The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions Medieval and Early Modern Peoples)

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THE KISS OF PEACE

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CULTURES, BELIEFS AND TRADITIONS medieval and early modern peoples Editorial Board:

william brinner, University of California at Berkeley florike egmond, Leiden University gustav henningsen, Danish Folklore Archives mayke de jong, University of Utrecht miri rubin, Pembroke College, Oxford University eli yassif, Tel Aviv University VOLUME 17

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THE KISS OF PEACE Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West BY

KIRIL PETKOV

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2003

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

On the cover: “The Mondzoen” (The Kiss on the Mouth) by P. van der Ouderaa. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petkov, Kiril, 1964The kiss of peace : ritual, self, and society in the high and late medieval West / Kiril Petkov. p. cm. – (Cultures, beliefs, and traditions ; v. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-13038-1 1. Kissing–Political aspects–Europe, Western–History. 2. Reconciliation–Political aspects–Europe, Western–History. 3. Symbolism in politics–Europe, Western–History. 4. Rites and ceremonies, Medieval–Europe, Western. 5. Social history–Medieval, 500-1500. 6. Europe–History–476-1492. 7. Europe, Western–Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. GT2640.P45 2003 306.4–dc21 2003045205

ISSN 1382–5364 ISBN 90 04 13038 1 © Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ......................................................................

vii

Introduction: Sub specie osculi ..................................................

1

PART ONE

THE LEGAL BONDS OF PEACE

Introduction to Part One ...................................................... 33 Chapter One The Contest for Supremacy: Ritual and the Law in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries ............ 37 Chapter Two Transformations: Legal Ritual and the Evolution of Peacemaking in the Thirteenth Century .... 80 Chapter Three Withdrawal: The Decline of Legal Ritual in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Its Consequences ................................................................ 109 Conclusions to Part One ...................................................... 128

PART TWO

THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF RITUAL

Introduction to Part Two ...................................................... Chapter Four Sentiments at Work .................................... Chapter Five Discourses and Practices .............................. Chapter Six Emotions and Ritual Efficacy ........................ Conclusions to Part Two ......................................................

137 144 188 211 234

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 PART THREE

BUILDING IDENTITIES

Introduction to Part Three .................................................... Chapter Seven Identity From Without .............................. Chapter Eight Identity From Within: Self and Person ... Chapter Nine Ends and Networks: Ritual Identity and the Other ............................................................................ Conclusions to Part Three ....................................................

239 245 290 310 320

Conclusion .................................................................................. 323 Bibliography ................................................................................ 333 Index ............................................................................................ 353

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Above all, I would like to thank Jill Claster for her encouragement, sound critique, and understanding. Without the help of some people and institutions this project would have been different. Without Jill Claster, it would not have existed at all. David Hicks, always helpful, and Antonio Feros, a courtier and a gentleman, have been with me from the beginning and lent me their unflinching support when I needed it most. I owe them more than I can possibly ever repay. Lois Drewer directed my attention to visual sources. Nancy Regalado, Adnan Husain, Thomas Head, Geoffrey Koziol, Penny Johnson, and Willem Frijhoff each read parts of the manuscript at an early stage, offered invaluable corrections and suggestions, and spared me many blunders. So did the anonymous reader for Brill, from whom I received the sound criticism that forced me, among other things, to rethink the manuscript’s structure and bring it into its current shape. My contact at Brill, Marcella Mulder, has been a pleasure to work with. Being a non-native speaker, I would not have dared to offer this book to the reading public without the assistance of Cynthia Soderholm. All errors, of course, are mine. The Open Society Institute was instrumental in bringing me, a European blissfully ignorant of the U.S. academic world, to New York University, and provided the bulk of the funds for my training and living in New York City. When these ran out, New York University’s Department of History took over and allowed me to continue working. Projects in the humanities are not foundations’ darlings. I am grateful to the Director and staff of Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, who were so kind in extending two short-term grants and letting me work a month in their magnificent collection of microfilmed manuscripts, facilitating my research in every possible way. Seymour Patterson and Truman State University came forward with a small but significant contribution that allowed me to complete the manuscript’s preparation for print. Finally, Torbjorn Wandel’s friendship kept me sane during that very taxing period of my life.

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New York University’s great research library has been my home for the past eight years, but it is the staff of Interlibrary Loan Services to whom I would like to express my deep gratitude. The speed, accuracy, patience, and professionalism with which they handled my innumerable requests are truly amazing. The Author

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INTRODUCTION

SUB SPECIE OSCULI

Inter omnia vero pacis signa, que actibus transiguntor, precipuum et magis expressum est osculum, non dico pedis aut frontis aut auris aut alicuius membri alterus, sed oris tantummodo. Quia enim evidentius per oris officium quam per ceterorum membrorum nutum animi votum exprimimus, ideo per osculum oris pacis beneplacitum apertius annotamus. . . . Rufinus of Sorrento, De bono pacis, II, 28.

It is hardly a surprise that the earliest surviving systematic treatise on the medieval peace, Rufinus’ De bono pacis, was composed by a person who had been a canon lawyer earlier in life and was archbishop of Sorrento at the time he wrote.1 Ever since the early Middle Ages, clerics of all ranks had spearheaded the effort to justify the peace as a highest religious demand on the denizens of the West and infuse its practice with the precepts of the Christian religion. Ranging from theoretical compilations with limited applicability to practical programs with increasingly secular orientation, such endeavors sought to involve the lay population in non-violent modes of conflict resolution.2 Around the dawn of the new millennium the religious 1 Roman Deutinger, ed. and trans., Rufunus von Sorrent, De bono pacis (Hanover, 1997), 1–29 and De bono pacis, chs. 18–26. Deutinger’s introduction contains a fine historiographical essay on earlier scholarship. See also Klaus Arnold, ‘De bono pacis: Friedensvorstellungen im Mittelalter und Renaissance,’ in Jürgen Petersohn, ed., Überlieferung: Bildung als Leitthemen der Geschichtsforschung (Wiesbaden, 1987), 137–44. 2 There is a solid corpus of studies on the medieval peace. See, among other works, Ludwig Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landesfrieden. Vol. 1: Die Friedensordnungen in Frankreich (Ansbach, 1892); Roger Bonnaud-Delamare, L’idée de paix à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 1939); La Paix, Recueils de la societe Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, vol. 14 (Brussels, 1961); Hartmutt Hoffman, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei (Stuttgart, 1964); Thomas Renna, ‘The Idea of Peace in the West, 500–1500,’ The Journal of Medieval History, 6:3 ( June 1980), 143–68; Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992), and, most recently, Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340–1560 (University Park, PA, 1997); Udo Heyn, Peacemaking in Medieval Europe: A Historical and Bibliographical Guide (Claremont, 1997); and Diane Walfthal, ed., Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout, 2000). On representation

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ethics of peace, although not seldom disregarded, had seeped down into lay society and constituted the organizing frame of a welter of social practices. When, by the thirteenth century, lay authors took over the peace theme, they had a solid foundation to build upon. The concept of peace had evolved from a set of religious precepts to an ethical agenda designed to inform action at the grass-root level of politics. Little interested in theology as they were, the lay theorists strove to unveil the peace’s sociopolitical base, but the ethical justification was already there and they drew heavily upon it. Against the background of this trend, Rufinus, writing in the 1170s, shows no awareness that he was at the threshold of a new era. And yet, while the scope and pre-scholastic approach of his work was somewhat outdated, the trend to moralize and sacralize peacemaking was not. The conventions of theological thought and the religious fervor for penitence informed the major outbursts of medieval peacemaking throughout the high and late Middle Ages, from the late tenth- and eleventh-century Peace and Truce of God, to the Alleluia of the 1230s, to the Bianchi of 1399 and beyond. Characteristic of all these movements as well as of smaller-scale group drives for peace is the concept that the condition of peace was the sum of the private peace acts undertaken by individual peacemakers and embodied in standardized performances. Peace was not thought of as an accomplishment of the authorities even though it was frequently propagated and orchestrated by them. It was an intensely personal involvement, invariably described in terms of giving up personal hostility and of demonstrations of individual goodwill. The medieval peace, it seems, was unthinkable without the face-to-face, personal encounter and co-operation of former enemies. Personal encounters, quite naturally, were clothed in rituals. And just as Rufinus had argued, peacemakers all over the medieval West agreed on the reasons for which one among these rites, the kiss of peace, stood out as the most powerful peace act. The kiss brought about the fulfillment of the most perfect condition, the ‘Peace of of peace in fine art of the period see Stephan Kubisch, Quia nihil Deo sine pace placet. Friedensdarstellungen in der Kunst des Mittelalters (Münster, 1992). John Bossy’s Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge, 1998) and Markus Vogl, Friedensvision und Friedenspraxis in der frühen Neuzeit, 1500–1649 (Augsburg, 1996) cover the beginnings of the early modern period. An elegant short discussion of private peace as a technical legal issue is Antonio Padoa Schioppa, ‘Delitto e pace privata nel pensiero dei legisti Bolognesi. Brevi note,’ Studia Gratiana, 20 (1976), 271–87.

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Jerusalem,’ through which God reconciled humankind. It was the mechanism that linked social and heavenly orders in ‘the concord of brotherly peace’ by freeing the heart of worldly hatred.3 The holy kiss borrowed from the mass, that ‘great mystery’ of the early Church fathers, was the symbolic core of all true peace for it reaffirmed the Christian identity of the peacemakers. The idea that theologically loaded rituals served as the hinge between the theory and practice of peace, between the sacred and the secular world and between the inner man and outer behavior, was not peculiar to Rufinus. It was widely shared during the Middle Ages. Embodying the commitment to peace in ritual was certainly paying homage to the pre-modern Western preoccupation with form and the belief that form and content were inextricably intertwined. In the selection of a specific set of rites for the purpose, the kiss of peace, however, was going beyond that commonplace. Direct borrowings from Christian ritual life reflected the perception that genuine peace was inseparable from forgiveness and necessitated reconciliation. The paradigm of this mode of thought went back to the union of peace and forgiveness in Christ’s ministry. The New Testament peace program was an extension of the thirst for salvation. It stressed the internalized harmony, justice, love, and grace that permeated the whole being of the individual member of the Christian community. Peace was the free gift of the worshipper who has overcome the evil of dissent and joined others in the mystical body of the Lord and the Church. This was not the only conception of peace, of course. Peace had been understood as absence of hostility and open warfare as well as in the positive sense of concord, prosperity, justice and, above all, order, ever since Antiquity. The Roman peace of the classical era, the Pax Romana, had a pronounced legal dimension, both in its sense of legal relationship between two parties and in the sense of the power relationships Rome imposed on the political bodies it came to dominate through conquest.4 Since the high Middle Ages, however, it was the Christian ideal of peace as a positive disposition and a relationship based on mutual confidence and

3

De bono pacis, 175, ch. 28. There is a succinct summary of the Christian and Roman traditions in Ronald G. Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition (Maryknoll, 1986), 9–20. See also his Catholic Peacemakers: A Documentary History. Vol. 1: From the Bible Era to the Era of the Crusades (New York-London, 1992). 4

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benevolence which coordinated the hierarchy of the relationship among most if not all other representations of the perceptions and practices of peacemaking. The rites centered on the kiss of peace were the centerpieces of this worldview. The high and late medieval periods, roughly between the years 1000 and 1600, abounded in references to and debates about the implications of the peacemaking kiss and its accompanying rites. Reaching its heyday by the end of the 1200s, the tide of commentaries abated in the following centuries as the main interpretations of the meanings of ritual reconciliation crystallized, but the ritual peace with the kiss continued to be discussed well into the early modern era. ‘References to the kiss,’ Klaus Schreiner remarks, ‘are legion.’5 It is part of my argument that it was so because in the kiss of peace the two traditions, that of a power relationship and that of inner disposition and participation, physical and mystical, in a community, blended in a single practice. The ritual kiss persevered in peacemaking for it facilitated the effort of the authorities to legitimize their power to command by converting external authority into an inner disposition, a drive that is evident ever since the Peace of God popular movements were taken over by ecclesiastical and lay lords to impose law and order on their own terms. This book then, is an attempt to address the question of what made the holy kiss of the Christian reconciliation and the rites clustered around it a strategic device of the medieval peace. Thus posed, the problem is quite broad and barely manageable. My focus, therefore, will be on one of its basic dimensions. Although recent decades have witnessed burgeoning research on both ritual life and peacemaking in the Middle Ages, the practices at the intersection of these crucial phenomena have not been tackled adequately. The study of the mechanisms by which the syntax of ritual peace structured the geometry of everyday politics on an individual level is in its infancy and its analytical agenda is still underdeveloped. The pages that follow aim to further the inquiry by identifying a subject matter that has been largely neglected. What is of interest to me is the long-term operation of ritual in face-to-face politics and personal peacemaking 5 Klaus Schreiner, ‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes’ (Osculetur me osculo oris sui, Cant 1, 1). Metaphorik, kommunikative und herrschaftliche Funktionen einer symbolischen Handlung,’ in Hedda Ragotzky and Horst Wenzel, eds., Höfische Repräzentation: Das Zeremoniel und die Zeichen (Tübingen, 1990), 79.

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as an example of a total practice linking individuals, groups, and societies. From this perspective, down to the seventeenth century Western ritual peace appears to have been, among other things, a demonstration of the political sovereignty of the premodern person. Sovereignty means different things in different contexts, but its core contents remain relatively stable: it refers to the possession of a certain measure of political power. If, as ample evidence from the period indicates, peacemaking (to reverse the mantra of the theorists of violence) provided the real stuff of politics, it is worth examining the ritual peace as a means to shed light on the ways individual sovereignty was asserted, contested, and appropriated. Exploring the practice of peace as reconciliation embodied in ritual interaction relates to the issue of sovereignty in several ways. Two of these will occupy me throughout the book and need to be identified at the outset. First, the form and therefore the content of the medieval peace act affected in a complex manner the personalities of the individuals involved and their position within the communities to which they belonged. Unlike other types of peace, reconciliation was supposed to order the political relations between persons and groups in a way that eliminated the sources of conflict. To succeed, reconciliation necessitated in equal measure the transformation of the person and the redefinition of the linkages to the social bodies within which the conflict and its resolution occurred. Second, the transition from conflict to peace was an issue of contested sovereignty and thus the bedrock of premodern politics. Ritual reconciliation was a means by which authorities at all levels sought to enter interpersonal relationships, de-legitimize the individual and group rights of violence, and monopolize violence themselves. Their strategy was to select a rite with acknowledged efficacy, transplant it into the field of peacemaking, and sublimate it as a standard form which, in spite of the variety of meanings borne by ritual, had fairly predictable effects on the interacting parties. The authorities were concerned with the outcome of a ritual, not with its pre-set meanings. Control over the form of interaction ensured the possession of a strategic leverage in the appropriation of the corpus of traditional rights and privileges enacted in ritual. The struggle over sovereignty was a long process with many dimensions. I am concerned with it only insofar as it played itself out in the field of the specific ritual cluster dominated by the kiss of peace. But this does not mean that the inquiry is a self-serving endeavor

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with limited application. On the contrary, the focus on this particular ritual calls attention to the logic that dictated that social bonds be sustained by physical proximity, mingling, and coalescing of human bodies. Involving the body implies, first, dealing with processes evolving at the level beneath the specifics of the local and the particular and, second, taking the long view. The rites of peace were employed because throughout the medieval centuries, social relatedness, perhaps more than in any other period in Western history, was embodied in incorporated practices subject to the ‘habitus,’ to borrow Bourdieu’s term, or ‘controlled spontaneity’ type of governance.6 This book is about the latter’s normative principles. While I would not identify my position with that of Rufinus, I cannot help noting that the quest for principles is a systematic enterprise at a time when this approach, widely practiced in the past, is not treated kindly by current scholarship. The modern axiom is that ritual is above all about contextual symbolism and its appropriations, with the context determining all meanings: that of the ritual encounter which actually took place in a specific historical past, of the ways it was recorded to posterity, and of the thrust of present-day interpretations. Modern students of ritual tend to stress the contingent, fluid, and historically specific character of these meanings. One does not need to go into details to notice that important as it is, such a methodological stance is only part of the story. It broadens indefinitely the scope of the inquiry. While offering an alternative to the older concepts of universal frames and dismissing general explanatory laws, this radically ethnomethodological epistemology, if taken by itself, would undermine the very possibility of reconstructing past practices. If meaning only emerges in the contextually interpreted practices of unrepresentative historical figures and is skewed by later authors subject to their own biases, can we talk about a specific historical past at all? Or should we, in the post-modernist fashion, deny the past any ontology? That the evidence about rituals is rarely more than isolated fragments from epochs that are rather poorly documented and is subject to the conventions and dangers of the recording and explication of past practice, as Philippe Buc has forcefully reminded us, seems to reinforce the ethnomethodologists’ argument.7 6

See note 12 below. Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2001). 7

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Be that as it may, to me the undeniable fragmentation of the cultural and social space of the medieval West and the added disadvantage of distortion in the course of its transmission to posterity are only parts of the inquiry into the operation of ritual. To concentrate exclusively on the segments of a practice’s implications would be a historical reduction akin to the ‘grand narrative’ approach to the study of ideas. Stressing fragmentation enhances, rather than neutralizes, the dangers of applying modes of theorizing built on acquaintance with other, non-Western societies. It means, too, that a layer of the past with a strong functional dimension rooted in the Western heritage is relegated to obscurity. The systematic approach and the search for long-term patterns can help redeem this past reality by making us more sensitive to the broad social and cultural phenomena from which the local forms of socializing derived their meanings. Ultimately, these phenomena lead us to a context whose implications would remain unacknowledged if only the microscopic lens applied. Although the complexities of interpersonal interaction seem infinite, I would suggest that just as the reduction of scale practiced by the microhistorians is not a reduction to the particular, the quest for fundamentals is not a preoccupation with monolithic universals. Nor are changes that take centuries to complete without consequences for the everyday functioning of medieval societies. The suspicions about the heuristic value of general principles follow in part from the lack of willingness to deal with the whole range of causality in the fragmented and incoherent world that current epistemological strategies have reconstructed. While heightening our awareness of diversity, ethnomethodology contributes to scholarly myopia by obscuring the role and significance of repeated patterns of conduct, similar representational forms, and identical emotional reactions, which do not necessarily stem from biological imperatives. The slant toward ‘local knowledge,’ as Clifford Geertz put it, with its militancy against the collective subconscious and shared mentalities should not edge out alternative explanatory models. The question, then, is not whether the quest for systematic principles makes sense at all. Rather, if all meaning is local, does the unveiling of underlying universals contribute to the inquiry in any significant way? As we ‘go local’ and become entranced by contextual diversity, are we not losing sight of the basic operative principles of the medieval societies? My answer to both questions is affirmative. Throughout, I attempt to demonstrate that to ignore the systematic approach imposes

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considerable limitations on our understanding of the workings of the premodern peace. In the words of one theorist, the attentive observer ‘cannot help but notice that the patterns and forms of presentation he or she examines do not lead to a specific order, but that they are that specific order.’8 The persistence of a formalized ritual practice of peacemaking over the long term indicates that there was a social consensus as to its functions, diverse as its meanings and local appropriations might have been. From this point of view, a series of further questions suggest themselves. Is the long-term consensus about the uses of the ritual embodying the concept of peace as reconciliation an expression of the consent to surrender or suspend individual and collective rights of violence as a means of conflict resolution? In other words, does the social consensus about a practice imply the appropriation of agency, or, on the contrary, did the broad range of meanings this very consensus pre-supposed (otherwise it would not have existed) actually preserve the sovereign rights of individuals and groups? How was consent induced and what made a particular, rather than any, set of rites necessary for its induction? Was the choice of form related to the contest over political rights? Were the meanings informing ritual peace exclusive products of the local and the singular, or did they rest on common assumptions? Assuming such assumptions, were they validated by official discourses functioning across cultural, social, and political boundaries? If so, how do standard and relatively stable Western discourses and institutions operative in peacemaking—Roman law, family practices, the feudal contract, urban communes, and Christian theology, to mention but a few—affect the meaning of local ritual practices? All of these are crucial problems that most current inquiries either do not engage or do not seem to tackle in a satisfactory manner. To address these problems, the evidence about the rites of peace ought to be put in an analytical context. As Bernard Cohn has convincingly argued, an analytical context is not necessarily characterized by a temporal—or, by the same token, geographical or social—unity.9 To recover the dispersed empirical fragments means not only to

8 Hans-Georg Soeffner, The Order of Rituals: The Interpretation of Everyday Life, trans. by Mara Luckman (New Brunswick, 1997), x. 9 Bernard Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22 (1980), 198–221 and ‘Toward a rapprochement,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), 227–52.

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reconnect them to their historical environment but also to restore them to a world of meaningful interconnections.10 Their intelligibility depends on our understanding of how their linkages to local contexts were structured by the operative principles of the analytical category to which they belonged. Hence the need to reconstruct the context that allows us to make sense of the diversity and evolution of the local rites of peace while accounting for the emergence of rituals that came to be universally accepted in the high and late medieval West.11 My contention is that the analytical field neatly accommodating these requirements in the context of the struggle over political sovereignty is the construction of hegemony. Peacemaking embodied diverse and, as we shall see, competing modes of conflict resolution. Each was coordinated by a system of beliefs, existed as a distinct ritual practice, and construed its own symbolic interpretative links to the social environment in which it took place. Handshake, embrace, symbolic ‘handing-over’ of the guilty party, eating and drinking together, and other forms of peace were all practices with age-long pedigrees, which, while invariably embodying the concept of sociability, were also rooted in local custom and belief. Each of them reflected a tradition of zealously guarded political rights determining individual and group identities. None of them acknowledged an authority higher than the family, clan, or at most the local community. The emergence of a standard mode of ritual conflict resolution all over the high and late medieval West was an effort therefore to promote reconciliation and the Christian ethics supporting it as the exclusive interpretation of the peace act at the expense of local traditions. It was an attempt to override other interpretations and integrate the diverse rites of 10 For a forceful methodological argument see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980), xxv–xxvi, and the discussion in John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, 1992), 15–8 and ch. 10. 11 As recent criticism of the new cultural history’s interpretative modes has shown, the second part of the problem is of crucial epistemological importance. See Richard Biernacki, ‘Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History,’ in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999), 62–95; idem, ‘Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry,’ History and Theory, 39:2 (2000), 289–310. For critical notes from a different perspective see Jordan Goodman, ‘History and Anthropology,’ in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London and New York, 1997), 783–804. For a defense of interpretation as a strategy of grasping meaning, understood as intention and significance, see Michael Stanford, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Oxford, 1998), 16ff.

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peace in a hierarchy subjected to the doctrine preached from the pulpit and adopted by the secular authorities. The local, traditional, and to a great extent pre-Christian meanings of the peace had to compete with a powerful newcomer propagated by Church and state alike to make up for the illegitimacy and impossibility of coercion by imposing a new ethics of political interaction. Behind the value system borne by the symbolism of the holy kiss of Christianity stood the authorities’ will to power, the power to acquire, preserve, and monopolize the agency exercised in the act of peacemaking. Ritual played a crucial role in the effort to reformulate the discourse on peacemaking. Through the kiss-centered rites the forces of law, order, and official morality strove to render their value system hegemonic, using bodily mnemonics to form, affect, and control personal dispositions that in other contexts would appear as natural, spontaneous, and improvised. 12 Ritual ‘sedimented’ ideological precepts into the body; it thus secured the acquiescence of individuals in the networks of intentionalities in which they were enmeshed.13 The operation of the ritual kiss exemplifies the postulate of Alltagsgeschichte that social systems acquire agency by engaging in cultural practices.14 The logic of the strategy was corporeal. The kiss acted as a bodily mechanism that guided conduct towards the mode of conflict resolution targeted by the authorities. More than any other rite, it was capable of inducing dispositions intimately associated with the period’s basic forms of socialization. It is my contention that the performance of ritual integrated such personality traits into a different context, that of peacemaking, for the dispositions were not just cognitive and affective abstractions. They were parts of a corporeal habit as well and were 12 The issue is not new of course, and there is a burgeoning literature on it, although Pierre Bourdieu appears to have put it forth best. See his Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), 94ff. Habitus can be succinctly defined as the ‘principle of controlled spontaneity and improvisation.’ In this study the reference is to the spontaneous creation of cross-cutting ties between symbolic domains. For a concise survey of further theory see Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagiation, 70–80. 13 On ‘sedimenting’ see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989). See also Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, 1987), esp. 173 about the body as a ‘memorial container,’ holding memories of joy or pain that can be relieved involuntarily. Both Connerton and Casey build on MerleauPonty’s theoretical insights, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York, 1962). As for ‘intentionality,’ I am paraphrasing Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), viii. 14 Goodman, ‘History and Anthropology,’ 795.

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therefore carried by the socialized body itself. Mobilized by the kiss, habit sublimated the ideological contents of the authorities’ ethics of peace embodied in the ritual they strove to assert to an order of signs and practices that were natural and universally accepted—that is, habit forged the authorities’ ideology into a hegemonic category. Through habit, the interpretative scheme of the authorities became non-negotiable, for now it emanated from the very body of the individual. Ritual transformed the authorities’ paradigm into a hegemonic principle dominating personalities and actions. The choice of the kiss as the main vehicle of this strategy was not accidental. The kiss is a universal, although also a historical category that reaches back into the mists of time. As a function of the orifice of the mouth, the organ of speech and communication, yet suggesting connections to hunger and sex, and ingestion and incorporation as well, the kiss is at once a metonym and metaphor, corporeal and cultural, involving controlled, social interaction and uncontrollable individual reaction. It establishes contradictory yet constitutive linkages between the individual person, his or her body and inner self, and the outer social world. Kissing, even more so in the premodern period for reasons I shall explore in detail later, was a total practice on its most fundamental level. The major value of the kiss as a reconciliatory rite was that it produced an intensely physical experience in which a set of obligatory relations was rooted.15 Combining cultural and extra-cultural dimensions of existence, these relationships accounted for the application of the kiss as a recurring phenomenon. The ritual kiss’s capability to mobilize such relationships within the dominating discourses of Church and state was key to the rite’s sublimation as a strategy for hegemonic action.16 The action played itself out on many levels. Three of these seem to be of special importance: the socialization 15 For the theory of obligatory relationships see Paul Friedrich, ‘Shape in Grammar,’ in Janet Dolgin, David Kemnitzer, and D. Schneider, eds., Symbolic Anthropology (New York, 1977), 381–93. Friedrich defines the concept as operative in the perception of shape and space; however, he examines anatomical relations only in linguistic context. The concept certainly has broader implications, as Friedrich himself notes, for obligatory relations of taxonomic and paradigmatic types; the ritual kiss works in the field of paradigms. See also Renaat Devish, ‘Space-time and Bodiliness: A Semantic-Praxiological Approach,’ in Rex Pinxter, ed., New Perspectives in Belgian Anthropology, or, the Postcolonial Awakening (Göttingen, 1984). 16 For the definition of ritual as a strategy for action see Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York-Oxford, 1992).

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of affects, the transformation of informal interaction into legal obligation, and the construction of personality. Let me exemplify this by briefly looking back to the applications of the kiss prior to the period dealt with here. The kiss carried a double moment of secular and sacred affect for the ancient Hebrews and Greeks.17 Classical antiquity witnessed the conventionalization of the kiss. Nonetheless, as a ritual the kiss was still used to translate ontological but highly structured social relations, such as kin and family ties, into instantiations of affection.18 In the later Roman Empire the domain of relatedness embodied by the kiss transcended the realm of pure social convention and permeated the field of the political, from acts formalizing ties of patronage on local level, to rites of submission and protection in imperial adoration where sacred and secular overlapped.19 An obligatory element had already been present in the secular adoration rites.20 Early medieval Germanic custom, as far as it is possible to trace it, preserves references to similar referential fields.21 The early Christian tradition built on these connections, and yet, for all this, the pre-Christian and early Christian kiss was not, despite appearances, an established rite of the secular peace. Late antiquity knew the kiss above all as a gesture of affection between close kin, as an intensely spiritual rite of peace and unity in Christ, and as a 17 August Wünsche, Der Kuss in Bibel, Talmud und Midrasch (Breslau, 1911); KarlMartin Hoffman, Philema Agion (Gütersloch, 1943). 18 For the Roman custom, see Nicholas James Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), 1–50. 19 For patronage, see a remark of Maximus, a fifth-century bishop of Turin; I quote after Edmund K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (London, 1903), vol. 2, 295; for the kiss of adoration see Franz Dölger, ‘Verweigerung von Kuß, Händegedruck und Salzgemeinschaft aus Gewissensbedenken,’ ACh, V, 55 and especially Gladis Amad, Le baiser rituel: un geste de culte meconnu (Beirut, 1973). 20 Amad, Le baiser rituel, passim. 21 William Foulke, ed. and trans., Paul the Deacon, History of the Langobards (New York, 1971), 150; Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem, V, 17; IX, 11 and 20; VII, 29, quoted after Bruno Kruschi, ed., MGH, SRM, 1, 2nd edition (1937–1951). English translation in O. M. Dalton, trans., The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (Oxford, 1927), vol. 2, 185–6, 381–92, 305–6. The Anglo-Saxon custom is documented by the use of sibbe cos to translate ‘kiss of peace,’ Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, eds., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, 1983), 868. It needs to be remembered that the term appears in a monastic environment and might have reflected the notion of the monastic community as an artificial kin-group. Be that as it may, the root of the concept would lead us, once again, to the natural ‘sib’ community to which it originally referred.

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legal rite regulating property issues between prospective marriage partners. The contents, local variations, and evolution of these phenomena have been studied in detail and are by and large clear. Except in the case of the unlikely appearance of a large body of new material very little can be added to or changed in the findings of three generations of critical scholarship. As the rites of the medieval secular reconciliation drew the most important of their meanings from the stock of religious paradigms, it is worth outlining the theological and liturgiological implications of the holy kiss of early Christianity.22 The genius of the early Church fathers grasped the importance of the powerful hub of meaningful linkages packed in the kiss and introduced it into the central Christian mysteries. The kiss emerged as a distinctly Christian act with pneumatological significance in Paul’s Epistles and acquired dimensions quite different from these of the formal kiss in the Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. As L. Edward Phillips put it, for Paul the kiss carried the spirit which, even when having a strictly anthropological referent, was understood as God’s pneuma given to the believers, as the Divine Spirit animating the flesh. But the kiss was more than that. Sharing the kiss, the early Christians delineated the boundaries of their community in the same way that the secular kiss of the Roman family delineated family boundaries. The physical contact between the members of the group, by virtue of the kiss’s pneumatology made brothers and sisters in Christ of persons unrelated by blood. Furthermore, already by the first century the kiss might have carried the implication of reconciliation.23 In the second and third centuries the link between the peace and the sacred pneuma was reinforced in several venues. Such, for example, is the function of the kiss in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus.24 For Tertulian, the spirit exchanged between Christians through the kiss was the bond of Christian fellowship, communicating the peace of God among his children. Attributing holiness to peace and reconciliation 22 For the following paragraphs I am indebted to L. Edward Phillips, The Ritual Kiss in early Christian Worship (Cambridge, 1996), 9–25; Eleanor Kreider, ‘Let the Faithful Greet Each Other: The Kiss of Peace,’ Conrad Grebel Review, 5 (1987); Nicholas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 1–50, and Yannick Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age: Rites, symboles, mentalités, à travers les textes et les images, XI e–XV e siècles (Paris, 1992), 221–53. 23 If Cumming’s interpretation is correct, see G. J. Cumming, ‘Service Endings in the Epistles,’ New Testament Studies, 22 (1976), 110–113. 24 G. J. Cumming, ed., Hippolytus. A Text for Students, Grove Liturgical Studies, 8 (Bramcote, 1976), 18–19.

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was not just a dogmatic precept for the worshippers of the God of Peace. It had a strictly practical dimension. Those who had lapsed in times of persecution made their peace with God by being reinstated in the community through the holy kiss of peace. In Cyprian of Carthage and even more so in Cyril of Jerusalem, the kiss’s implications of peace and reconciliation gained added momentum and strengthened its sacramentality. Cyril added another touch for future exegetes by stating that the kiss was a ‘commingling of souls.’ The kiss, he postulated, ‘is a sign of a true union of hearts, banishing every grudge . . . [the kiss is] a reconciliation and therefore holy.’25 From such beginnings the kiss expanded to cover man-to-man reconciliation in preparation for participation in the sacramental mysteries of worship. In the third-century Christian community, peace, reconciliation, and unreserved forgiveness became mandatory prerequisites for practicing the Christian religion, as the Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum maintained.26 In Theodore of Mopsuestia’s succinct late fourth-century formulation, the ritual kiss was holy only if it signified the secular reconciliation of those who exchanged it.27 Some of the sanctity of Christian mystery thus rubbed off onto the everyday practices of life in peace and conflict. For all these reasons, already by the second century the kiss was linked to such liturgical acts as communal prayer and initiation rites. By the fourth century, the extant evidence about the nascent liturgies of the early Eastern communities points to the presence of the kiss in the eucharistic liturgies. In Western practice, if we may judge from Augustine, the late fourth-century kiss was tied to the Lord’s Prayer and the communion. He also endorsed yet another theological dimension of the kiss that was to be stressed in later times, the supplication for forgiveness in the traditional Roman do ut des spirit in the invocation ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ The kiss now stood for the true offering to the Lord, the gift of peace and reconciled relationships among the members of the community. This rich array of theological connections kept the liturgical kiss

25 Richard W. Church, trans., St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (Oxford, 1951), 72. 26 Robert H. Connolly, ed., Didascalia Apostolorum (Oxford, 1929), 116. 27 Theodore of Mopsuestia, On the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist (Cambridge, 1933), 93–3.

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alive during the shifts of doctrine and practice following the triumph of the fourth-century Church. The rite could not escape, however, the consequences of the transformation of Christianity into an official, state, and mass religion. Around the beginning of the fifth century, with the changed scale and context of the increasingly ceremonial Christian worship, the ‘holy kiss’ metamorphized into a liturgical device in search of meaning. From the point of view of the clergy, as a letter of Pope Innocent I to the bishop of Gubbio of c. 416 linking the kiss to the communion testifies, the kiss was the ‘closing seal’ or the assent of the congregation to the act of consecrating the mysteries. This stance, even though coming from the bishop of Rome, does not seem to have been generally accepted. The Augustinian link to communion proved more authoritative. For the individual faithful, in Eleonor Kreider’s apt formulation, the kiss became part of a sanctifying process related to personal piety rather than predominantly an act of assertion of the Church’s corporate essence. The fifth-century kiss completed the transition from relational to legal, from outward to inward, and from corporate to personal concern.28 The rite preserved this position, if not the liturgical meaning of assent throughout the Middle Ages, in spite of recurring suspicions about its connection to idolizing trends as late as the ninth century.29 By the late tenth century, with the limitation of the lay access to the sacred and the hierarchization of the relationship between the Church and the secular society, the functional dimension of the kiss was transformed in an important way. The rite came to mark the dependence of the lay folk on the clergy officiating at the sacred mysteries.30 The kiss was associated to the act of commingling symbolizing Christ’s return to life in preparation for communion; with time the kiss came to substitute for the latter. In stark contrast to

28

Kreider, ‘Let the Faithful Greet Each Other,’ 33–43. For the later theological complications of the kiss see Ann Freeman, ed., Opus Caroli Regis contra Synodum (Libri Carolini), in MGH Concilia 2, Supplement 1 (Hanover, 1998), 544–50. 30 For the early medieval period see Georg Nickl, Der Anteil des Volkes an der Meßliturgie im Frankenreiche von Chlodwig bis auf Karl den Großen (Innsbruck, 1931), 47–51. For later developments see Charles Caspers and Marc Schneiders, eds., Omnes Circumadstantes: Contributions towards a History of the Role of the People in the Liturgy (Kampen, 1990). The early liturgical kiss referred, above all, to the drama of the last super, the resurrection of Christ, and the unity of Christian community in Christ, see O. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, 1971), 35–77. 29

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earlier practice, however, the mystery was received by the officiating priest via the kiss of the altar and the chalice and then, through the kiss again, communicated to the congregation according to rank and status. The break with tradition has as much to do with transformations of doctrine as with the structure of the Christian community of believers as a body politic. With the new arrangements came a hierarchy in the relationship between clergy and lay folk absent in the earlier tradition. Sharing the kiss at the invitation of the priest was one thing; ‘receiving it’ from above, as it were, another matter altogether. Lay people’s capacity to induce action that was not exclusively sacramental, but with a pronounced social dimension as well, was not denied altogether but was seriously curtailed. The point was that clergy and congregation were now integrated into a hierarchy reflecting the monopolization of agency, or the power to validate practice by the Church. Although the legacy of the early Church fathers had an internal logic to it, it was anything but orderly, and diverse theological interpretations continued to sprout throughout the high and late Middle Ages. At the beginning of our period, however, scriptural exegesis seconded liturgical practice and moved toward constructing a hierarchy of the rite’s meanings. The tendency was in synch with the formation of the scholastic mode of thought and was already clear in the works of the leading high medieval exegetes. Twelfth-century exegeses of the Song of Songs, for example, tended to link the kiss to the Sermon on the Mountain, that is, to reconciliation instead of the traditional stress on commemoration, resurrection, and incarnation.31 Liturgiologists, for their part, recognized that accommodating diversity of theory strengthened the functionality of the rite. John Beleth in the 1160s and Innocent III in the early 1200s were instrumental in organizing the loosely floating body of concepts about the symbolism of the kiss into an elaborated scholastic edifice attempting to integrate all available theological thought.32 The great canon lawyer 31 The standard studies on the Song of Songs are Friedrich Ohly, Hohelied-Studien. Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200 (Wiesbaden, 1958) and Helmut Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den leteinischen Hoheliedkommentaren des Mittelalters (Münster, 1958). 32 Herbert Douteil, ed., Johannis Beleth Summa de ecclesiastici officiis, 2 vols. (Turnholt, 1976), vol. 2, esp. 83 ch. 48, and Innocent III, De sacro altaris mysterio, book 6, ch. 4: De osculo pacis, in PL, vol. 217, col. 807 and especially cols. 909–10. Less influential, but also popular was the simplified version of Sicard of Cremona, emphasizing the fraternity in Christ and the incarnation, PL, vol. 213, cols. 139–40.

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and compiler, Guillaume Durand, borrowed generously from them to formulate the definite explicatory canon in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.33 With slight variations his texts provided the material with which lesser minds filled the pages of scores of explications of the mass throughout the pre-Reformation period.34 The theological and liturgical implications of the kiss of peace attached a value to the rite, which seemed to facilitate its seeping down to lay society in a number of fields. The kiss, as it were, carried its own justification. Hence, it is fully possible that, when in the early fourth century the kiss was formalized as a legal device of the late-Roman pre-marriage contract, it occurred because secular law was reinforced by the relations already present in the theological and liturgical function of the kiss.35 The appearance of an important link between the two perceptions of the public kiss, the legal and the theological, is suggested by the legal language in which the early eucharistic feast was couched.36 With these implications the ritual kiss was preserved in the legal canon as it was handed down through the ages. The spread of customary law after the fall of the

33 A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau, eds., Guillelmi Durandi Rationale divinorum officiorum (Turnholt, 1995–1998), vol. 1, 287–90, Liber Quartus, ch. 9 and especially 543–7, ch. 53, ‘De pacis osculo.’ 34 Fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries explications of the mass followed either the canon as established in the early thirteenth century or Durand’s amended version. So do, for example, definitions of the role of the kiss in Eggeling Becker of Braunschweig, Expositio canonis missae, MS Barth 93, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, HMML, # 44779 271v–272v; Albertus Magnus, Bedeutung der Heilige Messe, MS Bernkasterl-Kues, HMML # 95, 82r–83r; Nicolas Stoer, Expositio canonis missae, Universitätsbibliothek Giessen HS 746, HMML # 45526, 88r–89v; Guillaume of Gouda, De expositione missae, Historisches Archiv Köln, HMML # 36946, 61–6, 72, 77–9, 104–8; Bernard of Parento, Tractatus de officio missae, Universitätsbibliothek Bonn MS S373, Nr. 188, HMML, # 39087, 134v–136v; Heinrich Liebl, Expositio canonis missae, HMML # 11629, 98–101. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library for supporting in every possible way my research in their rich microfilm collection. For an English collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples see J. Wickham Legg, ed., Tracts on the Mass (London, 1904), 14–5, 26–7, 48–9, 64–7, 74–5, 82–3, 102–3, 162–3, 174–5, 210–211, 226–7. 35 For a discussion of Constantine’s laws instituting the kiss as a formal expression of legal obligation see most recently Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford, 1991), 151ff. To the best of my knowledge, none of ancient and modern commentators of Constantine’s law links the theological teaching about the kiss with its appearance in the legal frame of marriage in the early fourth century. 36 See the evidence in Franz Dölger, ‘Ein wichtiges Zeugnis für agere im Sinne’ von ‘Meßliturgie begehen,’ ‘die Eucharistie feiern,’ ACh, I, 63–4.

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last authorities following the Roman imperial legal tradition, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, did not affect its vitality as a legal rite and, I would suggest, detached it from the theological background against which the law operated. More importantly, however, while the diversity of custom-defined meaning characterizing the early medieval local usage of the kiss-centered rites has been demonstrated, and cannot belie the link between law and dogma, the essence and evolution of the legal bond established by the kiss during the following centuries remains to be investigated. This is worth remembering, for around the beginning of the period the kiss migrated in the rites of vassalage, the second most important form of social relations in the high medieval period. What matters is that in all cases the operation of the ritual kiss throughout the high Middle Ages was influenced by theological thought but could not be reduced to it.37 The codification of the legal formalism of peacemaking in the period from the last quarter of the thirteenth to the first quarter of the fourteenth century betrays sociopolitical rather than religious-ethical principles of organization. Again, it was the ubiquitous and industrious Durand, following his teachers of the Bolognese school of legal systematizing, who furnished the backbone which later legal commentaries fleshed out. The contours of the evolution of the ritual kiss thus seem clear. What is unclear is how the concepts of relatedness embodied in the informal kiss of kin and feudal affiliation, the holy kiss of Christianity, and the legal kiss played themselves out in the remarkable expansion of the rite in secular peacemaking. Each of these spheres of action had its own social agents, the lay people, the Church, and the secular authorities. There are sporadic references to the kiss as a peacemaking device before the tenth century, but the kiss-centered rites were overshadowed by other practices, above all by the ubiquitous handshake, and a roster of words, things, and actions with long Biblical, Greco-Roman, and Germanic pedigrees.38 The ritual

37

I infer this from Émile Chénon, ‘Le rôle juridique de l’osculum dans l’ancien droit français,’ Mémoires de la societé nationale des antiquaires de France, 8th ser., VI (1919–23), 124–55 and Giorgio Tamassia, Osculum interveniens (contributo alla storia dei riti nuziali),’ Rivista storica italiana, 11 (1885), 241–64. 38 Rufinus of Sorrento has a short list in his De bono pacis, ch. 27, see Deutinger, Rufinus von Sorrent, 172. Thirteenth-century legalists elaborated a roster of cases. A classic late-medieval moralistic example is Johannes von Paltz, Coelifodina, ed. by Christoph Burger and Friedhelm Stasch (Berlin-New York, 1983), 155–7.

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complex coordinated by the kiss became highly visible only in the late tenth century. In any event, it was propagated on a grand scale by ecclesiastical and lay authorities alike by the year 1000. Gaining a solid foothold in the official peace theory and practice, the ritual kiss did not surrender it for at least three centuries and remained influential long thereafter. Students of the Middle Ages have not failed to notice this, ask why it was so, and attempt to provide answers to the question. Indeed, the increasing frequency with which the kiss-centered rituals appear in evidence from the turn of the first millennium on has attracted the attention of generations of scholars. There is a valuable scholarly tradition on the subject. Much of what has been done, however, remains inadequate to the task. Three aspects, in particular, invite criticism. First, in spite of the interest in ritual there are no studies explaining the persistence rather than the reasons for the initial incorporation of the kiss of peace and its accompanying rites in the context of conflict resolution.39 Second, there is no coherent, conceptual argument revealing the evolution of the modes of social interaction embodied by peacemaking ritual. Third, the relations between the forms of the peace act and the analytical fields endowing them with meaning seem to pose the greatest challenge to the students of peace and remain practically unexplored. These problems are well demonstrated in the first modern surveys of the kiss-centered rites. The most representative of these, Christopher Nyrup’s collection of historical anecdotes and case studies from all over Europe, was published at the turn of the twentieth century. It did not go beyond empiricism and basic structural functionalism.40 Attempting a systematization of a large amount of material, Nyrup’s method followed contemporary descriptive ethnography aiming to preserve records of practices near extinction rather than utilizing them as heuristic devices for the study of ritual and society. 39 Peace with the kiss appears only episodically in the two major recent contributions to the study of early and high medieval ritual life, namely, Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992) and Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997). 40 Christopher Nyrup, The Kiss and its History (London, 1901). There is a shorter version of the same approach in Ernest Crawley, The Mystic Rose (London, 1902). A similarly anecdote-like survey of mostly modern material is Charles Carroll Bombaugh, The Literature of Kissing, Gleaned from History, Poetry, Fiction, and Anecdote (Philadelphia, 1876).

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The same observation holds partly true for the largest group of specialized studies, the work of liturgiologists discussing the Christian osculum pacis, the kiss exchanged at mass. The sophisticated empirical skills of this discipline’s practitioners produced a roster of inquiries, which can be grouped in three categories. The earliest trend was to discuss the kiss as a symbolic rite within the framework of Christian worship. Building on the rich tradition of liturgical exegesis from the early Christian centuries to the age of the antiquarians, modern liturgiologists mapped out the evolution of the liturgical kiss, as well as its place, role, symbolism, and significance in Western liturgies from its earliest occurrences to the post-Reformation era.41 The relationship between liturgical and social function, however, was not a concern of theirs. Nonetheless, the wealth of detail gathered by these meticulous researchers allowed a second wave of scholars, from those writing in the pastoral vein to the more socially minded, to place ritual within a larger interpretative scheme. The kiss-centered rites and their shifting contexts were explored to chart the transition of the early Christian communities into the hierarchical, stratified edifice of the medieval Catholic Church.42 While most of these scholars operated from within the theological discourse, a third group, consisting

41

Such as Adolph Franz, Die Messe im deutschen Mittelalter. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Liturgie und das religiösen Volkslebens (Freiburg, 1902); August Wünsche, Der Kuss in Bibel, Talmud und Midrasch; Karl-Martin Hoffman, Philema Agion; Josef A. Jungman, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Solemnia), trans. by Francis A. Brunner (New York, 1951–55), vol. 2, 321–32; Franz Dölger, ‘Der Kuß im Tauf- und Firmungsritual nach Cyprian von Karthago und Hippolyt von Rom,’ ACh, I, 186–96; ‘Der Kuß der Kirchenschwelle,’ ibidem, II, 156–8, ‘Der erste Friedenskuß der Täuflinge im Kreise der Gläubigen,’ ibidem, 159–60, ‘Zu den Zeremonien der Meßliturgie: II. Der Altarkuß,’ ibidem, 191–221, ‘Verweigerung von Kuß, Händegedruck und Salzgemeinschaft aus Gewissensbedenken,’ ibidem, V, 51–9, ‘Christen verweigern Heiden den Kuß. Ein Volksbrauch in Kappadokien nach der Georgslegende,’ ibidem, 147–9; Ludwig Eisenhofer, Handbuch der katolischen Liturgik (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1964); Joseph Braun, S.J., Das Christliche Altergerät in seinem Sein und in seiner Entwicklung (Munich, 1932), 557–72; Klaus Thraede, ‘Ursprünge und Formen des “Heiligen Kusses” im frühe Christentum,’ Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum. Erganzungsband, vol. 11–12 (Münster, 1964), 124–80; Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica. Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church (Oxford, 1962); and Rudolf Suntrup, Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden und Bewegungen in lateinischen und deutschen Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1978). 42 Phillips, The Ritual Kiss; Eleanor Kreider, ‘Let the Faithful Greet Each Other,’ 28–49; Walter Lawrie, ‘The Kiss of Peace: A Declaration of Koinonia,’ Theology Today, 12:2 ( July 1955), 236–42; Stephen Benco, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington, 1984), 78–103. See also Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, S.J. and Paul Bradshow, eds., The Study of the Liturgy (New York, 1992).

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of historians and sociologists, adopted a secular perspective. The best contribution here belongs to John Bossy, whose historico-sociological analysis of the late medieval mass exposed the dynamics of the social textures hidden behind the theological façade of ritual.43 Bossy’s analytical approach poised the kiss at the hub of the linkages binding individual to community, but it also invited the criticism of later scholars who focused on the conflict over rank and status inherent in the late medieval liturgical practices.44 The evolution of the liturgical kiss from a theological into a sociological problem and a heuristic device of social and cultural history is indicative of the shift in scholarly interest demonstrated by the second major group of studies of the kiss, the work of the legal historians. Following a tradition of their own, the post-medieval stage of legal inquiry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century focused on the two large fields where the rite still had legal implications at the time they were writing: namely, marriage and vassalage. The antiquarian revival, perhaps best exemplified by Charles Du Cange, broadened these spheres to include the cataloging of evidence about property exchange and peacemaking. Like Du Cange, the early legal scholars saw their task in collecting and classifying instances of ritual practice which they considered to be the forms or ‘vestments’ of the various contractual ties explicated in the commentaries of the medieval Romanists.45 By the turn of the nineteenth century, this approach was abandoned. French and Italian legalists working on the rituals of vassalage and property exchange and German legal 43 John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700,’ Past & Present, 100 (August 1983), 29–61, and his ‘Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community, and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,’ in Derek Baker, ed., Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World (Oxford, 1973), 129–43. 44 Virginia Reinburg, ‘Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,’ Sixteenth Century Journal, 23:3 (1992), 526–47; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge-New York, 1991) and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, 1992). 45 For a selected list of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘osculatorians’ see Hans-Wolfgang Strätz, Der Verlobungskuss und seine Folgen rechtsgeschichtlich besehen. Nebst drei Anhängen (Konstanz, 1979), 51–2. Among the early modern authors, two works stand out, Martin Kempe, Dissertatio historico-philologica gemina: prior, de osculo in genere, ejusque variis speciebus, posterior de osculo Judae (Leipzig, 1665), and Stephan Wiesand, Disputatio de osculis iuris symbolis (Leipzig, 1764). The best inventory is still Charles du Fresne Sieur Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Graz, 1954), vol. 6, coll. 71–4.

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historians studying feud and reconciliation attempted to clarify the role of the kiss-centered rites within the formal legal procedures in which ritual was included. The contribution of the critical legal school consisted of adding a structural dimension to the uses of the kiss and in postulating the law of obligations as its operative field.46 Having accomplished this during the period between the World Wars, modern legal science considered its job done and shelved the case of peace ritual. Shifts in the study of liturgy apart, the post-World War II era witnessed a re-orientation of the inquiry into new fields. Developments in related disciplines stimulated renewed interest in pre-modern Western ritual in general and the kiss-centered rites in particular. Anthropology, especially its symbolic interpretative branch, proved most inspiring. Under such influences, the new studies tended to address the ritual kiss as a cultural practice rooted in the functioning of a self-sufficient, coherent system of signs and symbols. The advent of cultural symbolism was heralded by an attempt at a synthesis, Nicolas Perella’s monographic discussion of the kiss as a religio-erotic rite. Perella’s main target was the symbolism of the love kiss. He focused on a few primary metaphors harking back to the early Christian epoch, such as the kiss-soul and kiss-spirit, and drew almost exclusively on fictional and narrative evidence. His work was a specimen of literary theory in the field of migratory discourses and excluded sociopolitical causality.47 This approach was shared by shorter literary and linguistic studies on the kiss. One of the few works in this area, Jones’s survey of the kiss in Middle High German literature was limited to highlighting the principles according to which the conventions of social interaction were converted into literary

46 Émile Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ Nouvelle revue historique du droit français et etranger, 16 (1912), 573–660, and especially his ‘Le rôle juridique de l’osculum;’ Lucien Anné, Les rites de fiançailles et la donation pour cause de mariage sous le Bas-Empire (Louvain, 1941), 63–85, and 296–306, esp. 82; Giorgio Tamassia, Osculum interveniens; Mary Brown Pharr, ‘The Kiss in Roman Law,’ The Classical Journal, 42:7 (April 1947), 393–7; Rudolf His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen im Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1901) and his short but instructive references in ‘Gelobter und gebotener Friede in deutschen Mittelalter,’ ZRG, 66 (GA, 33) (1912), 139–223, esp. 197ff. 47 Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane. Perella’s approach provoked Le Goff ’s somewhat justified remark that this was ‘just another book on courtly love,’ see note 49.

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tropes. Jones then discussed the latter as signs operative within the literary discourse’s own conventions.48 At the other end of the spectrum absorbing the fresh theoretical impulse, Jacques Le Goff ’s seminal study of the symbolic rites of vassalage abandoned earlier legalistic schemes in favor of a ‘thick description’ in a Geertzian fashion and built on a crossbreed of symbolism and structural anthropology. Le Goff saw the kiss as the embodiment of the social equality and reciprocity characterizing exclusively the French feudal custom.49 The idea was present in the medieval legal tradition on reconciliation throughout the continent, but Le Goff ’s preoccupation with structurally oriented, closed sign systems prevented him from grasping the connection. Another study of the rites of vassalage from the vantage point of symbolism, J. Russel Major’s, although locked in a different explanatory scheme (Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process), introduced historicism to the problem. Russel Major supplied a dynamic dimension to Le Goff ’s structural interpretation by considering the reasons for the demise of the rite and attempted to broaden the range of causality by adding a socio-cultural perspective, the field of manners.50 Russel Major’s work reflects the impact of the most recent trend in the study of Western ritual, the new cultural history. This approach drew attention away from explanation and instead embraced interpretation. The act of reading the kiss as a cultural sign now constituted the fundamental analytical issue. The practitioners of this school approached the kiss as a fluid, multivalent cultural practice. They highlighted the diversity of meaning, the distinctions between public and private, and, in a modification of Van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s theories, the function of the kiss as a liminal ritual.51 48 George F. Johnes, ‘The Kiss in Middle High German Literature,’ Studia Neophilologica, A Journal of Germanic and Romance Philology, 38:2 (1966), 195–210; see also Peter Flury, ‘Osculum und osculari. Beobachtungen zum Vokabular des Kusses im Lateinischen,’ in Sigrid Krämer and Michael Bernhard, eds., Scire litteras: Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben (Munich, 1988), 149–57. 49 Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rituals of Vassalage,’ in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. by Athur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), 237–87. 50 J. Russel Major, ‘Bastard Feudalism and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17:3 (Winter 1987), 509–35. 51 Michael Camille, ‘Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral,’ in Daniel Poirion and Nancy Regalado, eds., Context: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature. Yale French Studies, Special Issue (New Haven, 1991), 151–70. I would

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Michael Camille’s and Willem Frijhoff ’s inquiries, for example, focused on the capability of the ritual kiss to refer to signs and symbols originating in distinct, internally consistent systems of meaning to reflect the affective scales and cultural values of different social groups. These studies enhanced our grip on the generation of meaning, but their weakness is in the reduction of ritual action to its semiotics and the failure to fully integrate causal functionalism into the interpretation. This shortcoming is neatly illustrated in Klaus Schreiner’s two recent essays on the kiss. Treating the rite above all as a symbolically communicative and performative practice situated exclusively within systems of signs exchange Schreiner reverted to a new ‘symbolic positivism,’ being unable to explain sociopolitical causality outside the range of the symbolic links.52 The cultural trend in post-war historical inquiry was most thoroughly integrated in the recent synthesis in the field, Yannick Carré’s monograph on the symbolism of the Western kiss from the fifth to the fifteenth century.53 This interdisciplinary study had three professed aims. The first was to make an overview of what the author called variables—that is, kissing in specific contexts, such as the kiss of peace, the vassal kiss, the kiss in greetings, in reconciliation, and the mystic kiss. Carré’s task was to explicate the symbolism of the rite within each category and define the categories’ chronological frames. Following a model harking back to Nyrup’s, Carré’s new-style symbolic inventory did provide more substance, especially of French provenance, and underscored the observation that the kiss-centered rites had indeed been a central ritual complex of the pre-modern West. Unlike earlier discussions, Carré positioned the symbolic dimension of ritual within the historical uses of the kiss. His inquiry was thus clearing the ground for a future ‘historical ethnography’ of the ritual kiss,

like to thank Prof. Regalado for bringing this article to my attention. See also Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Kiss Sacred and Profane: Reflections on a cross-cultural Confrontation,’ in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day, with an introduction by Sir Keith Thomas (Cambridge, 1991), 210–36. 52 Schreiner, ‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes;’ and idem, ‘Gerechtigkeit und Frieden haben sich geküßt (Ps 84:11). Friedensstiftung durch symbolischen Handeln,’ in Johannes Fried, ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im hohen und späten Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1996), 37–85. 53 Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age.

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based on better regional and quantitative studies. The second aim of Carré’s book was to reconstruct the constants, or the historically stable dimensions of ritual. Building on earlier findings, above all Le Goff ’s, Carré discussed the functioning of the kiss as a masculine, an egalitarian, an elitist, and a public gesture. Finally, Carré’s real contribution was the presentation of the evolution of the kiss as a synthetic reflection of the metamorphoses of individual and society from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. He postulated that the kiss stood for the symbolic union of carnal and spiritual that resolved the antinomy between the City of God and the City of Man. The ritual kisses among the members of the three orders of society embodied two types of harmony, the one interior and individual, the other social and collective, realized on four levels—corporeal, affective, spiritual, and intellectual. That harmony, in Carré’s view, characterized Western civilization in the high Middle Ages. The breakdown of that social order and the theories that informed it spelled the demise of the kiss. Carré’s conclusion set the research agenda for the future; only the total, interdisciplinary, minute inquiry into the functions of the kiss, he insisted, will help us understand the fundamental premises of harmony, order, and interdependence upon which medieval Western society was built.54 The unfolding of Carré’s synthesis as a progression from the particular to the general and from the empirical to the analytical captures the theoretical evolution of the now century-old critical inquiry into the ritual kiss. It is a convenient point of departure to assess the achievements and shortcomings of modern research, as well as the venues for further investigation emerging from it. Three major points deserve scrutiny, regardless of whether we address ritual peace on a local, regional, or inter-regional level. First, there persists the trend to substitute an inventory of the applications of the kiss and their symbolic ‘reading’ for an analytical approach. This is best seen in the study of legal ritual. Inquiries fail to account for the principles that underlay the connection between local forms, their generic functional context, and social environment. Carré’s ‘intellectual’ interaction, for example, included the kiss in the rites of vassalage and property contracts—both legal rites—but paid no attention to the features these ‘variables’ shared. Early critical

54

Ibidem, 323–36.

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legal scholarship captured some of the general patterns in the shifting legal contexts of the rite. Subsequent work, however, did not follow up on that. Legal ritual as an analytical issue disappeared. The problem of how the changes in the nature of the legal concepts embodied in the kiss reflected the evolution of its political environment, and therefore the power relations which played themselves out in peacemaking was overwritten by preoccupations with the symbolism of the kiss. This double reduction curtails our capacity to analyze ritual’s role as a legal form. The symbolic inventory approach to the legal field misses the main question, the nature of the obligation generated by the kiss and the reasons for which it was chosen over or worked along with other legal forms or symbols, such as the seal or the written record. Was the principle making the kiss operative in legal contexts applicable in other types of legal relationships? The substitution of symbolic interpretation for sector analysis does not allow us to address this issue and, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, gives an ahistorical slant to the investigation. Equally neglected is the question of whether the legal substance that was clothed in one and the same ritual changed over time and what conclusions can we derive about the sociopolitical premises of such an evolution. Finally, where did legal agency reside? Legal, social, and cultural historians so far have not attempted a genealogy of legal ritual on such terms, being content with identifying its local symbolism and social referents, its origins, and its demise. Second, the evidence does not support the argument for the existence of coherent, independent ritual discourses operating within closed symbolic systems and the suggested division of variables, constants, and levels of symbolic integration. These proposals, again, seem to mask an empirical solution as an analytical one. The ritual kiss of peace was more like a porous hub of partial connections, carrying over meanings from one symbolic field to another and mediating between symbolic and non-symbolic worlds. The alleged constants in the operation of the rite—rank, gender, and the public-private dichotomy—do not appear to be structural phenomena. On an analytical level, the practice of ritual reconciliation collapses the difference between constants and variables as postulated by Carré. The quest for the stable parameters of the ritual action needs to be reoriented toward hermeneutic constants, such as the actors’ affective and cognitive dispositions and the habit-memory that bodily practices induced and orchestrated.

