This slim volume is heftier than it appears. Engaging directly with the recent work of Gerd Althoff, Marco Mostert, and Geoffrey Koziol (among others), and embracing an older strain of scholarship that owes as much to anthropologists (especially Clifford Geertz) as to many venerable medievalists (Johan Huizinga, Ernst Kantorowicz, Marc Bloch), it makes an important contribution to the study of ritual and public life in urban communities. It does so by offering six specific case studies of the ways in which people in the fifteenth century used a variety of public media for communication, and by examining how the messages they conveyed were received, repudiated, misunderstood, acted upon, or ignored. And because the contributors pay special attention to the material conditions of performance and the mechanisms by which communications were reported to outsiders or recorded for posterity, they work toward a methodology that makes these further acts of interpretation a key aspect of any investigation. In my view, this forthright acknowledgment of the problems inherent in understanding coded behavior helps to counter "the dangers of ritual" outlined by Philippe Buc, precisely because it seeks to avoid simplification, over-determination, and the posture of paternalism that modernity tends to adopt vis-à-vis the medieval. Speech-acts and ceremonies should never be treated as transparent or perfunctory, and our own responses to the documentary residue of these complex encounters is also subject to scrutiny.
Although each of the six contributors brings something different to this project, the fact that they all focus on the precociously urbanized towns of the Low Countries, the Franco-Flemish borderlands, and the Swiss Confederation lends it coherence. The close economic ties among these regions and their towns' strong forms of self-governance gave them something of a common culture, and this facilitates comparison. So does the book's impetus and organization, which succeeds (as many collections do not) in fostering discussion among its component parts. As Jacoba van Leeuwen notes in her introduction, three of the essays examine "symbolic events that were organized to address a ruler" and three "deal with the use of symbolic communication to express political relations within towns" (xvii-xviii). So one has the opportunity to observe forms of communication that are outward-looking and some that are directed toward others in the same community. In the case of Bruges, we catch a glimpse of both. Andrew Brown's thoughtful meditation on "Ritual and State-Building: Ceremonies in Medieval Bruges," balances a critical review of anthropological models (in particular, the characterization of medieval Burgundy as a "theatre-state" à la Geertz's Negara) with effective analysis of different sources, in order to show how risky and open-ended such ceremonies could be, and how much "civic" and "princely" traditions overlapped. It can be fruitfully read alongside Van Leeuwen's own article on "Balancing Tradition and Rites of Rebellion: The Ritual Transfer of Power in Bruges on 12 February 1488," which looks closely at the inflection of a central civic ritual in a time of political unrest, and the ultimate failure of insurgents to establish legitimacy through their overt manipulation of tradition.
Christoph Freiderich Weber reinforces some of these findings in his contribution, an account of the changing relationship between the city council of Basel and its bishop from the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth century. He stresses that the establishment of ritual conventions sets up a framework that makes innovation possible--but not if those conventions are openly flouted or abruptly altered. And he formulates the central question of the collection: "when can a ritual be considered as understood, and if it is understood, is it also successful?" (29). In her essay, Katell Lavéant attempts an answer by examining a relatively rare artifact, the text of one of the plays that were frequently performed during the French king's royal entries into the towns of his domain in the later Middle Ages. For the most part, we have numerous descriptions of such plays but few scripts, and thus only indirect evidence of what was said. In this instance, however, the scribe who kept the account book for the town of Abbéville in 1531 saw fit to transcribe the dialogue that was performed for the entry of Francis I's new queen, Eleanor of Hapsburg. Of course, no play script can tell us what actually happened in performance, but Lavéant does a good job of analyzing the "complex strategy of communication on and from the stage," and she helpfully reproduces the text of an earlier edition.
The last two essays round out the collection. In "Giving by Pouring: The Function of Gifts of Wine in the City of Leiden (14th-16th Centuries)," Mario Damen explains the significance of public drinking rituals and the political role of wine in a region where beer was the more common beverage. He shows that "wine gifts can be viewed as a form of generalized reciprocity" (83), since the recipient was aware that he was either being rewarded for services rendered or being paid in advance for services he was expected to perform. Damen also provides a profile of the different groups and individuals who regularly received such gifts, and discusses the ways in which this potent form of public consumption regulated social hierarchies and maintained the city's "external and internal relationships" (99). Finally, Michael Jucker's "Negotiating and Establishing Peace between Gestures and Written Documents," offers a fresh analysis of the revolt that led to the unruly trial and execution of Zurich's mayor, Hans Waldmann, in 1489. He argues that "diplomacy and peacemaking can be seen as an ensemble of countless mutually-reinforced factors such as writing, oral communication, secrecy, clothing, publicity, procedure, individual negotiations, and personal relationships" (104). As its title suggests, his study is also concerned with the later documentation of these controversial events in four surviving sources, each of which naturally attempts to make meanings of its own.
Anglophone scholars have reason to be grateful to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and its Institut voor Middeleeuwse Studies, for regularly publishing volumes of their important series in English. Having said this, I hope it is not churlish to observe that this particular collection would have benefited from the services of an English-speaking copy editor. It is unseemly for a book of this caliber to be marred by so many basic grammatical and typographic errors (including "medievan" for "medieval" on the running heads of every other page). This is not merely a cosmetic issue, but a professional and intellectual one; individual authors seem to have been left to their own devices when translating their findings from Dutch, German, and French, and the very uneven results occasionally frustrate the efforts of the most sympathetic reader. Some arguments become sadly garbled, especially when they rely on technical or theoretical vocabularies which require specialized knowledge and careful handling in order to be rendered intelligibly. The editor's own expertise obviously takes other forms; despite these shortcomings she is to be congratulated for organizing the workshop that gave rise to these stimulating essays, and for encouraging their publication.