book about rituals monitoring usage of the said term. The author dismisses defining ritual and suggests that it is whatever modern historians agree on. Still, one can note Buc's tendency to define ritual as liturgical rites. Considering that most agree on ritual's polysemy does not advance knowledge much. The focus of the book will not be medieval political ritual, but rather the "relationship between medieval documents and twentieth-century theories of ritual (2). After listing what can be construed as ritual behavior (processions, banquets, etc., often linked to religious practices), Buc advances an improved definition of ritual by adding the notions of good and bad ritual. Bad ritual is manipulated from its original aims or it breaks down. Good ritual is consensual. But, of course since we cannot witness the performance, it is not the ritual per se that is good or bad but the narrative description that is constructed as such. Buc clearly states it later in the book, early medieval political culture was a culture of interpretation (245), but while medieval authors struggled to understand the rites they described, modern social scientists have reduced that struggle into single explanatory models.
The book is organized into two large sections. The analyses, in descending-chronological order, of sources from the tenth century to their late antique matrix is followed by a second section devoted to the historiography of social sciences from roughly 1500 to 1970. Buc's historical narrative covers the construction of Ottonian kingship over Franconian rivals, and Carolingian, Merovingian, and late antique constructions of ritual; or what we could call the sociology of early theologians. The first four chapters coalesce in their uncovering of good and bad ritual narratives over several centuries and focus on the intention of authors that I would almost label "functionalist" theologians.
Part one: Late Antique and Early Medieval Narratives, begins with "Writing Ottonian Hegemony: Good Rituals and Bad Rituals in Liudprand of Cremona." Buc first discusses several rites reported by Liudprand of Cremona in his Antapodosis; nomen-potestas, or the reality of power by force rather than name, friendship, care of the poor, coronation, humiliation-exaltation, royal advents and their manipulations/inversion. In general, Liudprand sublimated Ottonian's early difficulty and devaluated earlier Italian rulers. Hence Buc investigates how Liudprand constructed the opposition between Ottonian/good and Lombard/bad rituals. Good Ottonian rituals, sacred funerals, smooth political transitions and prayers opposed bad Lombard's rites where friendship, advents, coronation and the care of the poor were manipulated. Since the author established earlier that narrative constructions do not reflect actual practices, he forages earlier Carolingian culture looking for the Germanic behavior Liudprand assigned to Italians only.
The second chapter, "Ritual Consensus and Ritual Violence: Texts and Events in Ninth-Century Carolingian Political Culture" focuses on one of Liudprand's villains, king Arnulf. Arnulf sided with Carolingians and Bavarians against Saxons; hence Buc examines competing -- Liudprand's and Bavarians' -- rendition of ceremonies. Bavarian narratives applied liturgical kinship to Arnulf while Liudprand refused him liturgical usage. The latter implies that Carolingian authors accessed a ritual language, and used rituals to articulate narrative of actions -- and not their performance. The Carolingians used ritual's narrative for propagandistic purposes. To check if performance counted, he turns, for example, to competing rendition of Louis II's 864 Roman advent. He concludes that contemporaries were well aware of the possibility of a single event's multi-layered interpretation. Still, interpreting ritual meant controlling it.
"Rites of Saints and Rites of Kings: Consensus and transgression in the Works of Gregory of Tours," investigates how Gregory constructed bishops' ritual as good ritual to be copied by kings. The prime model of good ritual was episcopal. This chapter does not make it clear but Buc's definition of ritual in this case is liturgical and leads to articulation of the rex-sacerdos model. We are getting closer to the origins of political rituals as liturgical kingship. Although the chapter discusses rex-sacerdos, Buc demonstrates surprise at the labeling of a "Christian kingship" model (107). Here, I do not see how "Christian kingship" differs from "liturgical kingship" or rex-sacerdos. For Gregory, kings were members of the ecclesia and bishops controlled good ritual. He states "Good ritual being par excellence episcopal, the king's one moment of perfect rituality and hence sanctity comes about through an exact imitation of the sacerdotal model." (117) This, to me, sounds like Christian/liturgical kingship. Buc further reinforces the theologian/sociology link with bantering like "Gallo-Roman hagiographers had read their Max Gluckman and Victor Turner" (120). After discussing the bad rituals of a bad Chilperic who rejected episcopal guidance, Buc offers an interesting historiography of the Merovingians, who, manipulated by their successors, were transformed into a ritual-less, hence a power-less dynasty.
"The Late Antique Matrix: martyrdom and Ritual" ends the first half of the book discussing the Christians' "hijacking" into martyrdom of the Roman pagan rituals of execution; or how executed Christians became martyrs. The idea in itself errs close to functionalism. The chapter recognizes the ambiguity of early Christianity's rejection, or refusal to assimilate into, the Roman world, co-existing with Christian usage of a ritual language that was essentially pagan and Roman.