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This observation leads us to the third point, the main thrust of the inquiry. Those engaging the kiss-centered rites on some analytical level maintain that the rites of peace were above all a symbolic representation. Accordingly, the analysis is directed to ritual’s semiotic structure and the cultural code behind it. Within this broad consensus there are two camps, parting ways on the issue of ritual’s functional dimension. The majority shares the idea that ritual communicated a common social ethos and values. Reading the rite within a self-contained symbolic system or reinserting it into a historically specific background, this view presents the kiss as a device of social stability and equilibrium, since the rites of peace articulated symbolically and made intelligible the forces of cohesion in the represented social reality. Carré’s reconstruction of the high medieval ‘symbolic harmony of the kiss’ is the most forceful expression of this paradigm. The second interpretation goes along postmodernist lines. Its proponents conceive of ritual as contested grounds and the kiss of peace as a cultural form disguising and denying social conflict. Ritual interaction did not mirror and reinforce pre-existing social structures. On the contrary, it attempted to order social systems. This type of analysis allows us to break through the crust of social harmony and discern the conflicts simmering underneath.55 Introducing contestation, this approach moves away from symbolism and emphasizes the functional dimension—i.e., what matters for the inquiry is what ritual actually did. The search for such functional patterns is at the heart of my inquiry. It seems to me that if there is an epistemologically sound strategy for the reconstruction of the functional dimensions of the kiss over the long term and all over Latin Christendom, it is the snapshot technique. What follows, then, is an analysis of clusters of data gathered after extensive sifting of evidence from the regions where the kiss was consistently used as peace ritual. Monastic charters from the eleventh- and twelfth-century France, notarial records from the thirteenth- to sixteenth-century northern Italian communes, and the city statutes and other legal evidence of the late-medieval urban centers of northwestern Germany and the Low Countries are my main sources, along with narrative and corroborative evidence from other locales. Where possible, I have tried to analyze coherent action

55

Rubin, Corpus Christi, 76–7; Duffy, The Stripping of Altars, 126–7.

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sequences and detect recurring patterns within their local social context. To integrate the bewildering variety of local, regional, and supra-regional appropriations of the kiss-centered rites into a coherent reconstruction of ritual efficacy is no easy task. What makes it manageable is that the operation of the rites of peace can be analyzed in discrete categories. The first of the fluid referential fields of the ritual kiss is the legal dimension of peacemaking. Legal evidence provides, among other things, the time frame of the inquiry. The earliest extant evidence of the kiss as a legal instrument of the peace is in the legislation of Emperor Henry II in 1019. One of the last statutory injunctions I use is in the re-issue of the legal code of Antwerp in 1586. The analysis unfolding between these two chronological poles aims (1) to reveal the legal principles informing the functioning of the rites of peace; (2) to identify the shifting meaning of the obligation ensuing from the binding promise of ritual as the fundamental feature of the kiss’s legalism; and (3) to trace the interaction of the secular rites of peace with the ecclesiastical discourses attempting to control them. Discussing the uncoupling of the legal discourse from the religious field, I attempt to pin down the social essence of obligation and the legally actionable conditions it created. Second, the legal contract was stabilized by ritually governed emotionality. Emotions were induced, mobilized, or suppressed with the deployment of the kiss of peace. In the absence of legitimate coercion, the agreement to reconcile and forgo insult and injury, even when reached under pressure and couched in legally binding terms, was a shaky social device. If all habit is, in a sense, affective disposition, whether the peace would stand or not depended on the ability of the reconciliatory act to suppress the asocial emotions induced in the course of the conflict, to remove or neutralize them as conditions of revenge, and to induce positive emotions of socializing.56 The ritual kiss tackled this demanding task by causing individual actors to go through acts of emotion work that linked agency and context, orchestrating the coordination of emotion and affect in such a way that asocial sentiments were suspended, suppressed, or destroyed. The chronologically evolving feelings of the feud, such as anger, hatred, and grief, cultural artifacts as they are, are exposed in the

56

Connerton, How Societies Remember, 93–4.

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ritual interaction as having their roots in both organic affect and social sentiment. Juxtaposing this emotional texture against the authoritative ecclesiastical discourses based on love, mercy, and forgiveness by examining the evolution of a major reconciliatory narrative, The Tale of the Forgiving Knight, I seek to reveal the linkages between normative prescription and ontological affect. Finally, I select four emotional states induced in the course of the ritual encounter—anxiety, catharsis, disgust, and respect—to discuss the emotional efficacy of ritual. Third, a major issue for the student of ritual and power relationships is the constitution of identity in the contexts of the ritual peacemaking. High- and late-medieval ritual was a dynamic means of individuation, operating against the backdrop of the shift from traditional to functional mode of social stratification, the interaction enfolding within two historically consecutive structural frames, exchange and representation, and ritual being a remembrance-generating device unifying personality in action. In all cases identity was determined by the political and social contexts in which its appropriation took place, creating one type of identity in twelfth-century France, for example, another in a thirteenth-century Flemish commune, and yet another in sixteenth-century Florence. The rites of peace operated as linkages between self, role, and person and a contextual device validating the internal hierarchy of these identity building-blocks. Ritual peacemaking, it turns out, can be used to test the plausibility of the controversy over embodied continuity of identity versus identity resting on the continuity of other persons’ perceptions. The three categories, ritual in legally binding arrangements, its emotional economy, and its role as an identity-building device lead us, in their turn, to some of the fundamental principles of social and political interaction in the period. Without claiming to exhaust the whole range of implications of ritual, I outline by way of conclusion those that seem to have been of significance for the functioning of the peace rites. Let us, however, follow the order of things ritual and, without further ado, turn to the legal bonds of peace.

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PART ONE

THE LEGAL BONDS OF PEACE

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INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

THE LEGAL BONDS OF RITUAL

Ley. IIII. Que cosa es paz, e en que manera deue ser fecha, e que pena meresce aquelque la quebranta. Paz, es fin, e acabamiento de la discordia, e del desamor que era entre aquellos que la fazen. E porq el desacuerdo, e la mal querencia q los omes ha entresi nasce de tres cosas. Por omezillo, o por daño, o por deshonrra que se fazen, o por malas palabras que se dizen los unos a los otros. Porende queremos demostrar en q manera deue ser fecha la paz sobre cada vno destos desaquerdos. Onde dezimos que quãdo algunos se quisieren mal por razon de omezillo, o deshonrra, o de daño, se acaeciere q se acuerden para auer su amor de consuno, e ferel amor ver dadero conuiene que aya, y dos cosas que se perdonen, e se besen. Esto tuuieron por bien los sabios antiguos porque de la abundancia del coraçon sabla la boca, e por las palabras que ome dize da testimonio de lo que tiene en la voluntad porque el beso es señal que quita la enemitad del coraçon, pues que dixo que perdonaua, a aquel que ante queria mal, e enel lugar de la enemistad puso, y el amor. Mas quando la mal querencia viene e malas palabras que se dixeron, e non por omezillo, si se acordaren para auer su amor de consuno, abonda que se perdonen, e en señal quel perdonamiento es verdadero, deue se abraçar. Otrosi dezimos que quien quebrãtare la paz despues que suere puesta reteniendo en el coraçon la enemistad de la mal querencia que ante auia non la faziendo por ocasio, nin por otro yerro que acaeciesse entre ellos de nueuo, que deue auer aquella mesma pena, que han aqllos q quebrantã la tregua en aquella manera que de suso diximos. Alfonso the Wise, Las Siete Partidas, VII, 12, iv

In 1555, the learned licenciado Gregorio López published what proved to be the most authoritative edition of Las Siete Partidas, the fundamental

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law of the Spanish realm. Working with versions dating back to the thirteenth century, López followed tradition and wove through the text an extensive gloss of his own.1 His contribution makes clear that ritual was still a legitimate part of most legal actions. Peacemaking was no exception to that rule. López traced down its subtleties all the way back to Aristotle, drawing heavily on Guillaume Durand, Giovanni Andrea, and Baldus’s late medieval compendiums, but gave little credit to the neo-Latinists who maintained that consent alone made the peace act binding.2 To López, without ritual there was no actionable legal bond. There were two ways to make peace, he explained, with words and an embrace, and with words and a kiss. And while embracing was the standard gesture on most occasions, the kiss was required for reconciliation after homicide, grave injury, or insult. Supporting his argument with excerpts of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons heavily loaded with affective spirituality, López saw in the kiss the sign of the pure love that transformed the hearts of former enemies. In the context of the law, the kiss translated the individual emotive transformation into a formal legal bond. This was necessary, for although peacemaking was enforced and monitored by the state, it was still a private contract and without the parties’ total commitment the peace would not hold. López’s gloss reflects a discourse in which the ritual kiss was the central feature of the legal instruments constituting the peace act.3 Contrary to the assertions about the fading of ritual efficacy, sixteenth-century legal systems still made good use of the kiss’s legal potential. On this point the Spanish lawyer was not alone. At the time López was busying himself with the commentary, several Italian cities in the Papal States promulgated codes with detailed regulations of the implications of the ritual kiss of peace. About thirty years after the publication of the Salamanca Partidas, in 1586, the government of Antwerp published its own authoritative edition of the city’s statutes with similar references to the legal efficacy of the kiss of peace. Early modern legislation on peacemaking, following in the footsteps of high medieval jurisprudence, clearly considered the rit1 See Jerry R. Craddock, The Legislative Works of Alfonso X, El Sabio: A Critical Bibliography (London, 1986), 72, for López’s edition as parent of all subsequent editions. 2 Las Siete Partidas: Setena partida (Salamanca, 1555), 45. 3 I use the term ‘discourse’ with the meaning of the ‘general domain of the production and circulation of rule-governed statements,’ see Sara Mills, Discourse (London, 1997), 9.

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ual kiss something more than a tenacious formality that went against the grain of contemporary legal theory. And although the kiss soon lost its legal meaning and disappeared altogether from the law, among other reasons because of the increased coercive powers of the state, its continuous presence in medieval legal theory and practice is a phenomenon that requires explanation. At the heart of this phenomenon was the conviction that the kiss operated a legal instrument constituting the legal pact of peace. The task of the following discussion, therefore, is to explore the role of the kiss by unveiling the evolution, essence, and implications of the legal substance represented in ritual. Just as in the sixteenth century, the medieval kiss thrived in a wide range of local, regional, and inter-regional traditions and provided the formalism for a host of legal instruments. Probing several of those across the high and late medieval West is no easy task. I doubt the possibility to ever accomplish the ‘total inquiry’ which Carré called for. In the absence of such, we have to admit that one cannot study the workings of a legal rite that registered all over Latin Christendom by leafing through the contents of a single archive, nor can we cast the net deep and wide enough to cover all of the archives. The methodology I worked out had to take stock of the patchy and chronologically uneven information about the usages of the legal kiss and acknowledge the necessity of conjecture. My guidelines can be summarized as follows. First, on a macro-level it is possible to define relatively homogeneous geographical and cultural environments in which, compared to other places and times, the extant data documents substantial evidence about the kiss-centered rites over a discrete time period. Almost invariably these regions demonstrate a high level of political fragmentation, social strife, and the absence of centralized, legitimate, and coercive monopoly on power acknowledged as such by the parties to the reconciliation. Such are the French kingdom and the south of France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Castilian towns of the twelfth century, the North Italian communes and city-states, and the urban centers of the Low Countries and Northern Germany from the late twelfth trough the fifteenth century. Within these regions operated diverse and often idiosyncratic legal traditions, many of which took on the formalism of the kiss as the central rite of peacemaking. Each of the areas, however, displays common, recurring patterns that impose a degree of coherency on the hodge-podge of local custom. These patterns are revealed in the nature of the legal bond embodied by the kiss, its role compared to other ritual forms,

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the legal instruments which adopted the formalism of the kiss, the social agents engaged in peacemaking, the binding force borne by the kiss, and the legal character of the agreement enacted in ritual. Second, although the legal forms and instruments of peacemaking in each area followed their own rhythm, it is possible to discern broad shifts in the evolution of the kiss-centered rites as a Westernwide peace form. The set of features defining legal ritual as a regional phenomenon help anchor it in time as well. The fact that we cannot chart these developments in minute detail and that there are huge regional ‘blank gaps’ in the evidence does not mean that the attempt to analyze the changes in the legal implications of ritual is unwarranted. On the contrary, I would argue that the ‘total inquiry’ advocated by Carré is unnecessary for the understanding of the major political dimensions of peacemaking ritual. These can be understood fairly well if the fundamental principles governing the internal evolution and transformation of the binding forces of ritual practice are grasped. The evolution of the kiss as a legal rite reflects the process by which the struggle for the imposition of a hegemonic concept of the peace reformulated the nature of the legal bond established by ritual. In each of the above broadly defined socio-cultural environments, the contest enfolded according to its own rules, and although there are inter-regional borrowings and overlapping, each area can be examined as representing a distinct chronological stage in the application of the kiss as a legal device. The picture we will arrive at does not necessarily stand for a composite, pan-European progression of the relationship between peace ritual, law, and political power, but it will enhance our understanding of the principles governing their interaction as the Middle Ages unfolded. My inquiry into the legal bonds of peace therefore combines the chronological with the topical approach. On each of its stages of development legal ritual was characterized by features that are regionally specific and typologically distinct from what can be observed at the same time in other locales. From humble beginnings in the eleventh century, to becoming the exclusive form of peacemaking during the thirteenth and most of the fourteenth centuries, to its subsequent decline in secular jurisdictions in the following centuries, the legal kiss of peace followed a trajectory which has remained obscured by preoccupation with other dimensions of ritual. Let me now turn to the rapid expansion of the ritual kiss as a legal form to lay the foundations for revealing the logic governing that trajectory.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE CONTEST FOR SUPREMACY: RITUAL AND THE LAW IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

Legal ritual has long been a subject of interest and the kiss of peace has had its fair share of attention in the writings of legal scholars. In spite of this centuries-old tradition, legalists have not placed the rites of peace, and indeed few other rituals, in the context of the legal institutions within which pre-modern ritual formalism operated. The task of this chapter is to chart the early stage of the expansion of the kiss of peace along five major lines. I will explore (1) ritual as the form of the legal instruments employed in the reconciliatory contracts, (2) the binding forces of obligation borne by the kiss and (3) the traditions informing them, (4) the nature of legal bond the kiss embodied, and, (5) the conditions of peace created by the rite during the period of its expansion, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The choice of this time frame is not arbitrary. Although I do trace the genealogy of the traditions supplying content to the legal kiss of peace, a set of features characterizes the two centuries between c. 1000 and 1200 as a discrete period in the history of legal ritual. The period is marked by the extraordinary expansion of the kiss in customary law, its adoption in numerous legal instruments, and the struggle of the traditions in which it was already established to dominate the ritual forms of peacemaking. Above all, however, the high Middle Ages are remarkable, as we shall see, for the quite uniform legal concept engaged by the kiss. It seems appropriate to organize the inquiry in a topical manner, paying attention both to the genealogy of the legal customs discussed and their geographical distribution. I begin with a survey of the legal instruments operated by the formalism of the kiss in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and work my way through the conditions they created and the legal forces which sustained them.

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Having entered the continental legal traditions in the early fourth century as the formal rite of betrothal, the kiss was slow to expand into other legal fields in general and the sphere of legal peacemaking in particular. Uninterrupted ecclesiastical insistence on the positive social implications of the kiss employed at mass notwithstanding, the customary practices of peacemaking built on Roman legal traditions and the Germanic influences upon them were hesitant to endorse the kiss as their formal expression, or ‘vestment.’ The breakthrough must have occurred sometime in the late tenth century. The data are inconclusive, but if we can judge from the extant evidence, the first explicit reference to the kiss as the ritual form of a legally binding instrument is a case of firmantia. The medieval instrument of firmare in its technical sense is recorded in the earliest Bavarian and Langobard legal codes and had a continuing existence in all kinds of legal transactions throughout the Middle Ages.1 Closely related to a family of legal terms, such as obligare, adramire, auctorisare, and inwadiare, firmantia appears to be an instrument akin to the Langobard wadia and the Frankish fides facta but had strong connections to late Roman law as well. Since the high Middle Ages, firmantia was a common occurrence in the heavily Romanized southern European provinces and appeared in sources written in Latin, Catalan, and Provancal.2 In Italy, the adherence to the legal custom of vulgar Roman law was perhaps the main reason for the preservation of firmantia in twelfth- and thirteenth-century notarial practice. In this environment, customary firmantia made its way into civic legislation and was associated with the kiss. One of the earliest occurrences of the kiss of peace in Italian statutory law, for example, is in the statutes of Verona, where, drawing on sources from the eleventh century, the legislators expressly understood osculum as formal firmantia.3 The late registration of the rite, however, 1

Ernst Schwind, ed., Lex Bajwariorum (MGH Leges, Sec. I, Leges nationum germanicarum, Hanover, 1926), vol. 5 part 2, title XV, ch. 11. 2 For firmantia see Alex Franken, Das französische Pfandrecht im Mittelalter. Erste Abteilung: Das Engagement und sein Verhältniss zu der sogenante ältere Satzung des deutschen Rechts (Berlin, 1879), 220–40. 3 See the article about those who break the peace with exiles in the Statutes of Verona from 1228. The text of the law strongly suggests a connection with Liber Papiensis and the Constitutions of Henry II from 1019; see below.

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reminds us to exercise caution in connecting the kiss to the legal instrument at this stage of its evolution. In the territories of what is today France, the kiss-firmantia appears to have been in use much earlier and not only in the Romanized South. An example from the political history of the late Carolingian period, widely echoed in early eleventh-century historiography, the murder of William Longsword, testifies to its existence in northern France as well. On December 17, 942, in the neighborhood of the small village of Picquigny, about ten miles west of Amiens, Count Arnulf of Flanders met with his long-time enemy, Duke William Longsword of Normandy. The purpose of the meeting was to establish indelible friendship and peace. All principal sources, the Deeds of the Norman Dukes, Dudo of St. Quentin, Richer, and Raoul Glaber, confirm the official character of the meeting. The two princes first kissed at seeing each other; after reaching an agreement, they sealed it with an oath of friendship and, again, with kisses of peace.4 How this peaceful and otherwise cautiously prepared conference ended is well known. Duke William was treacherously called back, attacked, and murdered by Arnulf ’s henchmen. What counts for our discussion, however, is not the precarious character of the bond embodied in the kiss and oath, but the clear indications of the legal character of the two practices. It is true that none of the Norman-affiliated writers who raised an outcry at Arnulf ’s treachery went beyond the moral side of the story. There are, however, sufficient reasons to believe that the kiss was the embodiment of a formal legal instrument referred to by the Deeds with the technical term firmare. Duke William was caught off guard because to him ritual was not merely an affective or ‘symbolic’ gesture, ‘confirming’ or ‘strengthening’ the bond but a working device securing the contract. Arnulf ’s subsequent reconciliation with the king, too, indicates that the breaking of the bond was an offense against the Capetian ruler’s theoretical jurisdiction, feeble as it might have been in practice.

4 The terms used by the earliest authors are, respectively, cum eo amicitia uelle habere pacemque indelebilem firmare and post jurata amicitiarum sacramenta et plurima pacis oscula. See Elizabeth M. C. van Houts, ed. and trans., ‘The Gesta Normanorum Ducum’ of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni. Vol. 1: Introduction and Books I–IV (Oxford, 1992), 90–3, Book iii, 11–12. Compare also Dudo of St. Quentin, History of the Normans, translated with introduction and notes by Eric Christiansen (Rochester, 1998), 81–5.

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The sources thus support the conclusion of continuous and widespread application of the instrument within definable legal parameters. Firmantia entailed the giving of a pledge or security to guarantee the integrity of the act, and oftentimes included the pledge of the firmator himself—a practice well-known from the Frankish laws—or his fideiussor, or his material possessions. Its infringement triggered penalties. These varied locally, and ranged from losing one’s security, according to the tradition preserved in the thirteenth-century Tübinger Rechtsbuch but dating from a much earlier epoch, to seizure of the offender’s goods or body, to destruction of his property, to payment of indemnity or ban from the country.5 The main feature of firmantia as a legal instrument in all cases appears to be its promissory, interim character and its operation within the domain of the law of obligations.6 Finally, from the geographical distribution of the instrument we may conclude that firmantia was not a Roman institution, but rather a Romanized indigenous form. It was most probably brought to life by the practical necessities of the early medieval Romanized and Germanic societies struggling to define their legal structures with the vocabulary of Roman law.7 Throughout the early and the high Middle Ages firmantia was enacted through the performance of a rite or the presentation of an object. The handshake, the insertion of hands or immixtio manuum, the transfer of a rod or festuca, of a charter, or of a certain amount of money, or the touching of relics or the Gospels—that is, all the

5 Tübingen Law Book, ch. 127 (I use the microfilm copy in HMML) for losing one’s firmantia in case of failed third arbitrage. For a discussion of this case see Linda Fowler, ‘Forms of Arbitration,’ Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (MIC, Series C, Subsidia; vols. 1, 4, 6) (Vatican City, 1972), 138–9. 6 Here I use obligation as a general category. Thereafter I will distinguish between legal liability (Haftung) and duty (Schuld ) in the manner of the distinction elaborated by Otto von Gierke, Schuld und Haftung im älteren deutschen Recht, insbesondere die Form der Schuld- und Haftungsgeschäfte (Breslau, 1910). Gierke’s theory has been criticized and for good reason. It does introduce a too neat distinction in the procedural development of early Germanic law. However, it does provide conceptual tools that are indispensable in a discussion of the function of legal ritual. 7 On the most recent condition of the lively dispute about the relationship between continuity and change of Roman law and culture in the French south see Christian Lauranson-Rosaz, ‘La Romanité du Midi de l’an mil: Le point sur les sociétés méridionales,’ in Robert Delort, ed., La France de l’an Mil (Paris, 1990), esp. 49–53. Jeffrey A. Bowman, ‘Do Neo-Romans curse? Law, Land, and Ritual in the Midi (900–1100), Viator, 28 (1997), 1–32 focuses specifically on a ‘cultural pool’ of shared ideas and practices in the integration of written legal rules and their ritual sanction.

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habitual gestures accompanying the swearing of an oath—were its standard embodiments. With the adoption of the kiss of peace in the legal formalism of firmantia, an uneasy relationship with the other forms developed. High medieval law did not have such a concept as excess in formalism, but between the occurrence of the kiss-firmantia outlined above and the appearance of a substantial body of references to the rite by the middle decades of the eleventh century, a major development seems to have taken place. The kiss supplanted older customary forms, especially the different kinds of hand gesture, and acquired a fixed place at the concluding part of the firmantia procedure. Its stable position in the transaction and its role as a concluding form suggest that the kiss gained in importance or came to embody a specific dimension of the contract whose implications were expanding and whose legal significance was subjected to increasingly sophisticated interpretation. Was the new formal expression of firmantia a reflection of an attempt at a redefinition of the interpretative discourse within which the legal instrument operated? In charters from the first half of the eleventh century employing firmantia, the expression ‘insertion of hands and kiss [of peace]’ appears repeatedly. The formula is remarkable for two reasons. The same ritual sequence created the legal bond between lord and man in the rites of vassalage. Its presence there has traditionally been explained with the attribution of the rites to the two facets of the formal bond of vassalage, homage and fealty, but sources of the early twelfth century—Galbert of Bruge’s account for example—do not support that conclusion.8 Because no comparable inquiry into the rites formalizing the settlement of conflicts over property has been made, the formula appears to justify the convention that the kiss of peace was a mere ‘reinforcement’ of the contract enacted by the handshake or the insertion of hands. Both assumptions are in need of further scrutiny. The analysis of clusters of relatively homogeneous evidence preserved in high medieval monastic charters suggests a possibility of addressing the question. The settlements of various calumniae between

8 Jacques Le Goff had to argue that Galbert ‘confused’ the stages of the ritual ceremony in order to overcome the difficulty that the contradiction poses to the standard perception of the formal parts of the vassalic contract. See Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rites of Vassalage,’ 237–87. I would rather suggest that Galbert knew well what he was talking about and that Le Goff ’s problem stems from his disregard of the legal dimensions of ritual on this occasion.

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eleventh- and twelfth-century French religious houses and lay folk of the military class shed light on the connection between the ecclesiastical concepts of morality and obligation, so prominent in the indignation of the pro-Norman narrators of William’s story, and the customary legal practices of the lay estates. Calumniae over property were a principal source of social conflicts and a major opportunity to amalgamate theological morality and pragmatic explication of the legal custom in defending one’s position. Records of settlements of disputes are also a major source for the formalism of the obligatory contracts between monks and lay people. The cartularies of houses located in the south of France, where the Roman tradition was much more pronounced, preserved more references to the kiss. As one goes north the evidence gets thinner, but scattered cases are documented as far north as Mont-St-Michel.9 Whether the difference results from the limited use of firmantia in the north during the period or stems from a hesitance to adopt the kiss as the formalism of the legal act of firmare is open to conjecture. The manner of settling calumniae gives us a clue about the relationship between the two ritual forms, the kiss and the handshake, and indeed between the kiss and a roster of other legal forms. On a number of occasions the kiss appears to have functioned as a secondary device supplementing the hand gesture. If the insertion of hands or the handshake and the acceptance of a certain sum of money or an object created the contract and gave rise to legal obligation that was to be executed in the future, the kiss concluded the agreement that the obligation would be discharged. An example of the formula used for the purposes of reconciliation is preserved in the cartulary of the abbey La Sauve Majore in southwestern France. Between 1107 and 1147 the abbey was entangled in a series of controversies with a group of relatives from the clan of Bernard of Tartanac, namely Arnaud Guillaume and his mother, and Hélie of Lamothe. The problem was that the clan had ‘donated’ the land of Garifont to the abbey in exchange for 100 solidi, but failed to provide the land with settlers. Sometime between 1107 and 1118 the clan conceded to the conditions set by the abbey and Arnaud 9 In a case recorded in the cartulary of Mont-St-Michel under 1121, the transaction was concluded [ firmiter statuerunt] through the kiss only. Quoted after Jean Yver, Les contrats dans le très ancien droit normand (XI e–XIII e siecle) (Domfromt, 1926), 45, note 5.

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Guillaume received five more solidi from Abbot Geoffrey IV and confirmed his grant ‘in the hand of the abbot.’ The rest of his kin followed suit. Then, in order to make the peace even firmer, all present kissed the abbot.10 It is important to note that the two rites complemented each other and constituted a discrete whole which ensured the legally binding force of the transaction. All other ritual gestures, verbal arrangements, and the donation or exchange of objects preceded the ritual kiss, whose place was reserved at the end of the legal settlement. A typical entry, unfortunately the account is too brief to clarify the meaning of the kiss-firmantia. The cartulary of the same house, however, preserved more specific indications that the kiss-firmantia functioned as a legal instrument in its own right. A charter dating from the second decade of the twelfth century recorded how the transaction between Abbot Geoffrey IV and a certain Amauvin of Daignac ended the conflict between the abbey and the layman. Amauvin made a solemn verbal promise, supported by his pledge [ pignus] and guaranteed by fideiussors. The abbot gave him a tunic worth about twenty solidi and Amalvin kissed him.11 Contemporary records from other southern houses confirm the conclusion that the practice was widespread in the Midi. The settlement of a conflict between the count of Albi, Guigo III, and Hugh, bishop of Grenoble, in the course of which the count had seized and plundered lands, churches, and cemeteries belonging to the cathedral of Grenoble and harassed the clerics in every possible way, followed a similar pattern. The formal settlement, designated as a concordia arranged by appointed arbiters, stipulated that the count and the bishop should first renounce the possessions which each side claimed and divide jurisdiction over the contested property. The bishop then reinvested the count with some of the rights he himself had claimed. To pay back the gesture and show good will, the count granted market rights and other sources of income to the church of Grenoble. Finally, on September 5, 1116, the parties gathered together in the presence of witnesses, heard the decision of the arbiters, approved it, and closed the settlement with the kiss of peace.12

10 In manu G. IIII abbatis firmaverunt et ut firmus esset osculum ei dederunt, see Charles Higounet and Arlette Higounet-Nadal, eds., Grand Cartulaire de la Sauve Majeure (Études et documents d’Aquitaine, VIII, Bordeaux, 1996), 69–70, N. 56. 11 Pro confirmatione promissionum arum, Amalvinus abbati dedit osculum, ibidem, 96, N. 105. 12 Hic concordia facta est in presentia nostra et sub osculo pacis confirmata, et ab episcopo et

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The cartulary of another major house, St. Julien of Tours, features several more cases of kiss-firmantia whose legal significance has not been recognized in the recent detailed study of this monastery’s legal interaction and peace settlements with lay folk.13 For the purposes of this inquiry, an illuminating case is a charter from c. 1106 recording the life-grant of landed property originally belonging to the chapel of St. Remy. To guarantee the deed, Abbot Phillip and all the monks in the chapel personally ‘promised, swore an oath over the sacred relics, and confirmed the oath with a kiss of peace.’14 The oath over the relics, possibly involving touching the sacred objects as well, was not considered an act capable of its own to fulfill the requirement for the legal efficacy of the transaction. The latter had to be completed with the confirmation constituted by the kiss. From this brief survey of the use of the kiss as the legal form of firmantia, three conclusions suggest themselves. In the first place, there was a steady trend to substitute traditional rites with the kiss as the formal instrument of firmantia in a variety of legal dealings of ecclesiastics with laymen. In the second place, it is important that the oath, the insertion of hands (or the handshake), and the touching of the Scriptures needed to be supplemented with the kiss. The bond constituted by the kiss appears to have secured the contract guaranteed with the oath. Third, all this was recorded in a charter and witnessed by a group of men, and their seals were attached to the written instrument. Evidently, the constitutive function of the verbal agreement and the oath which guaranteed it were one thing, the concluding kiss another, and the record of the agreement and its authentication with the signatures of witnesses and their seals a separate matter altogether.15 Finally, these developments offer insights

a comite, see Jules Marion, ed., Cartulaire de l’eglise Cathédrale de Grenoble, dits Cartulaires de Saint-Hugues (Paris, 1869), 229–31, N. 81. 13 Stephen D. White, ‘Feuding and Peace Making in the Tourraine around the Year 1100,’ Traditio 45 (1986), 195–263; ‘Pactum . . . legem vincit et amor judicium. The Settlement of Disputes in Eleventh-Century Western France,’ The American Journal of Legal History, 22 (1978), 281–308; and his more theoretical piece ‘From Peace to Power: The Study of Disputes in Medieval France,’ in Esther Cohen and Mayke B. de Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context (Leiden, 2001), 203–18. 14 Promisimus et super sanctas reliquias juravimus et juramentum pacis osculo firmavimus, see Abbot J.-L. Denis, ed., Chartes de Saint-Julien de Tours (1002–1300) (Le Mans, 1913), 75–6, N. 56. 15 This case only is enough to cast doubts on Carré’s assertion that the reason

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into, but do not provide decisive evidence about, the fundamental question of whether ritual had acquired an independent functional dimension and, more importantly, the nature of its legal function. The problem will be better addressed against the background of the gradual expansion of the kiss into another major legal instrument of the period, fides facta. Traces of fides facta are documented at a very early date. During the early Middle Ages, it was widely used in most areas of the Empire east of the Rhine, in Italy, and in the French kingdom, more specifically in Aquitaine, Toulouse, Gascoigne, some regions of western France, and Normandy. Its pristine form was a gesture of giving the right hand or both hands, as in the forms of commendatio in manum or immixtio manuum, or in the oath.16 Fides facta’s association with the ritual kiss is witnessed from the first quarter of the eleventh century, when references to its use in the creation of legal bonds between churchmen and milites began to appear. As with firmantia, the kiss, which later functioned as testimonium fidei, appears also to have originally carried fides together with the handshake. Also, the employment of the kiss-fides facta followed an order in the procedure of establishing contractual bonds similar to that of firmantia. This phenomenon pre-dated the Germanic settlement west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. The practice of assimilating the two rites in the context of fides facta had Roman origins. In the form per osculum et dexteras, late Roman sources attest to the plainly contractual meaning of the kiss in informal peacemaking and the rites of betrothal. These seem to have been the contexts in which the kiss had legal connotations, although it was a common occurrence in conventional associations without legal implications.17 Between the Roman custom, with its more social rather than

for the disappearance of the kiss from the contracts was its substitution with other forms, ‘individualizing’ the document, see Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche, 158–62. If anything, the kiss coexisted with festuca and other objects serving the same purpose for quite a while. 16 MGH SRM, I, 787–8, see for some episodes Nino Tamassia, ‘Fidem facere,’ Archivio giuridico ‘Filippo Serafini,’ n. s., XI (1903), 367–71 and Walter Kienast, Die Fränkische Vasallität. Von den Hausmeiern bis zu Ludwig dem Kind und Karl dem Einfältigen (Frankfurt a. M., 1972), 78–9. 17 See Lucien Anné, Les rites de fiançailles, 63–85, 296–306, esp. 82. For osculum interveniente in betrothals see the fundamental studies of Tamassia, ‘Osculum interveniens,’ and Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ 573–660. Most recently Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage, discussed in detail the legal kiss in Roman law.

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specifically legal implications and the appearance of the medieval kiss-fides, there is, however, a substantial time gap, which calls attention to changes in the contents of fides. The infusion of a religious dimension in the contractual Roman osculum, which led to the wellknown double meaning of osculum pacis et fidei as Christian faith on the one hand, and personal trustworthiness, reputation, protection, and obligation on the other, was a post-Carolingian phenomenon.18 Although typologically linked, these concepts seem to have had an uneasy coexistence under a single ‘vestment.’ Even after the turn of the eleventh century, the tension between the distinct forms of fides facta continued to exist. An episode of Abelard’s life story suggests that the formalism of fides facta was not yet solidly linked to the kiss in the first decades of the twelfth century. When Heloise’s uncle and his kin cooled their wrath and decided on peace with Abelard to salvage the girl’s reputation, the agreement was made by engaging

18 Fides seems not to be mentioned alongside the kiss in formal contracts or cases of reconciliation that appear sporadically in sources down to the eleventh century. In Merovingian times, the kiss accompanied the oath in at least one recorded case of peacemaking that could be assimilated to fides facta—Chilperic’s deceitful reconciliation with Merovech and Brunchild, but there is no direct reference to the meaning of the kiss. See Liber Historiae Francorum, MGH SRM, II, ch. 33, and translation in Bernard S. Bachrach, Liber Historiae Francorum (Lawrence, KS, 1973), 83–4. After the partition of the Carolingian empire, during the frequent meetings, negotiations, and settlements between the heads of the Carolingian successor-states, the kiss appears several times but fides is not mentioned. See Reinhard Schneider, Brüdergemeinde und Schwurfreundschaft. Der Auflösungsprozeß des karlingerreiches im Spiegel der caritas-Terminologie in den Verträgen der karlingischer Teilkönige des 9. Jahrhunderts (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1964), 52ff. for the meeting of Savonières in 862, and Louis the Pious’s reconciliation with his son Louis, ibidem, 117–9. Nor does one see fides in some of the most conspicuous cases of tenth-century reconciliation. Flodoard’s account of King Raoul’s and Duke William of Aquitaine’s meeting in 924 narrates how, after a day of intense negotiations during which envoys crossed several times the Loire near Autun, the two princes met and kissed, but there is no indication of the legal content of the ritual act. See Philipp Lauer, Les Annales de Flodoard, publiées d’après les manuscrits, avec une introduction et des notes (Paris, 1905), 19–20. In a similar way, Richer conveys the essence of Count Heribert of Vermandois’s fatal meeting with King Charles the Simple in 923, an interview that ended with the capture and imprisonment of the king. After receiving the oath of Heribert’s envoys, who swore on their fides [ad legatis jurisjuradum pro fide accepit], Charles proceeded to meet Heribert with a kiss, see Robert Latouche, ed. and trans., Richer: Histoire de France (888–995), Vol. 1: 888–954 (Paris, 1930), 94. In Gerbert of Aurillac’s short note about Duke Hugh Capet’s reconciliation with King Lothar and his wife in 985 we read only that ‘on June 18 Duke Hugh kissed the king and the queen;’ quoted after Heinrich Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts. Studien über Denkart und Existenz im einstigen Karolingerreich (Stuttgart, 1984), vol. 1, 29, N. 98.

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their fides and kiss.19 As the account goes, it is not clear whether the kiss and fides were one and the same or separate elements of the ceremony. The expansion of the kiss into the realm of fides facta seems to have been impeded by its being anchored in a discrete Christian religious discourse to which the legal sphere opened only haltingly and by the tenacity of the hand gesture formalism. In the reign of the eastern Franks and the new polity, the German Empire, the kiss as fides facta appeared episodically as a borrowing from the French custom from the time of Lothar III (1125–1137) in the rites of vassalage only, and did not establish itself elsewhere. Even in the central and northern French territories, where it eventually became the norm in the rites of vassalage, down to the early eleventh century fides facta was exclusively clothed in the formalism of the oath.20 Similar was the situation in Langobard Italy, where wadia and the investiture were the most popular legal instruments. As in Catalonia, most of Italy, despite the widespread use of fides facta in Italian vassalage, remained largely immune until the twelfth century to the new ritual form in the creation of vassal bonds, the field par exellence of application of the kiss in the French kingdom.21 By the second quarter of the thirteenth century, the kiss was definitely established in Italy. The broad overview of the formalism of fides facta thus confirms the impression of the slow and uneven but ultimately successful expansion of the kiss as the form of this fundamental instrument of the medieval legal obligation. The survey does little, however, to shed light on the specifics of the rite’s meanings and functions in this environment. The issue of what was the role of the kiss in the framework of fides facta can be addressed by comparing it to its role in the formal sequence constituting firmantia. Three questions suggest themselves. First, if the handshake or another form of hand gesture was the principal companion and rival of the kiss in pacts of peace

19 Et tam sua quam suorum fide et osculis eam quam requisivi concordiam mecum iniit, see Jean Monfrin, ed., Abélard: Historia Calamitatum. Texte critique avec une introduction (Paris, 1959), 75. 20 Elizabeth Magnou-Nortier, Foi et fidélité. Recherches sur l’évolution des liens personnels chez les Francs du VII e au IX e siècle (Toulouse, 1976), 19–64. 21 For Catalonia see Perre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du millieu du X e a la fin du XI e siècle. Groissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse, 1976), Vol. 2, 741–3. For central Italy see Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval. Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IX e siècle à la fin du XII e siècle (Rome, 1973), Vol. 2, 1138–9.

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concluded with fides facta, does the evolution of the relationship of the two rites display features similar to that occurring in firmantia? Second, was the kiss allocated a particular position of importance in the ritual sequence of fides facta? And third, does the evolution of the formalism of fides facta supply any additional clues as to the nature of the obligation embodied by the kiss and its role in the legally binding contract? Among the substantial body of eleventh- and twelfth-century evidence about the uses of the kiss-fides facta, there are a few instances that offer suggestive insights. Although the data comes almost exclusively from the territories of the French kingdom, and the cases are far apart chronologically, they consistently display similar features and evidently represent the evolution of a distinct legal phenomenon. The ancient formula ‘handshake and kiss,’ which had its roots in Roman antiquity, and which we already saw employed in cases of firmantia and fides facta alike, was coming under pressure by the late eleventh century when applied to a single legal act. More importantly, the tensions arose not so much from a trend to simplify or regularize the uses of ritual by assigning a specific operational field to each act or gesture, as from the clash of the value systems informing the perception of contemporary legal instruments. The issue is perhaps best exemplified by a late eleventh-century case from the county of Bourge. Sometime in 1095, Gill of Seuly, a local high noble, perhaps enticed by the crusading spirit of the time and certainly in need of cash, decided to ‘return’ a church that had been in his family for generations to the monks of St. Florent from the abbey of St. Pierre. For their part, the monks, who in the wake of the Gregorian reform had an agenda of their own concerning property, were willing to pay the handsome sum of a thousand gold solidi of Blois for the reacquisition of the church. The sum was considerable indeed, and precautions were taken to hedge the agreement. The contract stipulated that, if at any time during his life, Gill decided to take back his ‘gift,’ he would pay back the monastery the sum that he now received. Yet the monks were unwilling to commit until Gill guaranteed [affidavit . . . per fidem suam] that he would hold his part of the deal. The knight duly offered his fides, as was the custom, through his hand. Oh no, said the monks, they did not want his hand, ‘because the hand is not fides; words and the soul/will are the fides that a Christian should observe as a Christian. Besides, it is not in the monks’ custom to accept the giving of fides

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through the hand.’ Gill complied, and in order to do what he was asked, he obligated his fides through the holy kiss and received the benefit of their prayers.22 This document illuminates a number of matters. There was a lay and an ecclesiastical way of engaging fides: the lay though the hand gesture, the ecclesiastical through the kiss. The two forms coexisted by the end of the eleventh century and had not yet fused into a homogeneous concept. Both were recognized legal instruments, but the hand-fides was ‘not Christian,’ and as such was not the monks’ custom. The monks did not trust the customary formalism of secular fides, but accepted the pledge of fides as a generic legal form. The lay custom of the time did make routine use of the formalism of the religious legal devices. The kiss was introduced and substituted for the established form of secular fides under ecclesiastical pressure. Finally, although we cannot know for sure what the knight’s fides was, nor whether under animus we must understand the old Roman instrument designating the legally binding will of the parties to the agreement or the Christian soul of the knight, the monks’ fides was certainly the Christian faith.23 The tensions between the traditional handshake and the kiss are visible in the arrangement accommodating the kiss in the procedure of fides facta. As in firmantia, the kiss came to conclude the legal act. A calumnia of 1127 sheds light on this development. A certain Paien the Norman laid claims on and later seized by force a mill in the locality of Blanchard belonging to the regular canons of the abbey

22 Respectively, non manu ubi non est fides, sed verbis et animo ubi est fides qualem decet christianum erga christianum observare, non enim est monachorum ex manu alicujus fidem accipere, and in fide et societate osculatus est monachos . . . and promittens eis fidem in osculo sancto, see Count of Toulgoët-Tréanna, ed., Histoire de Vierzon et de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre, avec pièces justificatives, plans, sceaux, monnaies seigneuriales (Paris, 1884), 474–5, N. 15. For convenientia as a type of contract see Paul Ourliac, ‘La convenientia,’ in Études d’histoire du droit privé offertes à Pierre Petot (Paris, 1959), 413–22. 23 On Roman animus see J. L. Barton, ‘Animus and possessio nomine alieno,’ in Peter Birks, ed., New Perspectives in the Roman Law of Property. Essays for Barry Nicholas (Oxford, 1989), 43–60. Animus applicability in this case stems from its being a designation of the will of a person concluding a transaction with another or acting unilateraly to accomplish an act with legal effects. Intention mattered most, since it made the distinction of what a person promised orally and his or her formal promise, see Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n. s., 1953, vol. 43 pt. 2), 362. Roman law knew the written guarantee of intention, but the custom of the early and high Middle Ages easily switched to gesture and ritual as well.

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of St. Laon at Thuars. The canons brought pressure to bear on the knight by taking their case to his overlord Aimery, the son of the local viscount Geoffrey. Aimery ordered the knight to give up the claim, return the mill, and sue for reconciliation. The quitclaim ceremony took place as Paien, having fallen on his knees, was kissed by the monks in faith and promised to make sure that neither he nor any other person would ever again claim the mill.24 Such pressure was not always necessary. In 1137, making a formal concession to the monks of Noyers, Eschivard of Preuilly and his son Geoffrey enacted the transaction merely by kissing abbot Bernier in testimony of their faith.25 The use of the kiss as fides facta legalized the arrangement by involving not only the principal parties, but the fideiussores who guaranteed that the obligation would be fulfilled as well. In yet another case, a charter of bishop Bruno of Hildesheim from 1158, composed on occasion of his authorization of a transfer of a certain property to the cathedral chapter of Hildesheim, recorded the guarantors’ obligation as embodied in the kiss and some kind of hand gesture to engage their fides.26 In cases of calumniae, such transactions were frequently witnessed, but it was the ritual act that constituted the legal renunciation of the claim. Such was the procedure when, sometime around the end of the eleventh century, Alberic Suaviton gave up, after a calumnia, his claim over a decima belonging to the Benedictine abbey of St. Vincent in Le Mans. Giving the right to the abbey as an annuity, Alberic placed his donum, the symbolic object signifying the gift, on the altar, and then kissed three of the monks pro fide conservanda.27

Flexis genibus in satisfactionem se ipsem per gulam tradidit et eos in fide osculatus est in eo quod nec ipse nec alius super molendinum ullum facerent calumpniam, see Hugues Imbert, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Laon de Thouars (Niort, 1876), N. 48, discussed in Émile Chénon, ‘Le rôle juridique de l’osculum, 131–2. 25 Et ex hoc abbatem Bernerium in testimonium fidei osculaverunt, see Abbot C. Chevalier, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Noyers (Tours, 1872), 540, N. 506. 26 Predicti ergo fidejussores fide sua interposita ore ad os et manu ad manum ita se mihi et ecclessie obligaverunt, ut, si predictus venditor aut heredes sui hanc vendicionem aliquando in irritu ducere temptarent, ipsi fidejussores persolverent. The charter is published in Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen (1868), 103, N. 6. I quote after Paul Puntschart, Schuldvertrag und Treugelöbnis des sächsischen Rechts im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Grundauffassung der altdeutschen Obligation (Leipzig, 1896), 360. Puntschart’s work is one of the finest discussions of the medieval law of obligations and its formalism, but on this occasion he failed to recognize the existence of the kiss which, in my opinion, is undeniable in the form ore ad os. 27 Abbot R. Charles and Menjot D’Elberne, eds., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint24

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The wording of the last case is explicit in addressing our major puzzle, the legal role of the kiss as the form of fides facta in contracts terminating calumniae. The issue has two dimensions: the extent to which the ritual act constituted the contract itself—that is, was the legal efficacy of the contract borne by its ‘vestment’ or by another legal device—and, more importantly, the exact legal significance of the kiss. The first problem is relatively easy to address. All contracts involving transfer of property to the monastic houses, be they quitclaims, donations, concessions, or ‘pure’ gifts were duly recorded, witnessed, and sealed. The legality of the transfer, however, rested on the act being guaranteed. The enactment of the ritual ‘vestment’ constituted the guaranty. This is illustrated by the complicated transfer of a forest, donated in early 1116 by Bernard, viscount of Comborn, to the abbey of Uzerche. The property went ultimately to the priory of Ventadour, but only after a long and bitter contest. At the official closing of the agreement on April 17, 1116, Abbot Mauricius and the monks of Uzerche who had gathered in the chapter as witnesses gave their solemn consent and Philip, prior of Ventadour, received the ‘gift’ from the hands of the abbot. Then, to guarantee that Philip and his successors would enjoy undisputed rights over the property in the future, Abbot Mauricius and his monks approached and kissed him.28 The technical term used was fideliter, which was a common expression in cases of fides facta, and its form was the kiss. The monks of Uzerche engaged their fides after the case went through mediation and arbitration, though no formal sentence was pronounced. Uzerche’s ‘gift and concession’ were confirmed, so that they remained valid in the future, with the signature of the abbot, and the signature’s validity was reinforced with his seal.29 The kiss, on the one hand, and the seal and signature on the other, clearly had different functions in this peaceful settlement of a property dispute that engaged the efforts of so many parties. The kiss evidently expressed consent: but consent to what? For the purposes of this study, the question is

Vincent du Mans (Ordre de Saint Benoit). Premiere cartulaire: 572–1188 (Le Mans and Mamers, 1886–1913), 200–201, N. 334. 28 Et ut haec dona fideliter ei et suis successoribus illibata conserventur, ego Mauricius abbas et omnes fratres nostri qui in ipso capitulo adherant ipsi Philippo osculum pacis praebulmus, in J. B. Champeval, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye d’Uzerche (corrège). Avec tables, identifications, notes historiques du X e au XIV e siècle (Paris, 1901), 217–20, N. 370. 29 Ibidem, 220.

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most important for grasping the implication of the legal kiss in contracts terminating conflicts over property. A series of calumniae, that took place between the 1030s and 1070s and involved the abbey of Marmoutier in Tours and a prominent troublemaker, the knight Theobald, supplies a number of clues. This long story of contested rights, showdowns, legal maneuvers, and peaceful resolutions began with a conflict over the juniorat of Naveil, which, Theobald claimed, had not been sold to the abbey by his wife’s kin, nor had he authorized the transfer. His case was settled, in the court of the count of Vendôme, but apparently via an extrajudicial procedure, with forty solidi for him and presents and small sums for his wife, Hélia, on whose behalf the claim was pursued, and for his four sons. Soon afterwards the knight reasserted his wife’s claim, this time for some decime in Brenières. The monks paid another twenty-five solidi and gave the couple the benefit of association with the community to settle the case. As his part of the deal, Theobald renounced the claim at the altar of the local priory. The term used to define the obligation he undertook was sponsio. Shortly thereafter Theobald changed his mind and began a new contest, for the allod of Leschére. Although this time around the affair almost came to a judicial duel, in the last moment the duel was called off, and again the deal was settled peacefully and outside of court. Theobald got another forty solidi for his consent to quit his claims over all former rights and possessions of his clan in the Vendôme. The charter does not mention what was the form of that particular concordia. The troubles were not yet over for the monks, for Theobald’s wife still had rights of her own in the region, and he was always quick to seize the opportunity and cause yet another calumnia. It took another twenty solidi to convince the knight to quietly give up that new claim. Finally, in 1072, two years after the death of prior Eude, with whom most of the previous transactions had been negotiated, Theobald apparently decided that there was a fresh opportunity and seized the appurtenances he had renounced before. This time the case was heard in full formality, in the court of Guy de Nevers, count-regent of Vendôme. Theobald asserted that the latest deal he had struck with Eude was not a concordia, but a conditional conveniencia, for which he was supposed to receive annual allowances. Instead of pulling out the charter and quoting the conditions of the concordia and the other clauses of the deal stipulated there, the monks decided to pursue a new concordia. It cost them dearly but it was worth the money. Fifty

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more solidi were given to Theobald, three solidi to his spouse, and a certain sum of denarii to all of his children, four sons and a daughter. For this, Theobald made a wide range of promises, from giving up all his claims to allowing the monks to decide on any further issues. To give official expression of this final settlement, he kissed the new prior in sign of faith. All this happening in the hall [aula] of the count, the prior and his witnesses then took to Theobald’s home, where the money for his family was disbursed and they authorized the agreement. To mark his entry into possession, the prior had to redeem, for two more denarii, a poor peasant’s beast of burden, which Theobald’s sons had purloined.30 With this last deal, Marmoutier’s troubles with Theobald were practically over. Although the knight and his daughter each tried their luck once again, declaring that certain small properties were excluded from the settlement reached at the placitum, and succeeded in extracting more money from the monks, they never contested the validity of the central agreement. In the course of nearly four decades of calumniae, the parties had gone through several extra-judicial settlements and two preliminary court decisions (the duel and the final settlement); at least two formal legal institutions, sponsio and fides facta, were applied, and a series of agreements of convenientia and concordia type took place. Each step of this long struggle reflects Theobald’s diminishing credit with the monks and their efforts to obtain a solid guarantee backing up his promises without pressing the knight all too much. The course of the events makes clear the progressively shrinking options of legal instruments left to Theobald, and pins down the point at which it became necessary for him to engage his fides. In

30 The affair is recorded in six charters from the cartulary of Marmoutier, see M. de Tremault, ed., Cartulaire de Marmoutier pour le Vendômois (Paris-Vendôme, 1893), 10–21. The final settlement is recorded in the following way: et de his adfiduciavit nos per fidem osculans inde ob signum fidei priorem nostrum supradictum. The fundamental work on Vendôme is Dominique Barthélemy, La société dans le conté de Vendôme. De l’an mil au XIV e siècle (Paris, 1993), see esp. 430ff. and 664ff. The name of Theobald appears frequently in the sections on the relations between monks and lay folk; the register on page 1069 has more than thirty entries. Barthélemy does not deal with legal ritual on the level I do, but my conclusions are consistent with his main observations. He states that most of the agreements were preliminary and Theobald had a fairly ambiguous relationship with the abbey, in spite of his official affiliation with the religious. I have some reservations as to his assertion that Theobald did a ‘homage of peace’ to the monks, when he had to kiss them.

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the direct dealings with the monks, it was up to him to choose the way to settle and decide with what promise to guarantee his words. As the affair progressed and a higher judicial institution got involved, he had less room to maneuver. At the culmination of the case, at count Guy’s placitum, he had no other choice but the recourse to the formal fides facta, given by the kiss to guarantee the promise of termination of his claims. It is remarkable that after all the legal struggles and the knight’s showdown, the definite settlement was reached in court, even though no sentence was pronounced. Throughout the controversy at least some of Theobald’s claims were legally sustainable, and it was a legal instrument that turned decisive in the end. This only suffices to raise serious doubts as to the correctness of both the functionalist interpretation of legal anthropologists and the argument of ‘symbiosis’ suggested in recent scholarship of more traditional bent.31 That Theobald did not break the promise sealed with the kiss was most probably due to factors outside the area of ritual and the law. Nevertheless, it is telling that he reserved fides facta for the last case and there was no going back on his word any more. The conflict moved within a legal frame, acknowledged as authoritative and binding by all concerned, not outside of the law. From a legal point of view, something must have occurred that fundamentally changed Theobald’s bargaining stance. My contention is that up to that point the monks evidently were in no position to extract from Theobald a guarantee that he would stand by the deal. The kiss gave them his fides, and for one reason or another the knight felt reluctant to forfeit it. The consent he had given to abide by the terms of the contract was a liability he would rather not forgo. As we shall see, it would appear that the concept of liability might have been the chief technical obstacle to his raising further calumniae and a major functional dimension of the kiss during the period. If firmantia and fides facta were the two basic institutions that struc31

Barthélemy, La société dans le conté de Vendôme, 664–5 is again closest to my interpretation. He defends a more shaded and workable these of high medieval justice as a living practice against the somewhat one-sided assertions of the legal anthropologists, who are prone to eschew most legalism to promote a kind of functional ‘equilibrium.’ One wonders, as Thomas Kuehn remarked once, if such was the reality, how did law manage to survive at all; see note 37 below. About the thesis of ‘symbiosis’ see Penelope D. Johnson, Prayer, Patronage, and Power: The Abbey of la Trinite, Vendôme, 1032–1187 (New York, 1981).

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tured the legal texture of those societies whose high medieval legal formalism adopted the kiss of peace into their legal fabric, there is fragmentary evidence documenting the expansion of the rite into a roster of other legal forms. The instrument of sponsio mentioned in the record of Marmoutier’s conflict with Theobald is one of these legal devices. Back in 1880, in his perceptive analysis of the legal history of the Roman and Germanic charter, Heinrich Brunner suggested that behind the instruments recorded as fides facta or wadiatio in early medieval charters we must look for vestiges of Roman institutions disguised in Germanic forms. Brunner stated that late Roman provincials could have designated with these terms the venerable Roman legal institutions of sponsio and stipulatio. His hint was one of the first indications that the legal science of the late nineteenth century, until then divided between bitterly quarreling Romanists and Germanists, would fare better if paying more attention to the process of mutual influence and ultimately the fusion of the two legal traditions.32 Brunner’s recommendation was rigorously followed in the study of most legal and social fields. Legal formalism, however, remained a murky area. The institution of sponsio, given as an illustration by Brunner but not pursued further, is a case in point.33 In Marmoutier’s cartulary the reference to sponsio is casual and implies familiarity with the term and its connotations. In cartularies from central and northern France registering settlements of conflicts sealed with the kiss, it was a rare occurrence. Sponsio was regularly employed in the South, particularly in Languedoc. In the diocese of Grenoble it was the standard legal instrument, which could take on a variety of ‘vestments.’ On occasions, especially in cases of reconciliatory contracts, it was embodied by the kiss. The applications of sponsio clothed in the formalism of the kiss confirm Brunner’s hint and allow us to add a further dimension to the understanding of the mingling of legal forms and contents originating in different legal traditions. The appearance of the kiss demonstrates that, as it was with fides, the changes in the Roman forms occurred not only under

32 Heirich Brunner, Zur Rechtsgeschichte der römischen und germanischen Urkunde (Berlin, 1880), 222, n. 9. 33 On Roman sponsio in general see Berger, Dictionary, 713, and in more detail Valerio Bellini, ‘Foedus et sponsio’ dans l’evolution du droit international romain,’ Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 40 (1962), 509–39.

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the impact of Germanic practices, but with the adoption of Christian concepts as well. Sponsio was a forward-looking device with the function of guaranteeing the contractual promise by pledging fides embodied by the kiss. An early twelfth-century case that illustrates the many-sided relationships between the comital house of Albi and the diocese of Grenoble will shed light on the role of the ritual kiss in the procedure of the legal settlement enacted through sponsio. On April 30, 1108, after many calumniae between different lay persons who contested the rights over the decimae of three parishes in the diocese of St. Vincent, Count Guigo de la Mota, the principal owner of the rights, arranged for their transfer to Hugh I, bishop of Grenoble. The bishop reciprocated with two excellent mules. The jurisdiction over the decimae having been partitioned and enjoyed for so long by so many people, Guigo knew something might go wrong. He promised that in case of conflict with a third party he would either help settle it, or repel the offenders, or compensate the bishop with a comparable income. With that the deal was not concluded, for Guigo himself entered the service of the bishop. This complicated the affair, since it added another element to the contract, the personal bond between Hugh I and Guigo. Nonetheless, the transaction was closed with a single ritual complex: the well-known oath in the consecrated hand of the abbot and the kiss as sponsio of Guigo’s good faith.34 The final act of the contract defined the kiss-sponsio as a guarantee of the count’s personal promise to uphold all conditions of the contract for an indefinite future. The giving of fides through the kiss represented a separate dimension to the contract that took place in the ‘here and now’ of the transaction. Count Guigo had taken care to ensure the inviolability of the current deal by other means. The bishop, for his part, had secured the deal with the gift of the mules, perishable but tangible ‘objects’ that could be invoked as proof. In addition, Guigo had all those who could have been potential claimants—his wife Hermangardis, his sons, and some of his lesser feodales—confirm the transaction in present. The ritual oath and kiss, however, embodying the sponsio of fides, constituted a different type of obligation, and

34 Et hec promitto me servatorum, pro juramento in sacrata manu prenominati episcopi Hugonis, et inde do ei osculum, cum bone fidei sponsione, Marion, Cartulaires de Grenoble, Cartulary B, 175, N. 119.

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conform well to what we have already seen in cases of firmantia and fides facta. Other local legal instruments, among them the widespread laudatio, served a similar function. Around 1140, the next bishop of Grenoble, Hugh II, and Count Guigo Delfinus of Albi, the son of Guigo de la Mota, fell out with each other [discordia habuerunt inter se]. The bishop complained that Guigo had broken the agreement concluded years ago by Hugh I and the count’s father. Guigo, it appeared, had grievances himself. The affair escalated into a formal quarrel, but the parties soon agreed [laudaverunt] to arbitration. After meeting with each of the parties, the bishop of Die, who served as an arbiter, pronounced a formal judicium. It was accepted as a whole by both count and bishop, who then sorted out a minor point of disagreement concerning a village. To seal the agreement, Guigo Delfinus went to the house of the bishop and there, in the presence of witnesses, officially ratified the judicium by exchanging a kiss with the prelate.35 The term denoting the ritual act of acceptance of the decision of the arbiter was laudatio. This was a common technical term in high and late medieval Roman law, whose social dimensions have recently been thoroughly explored on material from western France.36 Nonetheless, its role in the legal procedure and the formalism of peacemaking remain obscure. What is important in the case quoted above, for example, is that the ritual ratification of the arbiter’s decision did not constitute the peace agreement, the official concordia. The kiss-laudatio was only a provisional step that allowed the peaceful settlement to proceed. It opened the possibility for further negotiations—definition of property boundaries, ironing out other minor problems, hearing the testimony of witnesses, asking the opinion of ‘queen’ Mathilda, the mother of the count, etc. At any juncture of this long procedure, another conflict could have erupted. After the ritual kiss, Count Guigo and the bishop rode out to a place where they could oversee the process of demarcation of properties in person. After much labor, again in the presence of witnesses, the principals pronounced their final laudatio that completed the concordia, and had a charter made, thus settling the affair. The charter does not give any indication about the actual act of laudatio at the other stages 35 Facta est autem illius judicii laudatio, et de vico communiter possidendo, in episcopali domo, dato vicissim osculo, see Marion, Cartulaires de Grenoble, Cartulary C, 243–5, N. 122. 36 White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to the Saints, passim.

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of the affair, but it is significant that it expressly linked the kiss to the ratification of the bishop of Die’s arbitrated decision.37 The meaning of the kiss in this case, and indeed of the instrument of laudatio throughout the negotiations, was clearly that of a preliminary, conditional, and limited consent to the decision of the arbiter to whom the parties had delegated their judicial powers. It adds another dimension to the functionality of the formalism of the kiss by including a third party in the resolution of the conflict. It is important to note that the consent thus expressed constituted only a temporary submission to an authority constructed by the alienation of one’s own sovereign powers, and the ritual obligation by the kiss had a pronounced preliminary character. At any point the principals could have withdrawn the powers they had delegated. As we shall see, with time, as the powers to fully exercise one’s customary judicial rights were restricted, this conditional and temporary character of the kiss was gradually abandoned in favor of its interpretation as the device of the ‘ultimate’ peace. The survey of the local legal institutions, which assumed the formalism of the ritual kiss to ensure the validity of contractual peace, must include auctorizamentum as well. A number of references to this instrument come from the Benedictine abbey of St. Serge and St. Bach, situated on the left bank of the Maine in the vicinity of Angers. It appears to have been the prevailing term for a variety of the abbey’s legal transactions.38 The eleventh century was a troubled period for the abbey, as with so many other houses, due to the growing presence of the counts of Anjou in the region. Matching the aggressive expansion of their lay neighbors, the monks of St. Serge and St. Bach sought to augment their own domain and frequently made deals with the local minor nobility. The scribes of the abbey used a number of technical legal terms, but their most common designation for a party’s involvement was

37 Recent studies of arbitration emphasize the relatively late development of this legal instrument, but there are traces of it in the cases discussed here. Good orientation can be found in Karl S. Bader, ‘Arbiter, arbitrator seu amicabilis compositor,’ ZRG KA, 77 (1960), 239–76; Karl-Hans Ziegler, ‘Arbiter, arbitrator und amicabilis compositor,’ ZRG RA, 84 (1967), 376–81; and especially in Thomas Kuehn, ‘Arbitration and Law in Renaissance Florence,’ Renaissance and Reformation, n. s., XI: 4 (1987), 289–319. 38 Yves Chauvin, ed., Premier et Second livres des Cartulaires de l’abbaye Saint-Serge et Saint-Bach d’Angers (XI e–XII e siècles) (Angers, 1997), vol. 1, iii–vii.

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auctorizare. The term covered a wide range of meanings, all denoting the explicit consent expressed by one of the concerned parties, most often the lay donor, to the alienation of the rights or properties over which there had been a conflict. In simple transfers of property, when no quarrel was anticipated or terminated, the term was regularly used in the meaning of ‘authorize,’ i.e., giving one’s assent to the transaction, without any additional qualifications.39 On occasions, auctorizamentum served the purpose of firmantia, and was embodied by an object that the lay person placed on the altar of the abbey’s church. This was the procedure followed by Aimery the son of Loupell, who, in the beginning of the twelfth century, confirmed the donation of certain lands given to the abbey, many years previously, by his ancestors and his mother. The legal meaning of the act was the knight’s taking of an obligation to honor the gifts of his predecessors, extending the deal they had made to his own person and those dependent on him. Aimery’s auctorizamentum was a book.40 It is in situations like this that the kiss appeared, apparently to replace the object carrying the auctorizamentum. Thus, for example, sometime in the second half of the eleventh century the monks of St. Serge and St. Bach established at Thorigné bought an arpentum of land from a certain Berengar Borlerius. The final stage of the deal, the formal emptio or renunciation of rights, took place at a local landmark, the fountain of Aussigné, in the presence of Berengar’s son-in-law, who, as a collateral relative and heir, must have had some rights over the property that exchanged hands. To ‘authorize’ the transfer, he kissed the two monks representing the abbey and received from them two denarii in addition to the twelve coins they had already given to Berengar.41 Far from the abbey’s chapel and in the absence of another sacred object, the public space, the presence of witnesses, and, above all, the ritual kiss-auctorizamentum gave

39 Chauvin, Cartulaires de l’abbaye Saint-Serge et Saint-Bach, vol. 1, 197, Cartulary A, N. 203: Tescelin, becoming a monk, donates land to the abbey. His sister Algarde and her husband, Renaud, give their assent to the deal [auctorizaverunt]. 40 Et ut haec concessio firmissime teneretur, portavit ipse Aimericus autorizamentum concessionis suae super altare Sancte Sergii cum quodam libro, ibidem, vol. 1, 8–10, Cartulary A, N. 8. 41 Duos denarios recepit ipse filiaster, jamdictus nomine et causa auctorizandi osculatos est monachos Frotmundum et Walterium qui hanc emptionem faciebant, ibidem, vol. 2, 612, Cartulary B, N. 205. Chénon was the first critical scholar to note that the kiss could be a replacement for an object. Of that more later.

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legal validity to Berengar’s son-in-law’s own deal with the monks. The young man guaranteed the abbey peace of possession by clothing the monks with and transferring to them his rights over the property. Legalizing the transfer of property in that way seems to be a local development, yet it was related to a form that had virtually universal application throughout the premodern West: the investiture [seisin, Gewere, vestitura]. The first known employment of this technical term as a legal instrument was to designate acts by which the control over a piece of land was conveyed in a legal manner. Later it came to mean the results of this act and covered movables (chattels) and rights as well, and ended up having the general meaning of possession.42 Since the high Middle Ages, the most important field of application of investiture was, as with fides facta, the legal acts of enfeoffment. A basic feature of the medieval law of things and the real contracts, investiture complemented homage and fealty in the feudo-vassalic bond by creating the rights of the vassal over the fief conceded to him by the lord. The rights conferred by investiture were real rights [ jus in re], and medieval feudal law held that these real rights were a category distinct from all others.43 The institution held this exclusive character most tenaciously in the property rights of high medieval Italy, and since the thirteenth century was routinely expressed by a kiss, but the example of auctorizamentum quoted above demonstrates that offshoots of the practice can be traced in the French kingdom as well. It is worth noting that the corporeal investiture of Langobard law dominating early medieval Italian practice conferred real rights even though, in the strict sense of Roman law to which the neoLatinists adhered, it was not creating a perfect actual possession. The promissory character of the institution agrees well with what we have seen about the instruments operated by the kiss. To the best of my knowledge, no legal treatise on Italian feudal law defined the function of the kiss in investiture. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence from legal practice to support the conclusion that for the feudists the transfer was more like an act that gave rise to an obligation, rather than an actual conveyance of property or rights.44

42 Rudolf Hübner, A History of Germanic Private Law, trans. by Francis S. Philbrick (Boston, 1918), 185ff.; Andreas Heusler, Institutionen des deutschen Privatrechts (Leipzig, 1885), vol. 1, 74, 97, 219, 321, 382–5; vol. 2, 68, 70–1, 76, 154, 178. 43 Heusler, Institutionen, vol. 1, 384ff. 44 Hübner, Germanic Private Law, 244ff.; and Anton Heymann, ‘Zur Geschichte

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One of the central conclusions that can be inferred from the legal instruments surveyed thus far is that the ritual kiss was often perceived as a kind of surety given to guarantee obligations taken unilaterally by the one or both parties to the peace contract. For the eleventh century this conclusion can only be surmised. By the beginning of the twelfth century, there is evidence in which the ritual kiss is directly referred to as the form of the legal instrument of securitas. Medieval securitas originated in an ancient Roman custom according to which a citizen attacked by his enemies could find safety hiding in a temple. Imperial Rome expanded this tradition in an attempt to facilitate the handling of private feuds, with which imperial legislation had very little to do. Guaranteeing the safety of the person who sought protection under the statue of the emperor, securitas served to allow cessation of hostilities and clear the stage for private negotiations and/or the intervention of the authorities. Frankish legal traditions tied securitas even closer to peacemaking, assimilating it to those elements of the private contract that mediated the relationship between individuals. Frankish securitas was used almost exclusively in cases of grave crimes, such as rape and homicide. In this way Frankish traditions contributed to the development of the penal character of the institution as well, employing it to regulate relationships between individuals and groups on the one hand, and the authorities on the other hand, in cases of criminal offense. In sixth-century Frankish formulae, securitas was the instrument protecting the offender who had made formal attempts at reconciling with the wronged party from the vengeance of the injured and his or her clan, and from formal prosecution on the part of the public authorities. In the late- and post-Carolingian era, the application of the instrument widened. Securitas came to be employed in a roster of civil and penal cases, from guaranteeing the payment of a debt, another feature going back

des jus ad rem,’ in Festgabe Otto von Gierke dargebracht (Berlin, 1911), 1167–85. For a number of cases illustrating the Italian practice of kissing to invest see Augusto Gaudenzi, ed., Scripta anecdota glossatorum, 3 vols. (Turin, 1892–1913), vol. 2, 57, N. iiii. On Italian feudal law and its stress on fealty see the Langobard Libri Feudorum in Karl Lehmann, ed., Consuetudines feudorum (Libri feudorum, jus feudale langobardorum), (Göttingen, 1892), 119–23; Ludwig Wahrmund, ed., Die Ars notariae des Rainerius Perusinus (reprint from 1917, Aalen, 1962), 40–41, ch. 31; Gino Masi, ed., Formularium Florentinum artis notariae (1220–1242) (Milan, 1943), 50–51; and Hans von Voltelini, ed., Die Südtiroler Natariats-Imbreviaturen des 13. Jahrhunderts (Aalen, 1973, first published Innsbruck, 1899), vol. 1, 315, N. 638.

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to Roman legislation, to bestowing of safe-conduct, and ensuring immunity from vengeance.45 At this stage of its development, the kiss became one of the formal ‘vestments’ of securitas. Its uses display the characteristic mix of entangled civil and penal elements. Three of the formal areas of application of securitas, each with its distinct legal context and functional dimensions, were particularly well-served by the formalism of the kiss. The first of the functions of the kiss-securitas referred to the early Roman and Germanic custom of taking an obligation to ensure the immunity of the wrongdoer. The cartulary of the abbey of Sobrado in Galicia in the province of La Coruña registered, under 1162, a case in which the instrument was employed to settle the feud between two local noble clans, headed respectively by Juan Arias and Pelagius Ovequo. Both families were frequently involved in various transactions with the abbey throughout the late eleventh and the twelfth century. In the recorded case Juan Arias made a gift in appreciation of the role of the monks for the ‘redeeming’ of his son on occasion of the murder of tree members of the Ovequo family. The abbot of Sobrado mediated the reconciliation, and it was sealed at a meeting of the feuding parties, on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in the chapter of the abbey. The adversaries kissed with ‘the kiss of peace and security’ and shook hands.46 Working, as it was the custom, in conjunction with the handshake, the kiss was explicitly understood as the securitas feature of the deal. A second field of operation of the kiss-securitas was to guarantee the contract for cessation of hostilities between warring parties rather than the safety of the parties themselves. Such was the role of the instrument in an episode of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s fifth

45 Gino Masi, Collectio chartarum pacis privatae medii aevi ad regionem Tusciae pertinentium (Milan, 1943), 9–12; Du Cange, securitas, in Glossarium, vol. 6, 392–3. Further documents in Karl Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, MGH, Leges V, Formulae (Hannover, 1886), 12, 19, 20, 88, 277, 382, 538. 46 Et osculum pacis et securitatem et dextras in perpetuum dare fecistis et hoc ita totum completum est. See Eduardo Hinojosa, ‘La fraternidad artificial en España,’ in his Obras, ed. Alfonso Garcia Gallo (Madrid, 1948), vol. 1, 277, N. 51, quoting from Archivio General de Galicia in La Coruña. The charter is not in the collection published by Pilar Loscertales de G. de Valdeavellano, ed., Tumbos del monasterio de Sobrado de los Monnjes, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1976), where there are a number of charters mentioning the two families. On Sobrado and its twelfth-century expansion see Maria del Carmen Pallares Méndez, El monasterio de Sobrado: un ejemplo de protagonismo mónastico en la Galicia medieval (La Coruña, 1979), esp. 130–45.

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Italian expedition. On April 16, 1175, the emperor and the Lombard League concluded the truce known as the ‘Peace of Montebello.’47 On the next day, Umberto Clemente, consul of Pavia, on behalf of the Lombards, and Margrave William of Monferrat, on behalf of the emperor, swore the truce known as treuga Alexandrie. To guarantee the truce, four imperial advisors gave their surety ‘with hand and kiss’ [ fecit securitatem per manum et osculum]. Three of them, Margrave Henry of Dietz, the Imperial chancellor, and the Count-Palatine Otto, guaranteed only that the emperor would keep the truce. The count of Savoy added to this, by the same securitas, that were the emperor to default on the truce the count would personally come to Vercelli and allow himself to be imprisoned by the Lombards.48 This example of temporary cessation of conflict throws into greater relief the legal uses of the kiss-securitas. The truce consisted of a sworn and witnessed oath. Only when it came to providing a guarantee that it would be honored did the parties arrive at the ritual kiss. The nobles who guaranteed it were apparently acting as fideiussores. As disputed as the meanings of fideiussio are, it is clear that they could not be proxies for the emperor. The count of Savoy’s promise was a form of judicial hostage, a facet of the fideiussio institution. These observations help clarify the circumstances in which it was appropriate to deploy the kiss as a form of securitas, who could give it, and the conditions under which it was thought acceptable. The treaty also sheds light on the relationship between the different means of creating an obligation and guaranteeing it with the kiss-securitas. The rite itself did not create the obligation. While the kiss and handshake provided surety through a general and unspecified pledge, from the securitas of the count of Savoy it is clear that they could also involve the bodily seizure of the person giving it. The kiss could thus secure a corporeal obligation, which depended on the willingness of the fideiussor to stand by his ritual engagement. It is also clear that such a form of fideiussio was binding and effective, which explains 47

Further literature in Peter Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics (London, 1969), 304. See also Ferdinand Oppl, Friedrich Barbarossa (Darmstadt, 1990), 114–7. 48 Quod venient and mittent se in carcere ad Uercellas in potestate Lombardorum. The peace pact is preserved in two copies of the original notarial instrument composed in April 1175, now in the city archives of Piacenza and Modena, see MGH, Die Urkunden Friedrichs I, vol. 3, 135–8, N. 638. The negotiations are discussed in detail by Anton Heinemeyer in Deutsches Archiv, 11 (1956), 101ff.

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the unwillingness of the other nobles to pledge themselves in the manner of the Savoyard. As straightforward as its primary function was, the kiss-securitas could therefore refer to fairly complex legal affairs and co-ordinate the relationship between a number of institutions. This conclusion is well illustrated by the final stage of the dramatic conflict between King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. When on November 18, 1169, the king and Becket’s representatives met at Montmartre, the king promised that he was ready to accept Becket in his grace and love [in amorem et gratiam suam], giving up all rancor. Then, suddenly, Becket’s clerks raised the issue of the kiss of peace. Henry backed off immediately. He had sworn, he said, in a fit of anger, that he would never give the kiss to Becket again. The oath prevented him from kissing the archbishop. In spite of Pope Alexander III’s willingness to annul the oath, at that point the negotiations halted and, despite all attempts to proceed, dragged on for more than a year to end without ritual resolution. The chief obstacle was the kiss, the keynote, securitas.49 Personal emotions, to Henry himself, were not an issue. We may doubt his sincerity, but not the formal implications of the security requested by his opponent. Becket insisted on the kiss because he had consulted the pope on what guarantee to request and the papal answer had been that the kiss should suffice, since as a priest he could not legitimately accept an oath. Note the putting of the two devices on an equal footing, a fact that stresses equivalency in functional aspect. The king’s first reaction was to declare the kiss a trifle [modicum]. He had given his word, Henry insisted, and the archbishop should have been content with it.50 Yet Becket and his supporters evidently knew the difference between a ‘simple promise’ and the kiss. Put under pressure, Henry proposed that his son, the young Henry, give the kiss to Becket. The archbishop declined the offer. The pope, albeit haltingly, supported him. The kiss had to be given by the king personally because of the king’s slippery character.51 49 The conflict is discussed best in Frank Barlow’s definitive twentieth-century biography, Thomas Becket (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986). 50 The king reportedly said ejus nobis verbum placiut, et admisimus, see James C. Robertson and J. Brogstocke Sheppard, eds., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (canonized by Pope Alexander III, A.D. 1173), vol. 7 (London, 1885), 78–9. 51 In osculo pacis recipias, et ei pacem et securitatem tuam, necnon et universas possessiones

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For yet another reason young Henry could be neither proxy nor fideiussor for his father. As the papal emissary, cardinal Vivian, put it, only the kiss would allow Becket to return to England and enter his church ‘in good peace and complete security,’ without fearing that the king would change his mind and prevent him from acquiring his seat with all its former rights and privileges.52 The kiss guaranteed not only Henry’s personal goodwill and commitment to the deal, but protected by warranty the reacquisition of Becket’ s property, that is, the king would reinvest the prelate with the possession of the Church of England. The assumption is plausible enough, based as it is on the already discussed link between the kiss and investiture. Finally, the argument for the kiss rested on custom only. The kiss was, with all peoples and religions, the solemn form of restored peace after it had been broken.53 In the end, Becket did not receive the kiss and the securitas he wanted, neither for his Church’s repossession nor for his life. In spite of the French king Louis VII’s advice to stay in France until given the kiss of peace, some months later the archbishop crossed the Channel and returned to Canterbury, only to be murdered by four of the king’s knights a few days thereafter. Whatever the reasons for his murder, the absence of the kisssecuritas meant no peace and no safety.

The Binding Force of Obligation The legal instruments adopting, in the course of the high Middle Ages, the formalism of the kiss demonstrate some of the ways in which different facets of the Christian, Roman, and Germanic traditions combined to build the complex structure of local legal custom. Yet behind the bewildering local diversity there were a few basic concepts, developed by the premodern Western societies to capture the legal essence of the bonds that wove the texture of the

suas et suorum . . . clementer restituas; Sed quomodo certam concipietis spem ab homine lubrico, cujus verba et juramenta eandem vim habent, et pari sunt lance pensanda? ibidem, 206, 248. 52 Secure ad ecclesiam suam accederet, et in bona pace et securitate ecclesiam suam cum omni integritate, sicut habuit antequam exiret, ibidem, 80. 53 Quae forma solemnis est in onmi gente et in omni religione, et citra quam nusquam pax antea dissidentium confirmatur, ibidem, 246. See now Anne J. Duggan, ed. and trans., The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2000), vol. 2, 1045–66 and 1165–77, letters 243, 244, and 274.

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obligatory contract. Three stand out prominently. Fides, caritas/amor, and gratia were the fundamental principles on which the edifice of the legally binding peace was erected. All were Latin forms constructed in the official language of Roman legal documents to conceptualize a variety of practices. During the first Christian centuries, new dimensions were added to their core meanings. Finally, it was the Merovingian-Latin legal parlance [Rechtsaufzeichnungssprache] of the early Germanic kingdoms that set the seal on their medieval usage as fully developed legal concepts. All-important during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (and most debated in modern scholarship) was fides. Although its role in late Roman and early Germanic custom seems clear, the legal nature of fides during the high and late Middle Ages and the early modern period is still under discussion.54 Fides was the operative force in a number of legal transactions. In a legal substance, it supplied the content of firmantia, fides facta, laudatio, investiture, sponsio, etc. It was the most widely employed device of the formal peace contract as we have seen it thus far. Current scholarship emphasizes the fact that fides appears frequently in Roman sources describing patron-client relationships, and that the earliest references to Germanic fides [ foi, triuwe, triuwa, Treue] are in Latin-speaking sources. The old Roman fides seems to have been an almost exclusive quality of the patron. It denoted his reputation, reliability, social prestige, and the ensuing power and ability to manage social relationships and protect his men [Herrschaftsgewalt]: in short, everything that made possible the building of a following of clients.55 Some scholars also insist that the relationship based on Roman fides was a feodus iniquum, and that if there was mutuality in the obligation, its meaning for the patron was very different from that of the client.56 Most important for this study is 54 The literature on fides, Roman and Germanic, is enormous. Among the younger scholarship the excellent survey of Karl Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue in der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte,’ Studi Medievali, 10 (1969), 465–89 stands out; see also the works of Heinze, Hagemann, Kienast, Bartmuß, and Helbig quoted below. Frantisek Graus, ‘Über die sogenannte germanische Treue,’ Historica, 1 (1959), 71–121; and idem, ‘Herrschaft und Treue. Betrachtungen zur Lehre von der germanischen Kontinuität,’ Historica 12 (1966), 5–44, seems to be motivated more by a spirit of contradiction than a cogent analysis of the extant sources. 55 Richard Heinze, ‘Fides,’ Hermes, 64 (1929), 140–66; and Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue,’ 476ff. 56 Hans-Joachim Bartmuß, ‘Die “fides” in der erzählenden Quellen des 10. und beginnenden 11. Jahrhunderts und die sogenannte “germanische Treue”,’ Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Feudalismus, 3 (1979), 52–3.

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that loaded with ethical and social meaning as it was, Roman fides had no direct legal application. It designated a social virtue that can be summed up for convenience sake in the concept of ‘loyalty.’ The early Middle Ages witnessed the rapid transformation of this understanding of fides. The institution was formalized and objectified. In the Merovingian formula De regis antrustione, for example, the pledge of fides, although still constituting the fidelity which determined the moral worth of the individual, was also the formal obligation of the client to his lord.57 Germanic triuwa, which might have appeared as a derivative from the Latin fides but acquired more formal dimensions during the eighth and ninth centuries, preserved the ethical meanings of the Roman form if not its subjectivity. The elements of objectivity and sociability were bequeathed to the high Middle Ages, when, under the impact of Christianity, the notion of Middle High German triuwe as the connotation of a personal, subjective quality developed. In the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, this shift can be observed elsewhere in Western Europe, regardless of the balance of Germanic and Roman elements in the legal tradition of the particular region. The referential field of fides shifted from relations to personality, making a full circle back to the Roman concept. These were the basic characteristics of fides in the Christianized Romano-Germanic tradition. It is worth dwelling on a few more of them, for in the forms embodied by the ritual kiss they can be witnessed until the early modern era, especially in the Low Countries, where Frankish law remained strong for centuries. The unilateral character of fides was an important feature, amply documented in Frankish sources from the seventh to the ninth century, as were its promissory character and the time limits (ten, fourteen, and forty days) set for its fulfillment, according to Lex Salica and the Edict of Chilperic.58 As we shall see in the next part, the latter element remained in force well into the fourteenth century. Another element was the strongly sacral connection of the Germanic fides. Relegating the institution to the relationship between humankind and God, by the ninth century this allowed for the assimilation of the secular substantive

57 Karl Zeumer, ed., Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi: accedit ordines iudiciorum Dei (Hanover, 1886), Marculfi Formula I, N. 18. See also Magnou-Nortier, Foi et Fiédelité, 20–21; Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue,’ 476–7. 58 Magnou-Nortier, Foi et Fidélité, 33.

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fides/triuwa by the Christian faith.59 The process was slow and the results varied by locale. In practice, as we have seen in the case of Gill of Seulli, it was still going on in the late eleventh century. Finally, engaged through an object or a ritual gesture, early medieval fides had an especially strong connection to peace.60 When fides was kept, asserted in the tenth century Widukind of Corvey in his Deeds of the Saxons, there was peace; breaking a fides-promise meant the end of the peace.61 Quite naturally, the kiss of peace could only be given once. Practically all of these features of fides as a legal institution transpire in the legal texture of the peace contracts surveyed in the previous section. The high medieval fides/triuwe/Treue engaged through the kiss carried a marked legal connotation radically different from that of the old Roman concept. Its deployment gave rise to a strong, formal obligation. These implications of fides were worked out in the early Middle Ages. The common Germanic root-word that translated fides, preserved in the Old High German triuwa, meant a binding promise or contract. The legal meaning of the contract it created in post-Merovingian times and the high Middle Ages is a subject of dispute. The most contested issue is whether the pledge of fides created a liability [Haftung] that gave rise to action ensuing from an existing legal duty, or constituted the legal duty itself [Schuld ], or was an act of renunciation of rights [Verzicht].62 From the already discussed cases it would appear that in the majority, if not the entirety of the eleventh- and twelfth-century applications

59 Walther Kienast, ‘Germanische Treue und Königsheil,’ Historische Zeitschrift, 227 (1978), 265–324. See also Helga Albrand, Untersuchungen über Sinnbereich und Bedeutungsgeschichte von ahd. Triuwa und mhd. Triuwe bis einschließlich Hartman von Aue (Diss., Göttingen, 1964), passim; Karl Friedrich O. Kraft, Iweins Triuwe: Zu Ethos und Form der Aventuirenfolge in Hartmanns ‘Iwein.’ Eine Interpretation (Amsterdam, 1979), 36ff. 60 Gierke, Schuld und Haftung, 133ff. 61 Quoted after Bartmuß, ‘Fides und germanische Treue,’ 53. 62 For the first opinion see von Gierke, Schuld und Haftung, 297. A different thesis is developed in Franz Beyerle, ‘Der Ursprung der Bürgschaft,’ ZRG, GA, 47 (1927), 567–645. See also Hans Rudolf Hageman, ‘Fides facta und wadiatio. Vom Wesen des altdeutschen Formalvertrages,’ ZRG, GA, 83 (1966), 1–34. See also the criticism of Werner Ogris, ‘Die persönlichen Sicherheiten in den westeuropäischen Rechten des Mittelalters,’ in Les sûretés personnelles (Recueils de la Societe Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, vol. 39, Brussels, 1971), 7–26. For a most recent evaluation of the debate see Bernhard Diestelkamp, ‘Die Lehre von Schuld und Haftung,’ in Helmut Coing and Walter Wilhelm, eds., Wissenschaft und Kodifikation des Privatrechts in 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 6 (Frankfurt a. M., 1982), 21ff.

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of the kiss-fides, we are dealing essentially with a liability-producing institution. The reconciling parties did not acknowledge the condition of peace as an objectively existing duty, which they were supposed to appropriate in the act of the ritual kiss. Whether a voluntarily taken commitment, a forced entry into a reconciliation, or a submission to the decision of an arbiter or a judicial institution, the obligation that the parties undertook referred to the contract and its terms alone. Nor did the kiss constitute a complete renunciation of rights for the settlement was often, if not always, followed by another set of negotiations. Renouncing the right of forceful solution of one’s problems too was derived from the ritual’s primary function as a liability. To forswear a party’s right of violent response to insult and injury stemmed from the liability one agreed to take to honor the peace. The kiss of peace did indeed limit the range of the means by which one’s rights could be pursued, but it did this by virtue of the liability that the parties took to abide by the terms of the contract.63 If this line of thought is correct, it links the high medieval kiss to the legal concept that was arguably one of the most fundamental mechanisms of the premodern political interaction. In the early Romano-Germanic legal procedure, the pledge of fides resulted in the personal, formal, and legally obligating promise to fulfill the sentence of the court or the decision of arbiters [Urteilserfüllungsgelöbniss]. In societies where the rights and obligations of the individual to pursue private feud were legally established, there were no effective external legal means of coercing the warring parties to make peace. Homo faidosis lived under a law that did not require the acknowledgment of the validity of any other law as a duty of the sovereign, free person. Public law could appeal only to the feuding parties to accept the court’s or the arbiter’s decision by promising to fulfill its sentence. Only the breach of that specific obligation enshrined in the promise entailed licit legal action. Such action could be pursued by the authorities, the other party, or the fideiussor with consequences for the wrongdoer’s or debtor’s property, body, or personal freedom, in short, for his total person, depending on the particular form in

63 On liability see Reinhard Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (Oxford, 1996), especially 2–5. The transition from duty to liability, which Zimmermann traces in early Roman law, was duly repeated in the high medieval period, most notably during the thirteenth century in Italy and later elsewhere in the West. See Chapter Two below.

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which the pledge was made. Without the pledge of fides, no such action was legally defendable, the concept of duty could not be internalized, and coercion remained illegitimate or, in the very least, contested. As noted, fides was not the only institution supporting such a legal condition. Although to a lesser degree, the engagement of the other institutions with binding force of obligation borne by the kiss, gratia and caritas/amor, had similar effects. If the extant sources do not create a distorted picture, gratia appeared more often in high medieval evidence. Unlike fides, a second concept borne by the kiss, gratia, originally flowed down from the top of the social hierarchy. It was also imbued with a strong religious meaning. As a legal institution, its function lay in the field mapped out by fides: individuals built gratia bonds to take or fulfill obligations ensuing from a duty, legally or socially defined.64 Up until the eleventh century, gratia was almost exclusively a royal prerogative. In the High Middle Ages it devolved down the social hierarchy, penetrating knightly and bourgeois quarters.65 Whatever its social milieu, in essence high medieval gratia meant protection, immunity, and safe-conduct—in short, peace—guaranteed to those who sought them in the presence of the person bestowing gratia. As such, it could relate to both duty and liability, establishing a connection with significant implications for the perception of the formal kiss. The dimension of liability appears more pronounced. The protection of native subjects was a duty of the leader, but in the environment of formalized man-to-man relationships duty was not automatically mobilized. The ruler could extend peace and protection to those who sought it by ritually conferring his gratia with the kiss of peace, which could also be performed by proxy.66 In eleventh-century royal eulogies, the ‘sweet mouth of the king, which gives the kiss of peace’ was hailed, as Helgaud of Fleury wrote about Robert the Pious, and Benzo of Alba about Henry IV.67 High-rank-

64 Gerd Althoff, ‘Huld. Überlegungen zu einem Zentralbegriff der mittelalterlichen Herrschaftsordnung,’ in his Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 202ff. 65 Ibidem, quoting the law of the ministeriales of the archbishop of Köln; see also the tale of Melibeus below. 66 For the lady of royal birth as mediatrix for the king, protecting his charisma from contamination, see Michael J. Enright, Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophecy, and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tene to the Viking Age (Dublin, 1996). For royal officials bestowing the kiss see the following discussion of Ruodlieb. 67 Hans Seyffert, ed., Benzo of Alba: Sieben Bücher an Kaiser Heinrich IV (Hanover,

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ing individuals explicitly asked for the kiss-gratia as they entered territories where their legal status was uncertain. Given in public, the rite made clear that the person was under the king’s mund and therefore protected by the law of the land. Thomas Becket knew that full well when demanding the kiss of peace from Henry II. The kissgratia of Emperor Henry VI at the Diet of Speyer in March 1193 carried the Emperor’s formal obligation ( promisit; promittens firmiter, in the English king’s own words) to reconcile Richard the Lionheart with the king of France.68 Judging from twelfth-century local laws stipulating the duties of the ministeriales in the German Empire, gratia was legally definable.69 I was not able to locate comparable references for the French kingdom and other regions. If fides and gratia stood for the forces informing the legality of the peace agreement, how did the provisions of customary law and the legislators ensure that the pledge of the institutions carried by the kiss was binding? The evidence from the period is patchy and inconclusive, as one may expect given the social agents engaged in peacemaking and the absence of coercive authority capable of legitimately enforcing the law above local custom. At the time the kiss was adopted as a formal instrument of peacemaking, the concept of corporeal obligation seems to have sustained the legal custom of embodied responsibility. The earliest imperial legislation to mention the kiss, Emperor Henry II’s Constitutions of Strasbourg, of which more later, denied the right of substituting a champion in judicial duel to the murderer who had committed the crime after the kiss of peace had been exchanged.70 The idea evidently was that just as the peace was guaranteed by the body of the party, so in case of default the party’s responsibility had to be bodily discharged. The law also stipulated the loss of the hand in case of proven guilt. It did not

1996), 614; Robert-Henri Bautier and Gillette Labory, eds., Helgaud de Fleury, Vie de Robert le Pieux, Epitoma Vitae Regis Rotberti Pii (Paris, 1965), 58. 68 See, among others, Roger of Howeden in William Stubs, ed., Chronica magistri Rogerii de Houedene (London, 1870), vol. 3, 199. The best modern survey is John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven and London, 1998), 237–8. 69 Ahrer Dienstrecht in Theodor J. Lacomblet, ed., Urkundenbuch für die Geschichte des Niederrheins oder der Erzstifts Köln, der Fürstenthumer Jülich und Berg, Geldern, Meurs, Cleve und Mark und der Reichsstifte Elten, Essen und Werden (Aalen, 1960), vol. 4, 775, N. 624; and Das Kölner Dienstrecht, in Wilhelm Altmann and Ernst Bernheim, eds., Ausgewählte Urkunden zur Erläuterung der Verfassungsgeschichte Deutschlands im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1904), 166, ch. 3. See also Althoff, ‘Huld,’ 207–8. 70 See note 75 and Part Three for discussions of this law.

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intimate whether prosecution was to follow if the accused was vanquished but remained alive. If the murder was the result of a renewed feud, that might have been as far as the authorities could go. Although clearly Italian-inspired, Henry’s laws had their ultimate roots in Carolingian legislation. There, the breach of the peace that had been guaranteed by fides facta through handshake was punished by cutting off the hand, establishing a connection between the punishment of infringement of fides and the part of the body with which it was given. Henry’s demand for personal participation in the duel, however, was a new element, apparently resulting from the pledge embodied by the kiss. Whether this precedent originated a tradition cannot be ascertained, for secular law was concerned more with protecting the contract of peace than with the instruments which enabled it. Its wider implications seem to be corroborated by the local tradition in Normandy, where in the twelfth century fides was the main institution guaranteeing the obligatory force of almost any contract, especially in cases of compromise.71

The Modalities of Ritual Peace The engagement of the legal instruments embodied by the ritual kiss gave rise to a number of conditions determining the structure of non-hostile political interaction. Among the variations of the legally defined relationships of peaceful coexistence, truce or armistice [treuga], peace [ pax, compositio], concord [concordia], and friendship [amicitia] were the standard fields in which the rites of peace operated. Treuga, concordia, and amicitia seem to have dominated the eleventh- and twelfth-century settlements enacted with a kiss. The generic Latin term treuga, in one of its vernacular versions, is first recorded in its medieval form in 728, in the laws of the Langobard king Liutprand. Its appearance reflected a general trend, the descent of certain Roman legal institutions designed for use in interstate relationships to the level of interpersonal interaction. The Langobard treuga operated in the field of the Roman inductae.72 Under the name treuwa it designated a special, interim condition whose main feature

71 72

Yver, Les contrats normands, 44–83. Berger, Dictionary, 500.

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was the lack of open hostility among parties in conflict. Treuwa was commonly established through the intervention of a public official or a judge. It prepared the ground for pacification and reconciliation through the payment of indemnity. As the latter could be substantial and required time to collect, treuwa was by definition a future-oriented condition with a strong temporal dimension. Most of the vernacular variants of the term have the meaning of ‘temporary cessation of hostilities,’ ‘armistice,’ ‘truce,’ and ‘contract.’ In practice, the developed ninth-century Langobard treuwa was established by a publicly declared promise. Later local variations of the generic treuga added nuances to the Langobard pattern without changing its essence. In tenth-century Francia, triuwam ponere was the legal device of suretyship. The custom was followed in Normandy. With the same meaning treuga was rendered in Alfonso’s Siete Partidas. By the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century from these meanings sprang the most widely known variant of treuga, the French-inspired treuga Dei. Yet in France, with the royal power actively moving to suppress private feuds, by the thirteenth century treuga began to be distinguished from ‘security,’ the difference resulting from the fact that, in the words of Beaumanoir, ‘treugas are for a time, while peace lasts forever’ [trives sunt à terme, et assurements dure à toz jors]. Note the use of the term assurement to designate the condition of permanent peace. By contrast, Italian lawyers, canons, and civilists, such as the Glossa ordinaria to the decretal collection of Gregory IX, or the commentaries of Uguccio and Baldus, while reasoning along the same vein, kept the meaning of treuga as a security and surety. They justified their stance with the consideration that treuga designated an unfinished business, and therefore was an unstable condition that implied guarantees by definition.73 With the meaning of ‘truce,’ treuga spread all over the high medieval West. It was consistently used in civic law codes to designate the legal condition of temporary cessation of open hostility imposed on the feuding parties by the authorities, royal or civic, until a permanent solution of the problem was found and the parties were pacified. Up to the thirteenth century, in legal theory treuga was sharply

73 In the discussion of treuga I follow Ludwig Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden, 234ff., and Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue,’ 484–5.

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distinguished from peace. Yet in practice the difference was blurred, since treuga was, after all, peace for a given term. We have already seen that the formalism of the kiss on a number of occasions supported concordiae, more stable formal agreements without most of the conditional features of treuga, particularly its temporary character. The evidence from the high Middle Ages, however, as we have seen on evidence from southern France, points out that concordia, which had ancient origins and was perpetuated in ecclesiatical theory and practice, was quite an unstable condition itself. Due to this overlapping and because both peace and treuga were supported by the same institutions, above all that of fides, the ritual kiss supported the formal instrumentarium of both concordia and treuga contracts. It would appear that the formal embodiment of religious concordia, the kiss of peace, was promoted as the form of treuga to project the latter in time. The principal formalism of the lay fides, the handshake, guaranteed obligatory secular treuga contracts, as postulated in thirteenthcentury Imperial Landfrieden: treuga data, manuali fide interposita.74 Either as the form of fides, or as an example of the extension of the formalism of the kiss as a generic legal device, there is evidence that between the late tenth and the late twelfth centuries the formal kiss of peace was occasionally used to support treuga-based relationships. The only direct reference to this development I was able to locate is the already mentioned Constitutions of Emperor Henry II, issued at the Diet of Strasbourg in October 1019. The Diet was attended by Italian magnates, both lay nobles and ecclesiastics. Matters Italian were at the heart of the discussion. Among other business, the Diet legislated on peacemaking. The last of the three laws it promulgated, now preserved with glosses in the Italian legal collection Liber Papiensis, deals with breaches of treuga. The law provided that the offender must put up a fight in person if the case came to judicial duel. The text of the version now accepted as authoritative goes as follows: ‘If someone, under treuga, or after having given the kiss of peace, murders another man . . .’ [Qui vero infra treugam vel datum osculum pacis . . .], and seems to distinguish treuga from the condition established with the kiss of peace. At least one of the collection’s versions however, substitutes ‘after’ [post] in the opening phrase of the law for ‘or’ [vel ],

74

Ludwig Weiland, ed., MGH, Constitutiones, vol. 2, 428, N. 318 and 429 N. 319.

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thus allowing the possibility of equating treuga with the state of peace achieved by the ritual kiss.75 I am not aware of other direct references in normative evidence to the ritual kiss in cases of treuga. There is, however, at least one circumstantial referral to a similar use of the rite. The Usatges de Barcelona, the fundamental law of Catalonia, recorded in article 119 (130) a special case of unconditional but time-limited restraint from hostility that corresponded to the usual definition of treuga. ‘No men,’ postulated the article, ‘after they have greeted or kissed each other, shall commit any crime against the other person on that day.’76 The text of this article was most probably formulated at the ecclesiastical peace synod of Barcelona in 1064 and inserted into the compilation at the time of its redaction, in the second or third decade of the twelfth century.77 The title was part of a series of provisions that defined temporary peace following formal occasions, the one established by the kiss being of the shortest duration. There are reasons to assume that the kiss continued to operate relationships informed by the formal features of treuga until a much later time. Narrative sources from the second and third quarter of the thirteenth century provide specific references to the condition established by the kiss as a time-limited—in one case up to forty days—treuga-like respite from aggression.78 Alongside treuga, the kiss often constituted another widespread eleventh- and twelfth-century Western peace institution entailing liability, amicitia. The bond of amicitia was a legal phenomenon of a qualitatively different character.79 Let us have a look at its genealogy. 75

Georg Pertz, ed., MGH, Leges, IV, Liber Papiensis, 583, N. 3. Ut omnes homines postquam quemlibet habuerint salutatum vel osculatum, nullo ingenio aliquid ipsa die ei fortifaciant, see Joan Bastardas, ed., Uzatges de Barcelona. El codi a mitjan segle XII. Establiment del text llatí i edició de la versió catalana del manuscrit del segle XIII de l’arxiu de la corona d’Aragó de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1991), 142, N. 109 (130). Donald J. Kagay, ed. and trans., The Usatges of Barcelona. The Fundamental Law of Catalonia (Philadelphia, 1994), N. 109 renders ‘vel’ with ‘and.’ It is a valid translation but I do not think it reflects the spirit of the original. 77 The date of the Uzatges was convincingly established by Joan Bastardas, Uzatges de Barcelona, 32–5. For the source of title 119 (130), see, beside Bastardas, Eugen Wohlhaupter, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottes- und Landfrieden in Spanien (Deutschrechtliche Beiträge, vol. 15, part 2) (Heidelberg, 1933), 340–64; and Gener Gonzalvo I Bou, ed., Les Constitucions de pau i treva de Catalunya (segles XI–XIII) (Barcelona, 1994), xxivff. 78 I discuss this application of the kiss of peace in the section on the French courtly romance Silence, see Chapter 6. 79 In what follows I am using the findings of Gerd Althoff, ‘Amicitiae [Friendschips] 76

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Ancient amicitia regulated several areas of domestic and foreign relationships in republican and imperial Rome. In the field of international law, Roman amicitia obligated client states to the Empire. In the sphere of private and public relationships within Roman society, its legal implications are not altogether clear. Most scholars agree that classic Roman amicitia had an extra-judicial character and was more of a social than a legal bond. At any rate, the amicitia that grew up from some kind of objective relationships among Roman households seems to have had no formal and legal expression and was as easily dissolved as it was constituted. Without obliterating the Roman legacy, the influx of Germanic concepts in the post-classical Roman legal terminology radically changed the status of the institution. Old High German glosses translated amicus and amicitia as friunt and friuntscaf, respectively, or, on rarer occasions, trût and huldî, the latter two being designations for the Germanic fellowship of arms [Gefolgschaft; friunt also served as a translation of cliens. While referring to kin and blood-based relationships, early Germanic glosses also equated friuntschaft to feudus, thus merging two concepts that Roman practice had kept rigorously apart and allowing the formal expansion of amicitia in the field of the legally defined personal relationships. Thus, under the impact of Germanic custom, Latin amicitia acquired the meaning of a legal covenant with all the content and formalism it entailed. Germanic ‘friends’ were obligated to concilium et auxilium [Rat und Hilfe], and the concept of fides [Treue] was singularly operative in the building of early amicitiae. As already noted, fides-based relationships also obligated the parties legally and mutually, two signal features that the Roman institution lacked. Early medieval sources furnish evidence of this type of amicitia by using technical terms of unmistakable meaning, which had no application in the Roman concept.80 In the post-Carolingian era, amicitiae were created within the realm of politics to reinforce bonds of lordship. With the rise of the Ottonian Empire, the bond of amicitia between ruler and magnates gradually disappeared. The implications of equality, which the institution seems to have carried, precluded its use in the hierarchical alliances informed by fides-bonds, as Relationships Between States and People,’ in Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Oxford, 1998), 191–210; Voss, Herrschertreffen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, 182–98. 80 Fritze, ‘Die fränkische Schwurfreundschaft,’ passim; Maria Wielers, Zwischenstaatlische Beziehungsformen, passim.

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above all in vassalage. In the aristocratic circles of the twelfth century Empire, amicitia’s application had been narrowed down to an alliance for specific purposes, loosing the character of covenant.81 The investigation of the legal formalism of amicitia in high medieval urban environments is an extension of this tradition and allows for additions to the model outlined above. To begin with, it must be remembered that fides and amicitia were institutions of a different order. Amicitia was a condition and a contract. Fides was the operative substance on which the latter was or could be founded. It also appears that in an even greater degree than with fides, high- and late-medieval amicitia was built on bonds of caritas and gratia. Finally, although as a legal covenant amicitia could be guaranteed by fides formalized by handshake, reconciliatory amicitia gradually centered on the kiss of peace.82 The earliest surviving German courtly novel, Ruodlieb, composed shortly after 1050, captures best the early stage of the evolution of amicitia carried by the formal kiss. The language used to describe the alliance of friendship between the noble exile Ruodlieb and the royal hunter is highly technical. The hunter proposed a foedus built on fides. It was to last for their lifetime, and entailed that each partner should champion the other’s cause. Ruodlieb accepted the contract [ pactum fidei], which was concluded, according to custom, by a handshake. The two became formal comrades. To this formal bond, through the kiss, the bond of amicitia was added. It united their hearts, so that they could serve each other. The reference to ‘hearts’ united with the kiss was not just a poetic motif. It was a phrase with a strictly legal content. The relationship thus united in a broad covenant two distinct and complimentary pacts, foedus and amicitia, each with its respective formalism.83

81

Althoff, ‘Amicitiae,’ 191–210; Voss, Herrschertreffen, 182ff. Voss, Herrschertreffen, 182; Schneider, Brüdergemeinde, 47ff. Amicitia in settlements of English conflicts has been investigated by Michael Clanchy, ‘Law and Love in the Middle Ages,’ in John Bossy, ed., Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983), 47–67. Cases of ‘lovedays’ are frequently found in high and late medieval English court records, but unfortunately there is practically no evidence to support an analysis of the formalism of peacemaking in late medieval England, nor is there enough data to determine where we can speak of reconciliation and where settlement prevailed. Reconciliations with the ritual kiss are recorded exclusively in narrative sources without sufficient background to gauge their legal meaning. 83 Dando sibi dextras ibi fiunt moxque sodales . . .; Oscula (dando sibi firmi) statuuntur amici, 82

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Ruodlieb and the hunter were strangers to each other, but amicitia could supplement kin ties as well, adding to the blood relationships a legal dimension, as it did in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, despite the fact that blood relations were usually conceived of as amici. Narrating how the royal brothers Bran and Belli came to reconciliation and turned amici through the kiss of peace, Geoffrey seems to reflect contemporary practice when implying that legal amicitia as a liability was a thing apart from the existence of natural or artificially made kin ties.84 Apart from the fact that the one was a natural and the other a social bond, to respect the latter was a duty of the individual. Geoffrey added a few more details. The pact was conditional and staked on the willingness of each of the parties to keep their part of the accord. If any side failed in this, the pact could be dissolved. Amicitia’s character of liability is clearly demonstrated. The eleventh- and twelfth-century practice of medieval reconciliation thus held two institutions, amicitia and the fides contract, to be distinct legal concepts. The pact of peace was a composite act, enacted through the formalism of the kiss creating the amicitia-bond and guaranteed with fides-exchange. This development was present already in twelfth-century aristocratic bonds, if the composite amici fideles used by the Saxon chronicler Bruno is taken into account.85 The formal amicitia dominated by the kiss of peace and guaranteed by fides grew up from a distinctive type of covenant, long used to regulate private feuds between Germanic clans. It is not by coincidence that in most of the cases where there was a reference to amicitia, the sources made it explicit that there had been previous hostility between the parties involved. If amicitia was a formal covenant of peace, its opposite, inimicitia, was the state of open, legally sustained hostility, often amounting to formal feud between the two parties. Amicitia was not alterutrius dominis famulantes cordibus unis . . ., see Edwin H. Zeydel, ed. and trans., Ruodlieb, The Earliest Courtly Novel (after 1050) (Chapel Hill, 1959), 30–1, ll. 105–25. 84 Robert Ellis Jones, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Manmouth, with contributions to the study of its place in early British history (New York-London-Toronto, 1929), 286, vol. 3, vii. 85 This conclusion is supported by an eleventh-century reference according to which on October 16, 1106, Saxons and Schwabians restored their former alliance against Emperor Henry IV by having their leaders, the Dukes Otto and Walther, kiss to guarantee [confirmare] the pact. Then all knights, according to their rank, kissed in their turn and thus became amici fideles; see Hans-Eberhard Lohmann, ed., Brunos Buch vom Sachsenkrieg (Leipzig, 1937), 82.

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a direct derivative from a natural condition. It was constructed through the obligatory relationship carried by ritual to cancel the hostility that had interrupted the peaceful social intercourse. It was not before the thirteenth century, however, before the suppression of conflict in the framework of amicitia acquired more permanent dimensions. Let me now turn to the instruments, mechanisms, and environments of this transformation.

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CHAPTER TWO

TRANSFORMATIONS: LEGAL RITUAL AND THE EVOLUTION OF PEACEMAKING IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

In the course of its eleventh- and twelfth-century expansion, the kiss of peace was adopted in the formalism of diverse local, regional, and inter-regional customs. Having absorbed several facets of the early medieval cultural, social, and political traditions governing conflict settlement, legal ritual entered its heyday in thirteenth-century peacemaking practice. Some of the legal devices which the kiss came to embody—laudatio, for example, and firmantia—continued to be employed during the later Middle Ages. Others disappeared under the pressure of the new concepts and forms of peacemaking. Nonetheless, as an established component of legal peacemaking the kiss was wellpoised to provide the form of the instruments which rose to prominence in the thirteenth century and soon came to dominate the landscape of the revived Roman doctrine. The legal implications of the ritual kiss were thus preserved in the law of the peace of the later Middle Ages. Behind this illusion of continuity, however, simmered a new power struggle on a grand scale. The legal concepts underlying the ritual underwent radical changes. A major shift in the understanding of peacemaking was taking place. Despite continuing resistance the legal principles that were worked out in the process and were embodied in the kiss of peace were to remain the guiding standard for the future. Two developments frame the beginnings of that momentous change. On the one hand, from the thirteenth century on, authorities of all orders sought to suppress the rights stemming from the sovereignty of the private person by all means possible. This resulted in a progressive restriction of the use of formal liability devices, fides included. The most conspicuous manifestation of the change was the increasingly visible presence of the secular authorities, under whose auspices peace was made as factors sharing agency in the very act of ritual peacemaking. On the other hand, the original, largely secular fides was sacralised through its merging with the concept and prac-

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tice of Christian faith and gradually came to (re)present the obligatory linkages that faith stood for. The sum of this double pressure was the filling of the formal instruments which were informed by fides with new contents and the reorientation of the persevering formalism of the private peace contract toward a new legal construct, the duty to peace. Both developments are demonstrated in the changed discourse structuring the functioning of the kiss of peace. In this chapter, I chart the main contours of the first phenomenon, the infusion of new content into the legal instruments operated by the kiss of peace.

Old Forms, New Instruments By the second half of the twelfth century, the variations in the contractual instruments supported by the kiss of peace already included a formula that was destined to become the dominant form of peace ritual, osculum interveniente. Documented in the beginning of the fourth century as the formal expression of the late Roman betrothal contract [sponsalitia], by the late twelfth century osculum interveniente became the generic ritual form of the legal pact of peace in the region that set the trends in the revival of Roman law, the North Italian urban centers.1 The Interpretation appended to Emperor Constantine’s Constitution that recorded it for the first time as the form of a legal instrument offered the following explanation: the kiss was the surety or caution, given to guarantee that marriage would eventually follow. It was the central element of the legally sustained promise and embodied the pledge for the obligation to marry taken by the groom. As such, the kiss was adopted in the Theodosian code and its Germanic reception, the sixth-century Lex romana wisigothorum.2 The law survived the Arab conquest and surfaced in the earliest Spanish fueros.3 Spanish

1

For earlier views see Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 149. Mary Brown Pharr, ‘The Kiss in Roman Law,’ 395. 3 The texts of the fueros are quoted in Tamassia, ‘Osculum intervenies.’ Fuero Juzgo contains, basically, the law in the spirit of Constantine’s Constitution as preserved in the Theodosian Code. Its text is seconded by Las Siete Partidas, IV, 11, iii. Fuero Real, dating from the second half of the thirteenth century, expanded the provision. Fuero Viejo de Castiella preserves in a fazaña a unique case, exemplifying the working of the law and the legal meaning of the formal kiss. This is the famous case of doña Elvyra, the niece of the archdeacon of Burgos and the daughter of 2

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legal traditions retained and transmitted the spirit of the legal formalism of the kiss in this context until the thirteenth century as it had been in the times of Emperor Constantine. In southern Gaul, soon after the sixth century, osculum interveniente was Christianized, fusing with the osculum pacis. There, the uses of the rite in pre-marriage contracts manifest the misunderstanding of the original meaning of the kiss and its role as a surety. Local Gallican Church hierarchy associated the rite with betrothal only.4 The persistent use of the kiss as a formal legal instrument in the field of marital relations blended the pronounced affective dimension of the family bond (emphasized in the Frankish reception of the ritual kiss in the earliest Merovingian formulae) with the legal implications of Roman law. From that time on, osculum interveniente operated in a relatively stable frame of reference. For a lack of a better word I will term it ‘legal affect.’ The kiss derived a good part of its operational force from a dispositions field— the affective bond of love—on which the peacemakers could and, as we shall see later, did draw frequently. By the middle of the twelfth century, therefore, osculum interveniente merged the late Roman legal tradition and the Germanic custom of objectifying legal concepts with Christian overtones and the built-in affective dimension. With this referential field, it assumed a central position in the instruments of peace developed by the revived neoLatin doctrine of the Italian civilists weaving the legal texture of their urban communities. Judging from the extant examples of notarial practice generated in the wake of the thirteenth-century confrontation between Guefs and Ghibellines, osculum pacis interveniente established itself as the standard form in the authoritative manuals on the legal procedure of concluding private pacts of peace.5 It took time, however, before the rite was attached to a specific legal instrument. Two of the most influential syntheses in the thirteenth-century

Ferrant Gomez of Villa Armiento, and the caballero who wanted to marry her. I use the text in Eugen Wohlhaupter, Althispanisch-Gothische Rechte (Weimar, 1936), 30 and the translation of Mary Pharr, ‘The Kiss in Roman Law,’ 396–7. For the context see also Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1984), 36–57. 4 Émile Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ 590–7; Konstantine Ritzer, Le marriage dans les Églises chrétiennes du 1er au 12 e siècle (Paris, 1970), 291–302. 5 An excellent short survey of the legal theory on crime and private peace is Padoa Schioppa, ‘Delitto e pace privata,’ 271–87.

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Italian legal tradition frame the transition of the ritual kiss and the instrument it embodied into the core of the peace pact. The Ars notarie of Rainerius Perusinus, imperial notary, professor of law, and judge of Bologna, composed between 1226 and 1233, did not mention the kiss in the instructions on how to compose a formal written record, or carta, in cases of ‘peace, concord, or truce.’ Rainerius’ shorter and more specific article De pace, however, featured the kiss in the concluding phase of the legal act constituting the peace, following the oath, sworn corporaliter on the Gospels.6 Rainerius evidently hesitated to give the concept embodied by the kiss the status of the exclusive legal device of peacemaking. There were several reasons for this uncertainty. First, for Rainerius the legal instrument supporting acts of private peacemaking was the stipulation. In the purist neo-Latin tradition, the latter went without any ‘vestments.’ The ‘nude,’ verbally made stipulation in the form of a question and an affirmative answer made the peace, which was then recorded in the written carta to ensure the existence of a proof.7 In spite of the assertion that ‘all this completed, they gave peace to each other with the kiss of peace intervening,’ it is not completely clear whether Rainerius was willing to make a concession to custom and objectify the stipulation in the form of the kiss.8 Next, although in Rainerius’ legal scenario the stipulatio made the peace contract, it was the oath that created the obligation to fulfill it. In the way peace was made, beginning with the stipulation and finishing with the oath, very little substance indeed was left to ritual—unless we assume that it was somehow linked to the stipulation. Finally, for Rainerius the kiss was an instrument of the formal investiture, both in feudal and civic custom. This vague manner of defining the legal nature of the kiss before the great summae of the later thirteenth century established its uses reflects the confusion that reigned in the matter of the relationship between legal substances and their vestimenta and

6 Ludwig Wahrmund, ed., Die Ars notariae des Rainerius Perusinus, 40–41, Ch. 31: Carta feudi, fidelitatis et investiture: IIII Capitulum pactorum; 54–5; Ch. 51: Carta pacis, concordie sive treugue. For the De pace article see Augusto Gaudenzi, Scripta anecdota glossatorum, vol. 2, 55 (document N. 121). 7 A short but instructive summary of the development of cartas, notarial records, and the legal acts these instruments officialized is Voltelini, Die Notariats-Imbreviaturen, i–xxix. 8 Quibus omnibus sic peractis, pacem inter se, osculo interveniente, dederunt, in Gaudenzi, Scripta anecdota glossatorum, ibidem.

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sollemnia in the beginning of the thirteenth century. The uses of the formal instruments for which the kiss stood and the meanings of the concepts it ‘clothed’ were still fluid. Half a century later the composite osculum pacis interveniente took center stage in the legal formalism of the peacemaking pact. In the Summa totius artis notariae, penned by the most illustrious figure in the generation educated by Rainerius, Rolandino Passageri, the kiss was the ritual form of the peace act. The peace was made after insults and injuries, specific or general, had been inflicted, for which one or both parties were cited to some of the city’s courts. Rolandino’s elaborate ‘Instrument of peace and concord,’ which he included in the ‘Compromise’ category, opened with the kiss: ‘Antonio, on the one hand, and Conrad, on the other hand, made to each other, with the mutually given kiss of peace intervening, perpetual peace, end, remission, and concord.’9 The moving of the ritual gesture to the beginning of the pact was a significant development. The formula went on to introduce the element of promise, making the parties declare, through a solemn stipulation, that neither they nor their heirs would proceed against the peace thus made and that they would keep it forever. Next came another obligation, this time material, again expressed through a stipulation pledging the two parties’ property for the keeping of the peace. Rolandino then clarified a roster of fine issues in the nature of the reconciliation, the legal conditions and obligations it created, and their procedural characteristics. He, just as Alfonso in his Code, reserved the kiss for acts of peace [ pax] only. In cases of concord, remission, and ‘end’ of the conflict, the kiss was not exchanged. Capturing in full detail contemporary Italian theory and due process of peacemaking, Rolandino’s Summa became immediately a bestseller, the source of notarial instrumenta of reconciliation all over the peninsula and abroad. Adopted verbatim in Guillaume Durand’s Speculum iuris, by the middle of the fourteenth century Rolandino’s peace formula spread rapidly throughout Western Europe.10 With Giovanni Andrea’s and Baldo’s erudite glosses, and accumulating fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury commentaries from numerous lesser lawyers, Rolandino’s for-

9

Rolandinus de Passagerii, Summa totuis artis notariae (Venice, 1546), fols. 158v–159v. Guillaume Durand, Speculum Iuris, with commentaries by Giovanni Andrea and Baldus (Basel, 1574), 107, Lib. IIII, part. 1, De treuga & pace. 10

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mula became the normative text defining the legal form of reconciliation for the next two centuries. It ensured the triumph of the ritual kiss as the dominant form of the legal instruments of peace. The fact that the kiss of peace was accepted as the exclusive form of private reconciliation reflects the powerful presence of the rite in the customary tradition of both peacemaking and the obligatory contract. The collections of cartae pacis with which the archives of the Northern Italian cities abound flesh out the dry lines of the city statutes and notarial manuals with the practical concerns of real-life peacemaking and offer a sweeping vista of the practice of reconciliation. Close scrutiny of some typical cases helps illustrate the workings of the ritual formalism of the kiss within the thirteenth-century civic legal process. I will limit myself to a well-documented geographical area, Tuscany, where one can follow intimately the intersection of Roman law, the impact of contemporary sociopolitical structures on legal practice, and local specifics. Apart from their relatively rich evidence on peacemaking, Tuscan urban centers are also representative in the sense that the legal developments occurring there were later mirrored in other Italian jurisdictions. Comparative material from two more regions, the Papal States (on material from the march of Ancona) and Corsica, will shed light on both the legal specifics of the Tuscan reconciliation and the formal features it shared with practices in other geographical and sociopolitical environments.11 In Florence, records of private peace acts are available for study in an almost uninterrupted sequence from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century.12 The first observation from the scrutiny of these documents is the extraordinary thirteenth-century expansion of the rite. The kiss of peace was not explicitly mentioned in all records, and perhaps not widely used in practice during the early 1200s. On the other hand, references to it steadily diminish after the second quarter of the fourteenth century. When mentioned, the kiss-osculum interveniente appears almost exclusively in cases of grave offenses.