The monograph's second half, from theology to the social sciences, unravels the historiography of ritual and religion since the Middle Ages. Buc confronts medieval and modern notions of ritual and "historicizes" the "attemporal" ritual. The analysis is a long discussion of the precursors of Durkheimian sociology. Hence the said authors connected religion to social order or rather the necessity of religion and its rite for the maintenance of order and social cohesion. The first watershed in the historiography of ritual occurred with the reformation and its historical deconstruction of all but the two primitive sacraments. Reformers envisioned most catholic ceremonies or rites as bound to the political. The reformers understood non-sacramental practices as political ceremonies. Of course, Melanchton and Zwingli were strongly criticized by Catholics who argued that Roman sacraments were not civic. Luenig's Theatrum ceremoniale historico-politicum (Leipzig, 1719-20), developed first a theory of ceremonials. They were outward signs of obedience, lust for entertainment, and enforcer of social order. Luenig's delineation of ceremonies, by affecting social cohesion, anticipated Norbert Elias'.
Buc then traces the development of ritual's appeal back to sixteenth-century polemicists, the Lutheran's Magdeburg Centuriators for example, who tracked the historicity of the sacraments, but also to their Catholic detractors, humanists and their interests in the rituals of antiquity, and authors lured to the foreign rites of the newly discovered worlds. The latter leads to a discussion of the Chinese Rites Controversy -- whether missionaries (Jesuits) could participate in indigenous rituals (Confucianism). The controversy dislocated the association of ritual with liturgy. It vulgarized the distinction between a vocabulary of civic/political ceremonies versus one of religious rites. For the Jesuits -- to explain their participation in Chinese rituals -- China exemplified government by rites. Confucianism existed as an ethical system and not a religion, even though the performance of Confucianism entailed the performance of rites similar to religious ritual. Further, Augustine's double doctrine -- developed for pagans and heretics -- added to religion' s functionality. Rites belonged to utilitarian notions of order and obedience, hence held a function, detached from dogma (religious truth).
Buc's last argument focuses on the two, monistic and dualistic, models representing religion and society. Both entities are viewed into one (monistic) or into two autonomous parts (dualistic). He traces the preponderant influence of the monistic model throughout the modern period. Authors like Rousseau, Montesquieu, Suarez, and most of all Louis de Bonald and Fustel de Coulanges argued that religion and rites are constitutive of social groups. Their influence on "society" over "individual" led to notion of appraising a nation social's cohesiveness by its degree of religious' cohesiveness. De Coulanges suggestion of passage from religion to law influenced authors like Kantorowicz' discussion of kingship's definition, first liturgically then legally. Fustel de Coulanges emphasis on cult as the cement of social cohesion led to Durkheim sociology of religion. The book ends with a discussion of Geertz's state iconicity in ritual, its embrace by medievalists, and especially by the German historiography of ritual's orderly functionality. The last pages forewarn of "reductionism" when medieval narratives of ritual could be invented, and/or propagandistic.
Buc reminds us that medievalists must be site and context specific; must allow for their sources' hesitation and ambivalence. The Middle Ages allowed the coexistence of a monistic and dualistic model, a view where the "world" was kept at bay and embraced. Medievalists should keep the paradox alive and not reduce it with over-simplification issued from "attemporal" models (ritual).
Buc states early on that his book is overtly critical without offering much constructive criticism. He rejects social-scientists' application of the models they created to the early medieval sources. Yet throughout his narrative he creates his own model to apply to his sources, and he is trying to convince us to do the same. He concludes his first section by asserting that authors and not the events they narrate measure power (154). That is, in my understanding, whoever explains, or interprets ritual through its narrative show power, hence, I am assuming, legitimacy. A bit further, discussing late antique rituals, he suggests that ritual created consensus, hence critics, in order to invalidate that order, had to destroy its ritual (156). Not only are these statements social-scientific models, as is his assimilation of theology into sociology, his definition of good and bad ritual, and his modeling of ritual narrators as ritual controllers, but they come close to models elaborated by Victor Turner or Catherine Bell. Ritual "consensus" rings close to Turner's communitas, and the dialectic between ritual and legitimacy has been argued by Bell. She states, ritual "is a strategy for the construction of particular relationships of power [ . . .] Those who control ritualization are in command of a particularly powerful form of objectification." [[2]] These words could be applied to the authors of early medieval ritual narratives.
Still, even if we accept manipulation in ritual's narratives and the deconstruction of performance, where do we place the score of ritual prescriptive medieval ordines? Are they one author's fantasy? If we do not try new methodology how do we refresh older problematique? Shall we keep restating the same historiography, over and over again?
[[1]] See Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Paddington, Australia, 1994), for another dissenting voice.
[[2]] Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992), 202-3.