11

Gino Masi, Collectio chartarum pacis privatae medii aevi, passim. Another rich collection is the Sienese Caleffo Vecchio, see Giovanni Cecchini, Il Caleffo Vecchio del Comune de Siena, 3 vols. (Siena, 1931–1940). See also Dante Cecchi, ‘Sull’ istituto della pax dalle costitutioni Egidiane agli inizi del secolo XIX nella marca di Ancona,’ Studi Maceratesi, 3 (= Atti dell III Convegno di studi storici Maceratesi, Camerino, 26 Novembre 1967), (Macerata, 1968), 145–7; and Jacques Busquet, Le droit de la vendetta et les paci corses (Paris, 1920). 12 Masi, Collectio chartarum, passim.

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Manslaughter and bitter fights erupting over injured honor were the most common preludes to peacemaking requiring the kiss. Most reconciliations were extra-judicial affairs, although there are several mentions of law enforcement officials involved in the peacemaking. The latter trend became more marked in the second part of the century, when there are reasons to think that reconciliations had regularly been enacted under the monitoring of the civic authorities. The early thirteenth-century reconciliations were relatively simple affairs; by the 1270s they run into pages of details. Until the 1260s the ritual kiss usually went together with a simple promise on the part of the parties reconciling and agreeing to make and keep the peace. From that point on, the stipulation, which had entered the private pact by the late 1230s as a side device to arrange the material guarantees for the keeping of the peace, as was its original purpose in Roman law, gradually moved center stage to comprise the legal act of peacemaking. In the earliest instruments the kiss was accompanied by an oath, most often on the Gospels. Finally, although in the early decades of the thirteenth century there were considerable variations in the formal rendering of the written instruments, in the mid-1270s the cartae began to follow closely Rolandino’s formula. From the analysis of several hundred thirteenth-century cartae, it appears that after the entry of the stipulation most of the documents that omitted the kiss began using the stipulation and vice-versa. Also, already the earliest documents explicitly mention that the kiss and the peace it signified were given ‘mutually and in turn.’ The stipulation itself, when it became associated with the proper act of peace and not with the obligation to keep it through the pledge of properties, was invariably clothed in some formalism.13 I am not aware of any explicit reference to what these sollemnia consisted of. That leaves room for a tempting speculation; but let me note one more of the features of the legal pact preserved in the cartae. The way in which both simple promise and stipulation were defined in the instruments mirrored the structure discernable in the performance of the ritual act. The parties solemnly promised or stipulated ‘between themselves, mutually, and in turn’ to keep the peace and all agreements that accompanied it.14 13 Fecerunt ad invicem osculo pacis vicissim interveniente . . . sollemnibus stipulationibus hinc inde intervenientibus, ibidem, 119, N. xxx. 14 Et convenerunt et promiserunt inter se, dicte partes, ad invicem et vicissim inter se, ibidem, 159, N. 40.

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Some conclusions can be drawn at this point. The kiss was evidently a unilateral act, performed in turn by each party who ‘gave’ the peace and the party who ‘received’ it. Then the act flowed the other way round, i.e., the parties either kissed again, or the single performance of the kiss was considered to have been an exchange. The force that created the obligation was solidly linked to the form. In some cases it was necessary to delegate proxies for the express purpose of kissing. This was made with special legal instruments, authorizing the persons who were to make peace on behalf of those unable to be physically present to perform the rite (they could be exiles, banniti), or were prevented from doing so for reasons of decency (mostly women). When the family of Michele Assembrante of Pistoia made peace with Giovanni, Lombardo, and Giannino, the sons of Gratio, on January 6, 1283, it was considered inappropriate that Michele’s wife, Bonaventura, kiss the other party. She had to delegate her rights to Baldo, also called Gregory, with the explicit provision that he was to ‘receive the peace, end, and remission from them on her behalf and kiss them on the mouth in her stead.’15 Ritual was indispensable for the legal efficacy of the pact. Unilaterallity, mutual giving and receiving, physical presence, formal obligation through exchange of bodily actions, the increasing role of the urban authorities as a third party with the power to coerce—these were the features of the legal instrument embodied by the kiss on which the peace contract was built. The interdependence between content and form allows for a conjecture. As the second half of the thirteenth century saw the advent of the stipulation in place of the simple promise in the instruments of peace, the most plausible speculation that can be inferred from the cartae is that the kiss of peace came to express its formalism. The conclusion may be startling at first, but it follows logically from the historical evolution of the stipulation. Already in the early Middle Ages it was stripped of its original expression and meanings. In the period from the eighth to the tenth centuries, as stipulatio interposita and stipulatio subnixa, it came to denote written text, the charter in which the legal transaction was recorded, the signature of one or both of the parties, the festuca, or indeed any object embodying the corporeal obligation taken through it. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, during the period concurrent with the revival of the neo-Latin 15

Ibidem, 136, N. 34.

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legal practice, the stipulation regained some of its characteristics of an oral obligation under certain conditions and began to divest itself from the formalism it had taken on during the reign of customary law. It did not break free from all formalism though, nor did it lose the applications that had accrued to it during the earlier centuries.16 It was only natural, then, that when in the thirteenth century the stipulation began pushing aside fides facta (at the same time being itself intensely discussed by the neo-Latinists), the old Roman verbal questions and answers giving rise to legal action were translated into the impressive language of ritual. The kiss of peace assumed the form of another basic legal instrument—that of the private contract—and carried it on long after stipulatio in contracts other than peacemaking was disrobed from all formalism and acquired the form of a ‘nude,’ purely consensual verbal exchange giving rise to legal action. Settlement, termination of hostilities, giving up of the rights of revenge, and restoration of the legal and social relationships of peace were captured in the single, legally binding kiss as the form of the Latin stipulation combining the affective dimension of forgiveness and the law. The expanding neo-Latin legal doctrine was not the only legal field that still required ritual formalism when it came to peacemaking. Among the indigenous Germanic institutions regulating the conditions of conflict and peace, the Urfehde was of cardinal import in the Holy Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. As a legal device, Urfehde entailed a settlement by the granting of peace and giving up the customarily justified rights of vengeance. Due to its paramount importance for the judicial framework of medieval peacemaking in the German-speaking regions of Western Europe, by the thirteenth century one of the two types of Urfehde was linked to the reconciliation and developed into a more complex legal act. Part of it was formally supported by the ritual kiss.

16 For a brief definition of the Roman stipulation see Berger, Dictionary, 716–7. On the history of the medieval stipulation see Heirich Brunner, Zur Rechtsgeschichte der römischen und germanischen Urkunde; Francesco Brandileone, ‘Nota preliminare sull’origine della “stantia” o “convenientia,” ’ in Scritti di storia del diritto privato italiano, ed. by Giuseppe Ermini (Bologna, 1931), Vol. 2, 407–18, and especially ‘La “stipulatio” nell’età imperiale romana e durante il medio evo,’ ibidem, 418–528; Carl Karsten, Die Lehre vom Vertrage bei den italienischen Juristen des Mittelalters. Ein Beitrag zur inneren Geschichte der Reception des römischen Rechtes in Detschland (reprint, Amsterdam, 1967), 179ff.

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Such was the older type of Urfehde, the one of traditional Germanic stock. It routinely followed a preliminary or pledged promise to terminate feuds over serious matters of bloodshed or injury of honor [Streiturfehde] and led to cessation of hostilities. This referential field made the instrument amenable to the entry of the kiss. Although a private act, Urfehde was a legal instrument upon which both individuals and public powers could act, since breaking the promise of reconciliation was considered a public offence that gave rise to customary legal action. These implications of the device out-weighed the fact that the authorities could not get actively engaged in the Urfehde itself and could only make sure it was employed to pacify the parties to the conflict or guarantee that the injured party would renounce his grievances against the officials and institutions who had mediated the settlement or enforced the end of the conflict. Urfehde was offered in the first place by the injured party, the one who had legal rights to begin a feud and seek vengeance, reciprocating the legal and financial steps that the wrongdoer had done to bring about reconciliation. Only then could the offender offer his own Urfehde. The instrument could follow either extra-judicial settlement or a formal court sentence, and co-exist with the fines and punishments that the authorities were able to enforce against the offender.17 The formalism of Urfehde, which is of primary interest here, was originally the Old Germanic ritual sequence of an oath and a hand gesture. A case in point is the Christianized Old-Icelandic Trygäirformula. It preserved the cold formalism of the ancient Scandinavian peace tradition, a true settlement rather than reconciliation, and was most resistant to the influence of forgiveness and reconciliation borne by the kiss. The procedure it prescribed consisted of an oath and a handshake: ‘And now put your hands together, NN. and NN.; keep

17 Carl von Amira, Grundriss des germanischen Rechts (3rd edition, Strasburg, 1913), 247ff.; Heinrich Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, Vol. 1 (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1906), 226–7; Franz Beyerle, Das Entwicklungsproblem im germanischen Rechtsgang. Vol. 1. Sühne, Rache und Preisgabe in ihren Bezug zum Strafprozeß der Volksrechte (Heidelberg, 1915), 151–68; Wilchelm Ebel, Die Rostocker Urfehden. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Strafrechts (Rostock, 1938), 13–24. It is important to note that in the German cities of the later Middle Ages from the beginning of the thirteenth century another form of Urfehde was developed. It began to be demanded by the authorities from released prisoners who in this way acknowledged the right of the public powers to monopolize the use of force and deploy coercion to keep the peace through any means they deemed appropriate, including rights over the bodies, property, and personal freedom of released felons [Hafturfehde].

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the oath that you have sworn by the will of Christ and all the men who have witnessed this peace.’18 The overwhelming amount of medieval German Urfehden adhered to this kind of formal expression. The early medieval Anglo-Saxon Unfáehäe seems to mark a transition to the more complex tradition, including the ritual kiss with its deeply Christian implications, although there is no complete agreement about its formalism. Designated with the term for reconciliation, halsfang, which might have meant embrace, by the time it was recorded in royal legislation Unfáehäe was assimilated to the kiss. Leges Henrici I explains the term as ‘the English word with which the embrace around the neck is called.’19 This appears plausible, since it was in the Low Germanic legal traditions with historical Anglo-Saxon connections, especially in Western Frisia, Zeeland, and some northern Dutch provinces, that the kiss as the form of reconciliation displaced the hand gesture and joined the oath of orveide. The standard expression in Frisian laws, ‘peace with sworn oath and the kiss’ [swerren ed and keste mond ], points to an implication of the rite in the creation of the peace obligation on a par with the sworn oath.20 A Münzordnung from the same region prescribed that the feud remain in force until the parties reconciled ‘and each and every one of those who had sworn the oath had kissed with their mouth, and given up the feud. . . .’21 On other occasions the kiss framed the indispensable, but preliminary stage of the payment of wergeld, which in some places was considered to be the price for the kiss.22 If this is the correct interpretation, then the kiss

18 Nu legia ∏eir hendr sinar saman NN. oc NN.; halldit vael trygäyr at villia cristz oc allra mana ∏eirra, er nu heyräo trygäa mal; quoted after Beyerle, Entwicklungsproblem, 152–3. On the strict formalism of northern peacemaking, aimed at reaching a settlement, rather than reconciliation see Andreas Heusler, Das Strafrecht der Isländersagas (Leipzig, 1911), esp. 85–7. 19 . . . est autem verbum anglicum, quod latine sonat apprehensio colli, see L. J. Downer, ed. and trans., Leges Henrici Primi, edited with translation and commentary (Oxford, 1973) ch. 76. The term halsfang had the same meaning in Icelandic practice; see Richthofen, Altfriesisches Wörterbuch, in his Friesische Rechtsquellen, 794. On halsfang see also Heinrich Brunner, ‘Sippe und Wergeld nach niederdeutschen Rechten,’ ZRG, GA, 3 (16) (1882), 15–18, and Harold D. Hazeltine, Die Geschichte des englischen Pfandrechts (Breslau, 1907), 83–5. 20 His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 214, note. 3, discusses examples from Frisian laws. 21 Nu agen him elker lyck deer him diue freedeed swert mit sine mond kessa, ende deer mede da fayte wrtigia, see Karl Friedrich von Richthofen, ed., Friesische Rechtsquellen (Berlin, 1840), 411, ch. 1, ll. 35–7; 387, ch. 7, l. 3. 22 Als thio seke sened is and thi kos kesseth ist, see His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 201–18.

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seems to have appeared as the formalism of the settlement as a whole. It came to denote, and indeed to connote, Urfehde in Frisian peacemaking, imbuing it with the meaning of reconciliation and forgiveness rather than pure settlement. In northwestern Germany, where the kiss appeared fairly often, as a rule reconciliation remained only one of the parts of the peace pact. A typical example would be the Urfehde that Heinrich, burgrave of Stromberg, gave to the count of Ravensberg at Elmenhorst, near Ravensberg, on September 22, 1292. The high point of their meeting, after the payment of the required sum for amends had been arranged, was the kiss and the oath on the relicts. The reconciliation or kuste sone was tied to the orueide but did not absorb or displace the legal form that presumably embodied the latter.23 The thirteenth-century German Urfehde betrays a trend that was only implicit in the neo-Latin stipulation and became even more pronounced as the century wore on, the growing presence of a third party whose role was no longer limited to mediation. This evolution was region-specific and reflected the expanding claims of the public powers to mediate private conflict. The rights of the public authorities concerned with peace and order are quite visible in contracts involving Urfehden. Another of the thirteenth-century Western legal instruments employed in peacemaking, the French asseurement, demonstrates this development even better. On evidence from Northern France its origins can be traced back to the twelfth century. As a fully fledged legal instrument, however, asseurement flourished in the later Middle Ages. Unlike the Urfehde settlements to which the kiss was a newcomer, the association of the kiss with peacemaking in the French kingdom had, as we have seen, long roots, and the secular authorities could use the power of the tradition vested in this accepted form. A contract with a preventive character, asseurement initially belonged to the domain of high justice but with time seeped down to bourgeois quarters. In its basic form it was a solemn promise by which the parties to the conflict took an obligation to restrain themselves

23 Vortmer so hebbe wi deme greven eine rechte orueide vnde eine kuste sone also dese bref sprecht/vnde sinen vrinden/vnde hern ludincgere van bardeliue vnde sineme sone entruwen gelouet/ vnde vp den heiligen gesworen, see Friedrich Wilchelm and Richard Newald, eds., Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300, Vol. 2, 1283–1292, N. 565–1657 (Lahr, 1943), 761, N. 1629.

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from violence against each other. The promise was made to, or given ‘in the hands’ of an authorized official, local or of the central government. It is worth noting the continuity, of the ritual formalism adopted by the third party in this secular procedure, with earlier cases involving the ‘consecrated hands’ of a prelate. The similarity suggests if not the direct appropriation, at least the strong influence of early ecclesiastical ritual on its secular successor. In its high medieval forms, the asseurement could not be revoked. Breaches of the promise embodied in it entailed prosecution by the authority that had received the asseurement rather than the other party to the peacemaking act. In the course of the later medieval period, asseurement underwent a series of transformations concerning its social agents, its sphere of application, and the level of public authority permitted to receive and enforce it.24 Nonetheless, asseurement retained the substance of a legal instrument of the peace and the formalism through which it was executed. It was a public event, could be enforced by royal or communal officials, and was attended by specially appointed officers of the peace. Unlike osculum interveniente, asseurements were given to terminate a variety of conflicts. There is no discernible pattern in the diverse types of offense that led to its application. Being a promise to the other party as much as it was a pledge to the authorities, asseurement was sometimes staked on giving fides and in that capacity involved the ritual kiss as well. In this manner the Livre Rouge of Abbeville recorded the pledge of asseurement in a case dating from 1304. The parties put their joined hands in the hands of the mayor, and kissed each other in faith and loyalty.25 Virtually mirroring the ceremony represented in the two-party ritual obligation of firmantia and fides facta, and including the emergence of a mediating third party as in laudatio, the kiss-asseurement placed the legal act in a context which entailed a very different interpretation of ritual’s meaning. The emergence of a directly involved third 24 See now Elizabeth Cohen, ‘Violence Control in Late Medieval France. The Social Transformation of the asseurement,’ Revue d’histoire du droit, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis, 51 (1983), 111–22. Cohen surveys the work of French legal positivists and introduces a dynamic dimension to asseurement by exploring late medieval shifts in its meaning and application. 25 Et puis apres pais et accors fu fais entre les parties avant dites et par devant justiche, ch’est assavoir Jakemont Clabaut, maïeur adoncques et plusieurs eskevins et grant plante d’autre bone gent, et se baisèrent le dites parties en foy et loyauté, Livre Rouge, fol. 40v, quoted after Jean Boca, La justice criminelle de l’échevinage d’Abbeville au Moyen Age, 1184–1516 (Lille, 1930), 167.

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party with power to coerce transformed the nature of the legal bond created by the ritual peace. Cessation of conflict was no longer an issue of freely taken obligation. Peacemaking had acquired a new dimension.

The Conditions of Ultimate Peace: Thirteenth-Century Pax and Amicitia As understood by twelfth-century lawyers, the ritual kiss constituted a legal bond established for a specific case. A century later, the rite no longer worked as such in that way. The early thirteenth-century legal thought and practice of peacemaking had solidly anchored it in the bedrock of the legal pact defined as ‘peace’ ( pax, compositio, or concordia), which had many of the features of a broadly defined covenant. The medieval composite form pax cumcordia appears for the first time in early Frankish formulae. Compositio was the technical term that Langobard legal language used for the definitive peace in contrast to the temporary treuwa.26 There are hints that in Roman practice compositio had a social component, but neither the classical and late Roman traditions nor early Langobard legal practice has preserved any traces of its existence as a written document of a legal covenant. The formula pax et concordia seems to have turned standard by the ninth century in the Frankish Empire. It was employed in the context of securitas formulae, and seems to have influenced late Langobard legal forms after Charlemagne’s conquest of Italy in the eighth century. The formula grew out of a synthesis of the Roman pact and the Germanic compositio. Its purpose was to ensure that the wrongdoer was not cited before the judicial authority for committing the crime, and the injured party guaranteed through it that there would be no feud after the composition at which amends had been made and the wergeld had been paid.27 26 Pax cumcordia and compositio as types of legal reconciliation were defined in the first Langobard law code, the edict of Rothari, promulgated in 643, ch. 143. For a recent Latin-Italian edition with a commentary see Carlo Azzara and Silvio Casparri, eds., Le Leggi dei Longobardi, storia, memoria e diritto di un popolo germanico (Milan, 1992). For a complete English translation with introduction see K. Fisher Drew, The Lombard Laws (Philadelphia, PA, 1973). 27 The Roman pact, pactum, applied also in delictual obligations, being a composition between the offender and the person injured by the wrongdoing. See for a short outline Berger, Dictionary, 614. For a detailed list of applications of the term

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During the high Middle Ages, parallel with the revival of neoRoman jurisprudence, a whole roster of legal forms, such as treuga, amicitia, concordia, remissio, finis, transactio, accrued around compositio and pax to denote the fine shades of the peace pact.28 Most were guaranteed by fides and carried by the oath, the kiss, or other legal devices. Yet, above all other forms stood the formalism of the handshake. Some legal theorists derived from the latter the very term ‘pact’ under which the peace contract came to operate. The early thirteenth-century Italian legal masters, Roman civilists, and pragmatic authors of civic law codes most concerned with the feuds among citizens sorted out this chaos, defined the legal ramifications of all operative concepts, and attributed to each of them its appropriate sollemnia. The process of distilling distinctive formalism for the instruments of legal peacemaking was occurring intensively by the first quarter of the thirteenth century. The 200 years of legal thought and practice that followed saw the growth of a thicket of commentaries around the vestments of the primary concepts. Among the Italian neo-Latinists, foremost in the definition of the essence of the private pact was the opinion that the term ‘pact’ was closely linked to peace, deriving from the Latin term ‘giving peace.’ The pact expressed the consensus of two or more parties, their agreement to accept the stipulations of a judicial sentence or arbitration. Strictly speaking, most of the pacts that gave rise to legal action were generic obligatory covenants, engaged through fides or wadia, later involving stipulatio, and guaranteed through a roster of sollemnia. Thirteenth-century Italian notarial manuals list scores of such legal pacts, covenants of peace featuring prominently among them, sometimes as categories in their own right, on other occasions under the title of other, more generic agreements.29 For practical reasons having to do with the political and social constitution of their communities, most active in developing the peace and its derivatives and cognates as well as further references see P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1996), 1314–5 on pax and 390 on Concordia. 28 Masi, Collectio Chartarum, 1–20. 29 A short but instructive discussion of the origins, meanings, and formalism of the medieval legal pact is included in Rainerio of Perugia’s Ars notariae, see Wahrmund, Die Ars notariae, 1–3. Rainerio did not bind himself with accepting only one explanation; other authors were more specific. See, for example, Irinerius in Herman Fitting, ed., Summa codicis des Irnerius. Mit einer Einleitung (Berlin, 1894), 25ff. and Max Conrad, ed., Die Epitome exactis regibus, herausgegeben mit Anhängen und einer Einleitung (2nd edition, Aalen, 1965), 98–100.

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pact were the civic worlds of the Italian communes and the urban centers of the Low Countries. Most local legal traditions in these two regions consistently used the formalism of the kiss to embody the core of the peace pact. Both regions were the exclusive provinces of the contractual peace and shared the essentials of Western peacemaking, but their concepts of pax and concordia, frequently used to qualify the relationships of peace achieved through reconciliation, had distinct contents and ramifications. The analysis of the rites of peacemaking in these two areas highlights the basic traits of Western peacemaking as reconciliation. Even more important, it reveals distinct modes of social contract reflected in the ritual peace covenant. While abounding in references to the ritual kiss of peace, the early thirteenth-century evidence about the rites of reconciliation in the northern Italian communes and city states does not specify the role and meaning of each of the formal gestures in the complex procedure of the legal composition. It is thus difficult to gauge the contents of the obligation stipulated by the kiss. The sources become more circumstantial by the second quarter of the thirteenth century, when the power of the imperial ban devolved to the chief executive and judicial officers of the communes. This shift of responsibility empowered urban legislation to begin targeting city violence with a series of judicial measures designed to keep the social peace. Contractual peace became imperative for feuding parties who wished to retain their rights in the city and avoid being subjected to exile or heavy fines. The development of the standard written instrument of peace, instrumentum pacis or carta pacis, was the direct response to the employment of the ban to pacify the feuding clans and individuals and an attempt to end the everyday altercations that troubled the Italian communes. The cartae pacis were the exclusive prerequisite for the lifting of the ban or the mitigation of the pecuniary fines imposed for violent crimes. The communal officials and external peacemakers, the so-called pacieri or angeli pacis, in theory did not recognize the legality of the private feud, but were in practice compelled by tradition and circumstances to accept it tacitly or go around it. All they could do was work on limiting the escalation of violence by diffusing hostility and bringing already erupted feuds to a speedy end. The ban was lifted if the injured party offered the offenders peace and promised not to attack or judicially prosecute them. The obligation to peace undertaken by the parties to the conflict, however, had to be absolute, comprehensive, and hereditary. It included not only the

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principals of the feuding clans and the proxies who made peace in their stead, but also clan members who were covered by the principle of customary vengeance and failed to appear and make peace in person. The purpose of the peace pact was to eliminate all possibilities of legal and customary vendettas, regardless of how they were pursued, with a dagger in hand or in the law courts.30 The authorities were all too well aware of how easily one form of the feud could spill into another. In thirteenth-century northern Italian notarial manuals providing templates for cartae pacis, the formalism of the kiss was reserved exclusively for compositions known as pax and concordia. In the language of the instrumenta developed in such social and political contexts, settlements of these types meant remittance of all injuries, damages, and harms, said and done. Through these peace covenants the parties acquitted each other of all attacks on life, limb, property, or honor perpetrated from the beginning of the conflict. In theory, pax and concordia agreements differed from contracts with more limited application designed for specific aims and employed in cases of conflicts with lower intensity. But the real-life legal practice of reconciliation blurred the strict definitions of the theorists, who were often unable to tell the difference themselves, and established a broader understanding of pax. Two cases a half-century apart illustrate the confusion. In one of the earliest examples from Prato, in the early 1200s, a Pisan notary, Cascio, the son of Guido Spelacaste, made peace with Landino, son of Rainerio of Prato. The parties have ‘made and given between themselves and mutually, the kiss of peace intervening, end, remission, freedom, absolution, and perpetual peace of all injuries.’31 Peace came last, with a host of other conventions ahead of it. More than fifty years later, on June 14, 1274, at a time when the most influential summae explicitly linked the kiss only and exclusively to the perpetual, firm, and indelible pax, a notary of Pistoia recorded the reconciliation being made between Ficardino and Fiore, and taking place in the palace of the Captain of the People and before witnesses, with

30 The best short discussion of the instrumentum of peace is Peter Raymond Pazzalini, The Criminal Ban of the Sienese Commune, 1225–1310 (Milan, 1979), 93–8. 31 Fecerunt and reddiderunt sibi ad invicem, pacis osculo interveniente, finem, remissionem, liberationem, absolutionem, et pacem perpetuam de omnibus et singulis iniuriis. . . ., Masi, Collectio chartarum, 39, N. 7.

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the formula ‘Ficardo . . . and Fiore . . . kissing each other on the mouth, made between themselves end and peace and remission of all injuries.’32 Again, pax was assimilated to finis and remissio in the formal act that embodied all these concepts. Be that as it were, in Italian urban compositions enacted by means of the ritual kiss, the ritual act constituted the obligation that lay at the heart of the covenant. As the thirteenth century progressed, the contents of that obligation show a distinct shift in meaning. The change was caused by the evolving perceptions of the nature of the civic peace, its social agents, and the tensions it provoked. In imperial legislation, peace was a personal matter; order was the supreme aim of the authorities. The ultimate agency was reserved for the sovereign whose duty it was to maintain and enforce order. Urban statutory law, on the contrary, asserted that keeping the peace was the legal duty of the individual citizen and the membership of the city’s corporate bodies. The implementation of this concept ran into difficulties for a fundamental reason. Even though keeping the peace could be understood as a duty of the citizen under the conditions of uncertain legitimacy of the civic bodies which legislated it as such, once the peace was broken, the individual right to vengeance and retaliation overrode the generic duty to peace. At this point, no legal duty justified the making of peace and the perpetual, hereditary acquittal of injuries stipulated by the instruments of peace. It seems that the rapid spread of the formalism of the kiss demanded by the urban authorities was part and parcel of their attempt to deal with this difficulty by using traditional devices to impose an entirely new concept. The ritual reconciliation with the kiss in the framework of the thirteenth-century pax thus gave rise to a qualitatively new type of obligation. Placing the ritual kiss at the heart of the pact was an attempt to do away with the concept of peacemaking as a particular obligation undertaken as a specific liability, and substitute for it the perception of peace as a generic duty. The solution it provided was to wrap the peace act into the formalism of the ritual gesture that implied recognition of a generic peace duty by definition. Those who kissed and pledged their faith not only were obligating themselves

32 Osculando de ore ad os fecerunt inter se ad invicem finem, pacem, er remissionem perpetuam de omnibus et singulis iniuriis, ibidem, 106–7, N. 26.

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by taking a specific, freely bestowed and withdrawn legal liability, but were also acknowledging peace as a moral duty in the manner of the sacred peace of the Church and the no less respected duty of household peace with their blood kin. Actively asserting the civic peace and supporting it with the power of the ban and other legal instruments, but still lacking the power to coerce, the early communal legislators sought to impose peace and extend its social territory by generalizing the duty of peace. In other words, the entry of the kiss in the composition to embody the peace pact served to transform the particular liability to keep the peace into the general moral duty of peace enacted in the ritual covenant. The novelty in the legal bond formalized by the kiss was its stress on social consent, to which the ritual obligation now referred by drawing on the obligatory relations encoded in ritual. The development was of paramount importance. Instead of the self-imposed obligation of the person, who had previously been in a position to define the limits and parameters of his or her own involvement, the growing powers of the public authorities tied the ritual obligation to the already specified large and generic concept of civic duty and the consent to accept it. Perhaps the most impressive testimony to the changed nature of the ritual bond is to be found in the massive peace compositions of the leaders of the political parties in Tuscany in the latter part of the thirteenth century. One example will stand for them all. When on January 18, 1280, Guelfs and Ghibellines, fifty on each side, convened in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence to make peace as required by the formal sentence of the papal legate, Cardinal Latino, and ‘made and guaranteed the peace,’ the kiss of peace served, above all, to ‘announce’ [declararunt] the peace. Ritual blended in a single act what had been before two distinct facets of the legal act of reconciliation: the liability to fulfill the cardinal’s sentence and the parties’ acknowledgement of its binding character as a duty of the law-abiding citizen.33 What is significant is not whether the peace held, nor whether the new discursive frame increased the efficacy of ritual action. What I am arguing is that the authorities seized every available device to promote law and order 33 Facta vero pace seu confirmatione pacis; in Isa Lori Sanfilippo, ‘La pace del cardinale Latino a Firenze nel 1280. La sentenza e gli atti complimentari,’ Bolletino dell’ Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo e archivio muratoriano, 89/1 (1980–1981), Documenti, 203–4, 210, 226.

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and stamp out violence. Ritual peace and reconciliation through the kiss was an important component of that scheme and part of an ongoing effort to find substitutes for the lack of legitimate and effective coercion. Comprehensive, absolute, and hereditary as it was—and when properly enacted binding even for individuals not personally involved— the covenant of peace in Italian communes was a generic agreement and rarely gave rise to positive relationships between the parties by virtue of the peace act alone. As in the Nordic traditions, even the acknowledgement of peace duty was for the most part a settlement, a strictly practical affair. It was a response measured to the exact amount of pressure applied by the communal authorities. If additional clauses were attached to it, they had to be specially stipulated. Renouncing their feud on April 19, 1257, two families from San Gimignano complemented the peace made with the ritual kiss with the bond of amicitia by a formal obligation to marry their children. The latter obligation was separately arranged, as were the liabilities to fulfill the terms of the peace.34 Thirteenth-century Italian reconciliation was also a synallagmatic contract. The two parties took, in turn, mutual obligations that mirrored each other and emphasized their equality before the law and in relation to each other. By contrast, in the ritual peacemaking of the Dutch and Flemish communes, as well as in northwestern Germany, the creation of a positive bond between the parties was an integral element of the peace act. This manner of peacemaking had a long tradition in the North. Its formal foundation was the amicitia contract. We have already seen it in Roudlieb, where ritual was a future-looking device and structured interpersonal relations without prior conflict. The same pattern, however, was followed in thirteenth-century peacemaking. As amicitia seeped down to bourgeois quarters, strengthened the communal bond and provided the foundation for peace among the city dwellers, it was assimilated into the concept informing the pax bond. A ‘friendly’ reconciliation from the German town of Wetzlar is a case in point. Completing an amicabilis compositio on January 13, 1285, the clans of Dridorf and Nuveren terminated the feud caused by the murder of a certain Ludwig Han, a Dridorf clan member. The Nuveren paid for 2,000 masses for the soul of the victim, and

34

Masi, Collectio chartarum, 293–8, N. 1.

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arranged for his posthumous association with twelve abbeys. A lamp was to burn forever in the monastery of the Virgin in Wetzlar, and a source of an annual income of three marks was transferred in hereditary possession to Ludwig’s closest relatives. With financial and spiritual issues settled, the two parties met and had drawn up a written instrument following the familiar Italian model, in which they renounced all injuries, offences, attacks, and grievances through the kiss of peace. The peace pact enacted, the parties secured it through fides and the sworn oath. From that day, they were to be mutual and faithful friends. The composition was then strengthened with the ban of the commune. If someone dared to break the peace, he would be proclaimed violator fidei et honoris, would be banned from Wetzlar and the other imperial cities, would forfeit all his goods, and would be subject to the imperial ban as well as to ecclesiastical excommunication until reconciling again, judicially or through the gratia of the other party.35 Peace was clearly staked on the amicitia contract which ritual built. As in most traditions north of the Alps and west of the Rhine this was a field operated by the kiss. The kiss clearly did not engage the major obligatory concept of German contract, Treue [ fides]. Fides had its own sphere and was enacted through the handshake. The rites of amicitia were then staked on the positive legal affect borne by the kiss. The document did not specify its formal contents; contemporary evidence from other regions identifies it with another cardinal institution of the medieval legal and social obligatory relations, amor. The implications of the legal condition of amicitia as a feud-resolving contract derived from the Wetzlar reconciliation throw light on two related developments that reinforce the conclusion that the kiss was changing its legal referent. The first is a shift in the meaning of gratia: a concept we already saw as carrying the binding force of ritual obligation in the high Middle Ages. Early gratia had been primarily a liability device. In the thirteenth century the distinction between liability and duty became blurred. The technical language of legal evidence gives practically no clues for this development. With due allowance for genre specifics, however, the much more circumstantial body of narrative fiction makes up where the law comes up 35 Sed amici erimus ex nunc et in perpetuum in invicem et fideles; in Friedrich Böhmer, ed., ‘Zwei Mordzühnen vom 1285 und 1288,’ Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum, 6 (1848), 21–3.

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short. In the German courtly classic Kudrun, for example, the princess, introducing the noble lady Ortrun, exhorted Queen Hilde to kiss the maiden who had offered her service in times of distress. When learning that Ortrun belonged to a hostile kin, the queen outright refused the kiss. Yet the princess was afraid that without the kiss her relatives would feel free to attack the foreign lady. ‘Consider, my dear mother, how guilty I would feel were my kinsmen to kill somebody here,’ insists Kudrun, ‘give the poor [lady your] grace.’36 Only gratia ensured actual protection and was legally binding for all those under the ruler. The rite might have expressed personal liability, but it also embodied the promise for the fulfillment of the duty of protection inherent in the social position of the lord. As indicated in the document from Wetzlar, in the thirteenth-century urban world gratia seeped down the social hierarchy, since it was a convenient institution referring to the set of objective qualities characterizing social relationships restored after grave offenses and formal enmity. Lex Frisiorum, the collection of fundamental laws of medieval Frisia, where the lack of acknowledged political authority left peacemaking at the will of the free Frisians, summed up the content of the legal reconciliation between private persons in the phrase in gratiam reverti.37 Once given, gratia was almost irrevocable, had there been no further offenses against the life and honor of those conferring it. The kiss carrying gratia was often earned after the open demonstration of submission, humiliation, and expression of regret and remorse [deditio].38 It guaranteed that the offended side would quash the quarrel that fueled the justified ‘anger;’ that is, they would ‘put aside’ or ‘forget’ the legally acknowledged right to pursue a feud. The thirteenth-century Tale of Melibeus, a story in Albertanus 36 Nu küsset, liebiu frouwe, dise maget hêre; Gedenke, liebiu muoter, waz ich des hiete schulde, swen slüegen mîne mâge. lâz die armen haben hulde; in Karl Bartsch, ed., Kudrun (Wiesbaden, 1965), ll. 1582. The somewhat freely rendered English translation by Winder McConnel, Kudrun (Drawer, 1992), 163 translates this passage in the following way: ‘Show that you’re favorably disposed towards this poor woman,’ obliterating the meaning of the concept informing hulde. 37 Richthofen, Friesische Rechtsquellen, Document 30, title 2, Ch. 3. The previous paragraph uses the expression donec quomodo potuerit eorum amiciam adipiscatur. The cases are discussed in Rudolf His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 210ff. 38 The best discussion of deditio in the context of the rites of supplication and ritual construction of political power is Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992). This is perhaps the subtlest interpretation of pre-modern ritual as a device for structuring the political order available today.

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of Brescia’s moralizing work on vendetta and reconciliation, Liber consolationis et consilii, is a case in point. Melibeus, a rich and powerful citizen, took the acknowledgement of guilt by those who had wronged him in its customary sense, as a title to legal revenge, and considered pressing his case for seizure of the property and exile for the perpetrators. Yielding to the persuasion of his wife, however, he remitted his anger and received his enemies in his gratia by kissing them.39 As the text hints on many occasions, the conferral of Melibeus’ gratia was a case of building bonds of friendship and peace between two feuding clans through reconciliation soaked in religious reminiscences; nonetheless, despite the extra-judicial resolution of the case, the customary peace as a duty of the peacemaker was no less binding. A second development deserving attention is the impact of the concept of amicitia on the peace pact as the former became integrated into the latter through the ritual kiss of peace. A conspicuous example is Alfonso the Wise’s provision for ritual peacemaking as stipulated in Las Siete Partidas. The articles on peace or pax were composed in the vein of local fueros intended to halt the bloody clan and faction feuds in the late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Castilian and Aragonese urban centers. The fueros acknowledged the legal rights of the citizens to pursue blood feuds [inimicitia, enemistad ] exclusively in cases of serious offenses, such as physical injury, murder, and grave verbal attacks on someone’s honor. Custom separated the prerogatives of the public authorities from individual and clan rights to manage private relationships, allowing the latter the primary role in the termination of the feud. Making one’s peace with the authorities for breaking the public order and paying the price for that did not mean that the legal feud, which the injured party had the right to pursue, had been suppressed. The condition of inimicitia was terminated only and exclusively when the clan of the murdered forgave the offender. The wrongdoer had to be accepted in the injured party’s amor, as the fueros of Escalona and Calatayud put it, a term clearly related to caritas and gratia of other legal traditions. Until then, the injured party had all legal rights to attack and kill the offender, 39 Vos in nostram suscipimus gratiam et bonam voluntatem. Et ita, sublevando illos per manus, recepti sunt in osculum pacis; in Thor Sudby, ed., Albertani Brixiensi Liber Consolationis et consilii ex quo hausta est fabula de Melibeo et Prudentia (Kopenhagen, 1873), 126–7. An excellent interpretation of this episode is offered by James M. Powell, Albertanus of Brescia. The Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1992), 74–86.

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even after he had paid the due fine and indemnity and had made his peace with the authorities. In most cases the fine only put off the feud for a set period of time, normally nine days, giving the wrongdoer a chance to escape from the city.40 Alfonso’s new Code drew on these customary provisions, and in full accord with them determined that peace after the feud was only possible when the state of amor was restored between offender and injured. The Code spoke about making peace after discordia and desamor, equating them to enemistad, the officially recognized private conflict caused by murder, injury, and insult. Lesser strife was not the domain of ritual pacification: the kiss targeted the feud. Forgiveness was the sign of that crucial change of heart, and its formal expression was the kiss of peace. The kiss signaled that the enemistad reigning in the heart of the injured had been quashed and converted into pure and sincere amor. The heart, as in the German tradition of Roudlieb, was the source of legal amicitia and inamicitia.41 The ritual kiss of Alfonso’s Code not only guaranteed that the feud had been renounced, but converted the feud into peace and concord [ pax, pace]. Codifying custom within such a discourse was a radical departure from earlier practice. It was an attempt to modify the nature of the obligation on which the pact of amicitia rested. The Code amalgamated ancient custom, psychological analysis, and Roman law, in a splendid illustration of the thirteenth-century understanding of the sources of the powerful impact of legal ritual. The rites of peace accomplished what the Spanish monarchy could not legitimately do: define peace as the duty of the citizen. In the thirteenth century, the most that the royal advisors could hope to achieve was to carefully preserve, maintain, and perpetuate the rituals of peace as an efficient device for pacification of the turbulent civic world. Skillfully managing the formalism of the available peace instruments, the authorities instinctively grasped and 40 Postquam ad amorem eorum perveniat, homicidium pectet et ad domum suam revertat et vivat; et qui fuerit homiciero . . . exeat de villa et stet foras usque habeat amorem de parentis mortui, see Eduardo de Hinojosa, ‘Das Germanische Element in spanischen Rechte,’ ZRG, 44 (GA, 31) (1910), 282–359, esp. 300–30. The legal dimension of the formal pardon of the offended party which made the reconciliation possible is studied in detail by F. Thomas y Valiente, ‘El perdon de la parte offendida en el derecho penal Càstellano (siglos XVI, XVII, y XVIII),’ Anuario de historia del derecho espanol, 31 (1961), 55–114. 41 The heart as a device of the political and legal order is a concept recently discussed by Jean Nagle, La civilisation du coeur: Histoire du sentiment politique en France du XII e au XIX e siècle (Paris, 1998).

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consistently promoted ritual with age-old obligatory implications to fortify the interpretative scheme they sought to implement as the law of the realm. In Flanders the institutions of the peace were solidly rooted in the Germanic and Frankish past with its ancient social and legal customs of association as the most enduring feature of the true peace and a manifestation of the sincerity of the reconciliation.42 To be sure, the institution of trève, the local variant of treuga, supported by the urban public and judicial authorities, the eschevins, the count, or the duke (in Brabant), was a widespread mechanism to separate the parties while the feud was still alive. The peace, however, known as reconciliation [zoene, zoen, zoeve] mediated by urban ‘pacifiers’ [ pacificateurs jurés, geschworene paysmackers, paiseurs, appaiseurs, paismakers], whose office was institutionalized around the middle decades of the thirteenth

42 The best comprehensive modern survey of Flemish legal conflict settlement is still R. C. Van Caenegem, Geschiedenis van het Strafrecht in Vlaanderen van de XI e de e XIV eeuw (Brussels, 1954), esp. 290ff. Older works, such as Robert Fruin, ‘Over zoen en vrede in Holland, Zeeland en Utrecht en over de beteekenis van de Utrechtsche Keur op de vredebraak van het Jaar 1300 voor de politieke geschiedenis der stad,’ in his Verspreide Geschriften, Vol. VI: Studiën over Staats- en Rechtsgeschiedenis, ed. by P. J. Blok, P. L. Muller, and S. Muller Fz. (’s-Gravenhage, 1902), 274–314, are still valuable with the insightful analysis of the specifics of the early legal practice of the Low Countries. See also Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Documents nouveaux sur les moeurs populaires et le droit de vengeance dans les Pays-Bas au XV e siècle. Lettres de rémission de Philippe le Bon publiées et commentées (Paris, 1908). For the earlier period, there is a series of works by Henry Platelle: ‘Moeurs populaires dans la seigneurie de SaintAmand d’après les documents judiciaires de la fin du moyen âge,’ Review Mabillon, 48 (1948), 20–39; ‘Vengeance privèe et réconciliation dans l’oeuvre de Thomas de Cantimpre,’ RHD, 42 (1974), 269–81, and ‘La violence et ses remèdes en Flandre au XIe siècle,’ Sacris Erudiri, Jaarboek voor Godsdienstwetenschappen, 20 (1971), 101–73. Modern Dutch scholarship pays more attention to reconciliation and pacification, but ritual is rarely analyzed. See, for example, Klaas de Vries, Bijdrage tot de kennis van het strafprocesrecht in de Nederlandse steden benoorden Maas en Schelde (Groningen-Jakarta, 1955); J. W. Marsilje, Bloedwraak, partijstrijd en pacificatie in laat-middeleeuws Holland (Hilversum, 1990); H. A. Diederiks and H. W. Roodenburg, eds., Misdaad, zoen en straf: Aspecten van de middeleeuwse strafrechtsgeschiedenis in de Nederlanden (Hilversum, 1991), especially M. W. Stein-Wilkeshuis, ‘Wraak en verzoening in middeleeuwse Friese en Scandinavische rechtsbronnen,’ ibidem, 11–25. An exception is the fine short study of Hans de Waardt, ‘Feud and atonement in Holland and Zeeland: From Private Vengeance to Reconciliation under State Supervision,’ in Anton Schuurman and Pieter Spierenburg, eds., Private Domain, Public Inquiry: Families and Life-styles in the Netherlands and Europe, 1550 to the Present (Hilversum, 1996), 15–38. I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Willem Frijhoff for bringing de Waardt’s research to my attention and to Dr. de Waardt himself for providing me with a copy of his study.

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century, reinstated the condition of the ‘good peace and good love’ [boine pais, boine amor] between the feuding urban families.43 As in Italy, in the Low Countries the ritual kiss was the main vehicle of the pax-bond. Its formalism, however, reflected a quite distinct social mechanism. The obligatory relationships mobilized by the ritual kiss drew on each other to mutually reinforce the legal bond as a duty of the individual person by building a specific set of formal social implications into the symbolism of legal ritual. The type of relationship established in the act of formal peacemaking was similar to that in the feudal bond. Legal peace restored the normal everyday relationships in the city, but its most solid foundation was the ‘homage of peace’ that the wrongdoer and his relatives did to the clan of the victim. This type of homage was a common institution in the high and late medieval West. The earliest references to it appear in the first quarter of the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century the homage of peace made its way into formal legal collections, and was used in cases of peacemaking in France, Catalonia, Denmark, Holland, and the Empire. It was in the legal practice of northeastern France and the Low Countries, however, that it became the central feature of the peace pact. In some Flemish communes, notably Valencienne, Lille, St. Omer, and most probably Douai, the homage of peace was a judicial requirement. Elsewhere, as in the northern Dutch provinces and the northwestern Empire, it was frequently employed but was not indispensable. When performed, the homage of peace was a legal bond with all the consequences the latter entailed. In such a way it was defined in later variants of the Sachsenspiegel, which also definitely linked it to the formalism of the kiss.44 The obligatory relationships of homage thus found their way into the reconciliatory procedure of urban societies, but, as we shall see, the

43 The institution of peacekeepers is studied in detail for Ghent, see David M. Nicholas, ‘Crime and Punishment in Fourteenth-Century Ghent,’ Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 43 (1970), 289–334, 1141–76; and his ‘The Governance of FourteenthCentury Ghent: The Theory and Practice of Public Administration,’ in Bernard S. Bachrach and David Nicholas, eds., Law, Custom, and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe (Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 28) (Kalamazoo, MI, 1990), 235–60. A good study of peacekeeping in Valenciennes is Louis Cellier, Recherches sur les institutions politiques de la ville de Valenciennes (= Mémoires historiques sur l’arrondissement de Valenciennes, publee par la Société d’ Agriculture, vol. 3) (Brussels, 1886), 125ff. 44 The best survey of the homage of peace is in Rudolf His, ‘Totschlagsühne und Mannschaft,’ Festgabe für Dr. Karl Güterbock zur achzigsten Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages (Berlin, 1910), 349–79.

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linkages to the bond of the classic rites of vassalage that homage established were only part of the implications of the kiss. The legal traditions in which the homage of peace was the norm featured the kiss as the third act in a sequence that normally began with homage, was followed by the kiss, and concluded with the oath of peace. In Douai, a provision of the tribunal of the paiseurs from February 18, 1263, issued in the name of the countess of Flanders and Hainau recorded the peace concluded between Hues Boinebrok and Gerardin Goulet in the following way. Expressing his deep regret and repentance Hues, the offender, proposed to become ‘a man’ of Gerardin and his lineage, ‘if they would accept him.’ To atone for his crime, Hues promised to go on a pilgrimage. He then swore, on his fides, the oath of equivalency [Gleicheitseid ], asserting that, had the same offense been perpetrated against him or any of his kin, he would have accepted the peace in the same way that he now asked Gerardin to accept it. The equivalency oath sworn, and amends and pilgrimage having been promised, Gerardin agreed to the peace and ‘the two kissed between themselves in the name of peace and good love.’ The last act of the reconciliation was the oath with which the parties swore to put aside all hatred and injuries, and talk, drink, and eat together—that is, to restore the conditions of ordinary everyday civic intercourse.45 The ceremony and the obligations taken were then meticulously recorded in order to be followed by the parties to the reconciliation, and their fulfillment was closely monitored. Similar was the procedure in St. Omer. The peacemaking formula in the register of municipal bans drawn at the end of the thirteenth century by Ghis l’Escrinewerkere, who served long years as a paiseur, prescribed the minute details of the ceremony of reconciliation [zoeve]. The murderer or the proxy elected by his kin [kievetains] gave surety for the wergeld of the victim: twenty-four Parisian pounds that were to be paid as indemnity. On the specially appointed day, the wrongdoer appeared before the kin of the assassinated, carrying a sword and dressed only in a shirt, barefooted and bareheaded. He then

45 Ke Hues Boine Broke deviegne hons si com de pais a Gerardin Goulet et a ses amis . . . houmes de sen lignage, se il prendre les veulent . . . et baisent maintenant li un les autres en non de pais et de boine amour. The document is in Douai, Archives communales, layette 141, ser. FF, quoted after George Espinas, ‘Les guerres familiales dans la commune de Douai aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Les trèves et les paix,’ Revue historique du droit français et étranger, 23 (1899), Pièces justificatives, 457–8, N. 15.

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gave the sword to the head of the opposite clan, kissed the next of kin of the victim, and declared that he had become their man, i.e., did homage. Oaths were sworn on both sides and the terms and conditions of the payment of wergeld were fixed. After the first installment was delivered, the head of the wrongdoer’s clan, the kievetain, went to city hall to declare to the échevins that the conditions of the official reconciliation had been met, and requested a sergeant. Accompanied by the latter and four arbiters, he then went back to the kin of the offender to collect the rest of the wergeld and arrange its payment to the kin of the victim. Ghis’s provisions were still in force by the end of the fourteenth century.46 These two examples, which stand for a series of other cases of homage of peace, sum up the essence of the peacemaking pact as a personal alliance founded on social, legal, and moral obligations. As Rudolf His has correctly argued, this type of homage was not fealty or a form of fides facta [Treuversprechen, Treugelöbnis]. Engagement of fides followed after homage had been done both in vassalage and the peace rites (in Lille, for example). With the kiss as the form of the peace pact, fides continued to be embodied in the traditional formalism of the hand gesture. Furthermore, the homage of peace was not a mere formality. It was legally binding. Rudolf His saw in it a substitution with which the clan of the offender made up for the loss of life sustained by the kin of the victim. The wrongdoer (or the kievetain) offered himself as a new member of the injured family.47 If this conclusion is correct, and it seems to be, the legal formalism of the kiss of peace, in addition to being directly related to the vassal homage, constituted an act with which the representative of the offending clan literally joined the blood collective of the clan of the victim. The ritual kiss was not just a pledge of fides, nor was it a security device. It gave over the whole person as in the vassalage feudus of Germanic type. The immediate implication was the insertion of the former perpetrator into the network of kin ties supported by positive affect and embodying the most basic paradigm of the ultimate peace. 46 Et si doit chil, quant il l’espeie aroit rendue et aroit baisié, si devroit il dire: Sire, je sui devenue vos hom; in Arthur Giry, Histoire de la ville de Saint-Omer et de ses institutions jusqu’au XIV e siècle (Paris, 1877), Pièces justificatives, 576, N. 29, art. 791. The formula varied, see other examples in Oscar Bled, Le Zoene ou la composition pour homicide à St. Omer jusqu’au XVII e siècle (St. Omer, 1884), 93ff. and 185. 47 His, ‘Totschlagsühne,’ 375ff.

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By the end of the thirteenth century the shift in the binding force of obligation mobilized by legal ritual can be registered in data from the trend-setting traditions employing the kiss as the main form of their peace instruments. Over the next century the tendency accelerated and was picked up in environments where the kiss of peace was still a contested form. The staking of the contract on institutions such as amor was matched by developments in other operative fields of the kiss and was accompanied by the withdrawal and decline of fides in the legal sphere of peacemaking. Without the benefit of the comprehensive inquiry advocated by Yannik Carré, this process can only be sketched. Nonetheless, it is worth tracing its main outline, for the evolution of the legal kiss of peace in the later Middle Ages sheds light on the changing environment of interpersonal peacemaking and points to a new balance of power affecting the relationship between individual and community.

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CHAPTER THREE

WITHDRAWAL: THE DECLINE OF LEGAL RITUAL IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Even a cursory overview of late medieval legalism would confirm that by the fourteenth century the kiss began to withdraw from certain types of contracts. Evidence points both to the decreasing use of some of the legal institutions whose form it provided and to the growing hesitancy to employ the kiss as a public legal instrument. This development took place in legal traditions all over the medieval West and affected the formal peace pact as well. There are too few regional studies to see the picture in full detail, but where the formalism and the binding forces of the law of obligations have been better investigated, the broad lines of the retraction can be tentatively sketched. In line with the postulate that form endures while its contents may shift, mutate, or disappear, the kiss outlived most of the legal institutions it had been called to ‘clothe’ in the previous periods. Fides itself, the main vehicle of the customary obligatory contract had already been experiencing somewhat of a decline at the time when the ritual formalism of the kiss reached the peak of its influence. As the ‘nude’ contract and the stipulatio gained strength, fides was gradually pushed aside during the late Middle Ages. The process was subject to local vicissitudes and contexts, but the trend was visible even before the end of the thirteenth century. More importantly, in the local and regional traditions where fides persevered as an institution the essence of its obligatory force changed. At the time of its dominance over the contractual peace in the high Middle Ages, fides’s quality of a legal concept was its paramount feature within the legal discourse in which it operated. The rest of the rich social and cultural implications it carried assumed secondary roles. By the fourteenth century the situation had reversed itself. The law had receded in importance in the definition of what fides was all about. This opened the way for the institution to refer to two social spheres that had been implicit in its functioning throughout the Middle Ages, but

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had been overshadowed by the legal dimension of fides in the field of obligatory relationships: religious faith and personal honor. Both concepts had been present in the social workings of fides since the early Middle Ages as secondary semantic referents. By the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, the essence of fides as a force of obligation had for the most part either been subsumed in the concept of Christian faith or assumed the qualities of a pledge of honor. This had two consequences. First, fides was de-secularized. As long as it continued to be employed in legal matters it was in the domain of canon law and subject to ecclesiastical rather than secular jurisdiction. Although it remains to be investigated whether the high medieval synthesis, as Carré argued, had disintegrated to its constitutive parts, the migration of fides is amply documented. Second, fides as carrier of honor no longer had the obligatory force of the former legal institution. The failure to uphold one’s pledge of honor was not a legal offense. Whatever its social consequences might have been in different times and places, no longer did such a failure lead to concomitant or collateral legal intervention. Defaulting on one’s ritual obligation entailed loss of face and reputation in certain quarters, but it triggered no punitive action on the part of the authorities with legitimate claims to the right to coerce. The metamorphosis of fides and its retraction from the legal field went concurrently with the imbuing of the ritual kiss of peace with new significance. Just as the social transformations in the fourth and fifth centuries had turned the kiss of early Christian koinonia into a liturgical device in search of meaning, the later medieval developments allowed for other social institutions to step in and fill with new contents the ritual kiss. Drawing on the ancient and medieval caritas and supported by some of the obligatory connections that the kiss had carried throughout the ages, the late medieval amor and dilectio came to inform the contents of the kiss with a new set of meanings referring to legally and socially defined emotions. This shift had lasting implication for ritual’s subsequent evolution as a social act and will be explored in more detail in the next part. Parting with the institutions that relegated it to the strictly legal sphere of application, however, did not mean that the kiss of peace lost its impact on the process of legal peacemaking. For a series of reasons going beyond the traditional assertion about the tenacity of medieval formalism, the kiss of peace was preserved in the procedure of reconciliation.

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The vestiges of the high medieval synthesis survived not just as examples of cultural inertia. Behind the pertinacity of form, there was a functional rationale informing the contents of the ritual interaction. The following overview is not intended to provide a comprehensive coverage of the evolution of fides and the kiss of peace in the later medieval period. Its goal is to demonstrate that the relegation of fides to a different referential area was parallel to changes in the application of its one-time form, the kiss of peace. Although the kiss had not been exclusively linked to fides and at places remained within a different operational field, the change in the conditions determining the vitality of fides as a legal institution seems to have had similar impact upon ritual form as well. Most conspicuous was the increasing assimilation of both fides and the kiss into the domain of religious faith. Late Medieval fides and the Kiss The conviction that fides had legal implications remained strong, perhaps strongest, in the German-speaking regions west of the Rhine and warranted its continuous employment throughout the Middle Ages. By the end of the thirteenth century there was still a clear and well-discernible distinction between the judicial obligation taken through fides and the one guaranteed through simple promise [ promissum simplex].1 The tradition in which fides was rooted did have to face, however, the neo-Latin influences emanating from northern Italy. We have already seen them reflected in the reconciliation from Wetzlar. The same period, the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries saw the gradual but irreversible acknowledgment of the informal contract as binding legal practice. The ‘nude’ contract gained ground steadily, although the formal pledge of faith [Treugelübde] lingered until the end of the sixteenth century, to disappear rapidly thereafter under the impact of the fullscale reception of Roman law. 1 To give an example from the legal practice in northern Germany, from the region of Bremen, in a charter of 1296 recording a sale of land, the sellers, knights by social status, promised on their fides the buyer’s peaceful entry into possession. One of them, however, a certain Borchard from Cattania, explicitly refused to give his fides and insisted on securing the same liability on his word only. See Gierke, Schuld und Haftung, 222.

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Elsewhere, the transformation of the ritual formalism of peacemaking began as the kiss peaked in influence. In the south of France, in Toulousan legal practice for example, in a region where Roman law had been influential all along, by the second quarter of the thirteenth century fides became the equivalent of a solemn ‘parole d’honneur.’ This development merits two observations. First, the breach of the peace pact sealed by the kiss now entailed neither pecuniary nor any other sanctions of secular law. The reasons for the reduction of the kiss’s specter of implications were complex, but its longtime functioning in a specific ritual environment is to be credited for at least one of the motivations behind it. We have already seen the inclusion of the kiss in the procedure dominated by the peacemaking oath. Thirteenth-century Toulousan notaries and canon lawyers assimilated the kiss in the oath; in such cases breach of the ritual contract entailed ecclesiastical penalties only.2 In contrast, in the northeast, in the county of Namur, the later years of the thirteenth century saw something of a short temporary revival of fides in peacemaking contracts. Lay folk sought recourse to it in peacemaking as well as in other contracts to avoid subjection to the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, which occurred when the court took a true judicial oath.3 Second, the Toulousan penchant for considering the contract with the kiss an affair of honor is corroborated by contemporary and later evidence from diverse social environments in other West European areas. The implications of pledging honor is discussed in more detail in the next part. It suffices to mention here that in the north Italian practice, as we shall presently see, secular courts upheld ritually sustained relationships which might not have been legally binding but engaged institutions of utmost importance for the functioning of the civic social machinery. The same concept held good for political societies built on the typologically similar notion of contractual obligation, or depending exclusively on the continuous display of the crucial faculties of trustworthiness and loyalty. A case in point, from the thirteenth-century Empire, is the reconciliation between the Emperor and one of his high nobles in the German fiction Duke Ernst.4 Real-life practice undeniably rested 2 Mirelle Castaing-Sicard, Les Contrats dans le très ancien droit toulousan (X e–XIII e siècle) (Toulouse, 1959), 455–9. 3 Jean Balon, ‘Sur deux garanties coutumières,’ RHD (1953), 567ff. 4 For the concept of honor staked on the ritual kiss in a political society built

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on such foundations. The end of a major late medieval conflict, which dragged on for centuries and was fought with utmost ferocity and complete lack of formal inhibitions, the termination of the feud of the Zamberlani and Strumieri clans on August 30, 1568, illustrates the role of the kiss as a pledge of honor, elevated to the state of both legal instrument and fine art in Italy, where commoners and nobles alike employed it to buttress social as well as legal relationships.5 In northern France, in twelfth-century Normandy fides had been practically indispensable in a large roster of transactions. A century later it was no longer a condition for a contract’s validity. As in the south of France, it seems to have not entailed corporeal obligation. There were, however, a series of pecuniary, moral, and religious sanctions for breach of fides. Such a context made it an almost exclusive reference to the divine. Moreover, with the triumph of the consensual pact, fides lost its position as a source of legal action. Fourteenthcentury Norman fides had completely dissolved into Christian faith. The consequences for its judicial status were serious. When, in 1205 and again in 1208, royal commissions refused to acknowledge the ecclesiastical courts’ competence in cases of fides, the institution was set to rapidly loose its last vestiges of practicality. Elsewhere in the kingdom of France, fides-based cases continued to be valid sources of action in cases under ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the century, in the spirit of Louis VIII’s Constitutions of Melun from 1225. The tradition was particularly strong in marriage contracts, where it persisted until the sixteenth century.6 In England, where high- and late-medieval judicial records of reconciliation with the kiss are practically absent, fides was kept alive on the idea of social contract see Duke Ernst in Cornelia Weber, ed., Untersuchung und überlieferungskritische Edition des HERZOG ERNST B, mit einem Abdruck der Fragmente von Fassung A (Göppingen, 1994), 444–5; translation in J. W. Thomas and Carolyn Dussère, The Legend of Duke Ernst (Lincoln and London, 1979), 124–5. 5 Melibeus renounced his lawful wrath and indignation for the love of God and his own honor, Deo amore nostroque honore. In the sixteenth century the concept of pledging honor in legal reconciliation was crucial, witness the sixteenth-century feud of Zamberlani and Strumieri in Friuli. The document recording their pacification is published by Ernesto Degani, I partiti in Friuli nel 1500 e la storia di un famoso duello (Udine, 1900), 170–71. The feud between the clans is discussed in Furio Bianco, 1511: La’Crudel Zobia grassa! Rivolte contadine e faide nobiliari in Friuli tra ’400 e ’500 (Pordenone, 1995), and Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore and London, 1998). 6 Yver, Les contrats normands, 44–83. For a discussion of French marriage contracts see Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ passim.

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throughout the fifteenth century in vassalage and in engagement or marriage contracts. Even by the end of the fifteenth century, ecclesiastical courts considered formally or verbally given fides a sufficient cause of legally sustained obligation. At that time, however, it was an institution operating almost exclusively in the domain of canon law.7 In secular cases it could easily be dispensed with. The petition of the House of Commons to King Henry VI in 1439 to omit the formal fides, given by the kiss, in feudal contracts because of the pestilence that was ravaging the country was approved without raising any legal objections or comments.8 The practice of the thirteenth-century Italian urban centers and states provides corroborative examples. The statutes of Bologna, Verona, and Lucca stipulated as a primary measure for breach of the peace exile for life and demanded a heavy fine for wounding a person with whom peace had been made. To the mind of the legislator it made no difference, however, how the peace had been secured, with or without the kiss of peace as a guarantee of good faith [bona fide factarum, observata bona fide].9 The situation was different in the Papal States, an ecclesiastical principality where canon law ruled and the jurisdiction of the supreme pontiff cast its shadow over secular legal affairs. A series of urban statutes promulgated up until the second half of the sixteenth century stipulated that the ritual kiss had specific, clearly defined implications. In fourteenth-century Rome and in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century statutes of Camerino and Tolentino in the march of Ancona, for example, the codification of customary law testifies to the clear perception of the exclusive role of the kiss as a formal peace device. The breach of the obligation taken by the kiss was punished by a scale of monetary fines different from that obtaining in cases when the kiss was not involved.10 Reneging

7 For a number of cases see the collection on marriage litigation by Robert H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (London, 1974). 8 David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents (Oxford, 1969), vol. 4, 1117–8. 9 For Bologna see Lodovico Frati, ed., Statuti di Bologna dall’anno 1245 all’anno 1267 (Bologna, 1869–77), vol. 1, 267: the peace was the kiss! In Verona, the breach of peace, whether guaranteed with the kiss or not, was punished with a pecuniary fine, as it was in cases of treuga, see Gino Sandri, ed., Gli statuti Veronesi del 1276. Colle correzioni e le aggiunte fino al 1323 (Cod. Campostrini, Bibl. Civica di Verona) (Venice, 1940), vol. 1, 415, N. XL. For Lucca see Salvatore Bongi, ed., Statuto del comune di Lucca dell’anno MCCCVIII, ora per la prima volta publicato (Lucca, 1867), 169–70, Lib. III, ch. 51. 10 See Cecchi, ‘Sull’ istituto della pax,’ 127–8 for the sixteenth-century statutes

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on a peace pact made through the kiss resulted in much heavier fines than defaulting on settlements concluded through any other ritual means or based on ‘nude’ pacts. Finally, an area needs to be mentioned where neither local nor regional authorities managed to legitimize their rule until well into the late fourteenth century. I have already noted that in medieval Frisia the kiss was one of the essentials of the legal peace. Frisian laws had early medieval roots, and the particular social constitution of the region preserved their archaic features longer than elsewhere. There were no universally acknowledged secular authorities in Frisia to punish the breach of private contracts formalized by the ritual kiss. The law allowed for the demolition of the house of the exiled but did not specify who was to enforce the measure. The statutes of Upstalboom, for example, composed around 1323 as the law of the free Frisians, stipulated that those who committed murder after reconciliation sealed by oath and the kiss of peace were proscribed from the country for one year and that only the Pope could absolve him.11 Two explanations suggest themselves in view of this leniency of the law. Either the murder ensued in the wake of a new feud, which shielded the perpetrator from the full force of the law, or the legal substance of the pledge of the kiss has shifted its referential field in the eye of the secular legislator. The second possibility seems more plausible. The injunction that only the Pope could absolve the murderer suggests not only the magnitude of the misdeed but also that it was considered primarily a sin and therefore the laws of reconciliation were in the competence of the ecclesiastical courts. Theirs was the only legitimate coercion, and it was of a spiritual nature. It must be remembered that in all such cases only contractual peace [gelobter Friede] was meant, and the punishment seems to have been only for breaking one’s obligation, not for the murder, which might not have been considered a crime under the circumstances.12 of Camerino and Tolentino; for Rome, Camillo Re, ed., Statuti della città di Roma (Rome, 1880), 98–9. 11 Huaso een man daed slacht wr sette sone ende swerren ede ende wr kesten mond, di schil wt wessa ieer ende dei butta lande, see Richthofen, Friesische Rechtsquellen, 105 for this provision of the statutes of Upstalboom from 1323, ch. 17: l, 26–8. Another penalty was the demolition of the house of the wrongdoer. 12 When peacemaking was securely in the hands of the authorities and was imposed rather than undertaken by the reconciling parties either voluntary or under pressure [gebotener Friede], its breach was by default a punishable offense that needed no personal sureties to give rise to a legal action. See Rudolf His, ‘Gelobter und

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The evidence supporting the relegation of the obligations arising from fides and the kiss to ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the hesitancy to accord them a privileged status in secular laws does not warrant a conclusion about the abandonment of ritual in the late medieval legalism of the peace. Rather, one may speak of ritual as subject to a ‘double jurisdiction,’ a condition which continued well into the early modern epoch. The emergence of this two-layered notion of legal obligation is a feature of the legal genealogy of the ritual instruments of peace. The communal and city-state legislators were always ready to intervene in case of ‘nude’ pacts of peace, but they acknowledged the binding force of the ritual engagement as well. Although in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian urban legislation the ritual act of peace was dissociated even from the pecuniary liability taken for keeping the peace, as testified by the numerous records of paci in regions under Florentine and Sienese jurisdiction, the public ritual act was still legally respected.13 The reasons for this are rooted in the peculiar nature of the ritual kiss as a device capable of mobilizing obligatory relationships anchored in distinct, sometimes completely unrelated discourses. The kiss persevered in civic legislation under papal jurisdiction because it entailed obligations that had to do with the concept of the duty of faith, allowing borrowings from canon law. By reserving a special domain of legal action for the kiss, the ecclesiastics inserted a moral and ethical dimension in the operation of the law. Honoring the kiss of peace as the formal vestment of the legal peace under ecclesiastical patronage and jurisdiction thus embodied the pre-modern concept of legal morality as an active social institution. The persistence of formal peace in the legal procedure of the early modern West testifies to the operation of a discourse that had arisen to overcome the Germanic concept of subjective law and the procedural rules flowing from it. For a long while, however, this discourse had to make use of the workable devices of the time, all embodied in formalism. The evolution of the strategies employed to enforce the binding power of formalism, from corporeal responsibility to banishment, from pecuniary fines to spiritual punishments, reflects the gradual shift in the perception of the social importance of the legal agency gebotener Friede in deutschen Mittelalter,’ ZRG, 66 (GA, 33) (1912), 139–223, esp. 197ff. 13 Checcini, Il Caleffo Vecchio, contains numerous cases.

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allocated to the individual peacemaker. They also reflect the lawmakers’ attempts to transform the subjective law of the free individual governing the matters of peace and conflict and implemented in practice as a liability into an objective principle conceptualizing duty.

Peacemaking and Religious Formalism in the Late-Medieval Low Countries The shrinking area of application of fides and its transformation into a religious and ethical concept were subject to influences that affected the use of the formal ‘vestments’ of the legal instruments of the peace embodied in the kiss as well. The encroachment of the secular authorities on the private rights of conflict settlement, on the one hand, and the spread of neo-Latin legalism, on the other, appear to have been the two main causes for this evolution in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Socio-cultural developments, the redefinition of privacy, the new sensitivity to the formal dimensions of the social hierarchy, which Russel Major has demonstrated, and considerations resting on issues of gender and decency seem to have been secondary factors at least until the sixteenth century. An explanation is therefore needed as to why, in an epoch of secularized law, the later medieval kiss of peace reverted to an almost exclusive association with the notion of religious faith while still functioning as a legal rite in secular reconciliation. The religious had insisted on this link ever since late Antiquity, but this does not shed light on the uses of the kiss as a formal legal institution outside the area of canon law. Even so, one has to bear in mind the Church’s opposition to allowing formalism, for instance in marriage, to interfere with the expression of the pure and binding ‘nude’ consent based on simple verbal exchange alone.14 One possible explanation of the perseverance of the kiss is that the complete immersion of the form into the religious discourse reinforced the obligatory relationships borne by Christianity as a duty of the denizens of the West. Fides, again, provides a parallel case. Where its obligatory force dissolved under the pressure of the authorities before the verbal consensual contract took hold of the procedure of peacemaking, its formal vestments

14 See, among other evidence, several cases cited by Francesco Brandileone, Saggi sulla storia della celebrazione del matrimonio in Italia (Milan, 1906).

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were rapidly filled with the contents flowing from its new obligatory field of Christian religious ethics. Peacemaking in northeastern France and the Low Countries provides some the most indicative case studies emphasizing the religious, the moral, and the emotive dimensions of the peace act in the late Middle Ages. Religious symbolism had been part and parcel of the peace composition all over the medieval West, but nowhere else does it seem to have subsumed late medieval reconciliation to such an extent. Although no definite etiological explanation for the emphatically religious nature of the kiss in the region has been offered, the fact remains that formal peacemaking sharply distinguished that northern continental tradition from the manner of the peace pact elsewhere. In Flemish peacemaking, Christian penance and humbleness were emphasized above all, although one must not exclude the presence of some vestiges of ancient Frankish customs, such as charmiscara, traces of which can be observed until fairly late in the medieval period.15 The fact that the reconciliatory rites were not a purely secular practice was highly visible even in contracts in which the secular homage of peace dominated the scene. The legally required kiss of peace was routinely framed by a series of features with sacramental character: the humble demonstration of guilt and repentance, the promise of pilgrimage, and the penitentiary garb and gestures of the offender. From this viewpoint, the ritual ‘giving over’ of the offender operated in a discourse with strongly religious overtones, assimilating the obligation constituted by the kiss of peace with the sacred duties of the offender as a Christian. It infused the notion of Christian morality into the reconciliation as an element backing both the secular and the religious side of the reconciliatory contract. The bond between the reconciling families was subsumed into the larger bond of kinship in Christ and the most fundamental generic bond with obligatory character which a Christian acknowledged, the duty of Christian fellowship. What was, however, the functional side of the religious frame? There seems to be little doubt that the penitential doctrine of the Church was the most probable immediate source of these arrangements,

15 See most recently Jessica Hemming, ‘Sellam gestare: Saddle-Bearing Punishments and the Case of Rhiannon,’ Viator, 28 (1997), 46–64.

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as Frauenstädt argued more than a century ago.16 The ritual spilling of Christian morality into the domain of secular law and the positioning of legal formalism within the formal settings of the Christian religion were no accidental matters. There was an established tradition of empowering peace relationships through a link to the sacred, but what were the social and political dimensions of the legal act enveloped in the religious mantle? Three approaches sum up the variety of constructs that have been offered to explicate the interaction of religion and law in the peacemaking pact. For the symbolic interpretationists, the ritual kiss was the embodied symbol of the cosmic symphony of earthly and heavenly orders.17 From a social-psychological point of view, the penitential procedure in which the kiss was included was the expression of the mutual desire of the parties to impose a face-saving screen on their reconstituted relationship. The ritual kiss presented the guilty party as assuming a position of humbled self-abasement in the eyes of God rather than rendering political satisfaction to the wronged party alone.18 Finally, for the legal positivists, the ritual kiss of peace and its accompanying rites were introduced and preserved in the legally binding reconciliation by the secular authorities and the Church as a prop, an exclusively sacred guarantee of the secular pledge.19 While these attempts at explanation capture important dimensions of reconciliatory ritual, there seems to have been more to the ritual incorporation of the numinous in the workings of the late-medieval legal machinery. The explanations seem to reduce the political thrust of the essential link between the legal, secular dimension of the

16

Paul Frauenstädt, Blutrache und Todtschlagsühne im deutschen Mittelalter. Studien zur Deutschen Kultur- und Rechtsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1881), 110ff. On penance see now Mary C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London, 1995) and Sarah Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 950–1050 (Woodbridge, 2001). 17 Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 323–36. 18 The explanation of the intervention of the sacred as a smoke-screen that allowed the parties to forgo revenge and still save face by submitting themselves to the higher duty of Christian fellowship is formulated best by Peter Brown, ‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,’ Daedalus, 104 (1975), 133–51. For an interpretation of religious penance as an intensely political rite which by no means eliminated the dimension of political relations and stressed humiliation without emotional satisfaction and no equality see Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners, 266. 19 As Frederick Maitland would have it in his definition of the role of fides facta, see Frederick Polock and Frederick W. Maitland, The History of the English Law before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge, 1968), vol. 2, 184–233, ch. 5, ‘Contract.’

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procedure—and its sacramental implications, the appropriation of the divine in the politics of peace—to the relationship between the parties to the peace only. Some of the detailed records of ritual reconciliation in Flanders underscore this conclusion and suggest a more complex relationship between sacred and secular. The city code, or keure, of Aalst, a commune in the province of Ghent, preserves what is probably one of the finest examples of this type of application of the ritual kiss in northern reconciliation and allows us a glimpse into the purpose of the fusion of secular law and sacred morality. On May 17, 1437, in the convent de Sterre at Aalst, Wouter Jooris and his sons, Martene and Jooris, made peace with the kin of Willem Scinckel, whom Martene had assassinated. The reconciliation had been mediated by commissioned arbiters. After ironing out all differences, they appointed the day for the formal peacemaking. Six of the town officials, or scepenen, of Aalst were present, along with eleven knights of the local feudatory Perron d’Aalst, the bailli of the count of Flanders, then Philip the Good of Burgundy (1419–1467), and the mayor of Aalst. At the appointed hour the two parties, accompanied by kith and kin, appeared at the convent’s church. They were instructed how the reconciliation was to proceed, and legal guarantees were given. The offenders took off their upper garments and entered the church. Dressed in white linen shirts only, barefoot and bareheaded, they were led, each flanked by two of the attending officials, to the other extreme of the choir, in the vicinity of the altar. There, the principal (montzoendere: virtually ‘the one who reconciled with the mouth’) of the injured clan stood, waiting for them with his kin and the rest of the officials. On entering the choir, the three offenders fell on their knees, their hands joined (variant: their hands had already been tied together). The bailli, the senior judicial official, spoke in a loud voice to the principal of Scinckel’s clan, Henric Ghijsels. He asked Henric, in the name of Christ, to forgive the wrongdoers for the murder of Willem, his brother, for they bitterly regretted the misdeed. The montzoendere stood still. The wrongdoers were led a couple of steps closer, fell on their knees again, and the bailli repeated the request. There was still no answer to his appeal. Finally, Wouter and his sons kneeled at the feet of Henric for the third time, and the bailli again asked for forgiveness. At this point the offenders stood up and in turn kissed Henric on the cheeks. After the kiss, the bailli turned to Perron’s men, addressing them as ‘men of the law,’ and asked whether the

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peace and the legally required reconciliation [wettelic zoendinc] just made were legal, binding, and done in the proper manner. The knights confirmed that the peace was legal, and done in the way it should have been. Then the mayor asked the town scepenen the same question. After hearing their affirmative answer, the bailli turned back again to Perron’s vassals and asked them whether there was anything else to be done. The reply was that the representatives of the two parties had to lay their hands on the ‘sacred objects’ and swear that they, their kin, and their friends and heirs, present and future, legitimate and illegitimate, male and female, would keep the peace and would not pursue vengeance. This having been done, the reconciliation was completed and the parties separated.20 Adding that many a reconciliation had been made in this manner, the keure specified that on one occasion, a certain Gill van Yedemghen did not kiss the relative of the victim, but put in his hand a staff [thalmken]. The reference to this variation in the performance of the peace ritual deserves special attention. The object, in which no doubt the ancient festuca is to be seen, was an alternative to the kiss, to be employed instead of the kiss but with the same legal function. The transfer of the festuca embodied the Germanic concept that the complete person of the offender was in the power of the injured party. To reciprocate, the injured kin were in the possession of the mercy [bermherticheijt] that originally they and they alone decided whether to bestow on the offenders.21 As Bayerle has pointed out, there was little symbolism in this act.22 Festuca, first mentioned in the edict of Chilperic I as a sign of self-pledge in cases of fides facta, was routinely marked with a special sign that embodied in a magical way the personality of the owner. The magic of the sign transformed the act of transferring the staff from a symbolic gesture into a fully ‘real’ one. Although there is little doubt that the beliefs supporting the transfer of the early Germanic festuca, on the one hand, and Gill’s thalmken,

20

Ende dat gedaen doe stonden zy up ende custen den montzoendre an zine wanghen, deen vooren, dande ende de derde naer, see Theodore de Limburg-Stirum, ed., Coutumes des Pays et Compté de Flandre. Quartier de Gand. Vol. 13: Coutumes des deux villes et pays d’Alost (Alost et Grammont) (Brussels, 1878), 469–73. 21 De Longe, Coutumes de la ville d’Anvers, 846. 22 The fundamental study is Karl von Amira, Der Stab in der germanischen Rechtssymbolik (München, 1909). For a modern re-interpretations see Franz Beyerle in ZRG, GA 58 (1938), 790ff., and Hans Hageman, ‘Fides facta und wadiatio,’ 9–10.

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on the other, were informed by the symbolic systems of different social worlds, the significance of this long-standing practice as a meaning-reproducing vehicle should not be underestimated. The festuca gesture belonged to an ancient, pre-Christian legal tradition and did not carry the moral and by extension the social implications of the ritual kiss. The statute recognized it as a valid legal instrument, but allocated to it the position of an aberration of the prescribed practice legitimized as custom by the keure. Even though we cannot determine with any certainty to what extent the reconciliation with the kiss-centered rites had been the rule in Aalst, the fact remains that the keure prescribed a structure of the legal peacemaking that downplayed the festuca formalism and with it the legal tradition it stood for. It presented the ceremony with the kiss as standard, the main canvas of the reconciliation, to which all other customs appeared as variations, aberrations, or additions rather than competing practices of the same order. The keures of Deurne and Antwerp, which followed in the main the ceremony of Aalst, contribute additional detail to the procedure of peacemaking with the kiss. The keure of Deurne, in the province of the duke of Brabant, specified that the attending members of both clans be dressed in black (to suggest mourning) and that some carry torches. This statute also stipulated that in Deurne, and in most other places, as indicated by the very name of the principal of the injured clan, montsoender, the kiss was on the mouth.23 The keure of Antwerp says that only after making their peace with the injured party could the offenders obtain letters of acquittal from the count, a feature we have already witnessed in those cases of Italian peacemaking which were conducted under the watchful eye of the authorities. There is, however, another important addition. While in Aalst, according to the law, the reconciliation was over with the oath, the two other keures added that after the kiss had been given, the clerk of the town council was to read the official record of the reconciliation. Then the bearer of the staff or another leutenant of the duke of Brabant ‘declared’ the peace in the name of the duke and reminded everyone that there were penalties for violation of the agreement.

23 Ende kust den montsoender aen sijnen mondt, in G. de Longé, ed., Coutumes du pays et Duché de Brabant. Quartier d’Anvers. Vol. 5: Coutumes du Kiel, de Deurne et de Lierre (Brussels, 1875), 356.

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Finally, in Antwerp, the city law from 1586, a time when contractual peace had made significant retreats as a way of peacemaking, stipulated that after the kiss the official leading the ceremony, the city Amman, produce the written instrument of the peace and have the parties swear it.24 The stipulations of these two statutes, just as the presence of an impressive array of representatives of the legal powers in the case described in the keure of Aalst, betray the hand of the authorities in the construction of the social and political functionality of the peace act. Despite the differences in the nature of the social bond constituted by the northern rites of peace, the link between the private peace covenant and the will of the authorities as we have seen it in the Italian communities was no less conspicuous. These short outlines of the procedures followed in the legal reconciliation in the Low Countries confirm that with or without homage of peace, the peacemaking in the region revolved around the kiss of peace. The acknowledgment of the custom of the kiss, legally binding secular act as it was, and yet being thoroughly modeled after ecclesiastical penitence and played out in sacred space, contributes one essential point to the explanations summed up above. The pool of symbolic linkages into which the ritual kiss immersed the reconciling parties constituted the validating feature of the transaction for two reasons. It assigned agency to the representatives of the political powers enforcing and monitoring the execution of the reconciliation. It also allowed the political powers draw the reconciling parties into a field of obligatory relationships sharing a common denominator, which the secular authorities had appropriated by virtue of their right of ultimate legal fiat legitimizing the act. Religious ritual did not constitute the bond ex opera operando. The efficacy of its intervention had to be validated by those with knowledge of secular law. The ‘men of the law,’ with their competing jurisdictions, authorized an essentially religious interaction as legally binding because they saw it as an artifact on which their respective legal traditions in feudal and urban law could agree. The traditions in which Perron’s vassals and the city scepenen of Aalst were steeped had appropriated the religious symbolism of the kiss to build their own modes of social 24 G. de Longe, ed., Coutumes du pays et Duché de Brabant. Quartier d’Anvers. Vol. 4: Coutumes de la ville d’Anvers (Brussels, 1874), 841–9; see also Leopold August Warnkönig, Flandrische Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte bis zum Jahr 1305 (Tübingen, 1835–1842), vol. 3, 66–7, Documents, N. 159.

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obligation. Now they projected their constructs of the ritual kiss’s legal implications back onto the parties in the reconciliation to validate it as a social bond common to them all through the impressive mechanism of orchestrated bodily interaction. The religious dimension of the bond therefore had been preserved, for it enhanced the grip of the authorities on the crosscutting links that made the peace obligatory for the parties of the reconciliation. The shared character of the bond underscored the social efficacy of the ritual peace pact with the kiss. It made the kiss of peace a recognized means of creating binding ties drawing on several symbolic discourses with obligatory character. Ultimately, all of the explanations offered thus far appear correct: but only because there are a few of them. The lack of consensus in the interpretation of the religious rite provided the background for the consent to its continuing usage, a situation the authorities exploited for their own ends.

The Late Medieval Bond: caritas and amor The withdrawal of fides from secular jurisdiction left a void in the domain of the forces supporting the peace pact. To fill it, late medieval traditions summoned two concepts that had been in operation since classical Antiquity and had been widely used to define early and high medieval social ties but remained with limited application within the domain of the law until the thirteenth century: caritas and amor. The genealogy of caritas leads back to a very complex, although predominantly ethically loaded, concept. The early Latin caritas had few affective overtones. In ancient Roman times the term had denoted scarcity and lack of provisions. Hence high price and preciousness were meanings that, metaphorically, informed its later understanding, in a concrete manner, as appreciation, benevolence, and veneration. From these roots, during late Antiquity caritas grew to acquire political connotations, and its personification appeared on imperial coins. It was intermittently used as a synonym for fides, amor, concordia, and pietas, in their fairly concrete Roman political meanings. Its evolution as an abstract concept was enhanced by the influx of Christian thought, which turned it into an expression of the specifically Christian type of love, the one bestowed by the Holy Spirit and Christ [Caritas est Deus]. From the second century on, Christian writers insisted on its close link to peace. ‘Caritas is the bond of brother-

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hood and the fundament of peace,’ in the words of Cyprian of Alexandria [caritas franternitatis vinculum est, fundamentum pacis]. On such foundations medieval ecclesiastical theorists constructed their peace concept of caritas, embodying it in gestures with highly obligatory relationships. Around the middle of the eighth century, Frankish churchmen stressed caritas as the strongest bond of peace. The Church’s concern with instilling habits of peaceful relationships in the hearts of the faithful Christians must have been genuine, but the ecclesiastics relied no less on the formal binding force of caritas, regularly expressed by the liturgical kiss of peace. Since the 750s Gallican church councils, under Roman influence, began insisting on exchanging the kiss at mass as a duty of the faithful.25 The kiss was supposed to link them together in the mutual bond of caritas. The binding force of its formalism depended on the mystery incumbent in the Christian mass and temple.26 The Carolingian Church, while trying to sort out the ambiguities of the religious kiss stemming from its ancient uses as a gesture of veneration and adoration, hold onto the same assumptions as the Merovingians.27 Although the Christian-communal meanings of caritas appeared in early Church legislation from the sixth century on, it was the infusion of the Germanic perception of the legal nature of political relationships into Merovingian Latin that helped construct the secular functioning of the caritas institution in the early Middle Ages.28 The 25 Ut in sanctae pacis osculo ostendant se unianimes in concordia pacis existere et mutuae caritatis in invicem vinculis conligati, in MGH Leges III. Concilia II, 1st part, 52, N. 7: Concilium Baiuwaricum, 740–750, title V. 26 Hinkmar of Rheims complained that a relative of his, a fellow-bishop himself, would not kiss him at mass or indeed at any ceremonial occasion, as was his duty, because of the grudge between them. See Hincmari Rhemensis archiepiscopi Opera omnia in PL, 126 (Turnholt, 1985), col. 290. Henry II changed the order of the mass on an occasion so that he did not have to kiss Thomas Becket, lest the kiss be considered the formal kiss of reconciliation. Richard Lionheart, for his part, deliberately went over and gave Bishop Hugh of Lincoln the liturgical kiss, and this was taken as the ultimate sign of their reconciliation. 27 MGH Leges III. Concilia II, 1st part, 171, N. 19: Concilium Francofurtense, 794, title L; ibidem, 208, N. 24: Concilia Rispacense, Frisingense, Salisburgense, 800, title VIII; ibidem, 248, N. 34: Concilium Arelatense, 813, introduction; 271 N. 36: Concilium Moguntinense, 813, title XLIII. See also Freeman, ed., Opus Caroli Regis, 544–50 for a treatise on the difference between the Christian kiss and the pagan kiss of adoration. 28 Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem, book V, 17, IX; 11 and 20; VII, 29. English translation in O. M. Dalton, trans., The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (Oxford, 1927), vol. 2, 185–6, 381–92, 305–6. The last two examples are discussed in detail by Wofgang Fritze, ‘Die fränkische Schwurfreundschaft der Merowingerzeit,’ ZRG, 84 (GA 71) (1954), 74–125, here 95.

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Merovingian term caritas constituted a social and a legal dimension in the context of a political alliance and the peace founded on it. The ritual kiss that provided the formalism of caritas as an ecclesiastical rite was solidly entrenched by the sixth century. It seems to have had links to a formal legal field supported by early Germanic practices as well. In that environment the kiss was the legal form that created artificial affinity built on the model concept ‘kin equals peace’ informing obligatory relationships between blood relatives. No early continental sources attest to that usage, but its Germanic character is perhaps indicated by the Anglo-Saxon translation of the ecclesiastical ‘kiss of peace’ as sibbe cos.29 The Christian influence on the concept is apparent, but it does not preclude an innate, already existing affective dimension in the perception of the Germanic kin bond which would have facilitated the fusion of ideas. In the ninth century the formal legal bond of the kiss-caritas supplemented and reinforced the kin-defined relationships of the family of the Carolingian kings.30 It is important to note that in all its variations caritas carried the notion of a strong, duty-like obligatory relation. The ancient Roman element of duty adopted and carried on by the ecclesiastical interpretation of caritas into new contexts strengthened the formal implications of the institution. Family and Christian faith: this double connection made caritas and the concepts intimately related to it, amor and dilectio, well positioned to enter the legal domain vacated by the retraction of fides, once the latter institution began to lose ground as an independent secular force of the law of obligations.31 ‘Love’ had had a more or less technical sense in the feudal bond from the time of its inception, but the formal switch from fides to amor occurred in the late Middle Ages. By the late thirteenth century there are signs that in

29

Bosworth and Toller, eds., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 868. For examples see Schneider, Brüdergemeinde und Schwurfreundschaft, 52. For the survival of caritas-forms in formal agreements between French and German rulers see Ingrid Vos, Herrschertreffen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zu den Begegnungen der ostfränkischen und westfränkischen Herrscher im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert sowie der deutschen und französischen Könige vom 11. bis 13. Jahrhundert (Köln-Vienna, 1987), 182ff. 31 Given that ethical considerations and affection had no place in the Roman legal rites of marriage, the fact that the Frankish groom transferred property to his loved one pro amorae dulcidinis vel osculum pacis leaves little doubts as to the strictly legal meaning of the concept of amor embodied in the kiss, see Zeumer, Formulae Bituricensis, MGH, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, 175. 30

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the legal formalism of the kiss, caritas-derivatives were competing with fides in one of its most important spheres of application, the rites of vassalage. The shift is manifest in Durand’s Speculum iuris, the formulary which fixed the model for the interpretation of the rite in the written feudal law of late medieval France. Durand employed the formalism of the kiss to support the instrument of stipulatio. His ritual kiss, which was osculum interveniente of the contemporary Italian civilists, appears at the end of the formal ceremony establishing the feudal contract ‘as a sign of mutual and perpetual affection and faith.’ Dilectio in Durand’s formula points toward a changed concept of the vassalic contract, a shift that stressed the importance of a secular dilectio as the binding force of obligation on equal footing with fides.32 Without entering into a discussion of the social and political transformations of Western societies which necessitated that change, it suffices for our purposes to mention that, as we shall see, the development was mirrored in the role of caritas-terminology in the evolution of the peace contract. The advance of concepts with strong links to the emotional world of the parties entering a formal contract through the kiss of peace, often in a ceremony soaked in religious symbolism, is a pronounced late medieval phenomenon. It calls for a separate investigation of the implications of what I have termed ‘legal affect.’ Before I turn to this task, however, a few concluding notes in reference to legal ritual are in order.

32 In signum mutuae & perpetuae dilectionis & fidei, pacis osculo interjecto, in Durand, Speculum Iuris, 314, Spec. IV, lib. 3. On Durand see also Pierre-Marie Guy, ed., Guillaume Durand, évêque de Mende (v. 1230–1296): canoniste, liturgiste et homme politique (Paris, 1992). Individual cases of creation of feudal bonds confirm the ascent of dilectio and amor, see for one example MGH Leges IV. Constitutiones, vol. 4, 2nd part, 1438, N. 1297: Infeudatio marchionis Salutarium.

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CONCLUSIONS TO PART ONE

THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF LEGAL RITUAL

Fragmentary as the evidence is, the discussion of the forms of reconciliation supported by the legal kiss of peace allows us to draw some conclusions about the evolution of the role, character, and functions of the rite as the formal ‘vestment’ of the instruments of the contractual peace. The evidence analyzed in this part suggests that throughout the high and late Middle Ages the ritual kiss, although not indispensable, was a vestment sui generis, frequently deemed necessary for the full and legal peaceful composition among feuding parties. The ritual kiss was no mere form, ‘clothing’ the peace pact to keep it alive. It was not a legal device on a par with the oral declaration, the object, the written charter, or the seal. There was a difference in kind between all other forms and the rites of peace. Neither the development of literacy nor the introduction of the seal as a personalizing tool supplanted the kiss. This was so because, although used as a substitution for material objects and definitely as an artifact embodying the essence of the individual peacemaker, the kiss of peace had a role and functions that none of the other judicial instruments possessed. It was not by coincidence that some Frisian sources, the Westerlaufensian reconciliatory formula for example, postulated that the wergeld was the price for the ritual kiss.1 The mind of the premodern legislator put the two judicial instruments at the same level, and for good reason. Whereas the oral and the written instruments served as legal proofs of the peace, the ritual made the peace by guaranteeing its very integrity with different facets of what the premoderns considered to be the most salient faculties of the person. The ritual constituted the personal commitment to peace, the covenant as a form of obligation for which no seal and written charter, designed to witness rather 1 Ther efter hat ma mi biada, her N. ti jeldane mit sawentundister haler merk . . . and that word, that hi mit there fiajefte muge thine ferde bihwerwa, thine kos kapia and tha sone thingia, see His, Strafrecht der Friesen, 216.

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than create, could act as a substitute. The forms of obligation embodied by ritual served different intents, but in most cases from the high Middle Ages they had at their end the assumption of some kind of liability, above all personal, but on rarer occasions real liability as well. The liability assumed through ritual was the primary principle that dominated the law of interpersonal obligations in the period 1000–1200. It made the peace act actionable. More importantly, through a series of features it established the concept of peace as a legal phenomenon. First, the ritual liability was an acknowledgment that there existed an objective law of peace—just formulated, ‘found out,’ or imposed by the authorities—but always a peace which not only was an abstract principle, but was also effective and binding from the moment of taking the obligation. Ritual peacemaking thus stands in the way of recent assertions, mostly by legal anthropologists, that high medieval law was all but non-existent as a working institution. Performing the rite, the individual and the group he or she stood for admitted that peace existed, not only as a period of nonviolence, spacing the intermittent line of feuds in the premodern societies, but as a legal category in its own right. Before, and for a time even after, the authorities took over the control of peacemaking formalism, ritual liability objectified the obligation, elevating it to a position that superseded the obligation to pursue revenge through acts of violence. The ritual was also an acknowledgment of the rights of the ‘other’ party in the feud to request, receive, and enjoy that peace. Contrary to expectations, the rite stimulated the development of the concepts of objectivity and equity in the legal practices of non-Roman origins. Finally, as the thirteenth century dawned, in many regions of the West the ritual kiss became an act of recognizing one more ‘other.’ It underlined the right of the authorities to establish, promote, and maintain the peace as a legal duty of the private person. Before the public powers of premodern Western Europe established their monopoly on violence and their exclusive rights of coercion, without such an express recognition and willingness for cooperation between the individual, the collective, and the social, there were no legal guarantees that the social peace would be kept. The shift in the contents of the legal obligation that the rites of peace embodied therefore reflects a hidden dynamic of the relationship between the authorities and the individual. This dimension has not been fully acknowledged as a viable topic of investigation thus far and certainly deserves

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more attention that the preceding pages were able to devote to it. Second, acknowledging peace as a legal duty established through the pact of ritual reconciliation with obligatory linkages to the sphere of the family, the bonds of service and protection between lord and man, and humankind and the numinous, the ritual kiss buttressed it with a special type of consent. Through it, the legally actionable promise to fulfill the terms of the deal was officially expressed [Vertragor Urteilerfüllungsgelöbnis]. The rite gave rise to the contract concluded after court sentence, arbitration, or freely taken decision to apply oneself to the conditions of the legal act by embodying, in the legally acknowledged instruments of fides, gratia, and caritas/amor, the will of the parties to adhere to its provisions. This was the cardinal function of the rites of peace regardless of the character of the obligation they gave rise to. As a special type of legally sustained promise, qualitatively different from the ‘simple’ (verbal) promise, the ritual kiss was of utmost importance for the legal background of the process of peacemaking. Only the obligation taken through it ensured the breaking of the vicious circle: feud, court decision, refusal to pay or to accept payment, and new feud. Throughout the premodern period, the taking of personal liability and, later, the acknowledgment of the personalized duty to compromise through ceasing hostilities and paying or accepting indemnity instead of fighting back, created the only legal guarantee that pacification would succeed. Third, this promise was deemed capable of building a legal and workable peace because for most of the period, due to its shifting contents, the ritual kiss substantiated it with the pledge of the type of surety that premodern legal practice cherished most. As Paul Puntschart formulated it more than a century ago, fides facta and its permutations had but one central goal: to give rise to suretyship guaranteed with the person of the party to the contract. On the level of anthropological constants, the kiss of peace appears to have had precisely that function. This kind of surety was filled with meaning, a real, hardly symbolic meaning at that, the very essence of the premodern concept of obligation.2 Fourth, the rites of peacemaking were able to fulfill these func2 Puntschart, Schuldvertrag und Treugelöbnis, 449: ‘Nach dem bisher Gesagten, ergiebt sich von selbst, daß das Treugelöbnis in Wirkung und Zweck eine Sicherstellung ist,’ and 459: ‘Man kan auch sagen: Die Sicherheit durch das Treugelöbnis ist eine Sicherheit mit der Person der Gelobenden.’

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tions over the course of several centuries, accommodating along the way a roster of legal instruments, due to the rather specific character of the legally sustained conditions of peace to which they gave rise. Throughout the high Middle Ages and to some extent during the later medieval period, the ritual of peace was not the definitive end of the feud, as has recently been argued.3 The ritual kiss did indeed ‘dissolve’ or neutralize the anger of the injured party, but it did not terminate the legally definable feud. In most cases, it just put it off. To the mind of the modern observer the peace that ensued after the ritual performance had all the features of the pre-modern treuga. Routinely, it was an interim, time-limited, and conditional solution. The time factor was at the heart of the ritual peace and was informed by the nature of the legal instruments embodied by the kiss. Fides facta, the most powerful of the ritual tools that structured the peace pact, normally created a time-limited condition of peace that allowed one of the parties to seek out helpers to swear the oath or to collect the sum to be paid as indemnity and gave the other party the opportunity to demand execution of what was due in case of outlying obligations. The seven- and forty-day postponements that the rites of peace allowed the parties in early Germanic legislation still held good in thirteenth-century Castilian laws and the keures of the sixteenth-century Flemish communes. Sources evidence the interim, preliminary character of the ritual solution, too. In St. Omer, the ritual kiss opened the procedure of collecting the wergeld, but it did not by itself constitute the peace, which was not forthcoming until the indemnity was paid in full. This case introduces also the element of conditional peace, on which legal sources by definition rarely dwell. The ritual kiss conferred peace to the wrongdoer, but it was the peace to fulfill his or her obligations to the quick and the dead before the feud was terminated—by both of them, one must assume. Pilgrimages had to be undertaken and alms given for the soul of the murdered person, and one had to prove in a practical way the ties that bind him to his new kin. Narrative evidence is more circumstantial than the laws of reconciliation, and amply supports the conclusions at which the legalists 3 Most forceful is Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics in ThirteenthCentury Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233 (Oxford, 1992), 172: ‘It [the kiss—KP] signaled the conclusion of the reconciliation, not its beginning . . . The kiss in public: that was the definitive, legal end of the feud.’ Thompson’s conclusion differs from what I believe to have demonstrated.

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only hint. A case in point is the reconciliation between Tristan and the kin of Morold in Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde. After his identity is accidentally discovered, Tristan is led before Isolde and the Queen. Only an immediate deditio, the ritual prostration, wins him the opportunity to begin negotiating. The noble ladies like the hero, but the duty to avenge their slain kin remains stronger. Tristan offers compensation, a rich and famous husband for Isolde. This turns the tables in his favor and the reconciliation [súoné] is imminent. The Queen mother is ready to commit to the deal [entriuwen] and reconcile, but hesitates to do so on the mere words of Tristan. She demands guarantees. Tristan, who is in no position to support his word at the moment, promises to do so later, as soon as the lady gives him her ‘peace’ [ fride], i.e., her protection. Were he not to stand by his vow, he pleads, after they have reconciled, she could freely withdraw her protection and leave him to his ruin. The Queen is convinced, and the ladies kiss Tristan to reconcile. Such is their peace: a conditional affair that is even more strongly emphasized as such in the following scene where Tristan meets the king. At the audience he also receives the kiss as a precondition guaranteeing him Gurmun’s grace and favor [minne und hulde]; an act of giving temporary peace and protection to the guest until the reconciliation is completed. It is dependant on Tristan’s paying satisfaction for the injury to Morold’s kin with whom the king is related through his womenfolk.4 To these illuminating episodes Eilhart of Overge adds yet another detail. Soliciting his father’s grace after kissing Tristan for peace, young Isolde requests Gurmun’s kiss as a surety that he would not harm the knight. Much in the manner in which a judicial officer imposed peace [ gebotener Friede] since the time of the Langobard kings, she ‘accepts’ the pledges of the two parties. She kisses the king to take the peace from the one party and then gives it to the other party through another kiss. As the events turn, this pledge saves the hero’s life, but it does not guarantee the end of the hostilities until much later. In either case, the kiss does not grant unconditional peace.5 4 This is how Tristan addressed the Queen: Frouwè, sprach aber Tristan, ich gewisse iuch schíeré dar an: bewaere ich’z iu zehánt níht, sô diu súoné geschiht, sô lât mich ûz dem fride wesen und lât mich níemér genesen . . ., see Reinhold Bechstein, ed., Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan (Leipzig, 1891), 2nd part, 17–21. English translation in Francis G. Gentry, with a foreword by C. Stephen Jaeger, Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde (New York, 1988), 138–41. 5 Danielle Buchschinger and Wofgang Spiewok, eds., Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant

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These characteristics of the ritual kiss, accounting perhaps more than anything else for its tenacity as a legal norm, define the ritual peace as a state of being in a sort of legal limbo. The legal kiss created a normative, structural liminality, informed by the rules of the three major discourses on which ritual drew and which determined the relationship between the parties that were on the verge of terminating the blood feud. The definitive end of the feud was not yet fully in sight, but open hostilities were suspended for a time, conditions to be fulfilled were carefully negotiated, and vengeance was held off. The obligation taken in the course of the ritual performance, whether active liability or passive duty, either specific or large and unspecified, was unstable, and a new outbreak of violence could occur in spite of all ritual guarantees. It was legally actionable in court however, and although operating in a liminal field, paradoxically enough, channeled the affair into a more predictable course. The strength of the ritual peace was that, without leaving the timesanctioned ground of the feud, it created a background that could eventually lead to its negation as a legal condition. ‘Liminality,’ Victor Turner noted, ‘is pure potency, where anything can happen.’6 The most important feature of the ritual obligation of the kiss was that it was a contract open from both ends. On the one hand, time elapsing, it could easily end without any lasting consequences for the social order. On the other hand, given the proper social environment, it could turn, as indeed it did in many of the cases discussed above, into a permanent legal condition. The evolution of the peace contract from a preliminary and conditional to a permanent and final solution of the private conflict reflects in a most intimate way the transition of the legal obligation carried by the kiss from liability to duty. This internal transformation of the legal process is the most conspicuous outcome of the erosion of private rights and the successful implementation by the authorities of the concept of the duty of peace by means of ritual. This is perhaps the most significant achievement of legal ritual. The peace of the kiss did not always terminate the feud. To a shortsighted society, however, it did offer a longer view and increased und Isolde, mittelhochdeutsch/neuhochdeutsch (Greifswald, 1993), 55. English translation in J. W. Thomas, Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant (Lincoln and London, 1978), 71. 6 Victor W. Turner, The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia (Oxford, 1968), 577.

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the predictability of interpersonal interaction. Ritual reconciliation built on the kiss of peace was a legal condition that could contest the ground of the feud by leading the fighting parties from violent feud to law court. By extending the dimensions of the feud beyond its customary boundaries of violence, the rites of peace facilitated its radical transformation into judicial strife. Ritual peace undermined the rights of private violence and nurtured the conviction that, in the pursuit of justice, the protection of the law was worth more as a judicial procedure to which one had the duty to submit him- or herself than as a contested right of aggressive self-defense.

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PART TWO

THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF RITUAL

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INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF RITUAL C’e talvolta, nel volto e nel contegno d’un uomo, un’espressione così immediata, si direbbe quasi un’effusione dell’animo interno, che, in una folla di spettatori, il giudizio sopra quell’animo sarà un solo. Il volto e il contegno di fra Cristoforo disser chiaro agli astanti, che non s’era fatto frate, nè veniva a quell’umiliazione per timore umano: e questo cominciò a conciliarglieli tutti. Quando vide l’offeso, affrettò il passo, gli si pose inginocchioni ai piedi, incrociò le mani sul petto, e, chinando la testa rasa, disse queste parole: ‘io sono l’omicida di suo fratello. Sa Iddio se vorrei restituirglielo a costo del mio sangue; ma, non potendo altro che farle inefficaci e tarde scuse, la supplico d’accettarle per l’amor di Dio.’ Tutti gli occhi erano immobili sul novizio, e sul personaggio a cui egli parlava; tutti gli orecchi eran tesi. Quando fra Cristoforo tacque, s’alzo, per tutta la sala, un mormorìo di pietà e di rispetto. Il gentiluomo, che stava in atto di degnazione forzata, e d’ira compressa, fu turbato da quelle parole; e, chinandosi verso l’inginocchiato, ‘alzatevi,’ disse, con voce alterata: ’l’offesa . . . il fatto veramente . . . ma l’abito che portate . . . non solo questo, ma anche per voi . . . S’alzi, padre . . . Mio fratello . . . non lo posso negare . . . era un cavaliere . . . era un uomo . . . un po’ impetuoso . . . up po’ vivo. Ma tutto accade per disposizion di Dio. Non se ne parli più . . . Ma, padre, lei non deve stare in codesta positura.’ E, presolo per le braccia, lo sollevò. Fra Cristoforo, in piedi, ma col capo chino, rispose: ‘io posso dunque sperare che lei m’abbia concesso il suo perdono! E se l’ottengo da lei, da chi non devo sperarlo? Oh! s’io potessi sentire dalla sua bocca questa parola, perdono!’ ‘Perdono?’ disse il gentiluomo. ‘Lei non ne ha più bisogno. Ma pure, poichè lo desidera, certo, certo, io le perdono di cuore, e tutti . . .’ ‘Tutti! tutti!’ gridarono, a una voce, gli astanti. Il volto del frate s’aprì a una gioia riconoscente, sotto la quale traspariva però ancora un’umile e profonda compunzione del male a cui la remissione degli uomini non poteva riparare. Il gentiluomo, vinto da quell’aspetto, e transportato dalla commozione generale, gli gettò le braccia al collo, e gli diede e ne ricevette il bacio di pace. Un ‘bravo! bene!’ scoppiò da tutte le parti della sala; tutti si mossero, e si strinsero intorno al frate. Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, iv, ll. 388–426.

For those familiar with the style and imagery of Italian Romanticism there will be little doubt that this moving, quasi-sacramental scene

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caps the first truly grand page of Manzoni’s masterpiece. With the insight and subtlety that had earned him the praise of being the greatest Italian writer since the Renaissance, Manzoni captured the essence of ritual interaction as an affair of the sentiments.1 Hesitation, embarrassment, and mild shame encounter a mix of pride, rage, grief, and condescension. Enter ritual. At once, condensed hostility gives way to a spirit of compassion, contempt to respect, revenge to forgiveness. Quite unexpectedly, humiliating surrender wins for Cristoforo the Capuchin the kiss of respect for which Lodovico the merchant’s son has vainly striven. Ritual accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of bringing about peace without concessions of rank, honor, and status. Impressive as the transformation was, in Manzoni’s rendering the taming of asocial sentiments by means of ritual was not really magic. Rather, the rites of peace were a mechanism employed by the Godinspired hero to unlock ingrained goodness. Ritual triggered the innate moral dispositions defining humanity. It made the feuding parties act upon the feelings of repentance, benevolence, and conciliation, ‘which God has planted in the hearts of all of us’ in the interests of the social peace.2 1 For the purposes of this study, I use the terms ‘emotions,’ ‘feelings,’ and ‘sentiments,’ interchangeably. I use ‘affect’ in the sense of a primary, impulsive, and physiological reaction. The expression ‘ritual management of emotions’ is used as a generic technical term, subsuming the diverse ways in which emotions appeared in the course of ritual action. My understanding of ‘emotion’ is partially informed by that of Robert Solomon, ‘Getting Angry: The Jamesian Theory of Emotion in Anthropology,’ in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge, 1984), 238–57: ‘An emotion is a system of concepts, beliefs, attitudes, and desires, virtually all of which are contextbound, historically developed, and culture-specific (which is not to foreclose the probability that some emotions may be specific to all cultures).’ I accept this definition and call attention to its latter part, the observation that there are emotions common to all cultures, because they are, above all, embodied phenomena. Useful surveys of recent work on emotions are Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey M. White, ‘The Anthropology of Emotions,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 15 (1986), 405–36; Gillian Bendelow and Simon Williams, eds., Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (London and New York, 1998); and Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland, eds., Handbook of Emotions (New York and London, 1993), esp. 341–53, 511–47, 563–75 on fear, anxiety, anger, and embarrassment. For the Middle Ages see R. E. V. Stuip and C. Vellekoop, eds., Emoties in de Middeleeuwen (Hilversum, 1998) and Claudia Benthien, Anne Feig, and Ingrid Kasten, eds., Emotionalität: Zur Geschichte der Gefühle (Cologne, 2000). 2 This is how Manzoni himself defined the meaning of such acts in his Morale cattolica. See Piero Nardi in Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, con il commento di Piero Nardi sul testo curato da A. Chiari e F. Ghisalberti (Milan, 1966), 117.

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Such understanding of the emotions and their ritual management would now appear both desperately outdated and strikingly novel. In terms of agency, for many the theist view of the divine as the source of the social and cultural consensus expressed in ritual is a call from bygone times. Widely shared by a large number of premodern writers across time, genre, estate boundaries, and specifics of discourse, this convention is tacitly skipped by most modern scholars. In terms of the relationship between society and the individual, however, Manzoni’s emotional economy of ritual would appeal to modern theorists of all allegiances. The organismic school would concur that ritual only triggers, stimulates, or expresses emotions.3 It does not create them, since emotions are natural capacities or susceptibilities of the person. The structural-functionalists would agree with the reduction of ritual to a functional symbolic device. The interactionists, for their part, would allow social factors to elicit emotions, enlarging the scope of the social but placing agency partly outside of the individual. The emotional constructionists would push this line of reasoning to the extreme. The adherents of this trend argue that the individual is only the site of emotional ‘events,’ which are generated by the ambient social order, its norms, ideals, and structures of power and authority.4 In a sense, we have come full circle. While constructionists would dismiss theism wholesale, so far as individual agency is concerned, they would find themselves speaking the same language as Manzoni’s characters. We should pause at this point and consider where this brief overview leaves us. For one thing, the trend to substitute society for God does not seem to be a satisfying approach. True, the external governance of emotional experiences is of utmost importance for the maintenance of the social order whose functioning is embodied in ritual. If the sentiments are not just natural, preset responses to external intervention but moral acts as well, they cannot be left to the person’s

3 From Darwin to Freud to William James to Randall Collins, to mention but the most conspicuous names. See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York, 1955); L. Borge Lofgren, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory of Affects,’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 ( July 1968), 638–50; William James and Carl B. Lange, The Emotions (Baltimore, 1922); Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology (New York, 1975). 4 For a recent survey of constructionism’s approaches and shortcomings see William M. Reddy, ‘Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions,’ Cultural Anthropology, 14:2 (1999), 256–87.

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own devices and must come under society’s control.5 Yet one should not completely dispense with individual agency in matters of choice, volition, and responsibility. Attributing all agency to society, as constructionists are prone to do, eliminates these factors and confuses the role with the person, thereby equating the emotional responses of the individual self with the phenomenology of the person.6 From the perspective of ritual, the main problem not only with constructionism but with most of the socially oriented approaches as well is the tendency to conceive of the individual actor either as a passive receptor of social and cultural conventions or, at most, as a manager of behavioral expressions.7 The knowledge of the mechanics of the ritual action thus produced is skin-deep, postulating an almost atomic individual at the end-point of the inquiry. The attempt to glean inside this ‘black box’—employing, for example, cultural anthropology’s theory of the opposition between fleeting personal moods and stable social motivations—does not seem a feasible heuristic strategy either.8 There are reasons to think that the emotional response can be reduced neither to the donning of the vestments of a transitory social role, although this phenomenon does play an important role, nor to the appropriation of the cultural code of the group as translated into a set of feeling rules.9 The emotive dimen5

See Uni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Chicago, 1990), 138ff. 6 See the criticism of Brian Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (New York, 1996), 25–31. 7 The most elaborated sociological account of emotional engagement in social interaction as a type of ‘acting’ is still that of Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY, 1959) and his Frame Analysis (New York, 1974). I borrow the expression ‘black box’ from Arlie R. Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,’ American Journal of Sociology, 85:3 (1979), 558. 8 A classical formulation of this concept is Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System,’ in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 97–8. Geertz, and cultural anthropologists as a whole, have long recognized that emotions are culturally constituted concepts, see an early work of Clifford Geertz, ‘The Vocabulary of Emotion: A Study of Jawanese Socialization Process,’ Psychiatry, 22 (1959), 225–37; L. T. Doi, ‘Amae: A Key Concept for Understanding Japanese Personality Structure,’ in R. J. Smith and R. K. Bearolsley, eds., Japanese Culture: Its Development and Characteristics (Chicago, 1962), 132–9. A good review of anthropological interpretations of emotion is Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick, eds., Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies (Los Angeles, 1984). 9 For transitory social roles see James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression: An Essay in Emotion (New York, 1982), 6–18. Averill’s work is perhaps the major contribution in the field of emotional constructionism. For applications of his theory of anger to medieval material see Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger,’ in Barbara H.

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sion of the relationship between individual and society remains an open issue. An alternative to the over-socialized theories is to situate the hub of the linkages between individual actors, society, and context in the acts of emotion work consciously performed by embodied agents.10 This perception was not foreign to the premodern frame of mind. The medieval Christian doctrine saw the individual as the nexus of interacting forces. Conscious work on one’s sentiments was a major factor in maintaining the equilibrium between the earthly and heavenly worlds. Managed feelings constituted the all-important core of the ontology of repentance and forgiveness in both sacred and secular context.11 Moreover, on occasion the sentiments were seen as originating in the person, not merely happening to the person, albeit influenced by social situations or the intervention of the sacred. Even in the theist interpretation, in which individual agency is normally reduced to the minimum, active emotion work on the part of the ritual actor is absolutely necessary to keep the ritually structured holistic world from collapsing. The theory of emotion work thus offers a unique heuristic tool for analyzing the emotional dimensions of ritual action. This approach informs the main lines of the exploration of the emotional economy of ritual reconciliation offered below. I take up three issues in this part of the study. In Chapter Four, I discuss a set of basic sentiments, such as anger, hatred, and grief, displayed in ritual encounters of peacemaking and attempt to map out the patterns of their management. Emotion work was by definition the result of emotive dissonance. The need to overcome it was an act of conforming to social norms, but it also indicates

Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London, 1998), 127–52, and, from a slightly different perspective Robert Bartlett, Mortal Enemies: The Legal Aspect of Hostility in the Middle Ages, T. Jones Pierce Lecture, University of Wales, (Aberswyth, 1998) and Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society,’ Speculum, 76:1 (2001), 90–126. 10 The concept of emotion work was authored and developed by Arlie R. Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work,’ 551–75; see also her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, 1983). For application of this concept in sociology, psychology, and anthropology see Thomas J. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama (Berkeley, 1979); and Uni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts. 11 For admirable analyses of emotion work in the social and political context of late medieval Florence see Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980).

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that there had been a difference between individual perception and collective norms. The ‘communicative community,’ to use Foucault’s term for society, had been fragmented. Ritual intervention helped to synchronize social and collective realities and individual expectations. Examining how the ritual actors were trying to feel to accommodate social and situational standards helps, first, to detect the obligatory relations between the validating social norms and individual emotive experiences and, second, to locate the foci of the generation of agency. The shifts in the basic emotions operating in the frame of ritual peacemaking chart both the historically evolving types of integration of the individual in the social structures of the premodern period and the discrepancies that punctuated the continuum of the ‘communicative community.’ The task of Chapter Five is to chart the contours of the discourses framing the sentiments playing out in the process of the ritual encounter. I track down three distinct moral templates governing the perception of the medieval sentiments of peace and reconciliation as moral phenomena within the pre-scholastic, scholastic, and postscholastic theories of the emotions. The discourses linked the efficacy of ritual reconciliation to the social and cultural background of the normative rules to which feelings were supposed to attune. My focus is on the discursive rules governing the emotion work that individual actors were supposed to perform to disclose the precarious nature of the construction of hegemony built on multi-referential social practices. In Chapter Six, I examine the role of the ritual kiss as a strategic intervention in the emotional world of the individual. The center of the discussion is on a cluster of five sentiments targeted by the ritual act, namely, anxiety, catharsis, disgust, contempt, and respect. I argue that by remolding the emotional canvas of embodied ritual actors, the rites of peace allowed as much for the emotional liberty of the individual as for the governance of the social norm. Before I open the discussion, a word about its technicalities. It has been argued that the conceptualization of many emotion terms is a phenomenon of our post-Cartesian minds.12 I concur. The emotions in medieval evidence can be inferred as much from direct ref12

This issue was recently taken up and fundamentally re-evaluated by William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca and London, 1993). I adopt Ian Miller’s central insights.

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erences as from the context of the ritual encounter and the descriptions of bodily conditions. Even when a specific term is lacking, usually there are enough circumstantial clues clarifying the nature of the feeling in question. Another issue is the character of the evidence. Affects and emotions are the stuff of narrative accounts, much of them pure fiction. So I shift gears radically and plunge into chronicles, saints’ lives, epics, exempla, moral treatises, religious and romantic poetry—in short, into the habitat of the literary scholar. This does not undermine the validity of the inquiry into the emotional efficacy of ritual. Enough work has been done on literary works, real-life records, and fiction to warrant the stance that for the purpose of analyzing sentiments, discourses, and the social codes they convey, the historicity of the events reported does not really matter.

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CHAPTER FOUR

SENTIMENTS AT WORK

Ritual reconciliation with the kiss was meant to re-establish the peace and ordered relationships that conflict and violent confrontation had undermined. Insult and injury had led to the collapse of the structures of everyday social and political intercourse and resulted in a state of hostility between individuals and groups. For the premoderns, interpersonal and intergroup hostility was often a total prestation, an interaction involving thought, act, and sentiment. Which of the three dominates the account in the extant evidence about the emotional economy of ritual reconciliation depends in part on chance and in part on the conventions of the genre being used. Close reading across genre borders reveals that there were patterns in the association of some basic emotions, above all, anger, hate, and grief, with the societal technology of conflict resolution through ritual.

Anger A typical reaction to the disruption of the normal flow of high medieval social affairs was the display of anger and indignation. Recent research—older studies of medieval politics did not problematise the sentiments—stresses the conventional and social nature of such displays. Among lay nobles, anger outbursts were components of the technology of power and occurred in stable discourses of disputing, feuding, and political competition. They were signs of the disputant’s honor or shame and had normative dimensions. Just as normative were the procedures of appeasement of anger by conventionalized arguments with which friends, enemies, and third parties appealed for peace. In this interpretation the lay nobles’ anger has all the features of a transitory social role.1 1 Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger.’ About anger and aggression see also Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, eds., The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and early Modern Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk—Rochester,

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While an indispensable beginning in the investigation of the ritual emotions at the outset of our period and at the juncture of individual feelings and the norms of political interaction, this approach does not seem to address the issue of the ritual obviation of grievances in all of its complexity. Overstressing role-playing, ‘acting,’ and ‘staging,’ disregarding the nature of the rites of peace as a legal bond, and being under the influence of emotional constructionism, the transitory role theory tends to misrecognize the main thrust of ritual.2 Such a tack either voids the individual of all affect, turning the individual into a flat, one-dimensional person, or severs the link between public demand and the ‘inner emotional world.’3 It can be argued, however, that there were strong links between what was felt and what was displayed. Beneath the layer of public vents of emotion, one can discern certain fundamental affects that seem to have been no less important in the ritual reconciliation than the openly staged displays of anger. These affects were shaped into social roles subject to the conventions of legalism and the theological modes of thought in performative acts. The same performative technology, however, was used to address their affective essence and reach under the surface of the social role while conforming to its rules, and dissipate the sources of conflict generated therein. A case study, the reconciliation between Archbishop Heribert of Cologne and Emperor Henry II, will provide us with a range of starting points. The event and its early records date from the period before the scholastic mind had imposed a set of guiding principles on the way emotive interaction was put down in writing. Sometime in late 1020, Henry quarreled with the archbishop, who had failed to provide timely military support during a difficult campaign.4

NY, 1998). For a sociological analysis of early modern social roles see Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformation of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London, 1998). 2 Gerd Althoff ’s interpretation of ritual encounters as staging, ‘Inszenierung,’ is perhaps the best illustration of this approach, see Gerd Althoff, ‘Demonstration und Inszenierung: Spielregeln der Kommunikation in mittelalterlichen Öffentlichkeit,’ in his Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 229–58, and other essays in the collection. 3 The expression belongs to Stephen White, ‘The Politics of Anger,’ 152, and suggests the existence of separate emotional worlds—the one public and the other personal, or ‘inner.’ What was the nature of the inner emotions, however, and how did they connect to the public emotions, is not discussed. 4 For Henry II’s campaign in 1020 see Siegfried Hirsch, Jahrbücher des Deutschen Reichs unter Heinrich II, completed by Harry Bresslau (Hanover, 1875), vol. 3, 171–7.

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According to one of the principal sources, Lambert of Deutz, the emperor did not trust the archbishop. At Henry’s coronation there were rumors that Heribert preferred to see another person on the imperial throne. To make matters worse, some of the emperor’s counselors had their own issues with the archbishop. These peripheral matters helped to escalate the quarrel, and the emperor decided to confront Heribert in person. Lambert hints that Henry had in mind to accuse Heribert of contumacy and relates that the emperor was quick to show his anger to formalize his position. His grievance was therefore a political and a legal issue and was thought of as most appropriately couched in emotional vestments. On the eve of the interview, however, the emperor had a dream in which Heribert’s innocence was divinely proclaimed. Henry realized his mistake and thanked God for illuminating him with the truth. It appears as quite surprising then that his private conversion was not translated into a straightforward public act. At the meeting, without revealing what had happened, Henry received the archbishop with a grave face and requested a large sum as amends. Knowing that he had been at no fault, Heribert found himself assaulted by false accusations from all sides. Suffused in tears, he offered to leave his see rather than endure such insults. As befits his genre, time, and character, Lambert stresses Heribert’s emotional commotion, humility, and modesty, and downplays the fact that the affair had fully formal legal dimensions as well. It was at this point, after having witnessed the cleric’s formal submission to the punishment normally imposed on contumacious vassals, that the emperor immediately jumped from his throne and embraced him reverently. Declaring that he had been misled by malicious counselors, Henry asked for pardon. Heribert easily and magnanimously forgave him. Under the witness of the Trinity, the two exchanged the kiss of peace three times. Heribert’s enemies at court, utterly ashamed [erubescentibus], fled in haste. As a further sign of trust, the emperor seated Heribert on his throne and discussed with him the affairs of the empire.5 This short scene fits the recently proposed explanations of high medieval anger. The emotional outburst embodied the emperor’s legal grievance. The numinous protected its earthly vessel, but the rules of formal political interaction necessitated the ‘staging’ of the 5 Georg Pertz, ed., Lantberti Vita Heriberti archiepiscopi Coloniensis, MGN SS, vol. 4, 748–9. Lambert’s account was written in the 1050s.

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public confrontation. Supplication with tears embodied innocence and surrender, legitimizing the grievance of the other party. Roles concurred, feelings meshed. Having saved face, the emperor could admit his mistake and submit to the demand of the divine without loss of honor. The kiss of peace embodied the forgiveness granted to Henry and induced a wave of public sentiments, identifying the real source of the conflict. The courtiers’ reddened faces—or shame— embodied their guilt. It confirmed Henry’s own innocence and ignorance of the causes of Heribert’s failure, exonerating him in the eyes of the prelate and the observers. The affair was settled entirely via the open clash and exchange of conventional emotions, anger on the part of the emperor and humility on the part of Heribert. More importantly, the emotions conformed to the rules of public roleplaying and ritual political discourse. There are, however, a few telling details that can be gleaned by looking under the surface of convention. On the one hand, it is quite clear that the emperor’s anger before the dream had been genuine. On the other hand, careful as he was not to reveal inappropriate emotions in his hero’s heart, Lambert hinted that Henry II’s supplication was not accepted automatically by the archbishop. It looks as if there was an awareness that it required quite an effort on Heribert’s part to forgive and forget. Not by coincidence Lambert used the term labor to focus the attention on what was expected from Heribert. He hastened to add that it was no more difficult for the prelate to forgive from the bottom of his heart than it had been for St. Martin. Why such an emphasis on the apparently easy and spontaneous grant of forgiveness? Henry II evidently knew the answer to the question. Late that night, accompanied only by his sword-bearer, the emperor sought out the saintly man in private. Taking off his coat to indicate that he was divested of his official role as a ruler and throwing himself at Heribert’s feet in an act of supplication, the emperor asked for forgiveness, exhorting the archbishop to remit the offence from his memory [erroris memoriam remittat]. Despite Heribert’s protests that no vestiges of the quarrel lingered in his heart, Henry lay prostrated until the archbishop lifted him from the ground and the kiss of peace was exchanged one more time.6 The political act of formal

6

See also the mid-twelfth century account of the event in the anonymous Life

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reconciliation was coupled with an intensely personal emotive encounter. Both were resolved through the kiss of peace. Unlike the earlier peace, which had announced publicly the clearing of the archbishop’s name, Henry II’s secret supplication was not a staged affair. Now the heart of the cleric, the locus of his affective being, had to be appeased. The crucial importance of this moment was fully grasped by the artist who, sometime in the 1160s, executed the shrine containing Heribert’s relics. Around a medallion depicting two scenes of Henry’s night visit, the prostration and the kiss, he wrapped the following commentary: ‘Blood-stained hearts won’t reconcile/the anger of the bishop is mitigated by [the soft words of ] the king/and the kiss of peace given three times.’7 Although by the middle of the twelfth century the discourse on the emotions was governed by new rules, as we shall see in due course, I am inclined to believe that this much later injunction captures a fact that Lambert had glossed over. It suggests an essential continuity in the emotional technology of ritual that defied discursive strictures and manipulation. Openly pointing to Heribert’s emotional state about which Lambert kept silent, this short commentary linked the verbal and the ritual part of the reconciliation. It staked it entirely on the emotional exchange enabled by the supplication and the ritual kiss. While the public reconciliation ended the legally sustainable charges of contumacy, it did not suffice to expunge aversive sentiments, cleanse the ‘blood-stained hearts,’ and resolve the conflict. The archbishop’s deeply felt indignation counted—at least that was what Henry II evidently thought. There is no reason to doubt his instinct. If anything, it implies that the public bond was to stand only if supported by the parties’ meshed sentiments. Another detail in Lambert’s account allows for a further conjecture. The archbishop was stunned [stupet] by the humility of the emperor’s conduct. If my reading of Lambert’s rendering of the scene is correct, the crucial sentiment he wanted to convey to his readers

of Bishop Meinwerk of Padeborn in Franz Tenckhoff, ed., Das Leben des Bischofs Meinwerk von Padeborn (Hanover, 1921), 90–91. 7 The inscription reads Corda cruenta necat venia/rex dum bene placat iram pontificis/ ter prebens oscula pacis; it is now in St. Heribert’s church in Cologne-Deutz. I quote after Schreiner, ‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes,’ 116, ill. 10. The author of the inscription mentions the triple kiss, which was actually exchanged at the public, legal reconciliation, but the scenes on the medallion clearly take place in Heribert’s chapel.

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was embarrassment. The humble saint could not tower above the emperor to regain honor in a secular affair. Heribert’s image as built by Lambert militated against that. Henry II’s humiliation, while paying homage to Heribert’s role as an agent of the numinous, inverted Lambert’s concept of the prelate’s saintly personality informed by virtue and the prescripts of humbleness. It is important to note that Heribert’s anger and embarrassment, just like Henry II’s supplication, were personal, self-centered reactions, not out-going, public sentiments. Nonetheless, the same gesture that had rectified the parties’ public relationship, the ritual kiss of peace, served as a device affecting their private feelings. It embodied Heribert’s willingness to forget his indignation and confronted the source of embarrassment by reversing the situation of supplication back to an affair of equality. The kiss fulfilled the task admirably, bridging the crevice opened between Heribert and the emperor by the ritual inversion of roles. It spanned the space stretching from public anger and the socially imposed demand for a ‘staged’ political interaction and face-saving to private heart-cleansing and management of anger and embarrassment. It is also worth noting that for Lambert Heribert’s sentiments and the memory of the emperor’s attack ‘staining his heart with blood’ were causally connected poles. Shifts at one of them triggered changes at the other end. Henry II chose to work on the heart, considering the sentiments the integrative axis of Heribert’s personality and the primary mover of action. Put in modern terms, this observation is not an argument for the contingent personality of the cleric, built on a fluid affective foundation. On the contrary, anchored in a relationship with his mind and memory, the sentiments of the heart acquired a degree of stability. Operating within the continuum encompassing memory, the sentiments transcend the perception of the emotions as a situational response or a transitory social role. Ritual management of anger and embarrassment conditioned and was in its turn affected by extra-contextual factors and dispositions rooted in individual memory as a long-term facet of personality. As we shall see, this issue kept surfacing in the emotional economy of high- and late-medieval peacemaking and by the fourteenth century there is evidence of attempts to conceptualize it. This case of high medieval appeasement of anger introduces some of the main analytical issues I will be examining in the following pages. Two deserve special attention. The first is the embodied heartand-mind core; the second is the manner in which ritual connected

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this core of the individual being to larger society. Both are dynamic processes, evolving throughout the medieval period. The most conspicuous development is that over time both fields experienced clear linear shifts in the focus of their emotional economy. In the first, the emotional component of the ritual interaction gradually slid from the self, to the interaction, to the ‘other’ party in the reconciliation. In the second, emotions revolved around the relative weight attributed to the spheres of the numinous, the kin collective, and the social, with a trend to migrate from the first to the last. These temporal progressions resulted from the historical evolution of ritual reconciliation in the course of the high and late Middle Ages. That evolution determined the way in which agency was generated in the course of the ritual interaction. The ritually induced sentiments highlight the dynamic nature of the individual as a social being and define the emotive hub of connecting tissues between self and society as a historically evolving phenomenon. Anger, the principal high-medieval emotion of conflict managed by the rites of peace, is a pertinent illustration of the functioning of this model. Sources from the period rarely offer such a neat juxtaposing of public emotion and private affect as in the case of Henry II’s and Heribert’s reconciliation. Nonetheless, in most of what has reached us, displays of anger consistently indicate the existence of not just any grievances but legally definable and defendable grievances. I have termed this phenomenon ‘legal affect,’ and I shall use it with this meaning throughout the discussion. Indeed, legal affect seems to have been the strongest characteristic of ritually managed anger in late eleventh- and twelfth-century evidence of all genres, and marks the period as a discrete unit in terms of its emotional economy. Authors revel in describing how injustice made heroes and villains alike behave like enraged demons. Beneath the emotional façade, however, of which narrators did not always approve, lay clearly identifiable reasons. These were already present in Lambert, who, as we saw, downplayed and conventionalized anger. His twelfthcentury followers, Rupert and the Anonymous of Abingdorf, did not spare effort to stress the monarch’s fury [ furor, iracundia] at Heribert’s unjustifiable inaction.8 They were in a large company. To catalogue 8 Tenckhoff, Meinwerk von Padeborn, 88–9 and Rupert in Pertz, Lantberti Vita Heriberti, 749. Both accounts are from the mid-twelfth century, the anonymous most probably dating from before 1162.

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only cases of anger management in which the rites of peace were involved would result in a long list. Here is a sample of some of the most representative twelfth-century accounts. In Raoul of Cambrai, the customary feud fueled the wrath of young Gautier during the judicial duel with the knight Bernier, murderer of his uncle. Bernier’s humble offer of reconciliation and forgiveness of anger [maltalent] enraged Gautier even more. The color of his face deepened [la coulor noircie] as he scornfully turned down Bernier’s proposal.9 In The Song of Aliscans, the face of Count William of Orange was fired in utmost rage, his gaze was fearsome; he was red with anger and malice as he attacked his sister. The reason, we are told by the hero himself, was that she had come between King Louis’s and William’s legal rights.10 In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Bren was ignited by anger when confronting his brother whom he held responsible for his banishment from the kingdom he had the right to rule. That was a great injustice [iniustitia].11 In the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, in a situation that resembles the quarrel between Heribert and Emperor Henry II, Hugh was under the customary and legally defined obligation to help his king, and his noncompliance was a legal offense [iniuria]. Richard gave vent to his grievances in a colorful range of strong sentiments: the king’s spirit was unbridled and fierce, he was in the grip of fury, and his royal wrath was like the roar of a lion. Yet as soon as the bishop put his case in legal terms—there was nothing the king could rightfully [iuste] complain about, he claimed, and he could duly demonstrate it—the king calmed down and reconciliation was under way.12 The fierce wrath and anger [zorn] of the Emperor in the German epic Duke Ernst was ignited by the duke’s alleged treason.

9

Sarah Kay, ed. and trans., Raoul de Cambrai (Oxford, 1992), 314, 318. William accusation was that his sister et vers le roi m’aïe desloee; see Erich Wienbeck, Wilhelm Hartnacke, and Paul Rasch, eds., Aliscans: Kritischer Text (Geneva, 1974), 163, ll. 2797–8. 11 Acton Griscom ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, with contributions to the study of its place in early British history, together with a literal translation of the Welsh manuscript No. LXI of Jesus College, Oxford, by Robert E. Jones (London, 1929), 285. 12 Gerald of Wales’ Life of bishop Hugh is the more colorful, see Richard M. Loomis, Gerald of Wales, The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln 1186–1200 (New York and London, 1985), 26, 28. The near-contemporary Magna Vita is briefer on this point, see Decima L. Douie and David H. Farmer, eds., Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, The Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln (Oxford, 1985), vol. 2, 101–2. 10

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To this the slandered duke added insult and a real injury by attacking the monarch in his own castle and killing one of his relatives, thereby breaking, along with the king’s peace, all customary laws of protection [Hausfriede].13 In thirteenth-century works, legal anger gradually moved backstage but was still a discernible feature of the conflict. Before the final reconciliation with the kiss of peace in the urban moralistic work, Albertanus of Brescia’s Liber Consolationis et consilii, Melibeus stressed the remission of his anger and indignation to indicate that he had the legal right to decide the fate of the offenders.14 In one of the miracles of St. Francis, the quarrel between the podestà and bishop of Assisi over rights of jurisdiction was translated as anger and indignation [contra ipsus indignatus ille; iracundia].15 In the Little Flowers, in a description of another episode of the life of the saint, wrath came as the justified, albeit inappropriate, reaction to theft.16 Legal anger is highly visible in courtly classics as well. Anger [zorn] organized conduct in Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan, motivating Gurmun’s attitude toward Tristan, who had killed Morold, kin of Gurmun’s wife. ‘Get up, lord Tristan, and kiss me,’ said Gurmun, ‘I am unwilling to forgive you, but I will remit my anger, since the women have done it already,’ that is, the legal precondition of the direct kin’s acceptance of the settlement had been fulfilled.17 Note the fine distinction between Gurmun’s private feelings and the emotion structuring public relationships. Similarly, in Kudrun, another work that continued to inspire chivalrous hearts well into the sixteenth century, the kiss of peace was the formal device with which Sigeband appeased his legitimate anger against the men of Garadie who had plundered his land.18 In Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Willehalm, Count William’s cool reception at King Louis’ court turned the hero into a ‘wrathful guest’ [zornebaere gast]; he almost cut off his sister’s 13

Weber, Untersuchung und überlieferungskritische Edition des HERZOG ERNST B, 445. Sunday, Albertani Brixiensis Liber Consolationis et consilii, 127. 15 Rosalind B. Brooke, ed. and trans., Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli sociorum S. Francisci. The writings of Leo, Rufino, and Angelo companions of St. Francis (Oxford, 1990), 166–9. 16 Damian J. Blaher, O.F.M., ed., The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Mirror of Perfection, The Life of St. Francis by St. Bonaventure (New York, 1951), 176–7. 17 ‘Stêt ûf, hêr Tristan, und gêt her,’ sprach Gurmûn, ‘unde küsset mich: ungerne sô verkiuse ich: iedoch verkiuse ich disen zorn, sît in die frouwen hânt verkorn, see Bechstein, ed., Gottfried’s von Strassburg Tristan, 21. 18 Stackmann, ed., Kudrun, 37. 14

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head.19 However, the loosened linkages of anger to justice, or the lack thereof, in Wolfram’s other major work, Parzival, are a noticeable retraction from the former norm. In the mature courtly discourse, the meanings of anger as ‘being torn apart,’ emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and in sense of social propriety, began to gain priority over legal affect.20 Accounting for the diversification of meaning and the fact that anger remained positively linked to the legal sphere in fourteenthand fifteenth-century sources, late-medieval evidence shows four major differences from the previous period. First, the thinning evidence about anger in legal frameworks suggests that the connection was weakened. Second, the legal frame appeared mainly in works carrying over twelfth- and thirteenth-century traditions. The evolution of the popular motif of the noble in revolt against his lord illustrates the trend best. Legality was the dominant theme in what appears to be the earliest variant of this theme, the twelfth-century Duke Ernst. The plot was developed, in the thirteenth century, in the immensely popular English romance Guy of Warwick, and was present in another work of the same genre, the fourteenth-century romance The Earl of Toulouse. Both departed visibly from the early versions: the role of anger was either minimized, or its legal meaning was expunged.21 Third, as witnessed by Wolfram, anger became less structurally determined and a more situationally defined phenomenon. And fourth, 19 Joachim Heinzle, ed., Wofram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 254. 20 Michael Swisher, ‘Zorn in Wolfram’s Parzival,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 93, 3:4 (1992), 401–4. The only episode of ritual appeasement of legal anger is Cundrie’s supplication of Parzival. Although the knight forsakes his anger, he does not kiss Cundrie, perhaps because her appearance differs so much from the courtly ideal, but also because Parzival retains his inner aversion [haz]. See Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival. Nach der Ausgabe Karl Lachmanns revidiert und commentiert von Eberhard Nellmann. Übertragen von Dieter Kühn (Frankfurt a. M., 1994), vol. 2, 331. For the basics see Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, 1978). 21 For different versions of Guy see D. J. Conlon, Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik et de Herolt D’ Ardenne (Chapel Hill, 1971); Alfred Ewert ed., Gui de Warewic, roman du XIII e siècle (Paris, 1932); Julius Zupitza, ed., The Romance of Guy of Warwick. The Second or 15th-century Version, Edited from the Paper Ms. Ff. 2. 38. in the University Library, Cambridge (London, 1875–6); and William B. Told, ed., Guy of Warwick, A Knight of Britain (Austin and London, 1968). There is a useful discussion of Guy as a literary character in Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knight: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford, 1990). Surprisingly, the author does not consider penitence in ritual reconciliation. I use The Earl of Toulose in Walter H. French and Charles B. Hale, eds., Middle English Metrical Romances (New York, 1930).

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anger was increasingly reported alongside of, or replaced entirely by, a set of other sentiments. This evolution of the ritual dissolution of anger leads to two conclusions. First, the cardinal fact is the versatility of ritual in appeasing legal anger as a social institution of high- and late-medieval conflict. As pointed out above, in early medieval evidence anger still encompassed the totality of the conflict clothed in emotion. Meaning and function, social and cultural consensus about displays of anger as the embodiment of public grievance and its justification, continued to overlap until the late Middle Ages. Second, from around the middle of the twelfth century, this paradigm began slowly to fall apart. Before considering the new paradigms that grew out of it, the cases of ritually appeased legal anger ought to be scrutinized to identify the pressures for change and the responses generated. The progressive dissolution of the tie between anger and the law opened the door for an increasingly powerful outside intervention issuing forth in a more complex emotional palette. When, by the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries, the legal frame relaxed its grip on the discourse explaining individual feelings, the meanings of anger diversified, and the uniformity of its interpretation diminished. In terms of practice, the predictability of the action founded on anger decreased. Such anger was spontaneous, unpredictable, and impossible to suppress. There were no legal rules for it. It was at the discretion of the self to react or to forego a response. This shift had an important consequence. No longer grafted exclusively onto the legal bond emanating from the social norm as bearer of its meaning, individual anger appeared in need of moderation, restriction, and suppression. Social consensus and individual sentiments parted ways. Where there was no effective coercive pressure directly applied or internalized as inhibition to natural anger, one of the ways to deal with anger was to confront it with overriding, socially constructed, and therefore manageable and predictable emotions. The social norm was embodied in a series of negative sentiments, such as embarrassment, shame, contempt, and disgust, all generated to force the individual into compliance. In such conditions, the rites of peace provided a major strategy to deal with societal pressures embodied in emotions that otherwise would have been unbearable, threatening the individual with destruction. Maintaining in part its legal links, the thrust of the ritual action slowly shifted from constructing the frame for public, formal legal-

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ity to managing the emotional economy of interpersonal relationships in each of the confrontations with the evolving feeling rules of social governance. In Raoul, the epic paradigm, customarily validated persistence in anger was qualified as madness by the other party to the conflict, the agent of the numinous, and the social norm expressed by the barons, and ended up being dissolved with the kiss of peace. ‘I beg you, my lord, put folly aside; this [foolhardiness] should not last forever,’ exclaimed Bernier, and the court concurred: ‘Sir Guerri, you are foolhardy to imply that his strength has failed him!’ The abbot of St. Germain tuned in, addressing one of the guardians of the old tradition and instigators of the feud, Gautier’s uncle: ‘My lord Guerri, your hair is all gray and you cannot tell what day you will be called to account. If you don’t make peace, so help me St. Denis, your soul will never win paradise!’22 To this end, ritual, the tool of the social and the sacred, intervened. ‘God,’ said Gautier, ‘how it grieves me to do it!’ Nevertheless, he bent down, raised up his adversaries from the ground and exchanged kisses with them [s’entrebaisent], as it befitted true friends and relatives.23 What grieved the knight so much and why was the ritual kiss necessary? Two reasons suggest themselves. First, although Gautier’s anger was still the expression of the norms of the clan feud, it was not its mechanical customary expression. The emotion took a life of its own as the social and the collective norms diverged with the new arrangement of power and the noble clans’ need to unite against the king. New feeling rules were being forged and they confronted the prescripts internalized by Gautier. The confrontation issued forth in a clash of norms and played itself out in the emotional reaction of the young knight, who now had to construct a new hierarchy of social priorities. The self embodied by the heart militated against the new social consensus and the pressures the latter generated through the dictate to rationalize conduct along new lines. The ‘heart’ was still in the grip of the now-obsolete old norm. To comply with the new social requirements, the actor had to consciously attune his feelings, that is, perform emotion work, which would align his feelings with the changed group 22

Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 314, 316, 318. Sarah Kay translates s’entrebaisent as ‘they exchanged embraces,’ see Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 318–9. 23

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expectations. The bodily confrontation in ritual fulfilled this task, for it forced Gautier to overcome his overwhelming anger. The grief he experienced resulted from the painful parting with the old norm. Second, at the beginning of the supplication scene Gautier refused to kill Bernier outright, instead proposing hanging or banishment. He thus contested his opponent’s social status on the grounds of his ‘unlawful’ killing of Bernier’s lord, Raoul. The argument rested on a customary norm, the inviolability of the vassalic bond. Put in emotion terms, we can characterize Gautier’s recoiling from action as an example of disgust. I will address disgust in due course. In this context it suffices to mention that Bernier allegedly lay so low socially that even personally applying the talion law to him was considered inappropriate. The barons countered with another normative perception, arguing that if Bernier had the support of ‘1000 men,’ he still commanded the respect of his vassals and measured up to the standards of the collective. The barons thus insisted that however grave Bernier’s misdeed might have been, in essence the two knights were on the same social level. The conflict between them was dangerous, since it threatened the coherency of the collective self that permeated the social personae of the knights and was now called into action against the king. Thus the ‘grief ’ that the ritual kiss caused Gautier was the expression of the painful struggle to overcome the sentiments originally generated according to the norms of clan membership. Presented as a reaction to a legal transgression lowering the rank and status of the opponent, it was thoroughly internalized as an individual affect and resisted outside pressure caused by shifts in the social norm. The emotive world of the knight was structured by the collective perception of ‘correct’ feelings, yet it was not the passive shadowimage of the collective construct. The individual was endowed with sufficient agency to shape his or her own emotional sphere, and the affects it generated could be in dissonance with the emotion norm of the collective. One could argue that the difference was one of pace, not of kind, and that the emotive divergence embodied in grief was the result of the collective norm outpacing individual emotional evolution. I would suggest that this is a perfect example of the distinction between affect, as a facet of uncontrollable individual agency, and emotion, as the expression of social normativity. All the same, there was a difference. It produced tensions, and this was the background against which the kiss functioned. The visceral asocial affects

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of the ‘heart’ were logically translated to the level of bodily confrontation in the reconciliation that followed. The ritual kiss was the acknowledgement of ontological equality and an embodiment itself of the obligatory relationships defining kin membership. The emotion work necessary to kiss overcame individual disgust and suppressed loathing. These sentiments had lost their meaning in the new social context. The kiss brought individual feelings in accord with the feeling rules of the new, larger social group encompassing the warring clans in a noble estate that patterned its structure on the model of clan relations. The world of the epic heroes was a world of gutsy feelings indeed. The strong affective potential borne by the rites of peace was employed in concord with the all out, crude and direct peer pressure, to quash individual affect generated as a byproduct of the operation of the clan norms. By the late twelfth century this referential field was becoming outdated. With the epic ethos of feudal strife giving way to the courtly ethos, subtler feeling rules came into play. Again, the rites of peace proved an invaluable device coordinating the integration of individual emotive reaction into the framework of the normative social governance of conflict. Composed in the 1180s, Aliscans pinpoints a transitional stage in the transformation of the emotional management of anger through ritual. Throughout the work, Count William’s outbursts of anger are an example of correct, legal, and socially acceptable conduct, a transitory social role with a strongly functional character. At the scene in which William kisses his sister to reconcile, the author thought it necessary to specify that ‘All this has William’s burst of temper managed; And this is how a man must counter arrogance: It will not stop until it is forced backwards.’24 And yet the count himself admits to Blanchefleur that ‘men are thus when overwrought with anger, and in a trice they say and do some madness.’25 Such anger was partly detached from the stable legal frame and depended on context. It required the validation of the observers and participants in the encounter; they had their say in the definition of its meaning.26 Thus, at his niece’s supplication for reconciliation, the norms of the 24

Ibidem, 86. Wienbeck et al., Aliscans, 172. Translation in Michael A. Newth, The Song of Aliscans (New York and London, 1992), 85. 26 Definition in Averill, Anger and Aggression, 9–10. 25

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courtly ethos and the heroic rage maintain an uneasy balance centered on the hero’s ‘heart.’ The count remains open as much to the young lady’s plea as to the king’s halfhearted submission to his demands. His heart ‘softened’ at hearing King Louis acknowledging his rights, ‘Yes, yes, indeed; whatever he wants he has it.’ In the same vein, to appease her uncle’s wrath Aelis has to qualify her mother’s anger as ‘madness.’ Furthermore, William’s rage is met with his mother’s reproach, who entreats the count to ‘draw back from fighting with the king in his own palace,’ referring to the legal norm of the king’s peace. Nonetheless, Ermengardt introduces a new point by insisting that William forgave his anger ‘for your niece’s sake, the noble damsel; she is the brightest jewel in all your family.’ The last reference was a call to respect the courtly ideal and turned decisive for the resolution of the conflict over rights that nearly caused Blanchefleur’s death. The two arguments’ relative weight can be gauged by the sentiments they generated in confronting legal anger. On the one hand, the king’s peace was a legal norm that William could or could not respect, for he had an equally legitimate legal grievance. Accordingly, he had the emotional liberty to accept it—‘soften his heart’—or contest it through anger, depending on the response he received at any stage of the conflict. Respecting the king’s legal norm was not an internalized duty suppressing individual rights. It could not annul William’s legal grievance, and hence his sentiment of anger could be switched off and on at will. The count brushes his wrath aside at Louis’s promise to help, but at the first sign of hesitation his whiskers began trembling with anger, and a new ‘rage burns like flaming coals in William’s cheeks.’ Heroic rage did indeed have the dimension of a transitional social role. On the other hand, Aelis’s supplication has a different effect. The count’s reaction to it is not dependent on his will. It produces an almost automatic emotional response. ‘The fairest maid . . . the noble damsel . . . the jewel of a most powerful family’ clutching at his foot is most embarrassing for the count. Embarrassment reflected the inversion of the courtly standard and forced William to adjust his feelings and actions. While he was at liberty to define his position on the plane of the legal norm, William was in the grip of the courtly ethos. “May Jesus bless you, my beautiful Aelis,” he utters in a warm, tender manner, “Get to your feet; you use yourself too badly” [Levés vos ent, trop estes travellie! ]. Fair ladies were not supposed to endure [travail ], at least not

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in such a manner. Supplicating a lady’s grace was the knight’s task; he was supposed to be tormented to win favor. This was precisely the moment on which Aelis capitalized. William’s embarrassment is of such a magnitude, that he forsakes his vow not to touch any one’s lips and obligingly kisses the lovely maid as a proxy for her mother, Blanchefleur. There is nothing now that can stop the reconciliation, and when the repentant sister appears, the siblings exchange apologies and seal the peace with four kisses.27 Ritually elicited embarrassment was the sign of the dissonance in the relationship between the self and the courtly norm and confronted the parties to the conflict with the social demand to correct the discrepancy. The form in which the latter was vested allowed the actors to cope with it with the ritual kiss of peace. Embarrassment seems to have been the major target of the ritual kiss in the courtly discourse, while the legal norm still lingered in the guise of emotional vestment. The management of embarrassment through peacemaking allows us to observe the penetration of the courtly norm in the high-medieval value systems and the destabilization of the link between law and anger. By the late twelfth century, it appears that in the courtly discourse the two main fields generating conflict, the obligation to one’s kin and the obligation stemming from the feudal bond, were susceptible to emotion management, for both were open to the impact of embarrassment. Remarkably enough, the kiss that came to formalize the act of peacemaking was also the act characterizing the formal manifestation of the existence or creation of obligatory relationships in both fields. The possibility of a direct link seems too obvious to miss. Countering the anger that embodied kin-based obligation with ritually elicited and managed embarrassment points to a major development in the emotional economy of interpersonal interaction. In Gottfried’s Tristan, for example, the Queen mother’s heart is ‘not so that I could be his [Tristan’s—KP] friend.’ The sentiment mattered, for it embodied the Queen’s customary legal obligation to avenge

27 Wienbeck et al., Aliscans, 170, 171, 173. The reading ‘kissed,’ baisie, is preserved in the oldest version of the poem, variant ‘a’ preserved in Paris, Arsenalbibliotheque, and dating from c. 1225, and in three of the earliest copies from the first half of the thirteenth century, ‘e,’ ‘A,’ and ‘B.’ Later copies substituted apaïe and drecie, most probably to correct the inconsistency with William’s vow not to kiss. Wolfram does the same substitution in Willehalm.

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her slain kin Morold. The exit from the situation was to elicit sentiments confronting that anger. The ‘well-born, well-bred, intelligent, and lacking in no fine qualities’ knight throws himself at the feet of the ladies asking for mercy. As might have been expected, supplication did not work automatically, for the duty to exact revenge remained. Yet Tristan persists. And so they stand, and so he lie— for hours—until Brandane, that epitome of the courtly ethos, remarks ‘My lady, the knight has lain there too long!’28 The situation is becoming embarrassing. The way out is to grant Tristan a hearing, and after he has played his trump card, the arrangement of Isolde’s marriage to King Mark, and thus paid his ‘amends,’ the spirits settle and the kiss is exchanged in reconciliation, for the former enemies are now future kin. Ritually generated embarrassment was thus a major strategy for successful management of conflict with the ritual kiss. The encounter could be staged, or result from an unpremeditated act as in Tristan’s case, but its main lines followed a similar course. In Cantar del mio Cid, El Cid carefully prepares himself—that is, engages in emotion work—for the interview at which he was to be readmitted into the king’s favor. At the meeting, he kneels down on all fours and pulls up a mouthful of grass in a demonstration of submission, refusing to get up until the king gives him pardon ‘from his soul and his heart.’ King Alfonso is most distressed and complies. The Campeador rises, kisses his hands and then kisses him on the mouth [e en la bócal’ saludó ] to complete the pardon and the reconciliation.29 The key to this scene and the actors’ motives is the inversion of social ranking by ritual excess. El Cid, who had been Alfonso’s vassal, is now a mighty lord entrenched in respectability. The peacemaking scene was at the same time a ritual restitution of their former feudal bond. Social rank, class connections, and collective identification, rather than pity, informed the king’s emotional reaction. The embarrassment elicited by El Cid’s show of extreme deference left no doubt

28

Bechstein, Gottfried’s von Strassburg, Tristan, 16; translation in Gentry, Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde, 138. The translator renders the Middle High German herze with ‘feelings.’ I prefer to retain the literal translation. For Brangane and the courtly ethos see Hugo Bekker, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan: Journey through the Realm of Eros (Columbia, S.C., 1987), 180–88. 29 ‘Pardon’ is conveyed with the feudal vuestra amor. The king’s condition is described with tan grand pesar ovo el rrey don Alfonso, see Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, trans., The Poem of the Cid (New York, 1984), 128.

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that El Cid’s humiliation was something the king did not approve of. He clearly did not like it and felt uneasy. His embarrassment was alleviated by the only gesture that embodied the rectified formal social and legal bond and which established peace at the same time. Supplication was not the only way to elicit embarrassment in order to overcome ‘annoying’ sentiments and trigger the peace act. St. Hugh of Lincoln, the Holy Man of the Angevin kings, generated it by delivering a ‘salutary shock’ to Richard I. Meeting with the king, he at once asks for the kiss of peace. At the answer, ‘You deserve no kiss from me,’ the prelate grasps the king’s cloak, shakes it violently, and repeats: ‘I have every right to one. Kiss me!’ Richard, shocked at the affront, could not but smile and kiss him.30 Hugh’s ‘triumph’ over the king, as his biographer put it, consisted in extracting the ritual warrant that his opponent’s sentiments did not support the legal quarrel between them. Confident in his rights, he chose a strategy quite different from supplication, but the end result was the same. In the cases discussed above, embarrassment restrained legally defined anger, spontaneous or conventionalized, by a temporary inversion of the normative rules of conduct in a roster of ‘communicative communities.’ The restraint reaction generated by embarrassment, however, was of low intensity and situationally determined efficacy. It did not call for a thorough shake-up of the individual, nor did it exercise control beyond the immediate context of the encounter. To refer to Aliscans one more time, Count William’s benign response to his niece’s supplication did not prevent a new outburst of anger immediately after the reconciliation.31 The solution to the problem of how to keep the emotive world of the increasingly independent self within the governance of the social was found in enlarging the scope of ritual efficiency by linking it to the norms of the community through another, much stronger sentiment: shame. As a strategic, deeply working sentiment, shame ensured the stability of the ritual bond in two ways. On the one hand, its anticipation forced the parties to the conflict to apperceive and change not just their relation to the norms with which the collective they belonged to structured conflict, but their total personality

30 Hugh insisted, da michi osculum, domine rex. See Douie and Farmer, Magna vita sancti Hugonis, vol. 1, 101. 31 Wienbeck et al., Aliscans, 174.

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as well. On the other hand, shame was the punishment unleashed at the infringement of the ritual contract. The generation of shame to apperceive one’s role in society in order to bring about reconciliation depended on the manner in which honor and peace were linked. In the value system of the epic world, the legal frame was a major way to mediate the connection. The formal dimension of the kiss of peace as the carrier of obligationproducing legal instruments provided the background to the environment in which shame was induced. In Duke Ernst, the pacification succeeded only when the nobles managed to trick the emperor into kissing the disguised Duke Ernst during a general amnesty on Christmas Eve. From the legal point of view the emperor had committed himself, since the ritual kiss was a liability. It did not matter how the parties had arrived at the closure. All the same, the legal bond would not work by itself. Appropriate emotionality had to ensure the stability of the reconciliation. In the act of dispensing the kiss, the monarch recognized Ernst. Hurt by the ruse, he would not speak. His anger [zorn] persisted and threatened to annul the forgiveness he had just granted. Yet when reminded that going back on the ritual obligation taken in front of God and the nobles would be a great shame, the emperor had to put his anger away.32 This episode highlights the link between the legitimacy of one’s role in the political system and the emotional world of the individual. The real confrontation was about control over the emotions. To impose its rules and ensure compliance, peer pressure worked not just by invoking the legal dimension of the emperor’s role as the upholder and guarantor of the law of the realm. The nobles were aware that the agreement would stand only if anger was remitted. They were also aware that, although arising from a common source, legal anger was one thing, anger as a personal affect another matter altogether. The former could be dealt with by locating the kiss at the cross-section of the religious and the legal discourse to assimilate duty and liability. Secular liability could be withdrawn; the religious duty was independent of individual will and active all the time. There was no dodging such an obligation. Religious duty, for its part, demanded emotion work. To enforce it as social practice, the princes included the legal peace within the honor-and-shame para32 Weber, HERZOG ERNST, 445; translation in Thomas and Dussère, The Legend of Duke Ernst, 125.

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digm. The invocation of shame, stemming from the unfulfilled obligation, accomplished the task of quashing individual affect that did not have the validation of the group. The community was not content with formal role-playing, however binding it might have been. Not complying with the demand for emotion work jeopardized one’s social standing as much as the formal breach of obligation. Shame nonetheless was not exclusively an internalized emotional reaction to social pressure. What it could entail is illustrated in the peace between Duke Segum and the emperor in Guy of Warwick, where the nobles threaten their sovereign with withdrawal of loyalty and revolt, should he fail to bestow his grace on the penitent vassal.33 Shame was an active social force, which could destabilize one’s social position and open possibilities for direct political contestation through all means available to one’s enemies. It was not a feeling that could confront and overwhelm personalized anger; it only provided the conditions under which emotion work could be performed. Shame confronting legal anger was thus as positional a construct as anger itself. A subtler manner of invoking shame of quite a different nature developed with the introduction of the courtly norm. We have already seen that some of the dimensions of anger in courtly settings suggested the loosening of its exclusive ties to the legal definition of grievance. Accordingly, shame was employed to confront individualized anger, which the legal frame could not manage. To address this problem, anger was conventionalized within the courtly rules of conduct and shame seeped down in the emotional world of the individual. Perhaps the best early illustration of the new manner of dealing with anger is Wolfram’s Willehalm. The reconciliatory scene between William and Blanchefleur completely eschews legality. The count’s anger is caused by the disrespect of Louis’s court. William is not after his rights; his is a reaction against a society treating him with indifference and contempt. How to counter the courtiers’ insolence is the count’s main problem, but he is aware that the court had its rules. While in Aliscans William speaks about rights and Aelis stresses the legal dimensions of her mother’s guilt, Wolfram’s Alice does not mince her words pointing out how William’s violent outburst

33 Conlon, Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik, 150–1; Ewert, Gui de Warewic, 81–3; Zupitza, The Romance of Guy of Warwick, 72–5; and Told, Guy of Warwick, 64–5.

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of anger infringe on the ethical rules of courtly society. “I am sorry about your honor [werdekeit],” she said, “Where are your courtly manners? Uncle, you have changed yourself greatly!” Alice’s reproach makes William conscious of his courtly self and the need to moderate his anger. There is no need to provide legal satisfaction. Tears come to his eyes and he asks Alice to raise and not to shame him.34 Anger caused not only disgrace in the eyes of others, but a deeply felt shame as well. Shame had been interiorized to such an extent that a reference to it brought about the immediate emotion embodied in tears. The embarrassment inferred from Aliscans’s context was transformed by Wolfram into shame [spot] for one’s aggressive, unbridled rupture of social relationships. We are left without a clue as to whether any free vent of negative emotions would have been met with the same reproach or whether anger was a reserved case. Either way, shame confronted and overrode anger as a higher-ranking demand. It called for an action to reform the self—Alice was explicit about that, judging from the term Wolfram used, gemüete—and forced William to adjust his conduct to comply to the official norm he has interiorized. The reformation of the individual to fit the courtly ethos logically led to peace. The effort has been to transform him and it succeeded. This episode suggests more than the enfolding of the ‘civilizing process’ of refinement of manners postulated by Norbert Elias and the accompanying perception of the inappropriateness of the expression of aggressive emotions in public. It implies a deeper political current: the diminishing legality of settling scores and pursuing justice on one’s own. This observation is directly related to the conclusion inferred from Heribert’s and Henry II’s reconciliation nearly two centuries earlier. Those who follow the over-socialized theories of emotionality stress the conventionalizing of anger as an acceptable embodiment of legal grievances but do not ask the question why shame had to be interiorized. This is perhaps because the answer would lead them to concede that anger was, above all, an affect, a natural emotional reaction to injury and insult rooted in the bio-

34 Aelis refers to kiuscheclîche zuht and accuses the count, oeheim, dîn gemüete hât sich ze gar verkêret. The count’s answer: ob dû mich niht spottes wesrt, sô stant ûf ! See Heinzle, Wofram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, 270. For the larger context see Joachim Bumke, Wolframs Willehalm: Studien zur Epenstruktur und zum Heiligkeitsbegriff der ausgehenden Blütezeit (Heidelberg, 1959).

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logical instinct for self-preservation. As soon as anger lost the conventional social justification that sublimated it to the position of an emotion, a device had to be worked out to confront it on its own existential level. The ambivalent nature of high-medieval anger has not been properly accounted for in most theoretical schemes, from the organismic school to social constructionism. It was crucial for the functioning of ritual. The discourses depicting anger as a sentiment developed to indicate the individual acceptance of the collective norm of the feud do not change its peculiar character. From its pristine form of affect, anger was sublimated as an emotion in the legal discourse that dominated the early and partly the high-medieval period because it expressed best the sovereign right to pursue justice on one’s own. The possession of the rights of violence was socialized and validated through the rights of anger. The link between the ‘inner world’ of the individual and the social conventions of legalism is thus no mystery. The taming of anger by recourse to manners introduced by the courtly era was a discursive reflection of the suppression of the private rights to violence then occurring, with more or less success, simultaneously in all social spheres and on all levels of individual actualization. Its central postulate, that anger was an inappropriate sentiment, in public or private, was an attempt to strip the private rights of violence of the legitimacy steeped in the naturalness of the biological imperatives for self-preservation. Anger’s affective dimension was a serious obstacle in the way of the successful implementation of this social project. Those who constructed the discourse appropriated by the authorities had to proceed by increments. A major step forward was to demote anger to pure affect. Wrath, rage, and anger had to be dissociated from the honor conferred by customary legality and explained away. The above-mentioned episode about the conflict between the podestà and the bishop of Assisi, composed around 1318, illustrates this process outside the sphere of the courtly norm. From the context it can be inferred that the episode was a conflict over judicial powers. Both the official and the prelate acted in anger [indignatio, iracundia]. Once St. Francis’s hymn to the Sun miraculously worked peace, the podestà, tears in his eyes, threw himself at the feet of the bishop, acknowledged him as his lord, and offered satisfaction. The bishop raised him from the ground, kissed him, and asked for indulgence himself, adding that by virtue of his office he was required to be

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humble, but by nature he was prone to anger and should be forgiven for that.35 It is worth noting that the acknowledgment of political subordination by the podestà came after intensive emotion work, but the position of the bishop highlights even better the conditions that caused the reevaluation of anger. There was an inherent contradiction in his social stance. His office demanded that he be humble and reconcile the guilty ones to God. Being a political personage he had power, privileges, and rights to exercise and defend. The authors of the story, however, did not think of anger as an appropriate embodiment of the bishop’s public personality. Anger caused scandal, rupture of the harmonious functioning of the community, and brought shame [magna verecundia] to the religious. Already Peter Damian, in his rendition of the popular story of St. Giovanni Gualberto’s reconciliation with his enemy, insisted that anger and hatred concealed in the heart of the pastor were polluting and disqualified him as a mediator between the divine and the lay folk entrusted to his care.36 The religious were supposed to lead the flock to peace, not to cause dissent. Peacemaking, on the contrary, conferred prestige and honor to the clerics.37 The authors’ reproach seems to result from the disparity between the types of socially acceptable anger displays and the political role of the bishop. The tension was resolved by relegating anger to the sphere of the self. The inappropriate sentiment was explained away as belonging to the bishop’s ‘nature’ as opposed to his ‘office.’ Anger was not a socially induced fact of life. It was an affect, a matter of temperament and of bodily humors. It was, in other words, an ontological fact. Its expression in public produced disapproval, internalized as shame by the group to which the actor belonged. The means to rectify the hierarchy of public and private, secular and sacred, that informed the personality of the bishop but was disrupted by his ontological dispositions was the ritual reconciliation. The kiss, besides restoring the peace, lifted the ban of excommunication and confirmed the bishop in his position of a pastor and a spiritual leader of the community. It reinstated him into the role that the intrusion of his 35

Brooke, Scripta Leonis, 166–9. Peter Damian, De frenanda ira, ch. 5, in his Opera Omnia, PL, vol. 145, coll. 655C–656A. 37 See Giovanni Villani’s account of cardinal Latino’s pacification of Tuscany in the late 1270s in Croniche di Giovanni, Mateo e Filippo Villani secondo le migliori stampe e corredate di note filologiche e storiche (Milan, 1889), vol. 1, 135. 36

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self had damaged and made transparent that his ‘inner being’ was pure and free of polluting negative affect. The ambiguity of anger, an affect and an emotion at the same time, allowed for successful ritual intervention that brought about resolution of the conflict without social concessions. This story, an early fourteenth-century representation, concurs with developments in courtly ethics. It brings to a new stage the transformation of anger as a link between the self and the social. It is a modification of the relationship between emotionality, legality, and personality, as represented in the early-eleventh century clash between Heribert and Henry II. Back then, the emperor’s and the archbishop’s anger had been a socially validated phenomenon integrating their ‘hearts’ and their public personae to order the totality of their relationships. In the story of Assisi, anger still served that purpose, but its position as a social institution was delegitimized. It was more intimately connected to the internal ‘nature’ of men, to their hearts, in stark opposition to their public personae. In Henry’s and Heribert’s days, anger confirmed people in their social roles. In Assissi’s story, it was ritual peacemaking that did so. Anger’s valence had changed. It was generated in the self and emerged as a disruptive force because the authorities had monopolized the rights of violence and considered anger outbursts illegitimate forms of social action. This perception stripped the individual of the facet of sovereignty conferred by legal affect, but it also transformed anger into an excuse. If anger was generated independently of the legal, ecclesiastical, and courtly structures, its outbursts could be employed to explain conflict with the destructive forays of the antisocial self into the public sphere. The late-medieval practice of peacemaking stressed the conciliatory function of the statement that the misdeed was done in a state of anger, or was due to the ‘hot temper’ of the offender. This clause was a staple feature in reconciliatory documents. A mid-fifteenth century Frisian reconciliatory formula from a case involving the ritual kiss summed it perhaps best. The murderer had to swear, with twelve oath-helpers, loud and clear, following the exact wording of the formula, that he killed the victim in a fit of anger, without premeditation and preparation.38 Late-medieval and early modern petitions

38 Bi redena rede ner bi leider lega ner bi ernithe; published in His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 365–7, Appendix 5.

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for remission of court sentences abound in details of how the anger of the convicted got the better of the person.39 As the emotive translation of a legal condition external to the individual, or as a natural disposition rooted in the ‘heart,’ anger was the main target of emotion management in the high Middle Ages. This picture began to change as the twelfth century wore on. As the legitimacy of private vengeance came under increasing pressure in the three official discourses of law, religion, and man-to-man relationships, anger slowly pulled back from the center stage of the emotional world of ritual reconciliation. Two new sentiments strengthened their presence in its stead, hatred and grief. Both had been present in the emotional economy of private conflict since the early Middle Ages but for a long while had been overshadowed by anger. Moving center stage to embody the emotional state of the injured or insulted person, they now displaced anger as the prime mover of action. The target of the rites of peace changed accordingly. Tackling a complex emotional palette necessitated the reorganization of the emotional economy of ritual.

Hatred Recent research, promoting hatred to the rank of social institution, argues that in the medieval period it was more important as a positional sentiment than as an individual affect.40 Indeed, hatred routinely resulted from conflicts over power, prestige, and privileges and informed anger. It was the standard response to injury and insult. Its aim was to inflict harm on the adversary in order to restore the lowered social status of the injured or insulted person or group. In the habitual vocabulary of customary justice, hatred was the emotion term for feud. The sentiment subsumed social action, confirming 39 See for examples Petit-Dutaillis, Ducuments nouveaux, and Claude Gauvard, ‘De Grace Especial’ Crime, Etat, et Société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1991), 705–52. About the argument of anger in the letters of remission of the Burgundian dukes see Marc Boone, ‘Want remitteren is princelijck: Vorstelijk genaderecht en sociale realiteiten in de Borgondische periode,’ in Liber Amicorum Achiel de Vos (Evergem, 1989), 53–9, and Monique Pineau, ‘Les lettres de rémission lilloises fin du XVe début du XVIe siècle,’ Revue du Nord, 55 (1973), 236–7. On remission in France in general see La faute, la répression et le pardon: Actes du 107e. Congrès national des Sociétés Savantes, Brest 1982 (Paris, 1984). 40 Smail, ‘Hatred as a Social Institution,’ passim.

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the argument for positionality. But did hatred invariably reflect individual dependence on society? By stressing the social character of premodern hatred and tacitly juxtaposing it to the modern sentiment which appears to be highly individualized, are we not oversimplifying the linkages between individual, group, and society in the entire medieval period? Let us consider some of hatred’s modalities in the settings of ritual peacemaking. Early in our period, hatred’s manifestations almost fully conform to the ‘social institution’ and ‘positional sentiment’ postulate. In the epic tradition, it was a socially sustained, conditional, easily hidden, often derivative, and certainly a most violent emotion. A few examples will illustrate that nature of high medieval hatred. In Raoul of Cambrai, hatred determined young Gautier’s worth in the eyes of his clan. ‘My dear nephew,’ said his uncle Guerri approvingly, ‘you really are a man of great worth, to hate all your enemies so heartily!’41 Note the emphasis on the heart and the collective target of hatred. The corporate solidarity of the clan informed Gautier’s rage and was perceived as hatred of the ‘other,’ the enemyclan. Hatred was the scale to measure the degree to which the corporate individual was subsumed in the collective. It was also a primary mover of action, generating anger. Sedimented in the heart of the knight, it rendered the action-motivating emotive world of the individual a collective construct. Hatred could be removed under direct pressures from the collective; yet, as we have seen, this was not without consequences for the individual’s emotional balance and required the intervention of ritual. In the Nibelungenlied, hatred [haz] stood for the irreconcilable grudge motivating Kriemhild’s feelings against those who caused the death of Siegfried. Unlike Raoul, however, it was not a primary sentiment. Hatred derived from grief, which had seized Kriemhild’s heart. We will see the meaning of such grief in due course. Moreover, hatred had a visible legal dimension. Germanic law considered guilty all those who knew about but did not prevent a crime, or tacitly consented to it, as Kriemhild’s brother Gunther had done. Her hatred therefore targeted not just Hagen, but all of Gunther’s household. Such hatred was legally manageable. When Giselher succeeded in bringing a formal reconciliation through the kiss of peace [kuste suone], Kriemhild gave up hatred and anger, 41 As Guerri put it, molt par ies de haut pris—bien hez de cuer trestoz tes anemis; see Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 316.

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although grief, the source of the former sentiments, remained.42 Kriemhild’s epic hatred was thus a situational construct. Hatred was also frequently a sentiment played out in the most violent manner. In the conflict between Magnus, the son of the Danish king Niels, and his cousin Cnut in late 1130, the latter’s aspirations to a royal title ‘drew on Cnut’s deadly hatred’ [letale odium], which gave rise to an incredible rage.43 On January 7, 1131, in a wood near Haralstadt, Magnus tricked Cnut into an ambush. After kissing his cousin and sitting down to talk, Magnus had his concealed henchmen suddenly appear and murder Cnut. The enraged party then dismembered the victim’s body, ‘passionately thirsting to satisfy their ferocity even on his corpse.’44 The courtly and religious frameworks that developed following the end of the twelfth century were organized and rationalized along a different matrix, strongly influenced by the scholastic theory of the emotional background of vice and sin. Hatred in such context was just as effective in embodying conflict as it was in the epic discourse. The major innovation of the scholastic interpretation was in the recognition of the capability of the sentiment to seep down to the individual affective level. Hatred was the prime mover of action and of a disposition constructed in and by the individual in most of the situations resolved through ritual reconciliation in Wolfram’s Parzival. The heart of Gawain’s sister, Itonje, was full with love [minne] for king Gramoflanz, and hatred [haz] for those who hated him. Countess Orgeluze was one of those who hated the king because he killed her husband. Gramoflanz, for his part, hated Lot of Norway and Gawain his son and fought the latter because the knight stole his precious wreath. Sir Keye earned lady Cunneware’s hatred [haz] because of his attempt to teach her courtly manners in a quite inappropriate way. Wolfram’s hatred was thus the overwhelming sentiment of enmity, being neatly distinguished from anger [zorn]. It seems that as anger lost its exclu-

42

Karl Bartsch, ed., Das Nibelungenlied, edited by Helmut de Boor with notes by Roswitha Wiesniewski (Wiesbaden, 1979), 182. 43 For a complete discussion of the sources see Wilhelm Bernhardi, Lothar von Supplinburg (Leipzig, 1879), 398–404. The role of the mother is stressed in Helmold; northern sources mention that Niels himself was not comfortable with Cnut’s advances and knew of his son’s plot, but refused to get involved in it. 44 Helmold von Bosau, ch. 5, 190. Translation in Francis J. Chan, ed., The Chronicle of the Slavs by Helmold, Priest of Bosau (New York, 1935), 154–5.

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sive relations with the legal discourse and diversified its meanings, hatred came to embody some of its functions. A major field of hatred’s workings was one of anger’s former connotations, the official state of feud sanctioned by customary law. Arthur’s mistreatment [manec laster] by Clamidé’s people filled him with ill will. Clamidé understood that his offense had led to a state of formal hostility [haz] and asked for forgiveness. When Gawain killed a foreign king, one of his vassals came all the way to Arthur’s court to officially declare a state of open hostility [haz] and challenge Gawain to a duel.45 Finally, in Wolfram’s courtly paradigm, hatred was explicitly and directly linked to honor and the crucial quality of truiwe, the concept paramount to his characters’ personalities. The epic world had mediated that relationship. There, the infringement of honor issued forth in anger and rage. These sentiments embodied the legal frame within which the restoration of honor was negotiated. To Wolfram the link was direct. Triuwe as a social quality involved, among other things, deep and selfless emotions. Hatred was the strongest of these.46 Experiencing hatred was already a display of triuwe. The religious paradigm conformed to a similar pattern of direct connection between hatred and action. The author(s) of the story of Assisi, directly and through a speech attributed to St. Francis, defined the relationship between bishop and podestà as mutual hatred [et ita nimis oderant se ad invicem]. Hatred was the primary emotion of the conflict, but, as in the epic and courtly paradigms, hatred could be socially controlled. Once hatred was remitted through ritual, the ‘natural’ anger that hatred had generated could easily be indulged. As in the courtly norm, the notion of hatred as the sentiment of the feud, susceptible to management by society and the collective, clearly informed the religious discourse. Hatred worked in a similar way in the legal arena. The remission of injury and insult in thirteen-century Italian reconciliatory formulas was an act of the will capable of dissolving hatred caused by the offense. A Florentine notarial manual from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, predating the manuals of Rolandino Passageri 45 Lachmann and Nellman, Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival, vol. 1, 278–9, 366–7, 516–7, 522–3; vol. 2, 93–5, 192–3, 246. 46 On triuwe in Wolfram see Hildegard Emmel, Das Verhältnis von ere und triuwe im Nibelungenlied und bei Hartmann und Wolfram (Frankfurt a. M., 1936); and Gisela Spiess, Die Bedeutung des Wortes ‘triuwe’ in den mittelhochdeutschen Epen Parzival, das Nibelungenlied und Tristan (Diss., Heidelberg, 1957).

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and Durand, used the subtitle ‘Truce between those who hate each other’ [treuga facta inter hodiales], that is, those who were in a state of formal hostility. It explained that the pact was used to establish peace after ‘murder or hate’ [de homicidio sive odio], stressing clearly the technical meaning of hatred as feud or enduring, socialized personal enmity.47 As late as the first quarter of the eighteenth century in Corsica, this synallagmatic statement was the core of the ritual reconciliation with the kiss.48 To sum up: in a number of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century works controlled by discourses operative in all genres, hatred subsumed and supplanted anger as the sentiment of conventionalized enmity. It was closely related to social respect and referred to qualities constructed to reflect the honor and public esteem conferred on the individual. The thirteenth century witnessed one major development, the recognition of the possibility of individuation of hatred. Together with its other main features, this composite character of hatred was carried over in the late-medieval period. Where hatred was a derivative sentiment, our authors identified its social source with insult and injury. Hatred’s evolution in the official discourses thus followed a progression comparable to that of anger. Hatred began as an emotion and ended as an affect and a dispositional quality of the self. Consequently, late-medieval thought on conflict management focused on the process of generation of individualized hatred and on the manners of its transformation and/or dissolution. Late-medieval moralists and legal theorists had no doubts that hatred arising from social conditions motivated individual anger and lay at the root of conflict. They advocated prompt and fair legal resolution to prevent the stabilization of socially conditioned resentment into personalized hatred as a long-term disposition. The author of Love God and Drede, an English moral poem composed c. 1400, was attentive to the grave consequences of hatred and sought its origins in the injustice done to one of the parties to the conflict. The solution was timely amends and ritual reconciliation. ‘If a man do a-nother mys,’ advised the poet, ‘Neighbores shuld them auyse/The trespasour amende and kys/Do bothe parties euene assise.’ Otherwise, he warned, ‘Old horded hate maketh wratthe to rise/And ofte gilteMasi, ed., Formularium fiorentinum artis notariae, 44–5. Busquet, Le droit de la vendetta et les paci corses, 604, Appendix, xxvii: peace pact from September 16, 1733. 47 48

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les blod to blede/fle fro fooles, and folwe wise.’49 If no justice was done, hatred remained, ‘horded’ in the heart. The poem illustrates the mechanism by which hatred as an external, positional phenomenon could be stabilized by unjust treatment, internalized, and individualized in anger. Asocial sentiments arising from a situational encounter grew roots in one’s personality, spanning the space between self and person, and person and social role. If there was no positive legal intervention on the part of the group or society, or personal amends on the part of the offender to restore the equilibrium in social relations, the negative sentiment triggered by the misdeed became an affective disposition of the individual. On the contrary, timely action coordinating equal dispensation of justice and personal satisfaction could lead to reconciliation embodied in the ritual kiss, which dissipated hatred. Authors were also aware that, because of its capability of seeping down into affect and of being transformed into an emotion of the ‘heart,’ hatred was an easily individualized sentiment. Individualized hatred was not necessarily directly expressed. Once conceived it was hard to manage it by social pressure, since it could be concealed and even temporarily suspended. John Gower’s allegorical female ‘Hatred’ drew attention to the inner self, heart-and-mind, as the locus of the mortal emotion that ‘keeps the heart in flames.’ If hatred achieved no quick revenge, she ‘pretends to bear no rancor, but swallows the transgression very close to her heart in her thoughts; so despite the prayers of people, whether friends or relatives, no reconciliation will be made until the time comes when she can take her revenge, undoing the person forever.’ Hatred was thus also lodged in the mind and was sustained by the memory of injustice. Hatred won’t cease even after confession; ‘she tells the chaplain she will give up her ill will forever, but right after Easter she returns to it as dogs to their vomit.’ The outward calmness and the lack of signs of anger did nor guarantee the extinction of hatred. She ‘sets down anger on Easter Day and leaves it at the door of the holy church, and when she comes back later from the altar, she runs off again spreading anger.’50 49 James Kail, ed., Twenty-Six Political and other Poems (Including ‘Petty Job) from the Oxford MSS Digby 102 and Douce 322 (London, 1904), 6. 50 William B. Wilson, trans., John Gower, Mirour de l’Omme (The Mirror of Mankind) (East Lansing, 1992), 64–5.

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Likewise, in what is perhaps the most original and influential latemedieval legal treatise on ritual reconciliation and its individual, social, and emotional dimensions, the papal lawyer Rainaldo Corso focused exclusively on hatred as a disposition of the individual, but for him individuation had different consequences. Making a distinction between the domain of the public and that of the private, and retaining the pragmatism that had characterized north Italian reconciliation all along, Corso reduced reconciliation to ‘remission’ and remission in general to ‘remission of hatred.’ ‘[In reconciliation],’ he argued in Delle private rappacificazioni, published in 1555 under the auspices of the papal Curia, ‘we are required to remit hatred; but we are not required to remit injury to life or limb, still less injury of honor.’51 Corso’s comments came as the natural result of the evolution of the views on the sentiments of conflict and their separation from the legal frame. Building on the practical wisdom of generations of lawyers, he insisted that the definition of injury issuing forth in hatred depended on the will and intellect of the parties to the conflict and did not proceed mechanically from structural pressures. Corso identified hatred as the sentiment of the feud and grave personal conflict, as it has been since the early twelfth century. He delegitimized hatred, however, distinguishing between Fehdegang and Rechtsgang. Hatred might have devolved to the status of individual character trait, but it was not to be indulged in the way anger was. We should remit the feud and quash individual conflict with the ritual kiss, Corso stated, but we can still pursue satisfaction through venues that lead to lawful amends for injuries suffered in the course of the conflict. In the eyes of the legal theorists, the animosity characterizing feud and individual conflict had become an affair of personal sentiments, uncoupled from legal discourse. How did embodied ritual confront such a formidable enemy of the peace? At first glance, the constructionists’ point of view explains it all. If hatred were exclusively the emotion term for feud and formal hostility, giving these up through a legally framed reconciliation would mean giving up hatred. Being the emotional vestment of a collective practice, hatred would cease to exist with the change of the social conditions that constructed it in the first place. If there was residual affect, the bodily interaction with the kiss, with its highly

51

Rainaldo Corso, Delle private rappacificazioni (Cologne, 1698), 9.

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affective potential, forced the individual actors to rearrange their emotional world in accordance with the demand of the social. The tenor of the theory seems right. What eludes us, however, is the mechanism through which the ritual dissipation of asocial affects could work. The problem with this explanation is that it neglects the question of what made the kiss enter the legal sphere dominated by hatred in the first place. As seen in Raoul, and explained in Love God and Drede, socially constructed hatred could loosen its link with the collective and endow the individual with agency. Once generated, the emotions of conflict could not be confined to the domain of the collective. Their extended habitat was the emotional world of the individual outside the control of the social. If hatred could be put aside in order to participate in that most consuming of rituals, the divine service, and then the quarrel could be picked up again, ritual was no match for hatred. Remission of hatred through the kiss worked in an emotional environment closed to social pressures. There is an analytical device, however, that allows us to penetrate under the seemingly sealed surface in which ritual operated and to shed light into the ‘black box’ of hatred: the emotional phenomena embodied in tears. Thus, in Raoul, the first thought of Alice, Raoul’s widow, in catching sight of the wounded Bernier was to finish him off with a crowbar. Yet when he humbly kissed her shoes, she was so moved that ‘tears began to fall—she could not have prevented them if she were to be cut limb from limb, when she sees Bernier abase himself so utterly.’52 Such tears were not the standardized response to ritual deditio, and were shed by a woman, but there seems to be more to them than pure convention. Tears filled the eyes of Kriemhild at the reconciliation following the murder of Siegfried. ‘Never with more tears was peace regained/among old friends,’ exclaimed the poet, meaning the kisses exchanged between Kriemhild and her kin, ‘and still her sorrow pained’ [ir tet ir schade wê].53 In Parzival, the ritual kiss through which hatred was remitted, especially on the part of ladies, was accompanied by copious tears. Their source, again, were the sorrow and acute pain following the murder of the husband, lover, or favorite. Tears were not reserved for ladies alone. El Cid shed tears while chewing grass at the feet of

52 53

Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 313. Bartsch, Das Nibelungenlied, 182 and the note to ll. 1114.

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King Alfonso. As a rule in epic and romance, the person remitting hatred wept as he or she was about to kiss his or her adversary. Analyses of the meanings of tears shed in contexts of power contests argue that in the bulk of the accounts tears embody helplessness. Torn between conflicting demands on honor, rank, status, kin and family ties, individuality, or corporate identity, the individual was in a state of misery. Characters wept despite themselves, unable to untangle the knots of obligations wrapping them from all sides.54 Accepting this explanation, I would suggest a somewhat different emphasis in the context of ritual peacemaking, accounting for tears as a heuristic link between the positional, socially constructed sentiment of hatred and its internalized embodiment in the characters’ heart. The question is: What do tears tell us about ritual efficacy? It has been observed that medieval tears are a notoriously ambiguous source of information.55 Indeed, there are infinite numbers of contexts explaining the meaning and function of tears shed at reconciliation. Nonetheless, tears seem to refer to an overarching emotional mechanism borne by ritual and operating regardless of the immediate context. The ritual kiss was meant to overpower the emotions existing within the individual and constituting its core. The anticipation of intimate bodily interaction with the hated one triggered an intense emotional response. Tears or painful sensations experienced and expressed during ritual action witnessed precisely the internal struggle to overcome personal, ontological, and individualized affect. Ritual tears fulfilled admirably the task of expressing and confirming the existence of the values that constructed the self and gave it social worth. They stressed the self-sacrificial, excruciating emotion work of subjecting these values to the dictate of the social

54 General observations in Harold Scholler, Studien im semantischen Bereich des Schmerzes. Darstellung des semantischen Situation altfranzösischen Wörter für ‘Schmerz’—doeul, meschief, torment, descomfort—im Roman de Renart le Counterfait, (1328–1342) (Paris, 1954) and Ernhard Lommatzsch, ‘Darstellung von Träner und Schmerz in der altfranzösischen Literatur,’ ZRPh, 43 (1923), 20–67. 55 Günther Blaicher, Das Weinen in Mittelenglischer Zeit: Studien zur Gebärde des Weinens in historischen Quellen und literarischen Texten (Diss., Universität des Saarlandes, 1966); Sandra J. McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewiston, NY, 1990); Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York, 1999); Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991); and Marjory E. Lance, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden, 1996). To the best of my knowledge, medieval tears have not been a subject of a detailed, systematic, and comprehensive study.

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and embodied the transformation of the affective vestments of individualism that opposed social demand into socially validated emotions. The intensity of the process would not have been of such a magnitude had there been no conflict over agency.

Grief An emotional response to injury to life and honor, grief had entered the field of ritual before the beginning of the second millennium. In a number of cases it occupied the foreground of the discourse on reconciliation and appeared consistently as the source of anger and hate. Since Friedrich Maurer, in his now classic Leid, systematically overviewed the meanings of grief in high-medieval German fiction, there has been much research and theorizing on this fundamental sentiment.56 Despite criticism, there is a broad consensus among scholars that Maurer’s central findings hold true. Unlike the modern sentiment, high- and late-medieval grief was undeniably a socially inspired feeling, related to revenge and honor. Often, especially in epics and courtly fiction (the stuff of Maurer’s inquiry), grief resulted from the conflict between pressures for making peace and the desire for revenge.57 In narratives more narrowly inspired by religious ethics, the sources of grief were guilt and contrition for sins committed in the pursuit of vengeance. The relationship between the individual and the social embodied in grief varied according to context, but the trend for a transition from anger and hatred to grief in the later medieval centuries points to a shift in the social pressures managed by ritual. An episode from the eleventh century, in the Miracles of St. Ursmar, will set the stage for the discussion of grief.58 In the spring of 1060 the monks of 56 Friedrich Maurer, Leid. Studien zur Bedeutungs- und Problemgeschichte, besonders in den grossen Epen der Staufischen Zeit (Bern-Munich, 1951). See also the review of Dietrich Kralik in Wissenschaft und Weltbild, Monatschrift für alle Gebiete der Forschung, 6:1 (1953), 35ff. 57 See Miller, Humiliation, 106ff. 58 It has been used in the discussion of the Peace of God movement, and I will limit myself to its emotional ramifications, which have not been investigated. See Henry Platelle, ‘La violence et ses remèdes;’ and Geoffrey Koziol, ‘Monks, Feuds, and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders’ in Head and Landes, eds., The Peace of God, 239–58.

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Lourdes took on a reconciliatory circuit throughout northwestern France and the Low Countries. The relics brought to peace longwarring parties who now kissed to reconcile and poured alms to thank the saint. In the village of Lissewege, however, in the county of Flanders, the monks met up with a knight who refused to reconcile with his adversary. Neither the saint’s presence, nor the prostration of the offender begging for mercy and invoking Christ, helped convince the knight.59 Motivated by stubbornness [ prae stupore], a technical term for the monks’ reproach, and grief [ prae dolore], the knight argued for his right to revenge. Encircled by his peers, who wept silently, he changed colors growing now pale, now red, weeping and stressing his grief as an argument against reconciling. Countered by the offender’s own wailing and the mystical power emanating from the relics, the knight gnashed his teeth, bewailed his misery, and threw himself on the ground, biting the earth in grief [mordebat terram prae dolore]. This scene of intense emotional struggle lasted three hours. At last, a miraculous sign of God’s judgment, a column of smoke, terrified the knight. All in tears, he begged forgiveness from the saint. Forgiveness had to be merited though, and he duly kissed his enemy and confirmed the peace with an oath.60 This short narrative, designed to praise the saint-peacemaker, allows a number of observations. First, feud and reconciliation were perceived as encapsulated by, derived from, and dependent on the emotions. Second, grief was the expression of the inability of the offended knight to pursue his legal grievance. Anger was the appropriate sentiment in such cases, but it is important to note that the account does not refer to secular hierarchy in the contestation of rights as it was normally in cases of anger. It is also possible that anger was not mentioned since the knight was denied the right to anger—his grievance was not justified in the eyes of the author. Third, grief was expressed through the signs and features of anger. The sentiment itself and the technique it was dealt with were totally embodied in corporeal action and condition. Change of colors, tears, gnashing teeth, and biting the dust are all bodily actions, inward and outward, indicating emotion work stemming from and aimed at dealing with grief. Fourth, grief was the only sentiment mentioned,

59 60

The complete text is in AASS, April, II, coll. 571. Miracula S. Ursmari in itinere per Flandriam facta, MGH SS, vol. 15:2, 840–41.

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embodying the knight’s legal grievance and his helplessness. Finally, there is little that tells us how grief about the slain kin was translated into a source of social action; the account is too thin for making a conjecture. Most important for the inquiry into the ritual management of such grief is that the meaning of the kiss of peace conferred on the offender was constructed in the context of the relations between the ‘stubborn’ knight and the numinous. The rites of peace had no inherent value as an emotion tool dealing with grief. The meaning of the episode derived from the quasi-legal frame stretching from the forgiving knight, to the begging offender, to the saint, and to the divine itself. The fear of present and future retribution spontaneously generated at the sight of the miracle overrode the grief of the injured. Moreover, the subordination of individual agency to the dictate of the numinous was supported by the emotions of the spectators. The stubborn knight’s fellows sobbed, cried in suppressed voices, and were overwhelmed by dread in lockstep with the main actors as the dramatic encounter enfolded. The implications of weeping and beating their breasts are murky—a century later the scholastic theory of the theological emotions would call such gestures compunction and contrition, although the Miracles do not offer even a hint in this direction—but the meaning of the involvement is clear. It gave social legitimacy to God’s judgment and rendered the ‘stubborn’ knight’s grief illegitimate. Whether this account was an idiosyncratic example of grief or reflected an occurrence typical for that time, place, or type of discourse is hard to judge. It does offer some beginnings, though, whose evolution can be traced in later times. The heroic world of the Germanic epic, the courtly code, and the civic ethos of high medieval urban life all accommodated components of this model to elaborate their own interpretations of the meanings of grief elicited in the outcome of violent conflict and the ways it was dealt with by ritual. The Nibelungenlied offers what is perhaps one of the most conspicuous cases of high medieval grief as a socially constructed sentiment detached from the meaning of ‘individual suffering, sorrow of the self,’ which it took on in modern times.61 It makes clear the issues on which the Miracles came up short, the origins of grief and its

61

I follow Maurer, Leid, 13–38, who offers an apt analysis of leid in the epic.

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essence. The murder of Siegfried and the fraud with the dowry were perceived above all as affronts to Kriemhild’s social status, the latter depending on the esteem she enjoyed. As Kriemhild’s primary motif for action, grief reflected a more fluid and therefore much more contested social construct than anger. Anger had a codified, structured field of reference, pointing to customary or written law. Yet leid was not a quality of the character’s heart. It was an emotion imposed on her, something done to her. As Maurer argued, grief in this setting was the interiorized shame inflicted on the individual. It reflected lowered social standing. Social phenomenon as it was, its dissipation necessitated a correction in social perceptions, not forgiveness that would seal the imposed low status. Recognition and restitution of former rank and prestige were the only way to wipe clean the shame of injury. The ritual kiss embodying forgiveness clearly did not constitute an appropriate strategy for coping with such grief. The impossibility to deal with it through any means but force informed Hagen’s decision to deprive Kriemhield of her treasure and so neutralize her. His action only added to Kriemhield’s grief, but that did not matter. For Kriemhield, shame could not be remitted through vengeance as long as the wealth—read honor and power—to which she was entitled was not in her hands.62 She had kissed her treacherous kin to ‘forgive and forget,’ but as long as there was no positive social action to make up for the loss of Siegfried, grief remained a powerful conflict-generating stimulus. Indeed, we are told that Kriemhild only remitted her hate [haz] and anger [zorn], not her grief [leid ]. The unfortunate decision to marry her off to Atila gave her a weapon for revenge and a means to deal with the grief caused by the double shame that Hagen inflicted on her. The early courtly world inherited this imagery of grief as a reaction to shaming and set about enriching it with new connections. I will not repeat the literary scholars’ discussions of the ennobling functions and meanings of individualized grief. Their endeavors have been of crucial importance, but they mostly built on the theological paradigm of the sentiments. My task is to sketch instead the shifts in the social perception of grief in cases of ritual reconciliation. Two trends are clearly visible. They highlight the transition to a new, 62 Bartsch, ed., Das Nibelungenlied, 184ff., translation in Francis G. Gentry and James K. Walter, eds., German Epic Poetry (New York, 1995), 134ff.; see also Maurer, Leid, 21–2.

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complex, two-tiered paradigm of grief, making the sentiment more susceptible to ritual management. On the one hand, there was the traditionally supported positional meaning of grief. Leid as the urge to defend honor was the motivation of Duke Ernst, who had been slandered before the emperor.63 Kudrun’s grief broke her heart [herzen leid], but its source was the shame she had suffered by being abducted, brought by force to Sigeband’s court, and forced to live the life of a servant girl. This had brought grief [herzenleit] to her mother too. The queen had wept after Kudrun, but what hurt her was the thought that her sufferings were a delight for Ortrun’s relatives.64 The murder of Morold caused much grief [leide] to the queen in Gottfried’s Tristan. It was her heart [mîn herze] that would not let her make peace and accept Tristan among her ‘friends.’ In the end, however, it turned out that fitting amends were sufficient to fully alleviate her grief.65 Grief after honor lost in the struggle with the Saracens was the chief emotion fueling Willehalm’s anger, as he stood alone in the midst of King Louis’s court, laughed at by queen and courtiers. Grief was only alleviated after the count avenged himself on the Saracens, restoring his honor.66 The language of practical morality and the emotional repercussions of the feud continued to carry these meanings of grief well into the late medieval centuries.67 On the other hand, the mature courtly tradition of the thirteenth century tended to either individualize grief or make it an abstract moral concept and thus divorce it from social esteem. Leid was the central theme of Wolfram’s Parzival, as it was in Willehalm, but its metaphysical meaning distanced it from the context of reconciliation. The death of his nephew, Saduc, grieved the emperor in Guy of Warwick and yet at the reconciliation with Duke Segum he remitted only his anger. Personal grief remained in a guise much like the

63

Weber, ed., HERZOG ERNST, 249; see also 239 and 245. Bartsch, ed., Kudrun, 312–3; translation in Connell, ed., Kudrun, 104, 162–3. 65 Bechstein, ed., Tristan, 16. 66 Heinzle, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbachs Willehalm, 250–51; translation in Charles Passage, The Middle High German Poem of Willehalm by Wolfram of Eschenbach (New York, 1977), 93. 67 See for example the case discussed by Daniel Waley, ‘A Blood-Feud with a Happy Ending: Siena, 1285–1304,’ Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham, eds., City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Essays presented to Philip Jones (London, 1990), 51, Appendix. The term is dolor. 64

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modern concept of sadness and anguish, since the peace was final.68 What came with the courtly ethos, therefore, was the changed valence of the link between the ‘heart’ and society embodied by grief. Grief, formerly an exclusive and almost automated emotional embodiment of injured honor, was now a link to the heart and mind of the self, which generated an individuated emotional response to social pressures. In this environment the meaning of grief became two-pronged. As noted above, the standard emotion term for the sentiment of discord in Wofram’s Parzival was haz. The emotive commotion seizing Wofram’s heroes in anticipation of ritual reconciliation was riuwe. Riuwe was a concept related to the idea of grief and remorse in its modern understanding. For Wolfram, riuwe bore a strong connection to pain [wê] and sorrow [ jâmer]. Drawing on this pool of shared meanings, grief pointed to the inner self, but also to the already mentioned and absolutely essential concept of triuwe, which was its source and field of action.69 Triuwe was to God and men, and a phenomenon only effective in socializing. Its highest, most distinguished form was faith as culmination of all virtue. Failing of triuwe consigned a hero to a spiritual wilderness and utter desolation. The courtly character without triuwe was not truly human. Through the concept of triuwe, a new paradigm of grief emerged, drawing on the theological emotions of high scholasticism and the knightly ethos and linking the inner being to society in a thoroughly reconstituted manner. Theological intricacies aside, the new paradigm eschewed some of the dimensions of grief as a positional social construct operating exclusively within the framework of shame and honor. Invoking triuwe and the divine as its standards, it built the implications of guilt and sin into grief. If sorrow and guilt could be linked to the honor paradigm and the bitter chagrin of shame, and induced in the self as the interiorization of moral trespass, they could be generated within and by the self for the purposes of social cooperation. These twists in the nature of grief rendered it more accommodating to ritual management. Three variations in the new paradigm are worth discussing, all having their origins in the thirteenth-century environment of grief. Whether they developed concurrently and represented a complex stage in the evolution of the emotional technology of ritual or constituted outgrowths of earlier traditions is an open 68 69

Conlon, ed., Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik, 151. Parzival, vol. 1, 516, 532; vol. 2, 248.

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question. They had common features, however, and were shared in a number of discourses. First, grief was associated with default on the ritually taken obligation to guarantee that the peace contract would stand or there would be punishment in the form of a severely negative emotional experience. Such grief was mixed with guilt and shame, not a surprising development in view of the formal obligatory dimensions of the kiss. The point is illustrated in the episode of Guy of Warwick where a treacherous peace was made in the name of a senior knight, Duke Loher of Lorraine. After the peace pact was sealed with the kiss, Guy’s party was caught in an ambush. Guy, who had accepted the peace but refused to kiss, got away unharmed and happened across the duke. Great was his indignation. ‘Wherefore have you imagined this treason!’ he confronted him, ‘I considered you a loyal knight! Certes, evil will ensue to you for having taken the advice of the false Duke of Pavia, and you will be forever dishonored by it, inasmuch as, after having kissed us, you betray us so vilely!’ At these words, the duke was seized by such a grief, affecting his heart [si grand deul au ceur; te duel en ad le duc; grete dole], that he could not answer a word. Tears came into his eyes and he rode away.70 The desire to run, disappear, and hide oneself is the primary indication of shame. Guy’s heavy words challenged the essence of the duke’s social persona, his quality of a ‘loyal knight.’ The pain generated by the mixture of negative feelings was the price to pay for the trespass of the ritually invoked norm. In the confluence of sentiments leading to emotional distress, guilt seems to be the leading principle, governing the conduct externalized as shame and conceptualized as grief. The feelings of guilt and shame transformed the legal liability of ritual into a moral category. To default on the ritually taken obligation was subject to social disapprobation, the response of which was internalized as an acutely negative emotional sensation. The rigid governance of the legal frame controlling through

70

The modern English version is after Told, ed., Guy of Warwick, 102. The AngloNorman original specifies that the Duke suffered si grand deul au ceur, see Conlon, ed., Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik, 209. The fifteenth-century version uses a thoroughly legal language, ‘Were we not kyste and made at oon,’ but spares the Duke the honor approach; nevertheless, he was afflicted by ‘grete dole.’ See Zupitza, ed., The Romance of Guy of Warwick, 156. The French version does not mention tears, but the rendering of duel in the grip of which the Duke finds himself is impressive enough, see Ewert, ed., Gui de Warewic, 177.

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anger was replaced by the more flexible social pressure of shaming. And yet, in this model, grief at dishonor was not an external condition imposed on the individual. It was produced in the self and resulted from the awareness of moral transgression. The transformation occurring with the incorporation of guilt and shame in grief ’s referential field had thus an important consequence. That intense grief could be felt justifies the actor somewhat, pointing out that he was, after all, a moral being. The incident in Guy of Warwick relays the ways in which the discourse on moral grief represented ritual as a device incorporating the moral standards of the community into the emotional world of the individual. The moral agent was in the grip of structural and legal norms. Embodied in ritual, these norms constituted a field of internalized ‘feeling rules.’ There was no need for coercion to create restraints to immoral action. Once the duke became aware of the nature of his action, the norm he had interiorized triggered negative emotional pressure. The immoral agent—impersonated by the Duke of Pavia in Guy—could not feel grief because he had not internalized the norms that constituted belonging to the group. He was in the grip of asocial personal sentiments, which were attached to his inner self and were managed neither by interpersonal interaction through ritual nor by social or collective disapproval. Second, grief was the result of emotion work constituting the positive moral act of overcoming asocial sentiments so that ritual peace could take place. Such grief announced the actor’s moral and emotional cleansing constituting the readiness to reconcile. We have already seen in Gautier’s grief in Raoul a demonstration of emotion work performed under peer pressure. In Eilhart of Oberge’s Tristrant, characters willfully generated intense grief to prepare for reconciliation. The remorseful ladies, Isolde and Brangane, lay at each other’s feet seized by great grief [ grovssem laid ] stemming from the realization of their misdeeds, real and imagined, until they found mercy [gnade] in their hearts and kissed in reconciliation.71 The scene of intense emotion work marks the full swing of an important shift in the ritual economy of grief. From obstacle on the path of social cooperation, as it was in the heroic world, in Elhart’s thirteenthcentury romance personally experienced grief turned into the foundation

71

Buschinger and Spiewok, eds., Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant und Isolde, 83.

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of positive social interaction. Eilhart’s language was heavily influenced by the contemporary theological discourse on reconciliation and compunction. This was the core of the ennobling grief through which the morally troubled hero attained a higher standard of ethics. The concept was central to Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan, the prototype upon which Eilhart built his own work, and was a staple feature of the thirteenth-century romance. Eilhart, however, simplified the original for his audience’s sake. For the knightly public, betraying one’s loyal friend was a step with legal consequences. Forgiving one’s lord for such an offense projected the feelings generated in ritual onto the feudal covenant and derived from the premise that if the bond stood, it stood because it was stabilized by appropriate emotions. Negative feelings had to be overcome and expunged by means of emotion work. Eilhart identified the sentiment generated by the emotion work as grief, equaling his emotional technology of peace to the norms governing feudal custom and fitting these two into the precepts of moral theology. In the third place, grief was employed not only to reform one’s own emotive world, but to reach out to the victim of insult and injury as well. Late-medieval ritual reconciliation demanded open demonstration of grief, regardless of what was the inner emotional state of the wrongdoer. Actual emotions did not matter, for such grief and its social role were fully positional. Concurring with the theory of ‘staging,’ in this model grief articulated in preparation for the ritual kiss communicated remorse, linking the parties through the referential frame of the moral discourse. Such grief implied perturbation and distress over the act of insult and injury, but its main function was to constitute a formal acknowledgment of guilt. This justified the demand for restitution put forth by the wronged party. The forgiveness of the other party alleviated that grief. In the medieval Frisian tradition, establishing such a positional emotional connection with the injured party was a legal requirement.72 It preceded the oath of reciprocal forgiveness [Gleichheitseid ], taken by the offender to give legal shape to his or her willingness to forgo revenge in case similar injury had been inflicted on him or her. Before kissing the kin of the victim, the offender had to swear, 72 For the circumstances of the codification, at Upstalboom, of the Frisian law codex of the Seven Sea provinces in 1323 see Karl Freiherr von Richthofen, Untersuchungen über Friesische Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin, 1880), 425ff. and 480ff.

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with twelve oath-helpers, that the misdeed grieved him, and would grieve him forever.73 In a more realistic tone, in the already discussed keure of Aalst, the guilty ones had to declare that they were ‘bitterly grieving the death [of Guillaume] and will be [grieving] forever, until they render satisfaction to God and to you.’ The condition of grief was to be terminated by the forgiveness of the other party.74 Grief in this scheme was not an internal disposition; it was a condition constructed and deconstructed in socializing. As in the honor and shame paradigm, grief here was a positional sentiment, but its source was different. Grief emanated from a moral template and served a legal condition. The keure of Aalst gives us the source of grief. It appears to be perceived as originating in the sense of guilt felt by the wrongdoer. More importantly, it allows us to understand the role of the ritual kiss as the rationalized instrument of dealing with grief and the function of forgiveness. The murder induced a material and moral debt to the community, God, and the other party. Until the debt was repaid, the transgressors remained in a state of insecurity sustained by the disapprobation of the authorities and the legal frame defining murder as a wrong deed. The demonstrative guilt and grief of the Wooters involved them in the social judgment defining the norm, whatever its internalized form might have been. The kiss was an extension of the involvement aiming to neutralize the negative judgment both morally and socially. By virtue of being a legal device, grief embodied the wrongdoer’s formal commitment to repay the moral and social debt incurred through the transgression. The kiss constituted the liability that the injured or insulted kin undertook to accept the emotionally coached ‘satisfaction.’ The kiss thus straddled internal affect and legal sociability in a condensed emotive hub that defies neat definition, but which recognized the normativity and morality of the social order as a product of the interaction between embodied agents. The social script within which the kiss and its supporting rites functioned did require even more direct proof that the requisite emotions really existed. It demanded emotion work, and the testimony 73 That hit him tha leth was and nu leth is and emmer mer leth bliwa scel, so lange so hine riuchte kan bithenzia; see His, Strafrecht der Friesen, 365. 74 Want hemlieden de zelve doot bitterlike leet es, ende eeuwelic wesen zal, tot dies zij Gode ende u daeraf genouch ghedaen zullen hebben; see Limburg-Stirum, Coutumes d’Alost, 470.

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was the shedding of tears. Whereas in most of the medieval West there was no prescribed judicial formula as in Frisia, in reconciliatory practice following the model of penance, of which more later, the wrongdoer was expected to cry bitterly when offering the kiss of peace to the kin of the victim. This is what Guilhem Bascul, a carpenter of Marseille, was required to do on April 10, 1349, Good Friday, in order to receive the pardon of the kinsmen of Guilhem Turel, whom he had killed in a drunken mêlée.75 Bascul’s ritual posture of grief was an admission of guilt and remorse, from which the other party’s rights stemmed, but tears went beyond what the keure of Aalst had required. The sentiments generated in the process of inducing tears meshed with the feelings of the injured and focused on the deed, and in admitting the effect it had on others reconstituted the injured party’s honor.76 From the inquiry thus far, it would appear that there is little guidance as to what extent and in what form the norms of reconciliation, be they social, legal, or theological, were internalized as feeling rules. I have discussed only isolated fragments of the major discourses within which these norms were constructed. To understand the workings of ritual in the context of the social norms, two things remain to be done. First, the normative fragments have to be reinserted into the broad areas of intentionality that generated their referential fields. Second, there is the problem of the efficacy of ritual as an emotional device. The latter is the derivative product of the interaction between normative discourse and actual practice. I presently turn to the first problem.

75 Quoted after Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Common Violence: Vengeance and Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century Marseille,’ Past & Present, 151 (May 1996), 50. For more examples from mid-fourteenth century Marseille see also his ‘Hatred as a social institution,’ 90–93. 76 For a discussion of remorse see Gabrielle Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford, 1985), 101ff.

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CHAPTER FIVE

DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES

By far the most visible of the discursive environments of the ritual kiss of peace was the religious paradigm. In this cultural frame, human existence was an intensely emotional metaphenomenon, an extension of the love between God and humankind. The rituals of Christian reconciliation, the main practice embodying that cosmic mystery, were a powerful tool for moral education. Through the mobilization of a range of sentiments, ritual played a crucial role in the integration of the lofty values of Christian morality into the everyday life of ordinary lay folk. The stress on positive affect in the link between the heavenly forgiver and the earthly creature was a major trend in the new type of spirituality developed in the high Middle Ages. Most important in the process were, on the one hand, the sentiments of guilt, remorse, and repentance and, on the other hand, the sentiments of pity, mercy, and love. These normative emotions entered the theological discourses attempting to govern the relationship among humans as well. The discursive representations of the rites of peace highlight some of the strategies by which the norms of affective interaction were projected into practice, reaching out to the lay faithful to structure their feelings through the embodied action of the ritual kiss. Implementing moral paradigms and positive emotionality into ritual peace was a project that was at its beginnings when the new millennium dawned. The few early narratives on reconciliation dating from the eleventh century eschewed interpretation of embodied emotions. The monk of Lourdes who recorded the peace circuit of his brethren did not employ the language of moral theology to render his account meaningful to the reader. To him bodily language spoke for itself, as did the concepts of retributive justice and do ut des morality. Similar was the position of Lambert of Deutz in the Life of Heribert. Writing in the 1050s, he did not frame his account into an overarching, emotionally oriented interpretative scheme. The primary affects of fear of God’s retribution and the wrath of His earthly vessel were enough of a motivation to sustain the reconciliation.

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This plain talk went out of fashion in the early decades of the twelfth century. The trend was not limited to the output of monastic scriptoria. Tales of reconciliation condensed in short exempla, the staple diet of popular preachers, wove theoretical constructs into the texture of their sermons on peacemaking. Fashioned to suit the taste of a diversified public, by the late twelfth century the exempla became a very influential and wide-reaching genre, which endured until the Reformation. So did the representations of ritual peacemaking fashioned by their authors.

The Tale of the Forgiving Knight The backbone of the inquiry that follows is the exploration of the evolution and appropriations of a typical exemplum, the Tale of the Forgiving Knight. The Tale was the most widespread short medieval narrative on ritual peacemaking. Originating in the late eleventhcentury story of Giovanni Gualberto’s conversion to religious life, it initially targeted the major issue of medieval peacemaking, the feud, and its most likely perpetrators, the knightly class, but was gradually adjusted to address a variety of audiences.1 Its numerous renditions, not yet investigated as a corpus, combine elements of lay and religious understanding of ritual, morality, emotions, peace, and reconciliation, and would repay a closer scrutiny.2 The variants of the Tale revolve around a central motif. A relative of a knight (next of kin, son, or father) is slain by another knight. Bent on revenge and catching his enemy by surprise, the vengeful knight raises his hand to strike. At this the wrongdoer prostrates himself and implores the avenger to take pity on him, for the sake of Christ. The revenging knight stays his hand, changes his mind, and reconciles with the offender by kissing and/or embracing him. They go to church together to thank God, and in a gesture of divine approval the crucifix bows his head to the forgiver, or leans over to kiss and embrace him. 1 The story of Giovanni Gualberto is in AASS, vol. 3, July 12. See coll. 298–9, and 328 for the First Life, and 349 for the Second Life. 2 For references to most variants of the Tale see Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum. A Handbook of Medieval Tales (Helsinki, 1964), N. 1375, and the Addenda et Corrigenda in Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Les Exempla médiévaux. Introduction à la recherche, suivie des tables critiques de l’Index exemplorum de Frederic C. Tubach (Carcassone, 1992).

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The goal of my inquiry is to capture the mechanisms of the Tale’s social appropriations. I follow a twofold strategy. First, I will chart the development of the normative accounts of the emotions encoded in the exempla. Second, I will examine some of the points of intersection of the theological emotion norms and the value systems of the lay societies they targeted. My approach is morphological rather than chronological as I seek to highlight the modes in which the high- and late-medieval variants of the Tale addressed the needs of various audiences. Although there seem to be enough versions of the Tale to attempt to do more than outlining its broad contours in time, this is something that goes beyond the task of this enquiry.

Pity and Honor: Caesarius of Heisterbach Composed by the end of the eleventh century as an integral part of a larger work, Giovanni Gualberto’s first Life, the Tale soon took on a life of its own. Deviations from the original story, in which the role of ritual was downplayed and emotions were almost nonexistent, were already visible in Gualberto’s second Life, an early twelfth-century work. The Tale was already a popular account by the end of the century, when moralists began to integrate it into the exempla tradition. The gist of the story in practically all traditions from the early thirteenth century on derived from Caesarius of Heisterbach. A prolific writer, he put together its most influential version in one of his major works, the Dialogue on Miracles. This is the first account in the Tale’s tradition where there is an explicit mention of the kiss of peace as the embodiment of pity presented as the primary sentiment of reconciliation. In Caesarius’s rendition, the prostrated offender implored the knight to take pity on him ‘for the honor of the most holy cross.’ ‘Touched to the heart by these words,’ the injured knight deliberated what to do, when pity suddenly overcame him, and, ‘for the honor of the holy cross,’ he pardoned the offender and gave him the kiss of peace. Not long thereafter, while on crusade, in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the image of Christ bowed to him from the cross. This was, Caesarius intimated, a great honor.3 3 Text in Joseph Strange, ed., Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis Cisterienses Dialogus miraculorum (Cologne, 1851, reprint Ridgewood, 1966), vol. 2, 99, N. 21; translated in Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, with an Introduction by G. C. Coulton (London, 1929), 23, N. 21.

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The most significant feature of Caesarius’s short story is his assessment of what constituted the motivation for the peace act and how was it rewarded. Honor cropped up continuously in his account. Caesarius evidently acknowledged it as the central preoccupation of his readers. To accommodate their value system, he incorporated honor in the hierarchy of the feelings stemming from a normative structure which made them all hinge on pity, the sentiment encoded in the religious paradigm of reconciliation. The construct was finely tuned to the sentiments informing the emotional world of Caesarius’s targeted public, the knightly class. The emotional technology constructed by Caesarius was not designed to confront the pressures of secular honor. Rather, the author adopted honor as the organizational principle of the account. Pity, the sentiment of forgiveness and the category of paramount importance in Caesarius’s moral discourse, was in this case a political sentiment as well. Founded on benevolence, it presupposed the superiority of the pitying subject and the inferiority of the object of pity. The act of pitying constructed a political hierarchy between the reconciling parties, which made up for the imbalance produced by the offense. Pity was not backed by respect to the pitied object. Respect was reserved for the divine. The forgiving knight’s pity was the recognition accorded to the position of submission adopted by the trespasser and the religious model invoked in the performance. The trespasser himself was granted little, if any, agency. Caesarius’s pity was thus more of an emotional shield protecting the injured person as he chose to forsake honor restored through revenge and embrace the notion of honor embodied by forgiveness. Pity was also the link between honor as a secular construct and the threat of divine retribution awaiting the avenger at the end of his days. The sentimental palette of the encounter elevated the knight above the trespasser. It legitimized the incorporation of the emotional response of pity into the normative scheme identified with the demands of the knightly code of conduct. Once this had been achieved, the ritual kiss entered the scene to fulfill the double task of legal reconciliation and identification with the divine on which the link established by pity depended.4

4 See for example a thirteenth-century Spanish rendition of the exemplum in El Libro de los Examplos, in Pascual de Gayangos, ed., Biblioteca de autores espanoles desde la formacion del lenguaje hasta nuestros dias. Escritores en prosa anteriores al siglo XV (Madrid, 1952), 453, N. 23.

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Molded to serve the taste of a specific audience while preserving its value as a theological virtue linking the ritual act of peace with the numinous, pity appears as an ubiquitous concept capable of addressing diverse mindsets. Practical law was much on the mind of Peter Idley, the knight, royal officer, and self-styled moralist of Oxfordshire in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. So was the late-medieval theology of morality. In the Instructions he wrote for the edification of his son, the section about the disastrous consequences of anger—‘wrathe’— conjoined legality and pity in an overarching frame of guilt linking the secular world with the law of the numinous. Idley’s account flows smoothly between the banks of law and religion. The concepts of offense, trespass, purchase, sentence, grace, and mercy (in legal context), were matched and contrasted by devotion, contrition, bitter sorrow of the heart, penance, pity, love, charity, absolution, and bliss. Both offender and injured thought of their respective cases and their relationship with each other and the divine as a judicial procedure at the court of the Judge ‘aboue,’ after whose laws human justice was modeled but for whom charity reigned supreme. The moment of forgiveness came when the avenger beheld ‘this knyght praieng so peteuslie’ and chose God’s justice through mercy over talion law and secular justice of the customary kind.5 Legal terminology rendered the case comprehensible for Idley’s fellow country squires, as did the emphasis on ‘noble charity,’ but the message that was being sent out was one of cooperation and forgiveness triggered by pity. Pity canceled the legal grudge. It was the sentiment opening up the knight for the divine grace, capped by the bliss that the crucifix bestowed on him with the kiss. Not only did love win against the law. As it had been with honor for Caesarius, for Idley law itself was subsumed in Christian charity through pity and the final act of recognition embodied in the kiss of the deity. Applying a similar idea of a causal connection between human and supernatural reconciliation, John Mirk’s influential Festial brought up the issue of ecclesiastical protection as no less a powerful and 5

Charlotte D’Evelyn, ed., Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son (London, 1935), 166–7.

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obligating norm. Awareness of this imperative prompted Mirk’s knight to stay his revenge on the offender whom he had followed to the altar, naked sword in hand. The offender’s acknowledgment of his ‘trespast’ and his ‘lowly prayde of mercy for Cristys sake’ make the avenger realize what ‘horrybull a dede’ it would be to do harm in church. His own conscience of guilt and legal trespass awakened, for the love of Christ he kissed the offender in forgiveness, for which he was himself forgiven with the kiss of the crucifix.6 John Mirk ended his Tale on a more universal note, recommending that ‘ ∏us shull ye foryeue oπyr for Cristis loue, and klip, and kys, and be frendes; and πen woll Crist clyppe and kys you, and yeue you πe joy πat euer schall last.’ The awareness elicited in the ritual act of deditio affected the higher-level relationship with the divine and prompted it to display and embody, in its turn, the sentiments that structured the relationships between men in the ritual kiss.

Pity and Do ut Des Morality: Jacob’s Well Pity was considered both a gift from the divine, which shared with humans one of its major faculties, the capacity to forgive, and a sentiment generated in the individual when proper ritual conduct set the stage in a way conducive to reconciliation. The noble classes were taught to adopt it to address their central preoccupations with honor, hierarchy, loyalty, and legality through the matrix of the theological scheme. For less sophisticated audiences it sufficed to lay out a simple scenario in which pity represented the link between the erring humankind and the all-forgiving God, and was the condition which brought about the absolution of one’s sins. The anonymous author of Jacob’s Well, a fifteenth-century English moral treatise, staked his theology of reconciliation exclusively on ritually induced pity as the point of intersection between two basic relationships, between Christ and man, on the one hand, and man and man, on the other hand. Asked to forgive for the love of Christ, the avenging knight was ‘steryd to mercy, & in πat mercy sprang πe watyr of grace, πat is, πe gifte of pyte.’ In that pity and mercy he 6 Theodor Erbe, ed., Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus ( John Mirk) (London, 1905), 123–4.

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lifted the offender from the ground and told him that ‘for πat mercy & for πat pyte πat Ihesu hadde in vs, I wil haue mercy & pity on πe,’ forgiving him the death of his father and kissing him in token of love. His pity was repaid on the following Good Friday. Leaning over to kiss the crucifix, the crucifix ‘halsyd hym abowtyn his necke, & seyde: πou forgyve πis knygt πi faderis deth for my loue, & kyssed hym; πer-fore I forgeue πe alle πi synnes & kysse πe.’ ‘Lo,’ concluded the author, ‘so do ye mercy, πat grace of pyte sprynge in you, whereby youre synne may be forgouyn.’7

Pity, Joy, and the Social Dynamics of the Ritual Sentiments: Guy of Warwick The normative account on the sentiments in which pity organized legality, honor, social ranking, and reciprocal morality with a slant toward imitative magic embodied in ritual is captured in another episode of Guy of Warwick, where the Tale of the Forgiving Knight fused with the motif of the rebel noble. The scene in question is the one in which Duke Segum reconciled with the emperor and gained forgiveness for the murder of his nephew. All renditions of the romance narrate how, stripping himself down to his shirt, with a naked sword in the one hand, and an olive branch in the other hand, the duke made his way to the church where the emperor was to hear mass. Once there, his humble submission won him the kiss of peace and forgiveness. There is, however, a disagreement in the rendition of the observers’ reaction. The early, thirteenth-century versions at this point either forwent the emotions or relayed the great joy of the barons at the humility demonstrated by the duke.8 By contrast, the later, fifteenth-century versions portrayed those attending as greatly pitying the duke and weeping for him.9 The switch from joy to pity and tears is not startling. The appearance of tears conforms to the evolution of the Tale in all traditions. Tears do not feature in variants before the fourteenth century; there7 Arthur Brandeis, ed., Jacob’s Well. An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience (London, 1900), 252–3. 8 Ewert, ed., Gui de Warewic, 82–3. 9 Told, ed., Guy of Warwick, 65; Zupitza, ed., The Romance of Guy of Warwick, 72–3. See also Hopkins, The Sinful Knights, 94 and note 39.

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after they are a standard occurrence.10 Also, both pity and joy have participatory character and express the audience’s validation of the legitimacy of reconciliatory ritual. In their essence, however, the two sentiments betray radically different value systems. The attitude of the earlier authors was structurally informed. They focused on the restoration of the political relationship that sustained the social order. The barons’ joy indicated their approval of the reconciliation as a restoration of the peace. Joy and tears for joy were reactions of satisfaction with the mending of the broken social bonds. The onlookers were concerned with the restorative effects of ritual. The social bonds and the person of the duke mattered for them as far as they fitted the ritual actors in a prearranged political scheme. According to the logic of relatedness that equaled hatred with the feud, joy was the emotion term for loyalty. Ritual submission was conceived of as an expression of the politically normative humility supporting the distribution of power. Morality was evaluated from a political standpoint. The duke’s humbleness legitimized the order of society. On the contrary, the pity of the observers who wept for the duke in the later accounts was agency-oriented. The duke was pitied, in his person, for what was perceived as humiliation. The act of submission had changed its meaning. The barons’ sentiments gave precedence to individual worth and the collective bond—the duke was a member of their class and had treated them with honor—over the ordering of the social and political systems. The duke’s ritual submission was not perceived as manifestation of political conformism. Rather, it was considered an infringement of his social rank and status. The shift from joy to pity and the different thrust of the two emotions link the meaning of pity in reconciliation to the transition from humility to humiliation. Humility and the joy it produced stabilized emotionally the early ritual contract, for they referred to an allincluding, universal social order linking society and the numinous. Humiliation was a limited construct and the pity it generated designated the noble class as a separate moral community. The dignified upper-class sufferer and his self-controlled humiliation provoked tears of pity legitimizing not so much the social order as the position of the individual actor, the respected member of a restricted social 10 One of the earliest examples is Jean Gobi’s work; see Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, ed., La Scala Coeli de Jean Gobi (Paris, 1991), 473–4, ch. 717.

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group. Not only does this episode demonstrate that Adam Smith’s theory of the moral sentiments had long roots indeed, but it also manifests the tensions arising in the paradigmatic late-medieval interpretations of the meanings of the emotions of peace and reconciliation.11 With time, these tensions were to collapse the very foundation of the dominating theological discourse. In the meantime, those constructing it switched to yet another register of interpretation.

Love: Robert Mannyng The political complications of the projection of the concept of pity into the late-medieval social theory of the peace might have escaped some moralists, but they had a spectrum of sentiments to draw on to make up for pity’s shortcomings. John Mirk had already induced pity from the love of Christ; later moralists focused entirely on love. Love guaranteed the mystic ritual union with the divine that rewarded the forgiver, but it also eliminated the tension between forgiveness and the implications of hierarchy in the ritual bond. It was the ideal relation of peacemaking; moreover, it was the result of emotion work. John Mirk’s call for love echoed through numerous versions of the Tale in which love of Christ reigned supreme as the sentiment of reconciliation. In such environment, honor disappeared; legality proved more resilient but ultimately followed suit. Instead, the emotional texture of the Tale was presented as supported exclusively by love. A popular French variant, preserved in numerous collections of exempla, said only that the offender requested pardon ‘for the love of the merciful Christ’ [ pour l’amour dou debonnaire Jesucrist].12 The Tale in the widely copied compendium of the French Dominican Stephen of Bourbon stressed that the forgiver was ‘moved by piety.’13 Even more telling are the exempla that used Caesarius’s model but substituted love for honor as the prime mover of action. The AngloNorman Manuel des Pechiez of William of Wadington, the Liber 11 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. I. Macfie (1759, reprint, Indianopolis, 1982), 10–13, 306–14. 12 See one of the most widely represented versions in Gérard Blangez, ed., Ci nous dit. Recueil d’exemples moraux (Paris, 1986), vol. 2, 12, ch. 418. 13 A. Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues, tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIII e siècle (Paris, 1877), 433, ch. 503: ‘motus pietate.’

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Exemplorum of an anonymous thirteenth-century English Franciscan friar, and the Alphabet of Tales, a Middle English version of Caesarius, all followed that tradition, substituting mercy for pity and piety and love for honor and identifying the knight’s sudden conversion with compunction of heart.14 From these modest beginnings, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, perhaps the most influential of the fourteenth-century English collections, erected a grand narrative of affective ritual encompassing the injured, the offender, and the divine. In this rendition the offender, besieged by the revengeful knight whose father he had slain, was aware that his misdeed was a sin and suffered greatly at the impossibility to attend church and ask forgiveness from God. At last, on Good Friday he set out for church, clad in a penitential garb. Surprised by his enemy, he implored the avenger to imitate Christ and forgive him, if he wanted to be forgiven himself. The knight, hearing such a remorseful prayer, became ‘meke & myld,’ and ‘for Ihu loue πat dere vs boghte/and for hys moder loue so dere’ granted him peace, and ‘yn gode loue keste πat knyght.’ In this account love transcended all other considerations, including honor, legality, and hierarchy, and elicited the reward of the numinous. When the forgiving knight entered church ‘in gode loue and parfyt charyte’ and kneeled down before the cross, ‘∏e crucyfyx πat πere was leyde/Hys arme fro πe cros vpbreyde/And clypte πe chyld hym betwyx/And aftyr keste hym πat crucyfyx.’ The human and the divine worlds met at the point of the kiss of peace. The ritual was the gateway transcending the boundaries of the sacred and the secular with the powerful concept of love. The parish wondered at the great miracle that had sanctioned the peace, confirmed the worthiness of the knight, and filled his heart with bliss. Mannyng stressed the collective approbation by adding that the knight who had ‘mekede hys herte so’ was indeed ‘dygne.’15 It is worth expanding on the last point. Mannyng’s attention to social validation reflects his keen insight into the social psychology of love as a sentiment incapable of creating a community. He seems 14 Mary Macleod Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, Early English Text Society, vols. 126 & 127 (London, 1904–196, reprint Millwood, N.Y., 1987), 337, N. 495; E. J. Arnould, Le Manuel des Péchés. Étude de littérature religieuse Anglo-Normande (XIII ème siècle) (Paris, 1940), 143. 15 Idelle Sullens, ed., Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne (Binghampton, N.Y., 1983), 97–9.

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to have doubted that the act of forgiveness will be approved spontaneously. Love was an intimate feeling shared with the loved object alone. Hence the need for the miracle of Christ on the crucifix, leaning over to kiss the forgiver in a tangible expression of the emotional bond. There are no reasons to doubt that for those to whom the Tale was preached the two kisses were causally linked. And yet, the feelings induced in the observers were not the same as those of the parties to the reconciliation. People marveled, awed, and were struck by the miracle. The sentiments of the audience were not an extension of the affects supporting the ritual arrangement as told by the moralists. Love to the other, embodied in the ritual kiss, mirrored and sanctioned by the ritual kiss of the numinous, appeared as an affect and an intimate personal experience. It could not be emotionally parceled out and distributed to the members of the collective. Love operated through the embodied action of ritual, but it could not break through the boundaries of the body without mediation. As long as the divine was directly involved—and it had to be for ritual to work its magic—all positive affect remained centered on it. This erected a barrier that broke off the continuity of emotive experience that was supposed to link the ritual actors to the observers as a ‘chain of love.’ Love was lost in the transition from individual affect to social sentiment. This jeopardized the preachers’ and moralists’ main task: to fashion a model of collective emotionality built on the emotional economy of interpersonal interaction that they expounded in the exempla of ritual peace. With love at the focus of the example, there was a discrepancy between the feelings of the actors, on the one hand, and those of the public, on the other. The dangers of this emotive dissonance were considerable. It eroded the efficacy of the moral lesson and allowed the observers to qualify their position by accepting or contesting the norm.16 There was no sure grip on the feelings induced by the Tale. The theological discourse operated on the assumption that the message sent out would prompt emotion work in step with what was presented as being experienced by the ritual actors. To create a coherent emotional continuum stretching from the individual actors to the audience, the preachers needed a stronger affective leverage against the corroding force of discord. 16 As Dante did by pitying Paolo and Francesca, whose moral transgressions compelled him to place them in Hell; see Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy (New York, 1995), 77–81.

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Embodied Hatred: Thomas of Cantimpré To achieve this task, the body, the sensual locus of the self, was brought to the fore. The strategy was not a new one. Fear, a powerful core affect transcending individual interaction and capable of creating emotive communities, was crucial for the relationship with the numinous throughout the early Middle Ages. To respond to the affective world of the high- and late-medieval centuries, it was intertwined with other affects and emotions.17 Teamed with disgust, fear elicited vicariously experienced sentiments linked to the feelings that sprung out of the interpersonal interaction and encompassed the community in the grip of the moral norm propagated in the sermons on peace. Two examples will shed light on the contextual appropriations of this strategy and its flexibility as an approach adaptable to diverse audiences and situations. In the eyes of the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré, a distinguished moralist and prolific writer on all aspects of moral edification, the combination of horror and disgust served the purpose admirably. In his main work on religion and practical morality, Bonum universale de apibus, composed c. 1258–1261, Thomas constructed a version of the Tale designed to embattle hatred, the emotional embodiment of the knightly feud. Under the title ‘An Example of a Terrible Punishment of Intestinal Hate’ [Exemplum de odio intestino terribiliter punito], this model worked through the presentation of embodied emotions. Thomas’s feuding knight, so went the exemplum, turned down all pleas for reconciliation, even though they were made on behalf of the wrongdoer by no less a figure than Jacques of Vitry, who happened to be preaching the crusade in Brabant. Despairing at the knight’s obstinacy, the preacher implored the public to pray for a sign against the knight, who, by persevering in his hatred, had turned against God Himself. Prayer not yet finished, the judgment fell down on the bullheaded knight. With his eyes inverted, the knight was trice hurled on the ground for the horror of all present. Blood and pus streamed from his mouth. Having brought the people to tears with this dramatic spectacle, the preacher prayed anew and lifted the knight from the earth. Instantly healed, he ran to embrace and kiss his former enemy, proposing reconciliation, asking for forgiveness, 17 See the forceful synthesis by Jean Delumeu, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt Culture, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York, 1990).

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crying and praising Christ. All this stirred a new commotion in the hearts of those attending the reconciliation.18 The account makes it clear that Thomas saw hatred as the foundation of conflict and the sentiment that embodied the feud. As we have seen, this was a common notion in thirteenth-century environments. Hatred was engendered by obstinacy in the pursuit of revenge. In the way Thomas structured his account, the audience was led to understand that once the reconciliatory plea was issued, the misdeed that had initiated the feud was of no consequence. Obstinacy was guilt, produced by the sin of hatred. Hatred was a revolt not just against the authorities who had launched a major campaign against private feuding, but a sin against God as well. Private conflict rooted in hatred was therefore immoral and in need of suppression. Supporting the secular powers’ attempts to cut off the lifeline of the feud and tame the feelings sustaining it, the moralist operated within the doctrine that God paid no less attention to sentiments and thoughts than to actual deeds. His bid was staked on the fearful intervention of the divine. Yet Thomas’s horrible spectacle was not entirely dependent on fear. He took to its limits the popular motif of painful expiation and applied it to reinforce the emotional canvas of reconciliation. In earlier traditions, those who spurned the efforts to make peace have been thrown on the ground (as in the Life of St. Wulfstan), were turned mute, or were immobilized until compliant (as in cases during the Great Devotion of 1233 and the Bianchi movement in 1399).19 Cases of forced or suspended bodily action as an efficient means to mold asocial emotions could easily be multiplied.

18 On Thomas of Cantimpré see Anton Kaufmann, Thomas Cantimpratanus (Cologne, 1899). I quote the Bonum after George Colvener, ed., Thomae Cantipratani S. theol. doctoris Ordinis Praedicatorum et episcopi svffraganei Cameracensis, Bonum vniversale de apibus (Douai, 1627), 221–2, Book II, ch. 18. The only discussion of this episode known to me is in Henry Platelle, ‘Vengeance privée et réconciliation dans l’oeuvre de Thomas de Cantimpré,’ 275–7. Platelle does not address the issue of emotions. 19 Reginald R. Darlington, ed., The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, to which are added the extant abridgements of this work and the miracles and translation of St. Wulfstan (London, 1928), 39; Benedict M. Reichert, ed., Fratris Gerardi de Fracheto, O.P., Vitae Fratrum Ordinis Predicatorum necnon Cronica Ordinis ab anno MCCIII usque ad MCCLIV (Louvain, 1896), 226. The case is discussed in Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics, 158. See also Salvatore Bongi, ed., Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi Lucchese (Rome, 1902), vol. 2, 308–9.

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Thomas, however, was not satisfied with intervention on the externals of the body. In his account, it is as if the knight’s hatred and obstinacy were embodied in the disgusting substances emitted under the torment of the divine punishment. Thomas made no reference to demons or evil spirits, the standard explanation of emitted bodily matter in exorcist practice. Jacques of Vitry’s exorcism and God’s intervention were not confined to chasing out the spirits of discord, nor did the divine action have the sole purpose of convincing the offender to submit to the judgement from on high. The punishment of Thomas’s knight targeted hatred alone. It revealed that hatred was part and parcel of his body and that if one were to free himself from asocial sentiments, they had to be physically expelled. Hatred was not external to the individual; it was an integral part of his physical husk. Put in modern terms, for Thomas hatred was not just a social institution; it was an incarnated phenomenon. Its dissipation involved the body not only through its regimentation or through the skin-deep management of behavioral expressions, gestures, or conduct. Hatred integrated the individual in a much more intimate way. It linked the soul, corrupted by sin, to its bodily container. The process of parting with it therefore was a thorough reformation of the entire person, seen from a corporeal perspective. In this discourse ritual peace was an aesthetic counterpart to hatred. The somatization of the feud was matched by an equally corporeal manifestation of the forgiveness embodied in the kiss of peace. The advantage of such a representation of the emotions, which captured a major facet of their thirteen-century perception, was that the audience experienced a shock of their own. Their sentiments were an extension of the emotion work on the ritual stage. The observers were first seized with horror; then the knight’s tears softened their hearts. The fearful sight of the repulsive mix gushing forth from the knight’s mouth elicited aversion to hatred, while a new tide of tears restored the purified knight in the position of a member of the moral community. Ritual actor and observers experienced in an emotional lockstep, moving from horror and disgust to relief, sympathy, and thankfulness. A short but impressive commentary on the Gospels’ maxim ‘Hate sin but not the sinner,’ Thomas’s tale targeted the production of emotional solidarity via a graphic account of the sentiments and the powerful sensations engendering them.

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Thomas’s case rested on a keen psychological insight into the nature of the solidarity created by fear and aversion, but the strategy of projecting incorporated images onto the audience could employ positive feelings as well. Corporeal emotionality was a beloved tool of San Bernardino of Siena, the charismatic preacher, stern moralist, and sworn enemy of the vendetta that was leaving bloody stains on the fabric of the fifteenth-century Italian urban societies.20 A master of dramatic representations exiting the emotions, Bernardino populated his sermons on reconciliation with miracles manifesting the divine punishment meted out to those who would not forgive. The grieving maid afflicted in the fashion of Thomas’s knight with a nose profusely bleeding until she agreed to reconcile is but one of the numerous occurrences in which he turned to the body and its substances as the locus of the emotions mobilized in service of peacemaking.21 Unlike Thomas’s account, however, San Bernardino’s discourse was informed by late-medieval spirituality, rich with implications of love and piety and focused on the body of Christ. Well-aware of the emotive impact of his verbal images, Bernardino knew how to combine stern castigation with a flow of soothing, vivid pictures meant to inflame compassion and contrition at the same time. This type of imagery, building a model representation of the type of bonds between humans that he advocated was the nexus along which he structured his message. All of his versions of the Tale of the Forgiving Knight had as a keynote conformity to the divine will and example, and carried the stamp of love as a primary if indirect motivation for reconciliation. Yet Bernardino’s image of love was quite different from that of Robert Mannyng. It was a socially flexible concept, adaptable to the taste of the audience and the preacher’s target. In one of Bernardino’s Tales, for example, the offender left his castle and surrendered to the avenger, driven by love and pity for his people who were suffering

20

The two most recent studies of Bernardino as a preacher, Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1999), and Cynthia Policritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and his Audience (Washington, DC, 2000), 176–77 do not conceptualize the role of the ritual imagery in Bernardino’s technology of peace preaching. 21 Ciro Cannarrozzi, San Bernardino da Siena, Le Prediche Volgari (Pistoia, 1934), vol. 2, 241, sermon XLII: ‘Del Perdonare.’

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deprivations on his behalf during the siege.22 The ‘love’ of the lord was not really an individual emotion; it stood for the reciprocal loyalty stabilizing the feudal bond and legitimizing the offender’s position as an ideal ruler. Bernardino’s most moving case expounded the familiar theme of Christ kissing the forgiver. It is a striking example of how representation based on embodied sentiments send out an emotional wave encompassing forgiver and public. The preacher made Christ descend from the crucifix, make his way through the crowd, and cling to the forgiver, embracing and kissing him three times before returning to his place. It was not so much the dramatic gesture of the deity that departed from earlier models. It was Bernardino’s graphic description of incorporated love and suffering that made all the difference. It was the sensation of physical proximity with the wounded, bleeding, suffering, tortured body, with His pierced hands and feet, the crown of thorns on His head, His face soiled by blood and spittle. The scene was so vividly portrayed in the sermon that aimed at creating a collective sentiment that it caused the audience to fall on their knees, weeping loudly in compassion and shouting ‘Mercy!’23 The figure of the forgiver disappeared in the general commotion and individual emotions were subsumed in the collective experience surging from the representation of embodied affect that arose in the individual interaction. The record of the account leaves no doubt that the emotions that Bernardino mobilized in his sermons did not fail to seize the hearts of his audience.

Affect and Theological Norm: Compunction and Contrition In the minds of authors like Thomas of Cantimpré and San Bernardino, the ritual act of reconciliation was subsumed in a lofty, overarching structure. Making peace with the neighbor was part and parcel of making peace with the divine in an act of penitential submission through which the sins of anger and hatred were expiated. In these discourses, images of the cosmic model of reconciliation and the normative feelings of guilt, sin, and compunction, initially 22

Ibidem, 242–3. Ibidem, 245–6. The issue of moving crucifixes is explored by William Christian, Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain (Princeton, N.J., 1992), but none of his examples is as vivid as Bernardino’s. 23

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the domain of the religious, were projected out onto lay societies. Transgressions of the peace in deed, thought, or sentiment were constructed as a sin and called for the internal reformation of the transgressor, visibly expressed in compunction.24 The paradigm was as old as the ministry of Christ, but it was not adopted in the practical instrumentarium of preachers and moralists of the peace until the high Middle Ages. The manuscript tradition of Vita Heriberti exemplifies the process by which this conceptual frame took hold of the representations of reconciliation. Commissioning a new Life of the saint in the second decade of the twelfth century, Abbot Markward of Deutz gave as a reason his dissatisfaction with the ‘style’ of Lambert’s early Vita.25 Complying with the request, Rupert, the author of the new Life, embellished Lambert’s work with two innovations. First, he heightened the tension of the ritual encounter by using strong adjectives that amplified its affective dimension. Second, he incorporated ritual peacemaking into the discourse of sin, repentance, compunction, contrition, satisfaction, and absolution. The reconciliatory scene was now couched in a heavy theological language, packed with quotations from the Psalms and the liturgical Ordos.26 Lambert’s unostentatious narrative suddenly acquired meanings within the universal economy of salvation. His two-stage peacemaking, with its transition from legal to personal reconciliation, was transformed into a moral progression, from ‘attrition’ to a proper, ennobling ‘contrition.’ Rupert’s model was a reflection of the discursive practice adopted as normative in the late Middle Ages. A sample of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century variants of the Tale will illustrate this development. The heart of the offender in Peter Idley’s story was deeply troubled and his mind contrite as he saw the people going to ask mercy from God on Good Friday. Seized by pious devotion, he undressed himself and headed for church, ‘and ther to desire penauns lowely and absolution ffor his misdedis and outrageous offence; this was of hymsilf the inwarde sentence.’ Thus he went, ‘with sobre chiere and 24 It is telling that around the beginning of the twelfth century we can observe the attribution of feelings of sin and compunction to lay people in their dealings with monastic houses. See for example a charter of St. Julian of Tours from 1129 in L.-J. Denis, Chartes de Saint-Julien de Tours (1002–1300), (Le Mans, 1913), 96, N. 75. 25 MGH SS, vol. 4, 740. Rupert was asked to re-write Lambert’s work ut styli rubigine subobscurum novo stylo rescribered. 26 See Ruperti Vita Heriberti in AASS, 16 March, 475ff. and Tenckhoff, Das Leben des Bischofs Meinwerk, 90–91.

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countenauns sadde,’ until surprised by his revengeful enemy.27 His sincere contrition, as expected, induced the grace with which the heart of the avenger was placated. ‘Have I,’ says the offender in a variant of the Tale in a north English homily collection, ‘no lyfe bot one.’28 In one of Jean Gobi’s stories, the murderer, clad in penitential garb, suffused in tears, hands joined, fell at the feet of the father of the slain in the church where the latter was himself doing penance, and asked for forgiveness. Granting the request, the father was then kissed by the crucifix.29 In Albertanus of Brescia’s Tale of Melibeus, the offenders were gradually led to a transformation of heart involving acknowledgment of guilt, sin, and bitter contrition with tears and grief [dolor].30 Giovanni Sercambi related stories of miraculous peacemaking in the wake of the Bianchi movement in which the offender, carried away by the spirit of devotion, performed genuine penance of peace [ pacis iniungeretur penitentia]. The injured gladly indulged him, and with tears the two men kissed to reconcile and wandered about town as true friends and relatives.31 The moralizing of the emotional world of ritual and the trend to attribute to trespasser and forgiver alike sentiments that were normative requirements of scholastic moral theology established a discursive connection with the concept of penance. In theory, the physical and emotional labors of high- and late-medieval penance were meant to purify the trespasser and win him, along with forgiveness and salvation, reintegration into the community.32 In the ritual practice of 27

D’Evelyn, ed., Peter Idley’s Instructions, 167. Gordon H. Gerould, The North-English Homily Collection. A Study of the Manuscript Relations and of the Sources of the Tales (Oxford, 1902), 84. 29 Polo de Beaulieu, ed., La Scala Coeli de Jean Gobi, 473–4, ch. 717. 30 Sundby, ed., Liber consolationis et consilii, 113–4. 31 Bongi, ed., Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, 306. 32 That penance was the framework of peacemaking is a commonplace in scholarly discourse; yet there are few works examining the issue in any depth. Two of those that do bear closely on my subject are Henri Platelle, ‘La violence et ses remèdes,’ 139ff. and Jean-Marie Moeglin, ‘Pénitence publique et amende honorable au Moyen Age,’ Revue Historique, 604 (October-December 1997), 225–69. The basic work belongs to Cyril Vogel, Le pécheur et la pénitence au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1969). See also Jean-Charles Payen, Le motif de repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (des origines a 1230) (Geneva, 1967), 1–80; Paul Anciaux, La théologie du sacrement de pénitence au XII e siècle (Louvain, 1949). An old but useful inquiry from a linguistic point of view is Leo Charles Yedlicka, Expressions of the Linguistic Area of Repentance and Remorse in Old French (Diss., Washington, DC, 1945). Some medieval treatises on penance that bear on the issue of social reconciliation are collected in John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, eds., Medieval Handbooks of Penance. A Translation of the Principal libri poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents (New York, 1938) and Jean 28

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secular reconciliation, those who were in control of peacemaking had considerations only remotely relevant to moral theology. The discourse on ritual peace reflected a specter of social concerns that made the penance of peace a living social joint. In meshing the emotionality of penance with the emotive vestments of social contestation, the language of penance in the twelfthcentury discourse on reconciliation addressed a major development of high medieval morality. Its central element was the expansion of the field of individual agency. Rather than obeying the dictate of external authority, the ritual actors were now represented as subjected to the internalized regulation of moral norms. Ritual peace presented them with opportunities to exercise that agency by applying consciously and deliberately the option of undergoing the emotion work of penance. Accepting the norms of penance was a testimony that the concept of peace was sustained by more than the reactive response to the pressures of external authorities. Through the emotion work embodied in ritual, a major tool of peacemaking, the empirical and universal affect of fear of the divine, was socialized into the Western Christian emotion of guilt as an active force motivating the actors’ conduct. The moral transformation witnessed in the emotion work propagated by the theological discourse was an integral component of the transition from peace as a liability to the concept of peace as an internalized demand and a duty in its own right. We have already seen it enfolding in the judicial sphere where it developed in concert with and as a reaction to the growing coercive powers of the authorities. Attempting the ethical integration of Western societies through the inculcation of interpretative schemes that depended on internal authority in the fashion of the accounts quoted above was a tremendously difficult task. The analyzed cases testify that highand late-medieval moralists and preachers seem to have realized that the theological discourse would work better if grafted onto the concept of interdependence of external and internal authorities, that is, as a structure bridging over a number of meaning-producing fields.33 Pierre Renard, ed., Trois sommes de pénitence de la premiere moitié du XIII e siècle. La Summa Magistri Conradi; Le sommes Quia non pigris et Decime dande sunt, 2 vols. (Louvain-sur-Neuve, 1991). Recently there has been a major contribution from a social point of view, Mansfield’s The Humiliation of Sinners. 33 I use the conceptual frame of Agnes Heller, ‘The Power of Shame,’ in The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective (London, 1985), 1–56.

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It stands to reason, therefore, that in the theological discourse the primary affects were not so much obliterated as subtly integrated within the interpretative frame commanded by the theological emotions. An emotive hierarchy developed within which the affects lost their status of immediate movers of action and mediated it only through the generation of theologically controlled emotions. The recognition of external norms was now being presented as the choice of the moral agent and his or her emotive transformation was of paramount importance. If turned into practice, the theological emotions could be an effective means for combating the enduring asocial emotions of discord, enmity, and feud. As we have seen, moralists and legal theorists were aware that hatred, insult, and injury could be put aside but not easily dissipated or forgotten. The public penance of peace and the honorable amends were two embodied strategies deemed capable of triggering the process. Through them the ritual actors not only acknowledged the validity of the external norm. The ritual peacemaking indicated that they were in its grip and were acting with integrity. The ritual act was a means to an end, however, and the social conditions in which the theological discourse functioned allowed for a range of appropriations. Two of the contexts in which the latter occurred are worth considering in more detail. The events on the eve of the battle of Montaperti, September 4, 1260, in which the Sienese Ghibellines routed the Guelfs of Florence and their allies are a fine example of the projection of the discourse on religious morality into the practical politics of the Italian civic communities. According to one of the most extensive versions of the story, as soon as the Sienese government rejected the humiliating demands of the Florentine envoys, the commune staged a grandiose ceremony of collective penance. It began with the barefoot religious traversing the city in a procession led by Tommaso Balzetti, the bishop of Siena. The Sienese lay folk followed suit. Attending a sermon at which the bishop implored God and the Virgin to protect the commune from its enemies, a huge crowd gathered in and around the Duomo, shouting loudly, with piety and grief, ‘Mercy, Mercy!’ Messer Buonaguida, the leader of the Sienese military forces, undressed to his shirt, barefoot and bareheaded, sword hanging from his neck, fell at the feet of the bishop in an act of collective penance by proxy. Balzetti elevated him, kissed him on the mouth, and led him to the church, where they prostrated themselves with bitter tears, commending the city to the Virgin. The bishop then arose and before

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leading the people to a new procession implored the citizenry ‘to embrace and forgive all injuries, confess and take communion, for we are all friends and this city should be commended to godly people only.’ The third procession completed, the people gathered anew in the square of the Duomo and began to make peace, and ‘those who have received a grave injury sought out their enemies to make peace and forgive them and kiss them.’ The impression of the public peacemaking was so captivating that the author could not help but repeat, once again, that enemies confessed their sins and kissed each other on the mouth.34 This moving account illustrates one of the principal ways in which the theological sentiments of the individual penance of peace and the involvement of the deity invoked through them were inserted in the discursive governance of communal politics. Three public processions, penitential garbs, purifying sermons, prayer, ritual prostration and absolution through the kiss of peace, loud cries for mercy: all these rituals were performed ahead of the countless acts of individual penance of peace undertaken by the private citizens. In the ritual in the Duomo, Buonaguida stood before the bishop as the city before God and received absolution, as an emanation of the collective, for the sins of his fellow citizens. In the streets and on the squares, the injured and insulted Sienese, prepared by sermons and processions, forgave their enemies and dispensed with hatred and anger to emerge clean and pure in the eyes of the Virgin. Giving up asocial sentiments was their penance, the price to pay for the divine protection of their lives and body politic. Managing individual sentiments of discord was the central part of the grand project launched by the commune. Its penitential nature sets it apart from the normal occasions of civic peacemaking where the ritual act of reconciliation glossed over personal emotions, oftentimes deliberately leaving them out of the arrangement for the sake of obliterating painful memories. The pressing need for solidarity pushed to the surface individual emotion work as the only way to ensure the protection of the divine and the cohesion of the commune. As in the moralists’ schemes, dealing with feelings of discord was 34 Antonio Ceruti, ‘La battaglia di Mont’ Aperto,’ Il Propugnatore, vol. 6, part 1 (1904), 39–41; see the basic work of Cesare Paoli, ‘La battaglia di Montaperti,’ Bollettino della Società senese di Storia patria municipale, 2 (1869), 3–92, and most recently Riccardo Marchionni, I senesi a Montaperti (Siena, 1992).

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what mattered, not the real injuries to life, limb, or honor. The disruptive sentiments of revenge were not easy to deal with; the penitential frame tackled this task quite successfully. By incorporating the discourse of penance into its program, the commune achieved the critical task of forcing individual peacemakers into performing genuine emotion work of reconciliation and through it ensured the stability and integrity of its political structure. In the Flemish and Dutch communes of the late Middle Ages, the fusing of the penance of peace with the ‘honorable amend’ in the practice and representation of less exalted occasions is witnessed in all major traditions of peacemaking. The penitential garb and the taking of an obligation to go on pilgrimage were standard parts of the mandatory voitval ceremony (ritual kneeling of the offender at the feet of the injured or his kin) before receiving the kiss of peace.35 The minute regulation of the penance of peace in urban legislation framed it into the legal texture of civic relationships. The exemplary cases of reconciliation recorded in the keures of the northern cities, discussed in the previous chapter, describe the ritual of reconciliation as penance from beginning to end. In the world of feudal politics, too, the element of saving face shared the stage with the hierarchical dimension of penance. The penitential scheme of the reconciliation exalted ritual humiliation in order to reconstitute the rank and status of the injured party, who was in a position to dictate the terms of penance. Like the prostrated Bernier in Raoul, Aelis in Aliscans (and her counterpart, Alice in Wolfram’s Willehalm), proposed to go on pilgrimage for their mother’s sake in order to restore the injured honor of the count. Blanchefleur herself repented of her rashness and was ready to go in exile as a penance for her offence: ‘From all of France I rather would be banished; I am prepared to go, if you would have me, 35 The voitval, possibly accompanied by the kiss but not necessarily so, was standard element of the reconciliation in one of the earliest, largest, and systematic collections from the Low Countries, the so-called Register Guidonis of 1301–1320, see P. W. A. Immink and A. Johanna Maris, eds., Registrum Guidonis. Het zogenaamde register van Guy van Avesnes Vorst-Bisschop van Utrecht (1301–1317). Mit aansluitende stukken tot 1320 (Utrecht, 1969). An example of reconciliation with the kiss, explicitly mentioned within the ceremony of voitval, is recorded in Antwerp’s Register vanden dachvaerden under April 12, 1475, see Antwerp Archief. Antwerpsch Archievenblad, 21 (1925), 1–4. A good study of penitential pilgrimage in the region, including expiatory pilgrimage of peace, is Eduard Cauwenbergh, Les pèlegrinages expiatoires et judiciaires dans le droit commun de Belgique au Moyen Age (Louvain, 1922).

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naked and penniless from Louis’ palace; to sanctuary inside St. Vincent’s abbey.’36 A late-thirteenth century manuscript of Willehalm portrays the Queen in a penitential garb, undressed to her short white shirt, her legs naked, rope on her neck, standing behind her brother while he bows down to lift Alice from the ground and kiss her.37 Penance did not allow for gender discrimination. Where trespass on customary rights and feudal jurisdiction was involved, penance could take extreme forms, as in the case of the honorable amend of the royal prévôt of Château-Thierry to the bishop of Soissons in 1411. The prévôt had put to death Jean Morneau, a clerk who had been under the jurisdiction of the bishop. To make his amends to the prelate, on May 9, 1411, he undressed to his shirt, took a candle worth four livres, and made his way to the church of Château-Thierry, where a large crowd had gathered. The corpse of the victim was brought in. The penitent kissed it on the mouth and loudly proclaimed that because of his avarice and in infringement of justice he had tortured Morneau and put him to death, for which act he now asked forgiveness.38 The case is an illustration of how the appropriation of the hierarchical dimension of the theological discourse for secular purposes brought about a shift in the meaning of the emotions elicited in the course of the ritual reconciliation. Humbleness was enmeshed with humiliation; the knowledge that the latter was felt was the satisfaction of the injured and the bitter chagrin of the trespasser’s friends, as we have seen it in some of the late versions of Guy of Warwick. In the later medieval centuries, compunction and contrition embodied by ritual were no longer means to dissolve asocial emotions and did not link to the divine. They had been thoroughly mastered by the authorities to ensure an emotional structure matching the social order, but in the process had lost their capacity to embody the duty to peace or to confront contestation of that same order. If the tears of the observers in Guy are any proof, the stability of the ritual peace had to be staked on a different emotional economy.

36 37 38

Wienbeck et al., eds., Aliscans, 172; translation in Newth, The Song of Aliscans, 82. Quoted after Heinzle, ed., Willehalm, Wolfenbütteler Handschrift, fol. 125r. The case is briefly discussed in Gauvard, ‘De Grace especial,’ 745–8.

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CHAPTER SIX

EMOTIONS AND RITUAL EFFICACY

In the model of ritual action I outlined in the beginning of this part, I proposed a system of management of the emotions spanning the space between individual and society. This space was inhabited not only by the primary asocial sentiments of anger, hatred, and grief. The intervention of embodied ritual did not just aim at stabilizing the emotional state achieved after emotion work had quelled these sentiments. More often than not the ritual kiss was a efficacious practice in its own right, transforming the emotions of conflict into other emotive forms. Bodily intervention under the pressure of the society and the collective forcefully sublimated individual emotional experiences onto a level facilitating peacemaking. In the following pages I will address the efficacy of the ritual kiss by exploring two sets of emotions: the self-oriented team of anxiety and catharsis and the other-oriented feelings of disgust and respect. These two sets by no means exhaust the applications of the ritual kiss as an efficacious social practice. They do, however, offer a representative sample of the role of ritual in the management of interpersonal relationships at the points of intersection of affect and emotion, individual desires and collective demand, and social change and structural homeostasis.

Anxiety At first glance, anxiety may hardly seem an emotional condition capable of contributing to the smooth and enduring outcome of the ritual encounter. Anxiety is credited for creating a state of nervousness, instability, depression, and indecision. Precisely these characteristics turned it into a powerful agent of peacemaking. In this context anxiety suspended impulsive aggressive action, giving the parties a respite during which they could search for an alternative resolution of the conflict. Produced by the clash of contradictory claims on the ritual actors’ personalities and often translated in the social language of honor, the induction of anxiety succeeded in stabilizing the ritual

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arrangement of peace. Let us consider some examples of its workings. In the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, Adam of Eynsham narrates how in 1199, harassed by royal emissaries, the bishop decided to seek redress of his grievances directly from the king. On his way to the continent he stopped for a brief visit at the Exchequer and asked the barons to refrain from action until the issue was sorted out. His manner was friendly [amicabiliter], and the barons promised [ pollicentes] to grant him [obtemperanter] the request, trying, all the same, to vindicate themselves by a trick. The bishop was politely invited to sit down to rest. Then, at the sight of the saintly man ‘sitting’ at the king’s Exchequer the barons burst in laughter. Having frequently denounced the institution as sinful and wicked, Hugh was caught off guard, but managed to save face and turn the tables in his favor. He flushed, jumped up, and at once kissed the unsuspecting barons, declaring that the triumph would be all his if after the kiss of peace they did his church any harm whatsoever. The kiss saved Hugh from embarrassment and left the barons stunned. They said that ‘he [Hugh—KP] has made it impossible for us to injure him in any way, even by the order of the king, without its redounding greatly to our dishonor.’ Hugh was left in peace.1 This episode highlights a few intriguing points. In the first place, Adam’s account is strewn with technical legal terms. Second, the barons felt free to joke with the bishop and promise him their peace verbally, but after Hugh kissed them their hands were tied. Third, and most important, the encounter was a highly emotionally charged affair. Hugh was perplexed, shamed, and anxious to free himself from the embarrassment of the unexpected gaffe. The barons’ joy quickly changed into embarrassment and anxiety. At the juncture of all these emotional transformations was ritual. The kiss of peace transported anxiety from one ritual actor to another, shifting agency in the process. Unexpected as the kiss was, it was an efficacious act that carried its own implications by definition, inducing obligatory relationships without the support of a situational discursive frame. Important as these observations are for the character of the ritual kiss as an extra-situational practice, Hugh’s act was a finely tuned emotional strategy. My contention is that generating anxiety was pre1 Douie and Farmer, eds., Magna Vita, II, 129; see also Leyser, ‘The Angevin Kings,’ 69.

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cisely Hugh’s intent in employing the kiss to escape embarrassment. The kiss, a gesture which the barons could not refuse from someone with Hugh’s reputation of a holy man, gave rise to an obligation to keep the peace, whereas their position as royal agents, and perhaps their personal preferences as well, demanded that action be taken against the bishop. It is worth noting that in spite of Hugh’s repute, the conflict was played on a secular plane. Adam did not mention heavenly retribution. It was the thought about their worldly honor that paralyzed the barons. Even if stressing honor masked the fear of divine intervention, for Adam the issue was socially validated. Creating a liability irreconcilable with positional duties, the ritual kiss elicited anxiety. The tension was pushed to the surface through the issue of honor, here understood as the necessity to adhere to the ritually taken obligation. The mechanism through which ritual operated in Adam’s short but instructive account closely connects two of the major spheres of ritual efficacy, legality and the emotions. Its principal components keep appearing in high- and late-medieval reconciliation and constitute a stable feature of the emotional economy of the ritual kiss. Honor and the phenomena through which it was constructed in ritual—such as law, power, prestige, allegiance, duties, and loyalties— were the generic obligatory field of the kiss all the way down to the sixteenth century. The engineering of a conflict of values in which the hierarchy of these social factors was clarified and rearranged in the interest of the peace was the main achievement of the ritual kiss. The process was intensely emotional, and its success depended heavily on inducing anxiety over honor. Generating anxiety was a preventive action, which forced the ritual actors to halt aggression and apperceive their principal motivations. Anxiety suppressed the immediate, instinctive impulse for retributive action. Without the intervention of the sentiment elicited by ritual, the course of the events could be expected to have led to a violent reaction. Anxiety sounded an ‘early warning’ of an impeding punitive emotional involvement on the part of society, normally associated with shaming. Last but not least, anxiety mapped out the rules according to which agency was distributed and appropriated. The temporary lull of activity during which the ritual actors were forced to suspend action and anxiously deliberate on their conduct and priorities is beautifully captured in Silence, arguably the most

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conspicuous thirteenth-century French romance built around inverted gender roles.2 Composed around the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the romance explores the question of whether women had the right to inherit and, given its provenance, answers it positively. It has been studied intensively in recent decades and is a rich source of literary tropes on gender-related issues. It is no less valuable a source for the uses and abuses of ritual in the later thirteenth century. The scene relevant to this inquiry is the dramatic episode in which Silence, disguised as a young page at the court of the king of England, was sent to France as a messenger carrying a sealed letter demanding her death sentence. The letter put the French king in a state of emotional turmoil, in which peace and protection, honor, shame, legality, and morality were all staked on the intense anxiety generated by the ritual kiss. The problem was that the king was so impressed by the beauty and bearing of the messenger that he spontaneously embraced and kissed Silence as soon as the ‘page’ was introduced. Then, as the chancellor read the letter, the king was seized by a deep anguish [ grant anguissce] that paralyzed his will. He ‘bowed his head, feeling such grief he could not utter a word; he had never felt such pain in his life.’ His dilemma was that he could neither turn down the request of his ally, the king of England, nor have the messenger put to death after he had kissed him. The kiss, so innocently and casually given in the beginning of the scene, had produced a conundrum from which the king could not extricate himself. As it turned out, the kiss was a formal and binding act of peace. The king himself admitted, ‘That is the kiss of peace. I cannot undo it or disregard it without bringing terrible dishonor upon myself . . . if I kill the youth for him [the king of England] I will be guilty of a terrible crime. Everyone will have reason to hate me if I betray him [Silence—KP] now.’ The concept of betrayal was technically charged. The king’s ally’s demand and the certainty that ‘he will always be able to say that I am the most dishonorable man in the world because I would not help him either as a favor or from a sense of obligation’ did not constitute such a technically binding obligation but was no less exacting. The clash of obligations, both highly demanding although of unequal value, not only immobilized the king, but threw 2 Sarah Roche-Mahdi, ed. and trans., Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (East Lansing, 1992). The episode I discuss is on pages 207–27.

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him into virtual despair. Seeing no solution, he called on his counselors. He was in a quandary, he explained, for ‘one cannot kiss a man and betray him’ [Ne doit trahir li hom qui baize], after having given his faith with the kiss. Yet, nonetheless, he felt he was obliged to the king of England. It is worth noting that although Silence was not technically the king’s ‘man,’ that is, his vassal, the monarch used the thoroughly technical, legal idiom of the feudal bond. The barons withdrew for a discussion. After a long deliberation, their conclusion was that the obligation of peace and protection embodied in the kiss was to be honored above all other obligations. The king accepted the advice. A tactful way to deal with the king of England’s request was devised. The anxiety over the kiss saved Silence’s life. The arguments put forth by the king’s counselors to defend the conflicting obligations brought to light by the kiss are most intriguing. The person of the messenger was of no importance for them. The king’s obligations did not stem from internalized, moral imperatives. The pressures upon him were both positional and contextual. He would not have hesitated to put the youth to death were it not for the kiss. Also, the king was aware that the kiss was legally binding, but this did not seem to have been his chief concern, although it was an important one. The main problem was that once formally given, in full sight of the court, the kiss translated the act of personal sympathy into the language of honor and power. The translation was straightforward, nonnegotiable, and not subject to interpretation. It triggered an automatic social norm. The king’s power rested on the upholding of the reciprocal, mutually obligating bonds constructing society. Addressing the barons, the king stressed the kiss’s legal formalism, but in the speech to himself he made clear that his major concern was the reaction of his vassals. To put Silence to death was not just a breach of the formal legal obligation carried by ritual. The king understood it primarily as treason, betrayal in political context. The ritual kiss was a component of the cultural system providing the binding interpretative context on which the social hierarchy informing the position of the king rested. The kiss embodied mutual trust and loyalty. ‘Who would ever trust me again?’ the king asked in despair, unable to undertake action that would undermine the very foundation of his power. The legality of the kiss and its moral implications had meaning as liabilities only as far as they represented the ruler as a trustworthy person commanding loyalty. He could not act if the obligation

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stemming from the cardinal virtue of loyalty to the system’s values had been formalized as restraint. The king’s dilemma identified in a perfect way the paradigm of contractual society and the symbolic capital upon which it rested as the sum of the individual bonds tying its members to one another. And yet, there was the opposite pull of the king’s feeling of personal obligation to his friend. The arguments of the barons addressed the king’s major concern. The count of Blois stood for the letter of the law but above all for the ‘friendship’ of the two kings. The king of England was his lord’s friend, who had been shamed by Silence. ‘Friendship’ extended the shame to the French king. Avenging the injury would wipe the shame clean and uphold the French king’s own honor. As for the kiss, the legal reprieve it accorded Silence was forty days, after which the king could safely have him (actually her) executed. The elderly count of Blois’s rigid legalism and stress on the king’s right to act according to his personal obligations sounded the alarm for the count of Clermont. While Blois stressed ties of reciprocity binding the rulers, gift for gift, honor for honor, and shame for shame, Clermont spoke in terms of a social hierarchy and moral sentiments. His system of duties, obligations, and legal bonds between men interacting within a tightly knit social group differed in kind from the bonds and freedoms prioritized by Blois. Within this ‘communicative community,’ the symbols of relatedness were signs of its virtual existence. Clermont reduced the social meaning of ‘friendship’ to personal preference and juxtaposed it to the proper judicial norm and its social implications. ‘Our king has given the youth the kiss of peace, my lords,’ he reminded his peers. ‘Even if King Evan were our father, and even if the youth had killed our brother, we should not advise our king to have him killed. The first duty of any subject is to safeguard his lord’s honor, just as it is the lord’s duty to see that he fulfills his obligation to his men’—whatever the king’s desires. The kiss had constituted such an obligation. The king’s honor, that is, his position in the group, now depended on abiding by its implications. Rebuked by the count of Nevers, who supported Blois, Clermont was forced to explain his point further. Submitting to England’s request would mean that his lord should sully his reputation to preserve someone else’s. The obligation to England could be bought out with money. Obliging a personal preference conferred no honor, whereas honor lost in breaking the ritual promise could not be retrieved. Royal ‘friendship’ was based on personal favors and mate-

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rial rewards exchanged between kings as individuals, not as persons through their social roles of rulers. It was legally and morally binding on an individual level, but it was not a reason of state. The king of England was no liege lord of the king of France and would therefore not incur shame as his part of the responsibility for the vile act of murdering Silence. It was all about the French king’s decision, and it was immoral, outright ‘vile,’ to act out of one’s personal preferences and disregard the formal bond that structured the community to which the king belonged. Clermont concluded his argument by adding that it was the barons’ sworn duty to advise the king to spare the messenger’s life even if he had set his heart on something else [se vostre cuers le vos conselle]. It was also the correct legal way, since ‘one does not kill a man before all the facts are in.’ Finally, it was the moral way to handle the affair, for ‘to consent to a vile deed, Sire, is shameful; to reject it is honorable.’ He himself, Clermont declared, would leave the service of the lord who asked him to ‘do a deed for which God and man would despise me.’ Having lodged honor in formalized ritual interaction, social cohesion, due process, a neat distinction between formal and informal ties of loyalty, tangible obligations, and an acute moral sense of right and wrong judged in the eyes of God and men, Clermont summed up the issue troubling the king in favor of Silence. His arguments demonstrate the extent to which the rules of formal ritual impinged upon social cohesion and the value system of the communicative community it organized. The anxiety that ritual had generated was alleviated and a peaceful resolution was found, but not before exposing the foundations of one’s existence as a social person. The contexts in which the meanings of honor and royal power were constructed consisted of a multiplicity of facets. They drew on the contractual features of the feudal bond, the courtly culture, a new concept of statism, the opposition to absolutist tendencies, a new definition of legality, and, perhaps, a measure of territorial particularism. Above all, it drew on the same subjection of individual desires to the formalized rules of the collective. Any and all of these could explain the position of a major French noble at the time and place Silence was composed. What matters for our investigation is that these considerations were structural norms and pressures constructed in formal ritual interaction and that the attempt to break free from the implications of ritual generated intense anxiety, highlighting the dimensions of one’s social position.

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In this mini-treatise on the links between bonds of ritual obligation, community, power, honor, and the law, anxiety operated as a device of the peace by preventing actors from intervening without fully apperceiving the contextual and larger social implications of their action. Ritually elicited emotions, generated in situations over which the characters had no control, were a roadblock to impulsive emotive action and cleared the path to a cognitive approach to the issues of peace and conflict.

Catharsis On other occasions ritual is represented as a powerful means that could lead to emotive resolution that forced actors to undergo a purely moral catharsis. Take Itonje in Wolfram’s Parzival, whose heart was affected profoundly by having to kiss for peace some of Gawain’s companions. ‘My lord,’ she complained, ‘you asked me that I should receive their kiss [of the two knights who fought with her beloved— KP], still not forgiven [unverkorn], on my mouth. Of this my heart is ill’ [des ist mîn herze ungesunt]. Her kiss, she made it plain, was like Judas’s treacherous greeting. It caused all triuwe to vanish from her.3 One can argue that the images of broken heart and vanished loyalty reflect a deeply felt anxiety. Itonje’s hatred for the knights was sustained by her love for Gramoflanz, a sentiment of the heart but also the main component of triuwe. Love in Wolfram was a personal affair but it too had wider implications. The social worth of a noble lady rested squarely on her loyalty to her knightly hero. Dispensing with that loyalty to fulfill the new social expectations for which Gawain stood integrated Itonje into her class, but produced an internal conflict that could lead to destruction or suspension of her triuwe. In the kiss that Gawain demanded, the social ethics of peace was supported by sacred morality, but the purpose of the clash was not only to reassert the superiority of the sacred paradigm. Peace on Gawain’s terms had a substantial degree of self-sufficiency and independence from the sacred. Going against the grain of morality as postulated by divine law and kissing in the fashion of the greatest sin helped suspend the social conflict until accommodation between 3 Lachmann and Nellman, eds., Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival, 2, 94. Translation in Lefevere, Parzival, 169.

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the self and the moral standard of the divine was reached. The identification with the negative image of Judas sublimated the conflict of loyalties to the highest possible level in order to unleash emotions attacking the very notion of triuwe organizing the self. Ritual meshed the feelings embodying social experiences and cultural symbolism to suspend the operation of triuwe as an integrative disposition of the ritual agent’s habitus. The anxiety produced in the process blocked its workings. We have already seen that in Wolfram’s portrayal of the knightly value system the loss of triuwe had devastating consequences. What was the purpose of the thus orchestrated conflict? I tend to see it primarily from a functional perspective. For the ritual actor who found herself in such a state of anxiety, there was only one way to preserve integrity and the critically important triuwe: forgiveness. Wolfram’s character was explicit on that point. Itonje’s anxiety was caused not because she had to kiss, but because she kissed without reconciliation, before having forgiven. Forgiveness in the fashion of Christ, the positive pole in the sacred dichotomy of loyalty and betrayal, constituted the moral cleansing through which Itonje would have to go to alleviate the painful anxiety over her integrity. The anxiety of the ritual peace forced her into emotion work that would expel hatred without jeopardizing triuwe.4 In such contexts, ritually elicited anxiety is what we see on the surface of the emotional encounter. How the individual dealt with it remained hidden. All we can surmise is that some kind of cathartic experience must have followed in the wake of anxiety to dissipate it and ensure the perpetuation of the social person. Catharsis, the emotion of cleansing, did the actual work of expunging asocial emotions. Unlike anxiety, which we dimly perceive behind the verbally articulated corporeal images, catharsis was clearly and visibly embodied in the shedding of tears. We have already seen it in action.

Disgust and Contempt Even though it was openly vented in tears, catharsis was a private, inward-oriented sensation. It did not represent the emotional dimension of the perception of the rank and status of the other party. Crucial for the working of ritual, catharsis fell outside of the range 4

On triuwe as an organizer of social integrity see Kraft, Iweins Triuwe, 57ff.

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of the sentiments constituting the feeling world of the competition for power, prestige, and public esteem. Moreover, traces of catharsis and anxiety are emotional devices we reach to through a double filter: the conventions of the account that has preserved them and the functional aims of the ‘events’ in which they unfolded. The emotional texture of the process of ordering persons and social groups in a hierarchical environment was best reflected in disgust and respect. These were the primary political sentiments confronted in ritual reconciliation. Although they often have to be inferred rather than directly registered in the evidence, unlike other sentiments both have clear conceptual expressions in the late-medieval period. Disgust, in particular, being at once an embodied affect and an emotion of social hierarchy was especially susceptible to the intervention of the ritual kiss. One has to distinguish disgust from its close relation contempt, although they seem to be typological equivalents. There are differences in the manner in which the two sentiments ordered the relationships between society and the parties to the reconciliation. It has been argued, most forcefully by William Ian Miller, that disgust is more structurally oriented and relates to the other person through the individual’s perception of the larger social order. In a hierarchical community, disgust reflects the construction of social boundaries as moral categories and their experience as corporeal realities. Disgust solidifies social hierarchy, for as a bodily sensation permitting no compromise it confronts social mobility with an extremely negative corporeal reaction connected to the reflex of organic self-preservation. Disgust sustains conflict by denying any possibility for assimilation to one’s opponent. The body militates against this with a reaction outside of the conscious control of the individual actor. Contempt, for its part, seems to be more individual-oriented, less corporeal, and more susceptible to compromise. It is the moral sentiment that assigns to the other party a lower-ranking status in reference to the individual first and foremost. It seeks to establish and/or contest rankings regardless of the legitimacy with which social structure endows them. The rise of contempt is an indicator of social shifts and an answer to claims transcending the established order.5 This makes contempt a dynamic phenomenon, especially useful in an inquiry into the transformative function of ritual. 5 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 216ff. See also Winfried Menninghous, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt a. M., 1999).

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Let us ponder disgust and contempt by using as a case study the best-known vendetta in the history of duecento Florence. On June 24, 1295, St. John’s Day, four nobles of the Velluti clan assassinated Lippo di Simone di Mannelli to avenge the death of Ghino Velluti, killed by a Mannelli eighteen years earlier, in September 1267, during the reprisals following the victory of the Guelf party. The incident caused fears that the old enmity between the Guelf and Ghibelline families might spark a new tide of political violence. The Signoria reacted immediately. After promptly banning the culprits, in the first week of July the consultative arm of the commune tried to work out a peaceful resolution between the clans. Yet the attempt at reconciliation by proxy failed. Then, under pressure from the government, on July 17 the parties convened in the church of San Pietro Scheragio, kissed each other on the mouth, and concluded a pact of private peace under the watchful eye of Capitano del Popolo and other high officials. The Velluti had already paid the usual fines and personal amends to have the ban of the commune lifted. With this the case was officially put to rest.6 Apart from the records of the official provisions of the commune, demanding peace, concord, and remission of all ‘hatred, enmity, injuries, and insults,’ the main narrative source of the affair is the Chronicle of Donato Velluti, the son of Lamberto, one of the participants in the vendetta.7 From his account it would seem that the emotions of conflict were the highest priority of the authorities. The Signoria enforced ritual peace because of ‘the rancor and bad feelings’ [rimasa la gozzaia loro e mal fiele] conserved by the Mannelli even after they had promised to restrain from retaliation. Even more revealing is Donato’s description of the parties’ sentiments after the ritual reconciliation. The ritual kiss, he contended, had forced the Mannelli to moderate their ‘bad feelings.’ As hostility ceased, it appeared that the ritual encounter had worked, but with some important side effects. Donato’s father was threatened in Genoa and feared for his life; the writer himself had to swallow the insult of having his greeting not returned by members of the 6 The best discussion remains Isidoro Del Lungo, ‘Una vendetta in Firenze il giorno di San Giovanni del 1295,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, 4th series, 18 (1886), 355–402, esp. 366–74. 7 Isidoro del Lungo and Guglielmo Volpi, eds., La Cronica domestica di Messer Donato Velluti, scritta fra 1367 e il 1370, con le addizioni di Paolo Velluti, scritte fra il 1555 e il 1560 (Florence, 1914), 9–19. The provisions for the peace between the Mannelli and the Velluti are in Del Lungo, ‘Una vendetta,’ 398–9, Appendix, section D.

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Mannelli clan. What actually happened was that even after the peace the Mannelli treated the Velluti rudely in public and openly demonstrated their disgust with them. Donato knew the reason. Being noble and powerful, the Mannelli were outraged that the Velluti had had the guts to open a vendetta.8 Donato Velluti may seem hypersensitive to the feelings of the warring families, but his attitude is well-founded. The parties to the conflict and the authorities had been aware that without proper sentiments the peace arrangement would not stand. As Donato made clear, the feelings of the Mannelli were not exactly fueled by grief over the murdered Lippo. Only a certain Gamaretto appeared to justify his animosity with the affective bond to his assassinated cousin. The rest of the clan had a different motivation. Some even risked the wrath of the commune and did not turn up to make peace in person, although the contract was nonetheless binding on the whole clan. The reasons were their feeling of superiority over the enemy clan. The absentees were not freed from the responsibility to keep the peace, but foregoing the ceremony was a demonstration of disgust with the other, socially inferior clan, which threatened their status, and whom they considered base upstarts. The ritual peace confronted all these tensions and resolved them through the potential of the direct and intimate bodily interaction onto a new level. The murder of Ghino Velluti in 1267 and the ensuing vendetta had been over the honor of social ranking. The Mannelli had sought to reassert their prestige in the city, severely diminished after the fall of parte Ghibellina. Correspondingly, the assassination of Lippo eighteen years later had been more of an insult than injury. The Mannelli were grandi, an older, noble clan, and were rich, populous, and prominent in the Oltranto. The Velluti were one of the newer mercantile families. Commercial wealth and Guelf connections had propelled them up the social scale. To submit to the Signoria’s order for peace and to abide by the demand for civil social interaction thereafter was a double challenge to the Mannelli’s status [ grandezza] in Florentine society. The kiss of peace meant equality; equality that negated their 8 E doppo della detta pace è vero che sempre stettono grossi con noi, però che per loro grandezza ci avevano a schifo, però che alla detta pace furono sforzati per lo Comune, ibidem, 15–19. For contempt see also a well-informed later commentator, Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. by Carlos Morena (Lewiston, 1990), 64–6: ‘We don’t want to hurt the people we despise but only to deride them and to show them how despicable and insignificant they really are.’

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exalted rank by putting them on equal footing with the ‘upstart’ Velluti. Enforcing the peace and the norm of equal standing before the law, the new political system deprived them from their superior position. The Mannelli’s demonstration of disgust was an attempt to maintain the social distance and reerect the boundaries around their social territory demolished by the ritual reconciliation. For Donato and his relatives, it was just the opposite. The achievement of social and legal equality embodied in the vendetta and the kiss offered them the opportunity to aspire to the rank that the Mannelli had denied them so far. Donato’s peaceful greeting was hardly motivated by sincere desire to socialize with his uncle’s murderers, just like the rude answer he received was more than a mere transgression of the norms of elementary civility. To the Velluti, all ways of mingling with their social superior, through vendetta or through the kiss of peace, were acceptable. They won them respectability and social esteem. For the commune, which took notice of the emotions of conflict harbored by the Mannelli, the bodily interaction of the parties was no less crucial than the legal peace to which it gave rise. Enforcing the ritual peace was a device to open breaches in the wall of asocial sentiments, to break through the moral barrier of disgust that set the parties apart along the vertical pole of social life and impeded civic social interaction. The commune could not control men’s minds, but it could well control their bodies and, through them, their feelings. Its response to dissent and conflict was curt and imperative: mingle! The legal kiss was one of the very few devices enforcing some sort of acknowledged equality, imperfect and limited as it was in this highly stratified society. However fleeting it might have been, it had one great advantage: it was tangible and left memories imprinted on the body. To the commune, the bodies of the feuding men were the most efficient means to transcend and demolish the socially constructed disgust that set them apart, giving rise, in the encounter, to feelings that sustained a new emotional economy of the social order. The Mannelli’s disgust and the threats to the life of Lamberto Velluti could be attributed to the urge to wipe ‘clean’ the Mannelli name and stop the contagion of equality creeping from down below. The legal order of the day was strong enough to prevent this from happening. The formalism in which it was clothed, the enforced kiss of peace, was an extension of its attempt to mold social relationships that took over where coercion left off. The kiss was a device that

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sought to demolish the social sources of conflict petrified in corporeal disgust. The Mannelli had to console themselves with the only means reconciliation left them: to defend their rank and status with the sentiment of contempt. In this context, the confrontation of disgust with ritual and the contempt it elicited in its stead fulfilled important social functions. A significantly weaker elicitor of violent response than disgust, contempt ordered anew rather than just stabilized the social distance between the feuding clans and did not contest the standard before which they were equal. The ritual kiss on the demand of the commune transformed disgust—the sentiment of absolute separation in a society of men defending their status with dagger in hand—into contempt, the sentiment of contestation among men equal before the law. Before the law took the upper hand through the ritual reconciliation, there had been disgust, resulting in hatred and urging the annihilation of the enemy. After that, the emotive dimension of social superiority could not be based on disgust alone. There are reasons to believe that Donato only narrowly missed the point when using the familiar term for disgust to denote the sentiment persevering after the peace. Forced to ‘cohabit’ the Mannelli could still protect themselves through contempt. Both hatred and contempt meant disrespect to the ‘other,’ but reflected a different arrangement of the relationship between social and moral order, on the one hand, and the individual, the ‘other,’ and the authorities, on the other. Establishing a benchmark of equality, contempt accorded to the parties a measure of protection lacking in disgust. It still provided emotional satisfaction for the Mannelli, who were deprived of other licit means to defend their status, and brought in the rudimentary notion of respect to an outside phenomenon, the commune, which engaged both agents and structured their relationship in a new manner.

Respect Respect appears as a moral sentiment organically connected to two other feelings, regret and remorse, but is a phenomenon of a qualitatively different order. The genealogy of respect begins with remorse. In Christian context, remorse was the emotion of salvation. The focus on the misdeed and the taking into account what people did to others made remorse

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a strongly positive moral emotion. Remorse expressed in the ritual encounter acknowledged to the other party the wrongfulness of the act of insult or injury and one’s complacency. Who was the other, however, in a ritual reconciliation enacted in the context involving self, society, and the supernatural? What made the reconciling feel that what they did was not right just because it injured others? In most of the cases dating from the early part of our period, remorse was based on God-oriented guilt. God- and self-centered, such guilt did not allow agency, hence respect, to the other party in the ritual agreement. The discourse of love, pity, forgiveness, and penance induced by the divine and experienced by wrongdoer and forgiver alike supported the major thrust of the idea of remorse until far into the fifteenth century. In this team of discourse and practice, the concept of remorse was inextricably attached to the divine. The human party in the reconciliation with which peace was made was the means through which guilt was expiated and expressed openly, for all to see, just like pilgrimage, flagellation, profuse tears, and ascetic life testified to remorse experienced and expiated on occasions other than peacemaking. In such contexts, ritual connected the parties to the peace indirectly, through the intermediary of the divine, which guaranteed and stabilized the agreement. Furthermore, remorse was self-centered, since both parties expected the reward or mercy of the divine. Nonetheless, translating legally definable guilt in human interaction and in supernatural contexts, remorse had two major functions in peacemaking. It placated human anger and secured protection to the wrongdoer by referring the crime to the court of the Highest Judge, who alone had the right to licit vengeance. In ritual, remorse demonstrated the parties’ respect to the outside agency through the positional roles each of them adopted. The arrival of the courtly ethos undermined the primacy of Godoriented remorse as one of the dominant sentiments in ritual reconciliation. Two developments seem important: the detachment of remorse from the divine, and the appearance of regret. While the apperception of the offense remained deed-oriented, these were significant shifts. The reorientation of the emotional economy of reconciliation to the human other was the central issue. Neither Count William’s forgiveness nor Blanchefleur’s repentance in Aliscans’ episode in which the queen only narrowly escaped with her life referred to the divine.

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After his anger cooled down, the count’s feelings about his angry outburst were mixed. He sought to explain away his anger, and was ready to make amends. In spite of the strong wording [ forment me poise, ke vos ai laidengie], the author’s remark that ‘this is the way to deal with arrogance!’ suggests that he did not expect the readers to think of the character as remorseful. Count William was represented as someone who acted in the right way. On the premise that it is impossible to feel remorse and yet believe that one was right to act as one did, the count’s feelings can be characterized as regret. The queen’s response was also quite cautious. ‘My lord,’ she said, ‘I am not angry at it/ Nor was there shame or baseness in your action/ You’re my brother/ I too repent the rashness/ Of any word of mine that earned your malice.’ If there had been any shadow of remorse in William’s apology, the negation of injury reinforced the meaning of the count’s repentance as regret. In Aliscans the courtly norm was not yet fully developed, but similar concerns informed the sentiments of Erec and Guivreiz in Hartman von Aue’s courtly classic Erec. The two heroes fought each other in a chance encounter that did not give them the opportunity to announce their identity. Luckily, Guivreiz recognized his friend just before plunging the dagger in his throat, and the combat ended with the kiss of triuwe that renewed their peace and friendship. Realizing how close he had been to making a fatal mistake, Guivreiz was seized by a feeling that can be characterized as remorse [riuwe]. When he spoke about it, however, Erec hastily answered, ‘Say no more and don’t be concerned about it. You didn’t treat me wrongly’ [ir enhabet an mir niht missetân].9 The courtly paradigm halted the attempt to reach out to the other with the sentiment of remorse. Erec did not hold Guivreiz responsible for his sorry state; the norms of the courtly ethos did not allow him to do so. The importance of the king’s sympathy was diminished by Erec’s emphasizing his own ‘foolishness’ rather than acknowledging that there had been a wrongful deed on the part of his courtly opponent. As in Aliscans, remorse was only a potentiality, an impulse that the power of the courtly discourse transformed into regret. While a major departure from the religious paradigm, courtly emotionality bore close resemblance to it in one important aspect. As 9 Albert Leitzmann, ed., Erec von Hartmann von Aue (Tübingen, 1967), 182; translation in Thomas, Erec by Hartmann von Aue, 110.

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with God-oriented remorse, the remorse-turned-regret embodied respect for a structural code. It was inappropriate to admit insult or injury if that entailed blaming the other for uncivil conduct. This was the argument that Alice in Willehalm used to counter her uncle’s anger; it was tantamount to a new insult to remind him of his former rage at the act of reconciliation. Detaching the sentiments of reconciliation from the divine, the courtly ethos allowed more space for human agency, but in it the actors remained isolated in their perfectly correct but somewhat cool and detached feeling worlds, without direct emotive interaction to mesh positive emotions. Nonetheless, the transition from the divine, a relatively stable cultural template during the later Middle Ages, to the more flexible social code made by men transformed the emotional world of reconciliation. A further stage in this progression was to reorient feelings from the deed to human actors even though these were not always the reconciling parties. This mode of interaction operated on the basis of demonstration of respect to individuals in their own right, without reference to contextual or positional factors and their import for the parties to the reconciliation. A case in point is the private reconciliation between two citizens of Rome, Paluccio ‘Cole Guatarii’ and Amator Porcari, recorded by notary Antonio Stefanelli on September 16, 1364. Paluccio and Amator had quarreled gravely and only the intervention of intermediaries prevented the bloodshed. The arbiters arranged a compromise, on the condition that it was to be sealed by ritual reconciliation according to the customs of the city of Rome. On the appointed day, Amator stood accompanied by twelve friends [socii ] in the square before the house of Buccio Romano in Trastevere (Paluccio’s neighborhood). Paluccio appeared and greeted him with the following words: ‘Amator, you’re welcome [bene si trovato]. What happened between us did not have to happen; here I am to make my amends. Take them as you please.’ Amator drew his sword, and with the words ‘If it weren’t for the love I have for Lello and Pietro [the arbiters—KP], I would have given you with this sword what you deserve,’ struck Paluccio without drawing blood. Once this ritual exchange was completed, the two parties kissed and agreed, within a specified time, to arrange for the definite reconciliation to take place as stipulated in the statutes of the city.10 10

Si non esset quod ego dimitto amore Lelli et Petri Pauli, ego darem tibi de ista spata in

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The ritual encounter enacted in this scene was a complex affair bundling together the concepts of injury, honor, revenge, satisfaction, regret, and respect. Paluccio was clearly the offending party. He made his honorable amends in his own neighborhood so that his kith and kin could witness that he had been in the wrong. The ritual took place in a public area, but it was a secular, not a sacred space. Paluccio took responsibility for the act but only as far as acknowledging that there had been a conflict, without emphasizing all too much his own guilt—and that was that. The dry Latin of the record cuts out much of the vivacity of the scene, but it does not seem that Paluccio was overly remorseful. He was only willing to go as far as restoring the balance that his misdeed had ruined. To him, the affair had the cold, carefully calculated benefit of an exchange of honor. The stress of his apology was on the misdeed. There was a shadow of regret to it, but it seems disembodied and impersonalized. In spite of the warm welcome that the notary thought significant enough to put down in the vernacular, Paluccio’s respect was for ritual as a legal custom. His respect forced the other side to respect the same rules, and with them the protection they accorded to Paluccio, who did not, indeed, depend exclusively on the benevolence of the injured or insulted party. Amator, for his part, brought along his socii to witness the other party’s admission of Amator’s superiority, deriving emotional satisfaction and symbolic capital from the ritual restoration of his honor. The sword-blow he dealt to Paluccio was the sign of disrespect after Paluccio’s act had undermined the public esteem due to Amator. The blow was a humiliation, restoring the equality of their relationship before the ritual kiss took place. The ramifications of the ritual act went beyond the immediate situation, however. Amator’s position was that Paluccio did not deserve respect in his own person. In word and deed he expressed regret that he was unable to reciprocate in kind for the insult he had received earlier. The context in which the two counterparts of the ritual peace enfolded necessitated respect to a human factor, which overrode the parties’ sentiments and allowed the reconciliation to take place. The capite talioni. Record from the archive of San Angelo in Pescheria, protocol of notary Antonio Stefanelli, year 1364, p. 119; published by Pietro Fedele, ‘Una composizione di pace fra privati,’ Archivio della Societa romana di storia patria, 26 (1903), 470–1. The statutes of Rome required the ritual kiss in reconciliation, see Re, Statuti della città di Roma, 97–9.

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ceremony leveling the ground for the reconciliation was not an exclusively local custom. From fragmentary data corroborating the Roman case, it would appear that by the fourteenth century this condition was a pan-European phenomenon. In a Frisian reconciliatory formula, for example, the representative of the injured clan grabbed the offender by the hair and put a naked sword on his neck. In Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland, there were cases where the offender would lay his head on the grave of the victim and the other party would put the sword on his head.11 In Flanders, as we have seen, the offender or his kin would present a naked sword to the injured party. Handing over the person of the offender to the injured party was therefore a common custom predating our period, and we have seen it frequently employed throughout high- and late-medieval reconciliation. Nothing compels us to argue that it accorded respect to the ‘other.’ On the contrary, in the Roman case Paluccio conformed to the postulate that respect in the ritual submission was due to the overarching frame of custom sanctioned by the community, which alone guaranteed his protection. Amator, whose willingness to forgo revenge was crucial for the reconciliation, identified a qualitatively distinct object of respect, the arbiters Lello and Pietro. Nothing is known about the relationships between Paluccio, Amator, and these two gentlemen. The concept of ‘love’ [amor] as an expression of respect was, as we have seen, a common convention of the time. I was not able to ascertain whether it had any structural implications beyond the personal bond created by amor. The statutes of Rome to which the instrumentum referred did not provide special legal status to the figure of the arbiter, and the document itself is silent about the nature of the man-to-man bonds that warranted Amator’s obligation to the arbiters. Whatever the case, their personal relationships were sustained by mutual respect, structural or personal. It was this that restrained Amator from retaliation. Apart from the reference to the arbiters, the motives behind Amator’s decision are unclear. We will probably never know them. What is clear is that in this case the human actors external to the encounter were paid due respect in the reconciliation and from a functional 11 His, Strafrecht der Friesen, 366; Johannes Grim, Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer (4th edition, Leipzig, 1899), vol. 2, 307; and Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz, Ethnologische Studien zur ersten Entwicklung der Strafe, nebst einer psychologischen Abhandlung über Grausamkeit und Rachsucht (Groningen, 1928), vol. 1, 444ff.

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perspective substituted for the deity of other accounts. Reference to ‘friends and relatives,’ and honorable persons as mediators and arbiters were common occurrence throughout the period. Yet neither the high medieval religious paradigm, nor the heroic ethos, nor the courtly norm accorded them the exclusive respect that we saw in the Roman ritual scene and which Amator’s words made explicit. The sentiment of respect attached to the arbiters increased the significance of human agency, but as long as the ritual encounter focused on the misdeed, the reconciliation remained positional and socially constructed. The factors stabilizing it were outside of the ritual actors’ control and exposed them to external pressures that could cause, and often did cause, the reversal of the peace contract. In ritual encounters of this kind, the parties remained ontologically ‘other’ and potentially hostile. This is why additional arrangements— above all, marriages, or the transfer of control over the case to the public authorities—were frequently employed to stabilize the contract. Genuine forgiveness, the essence of the emotional economy of the ritual reconciliation did not thrive on such soil. All that the pacificators could count on was the legal remission of insult and injury. Remission restored honor but was not a satisfactory emotive stabilizer of the peace arrangement. By the end of the period there was a widespread awareness of the dangers of this approach. The legal theorists felt uneasy at the practitioners’ exhortations to ‘remit’ injuries. ‘Remission,’ admitted Rainaldo Corso, in the middle of the sixteenth century, ‘is necessitated by the requirement for equality, and maintains that what has happened has not happened at all. But this is a fiction, for what has been done cannot be undone.’12 The situation changed radically with the development of respect toward the other party to the reconciliation. This shift shielded the participants in the ritual encounter from the volatility inherent in the dependence on external factors, contextual or social, structural or agentconstructed, contingent or enduring. Concentrating on the individual, it allowed for maximum efficacy of ritual in which the concept of equality with and acceptance of the ‘other’ was embodied. This freedom from the contextual conditioning of the encounter came at a price. Other-oriented respect was no longer a public concern; with its adoption, the ritual kiss of peace faded into the sphere of the private.

12

Corso, Delle private rappacificationi, 169.

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The ritual peacemaking between two noble families of Recanati, in the papal march of Ancona, is an excellent case in point and a fitting end to the inquiry into ritual respect. The reconciliation took place on July 6, 1550, in the town of Macerata, in the palace of the papal vice-legate, Rainuzio Farnese, cardinal of San Angelo. The record, made in the vernacular, is worth close attention for its vivid rendition of the ritual act and the abundance of detail about the context of the reconciliation. The speakers and ritual actors for the parties, Lamanno and de Antici, were surrounded by their fathers, brothers, and close kin. The deal was mediated by the vice-legate and witnessed by some of the highest officials in the province. The procedure began with the principals for both sides declaring that they entered the contract on their own free will and in full understanding of its implications. They did not intend to benefit from it and were not manipulated or coerced into reconciliation; nor did they reconcile by mistake or out of reverence and obedience to the legate’s wish. The cardinal himself declared that he had divested himself of all powers as a papal official for the occasion, attended the reconciliation as a private person, and invited the parties to speak and act in complete freedom. All these carefully worded qualifiers were an integral part of the contract: they saved the honor of the parties and ensured the legality of the act. The preliminaries completed, Lorenzo de Antici, the representative of the party that began the conflict stepped forward ‘in a humble and reverent manner,’ and addressed Leonardo Lamanno, the speaker for the opposing clan, as follows: ‘Messer Leonardo,’ he began, ‘I acknowledge that it was a mistake and I did an evil thing; if I had to do it again, I would not do it. Therefore I freely give myself into you to do with me whatever pleases you.’ At this Leonardo Lamanno responded ‘What are you talking about?’ De Antici began anew. ‘I stand here in front of you and tell you that I acknowledge that I have hurt you, and that I was wrong [havervi fatto torto], and I did an evil deed, and that if I had to do it now, I won’t do it. For this I am giving myself into you and in your hands, so that you can do with me whatever you like.’ Messer Leonardo evidently wanted to hear the confession one more time and asked yet again, ‘Are you telling me that you are giving yourself into me and in my hands?’ De Antici uttered his piece for the third time. As soon as he was finished, Leonardo Lamanno began in his turn. ‘Although your deed is not such as to merit forgiveness,’ he said, ‘since you put yourself

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in my hands, by your own free will, I forgive you freely, remit all injuries, and take you for a relative and a brother [ parente et fratello]’. With these words he took Lorenzo’s hand, embraced him, and kissed him on the mouth. Then each and every one of the two parties embraced and kissed each other on the mouth in sign of a sincere, true, pure, and perpetual peace.13 This fascinating scene is full of reminiscences harking back to high medieval peacemaking, but it departs from what we have encountered so far in a significant way. First, the formal shell of the reconciliatory ritual followed loosely the ecclesiastical model of penitential peace. The mediator was a person in close touch with the sacred, a high-ranking priest who stripped himself of his public office to retain only that faculty of his public persona that bore the inextricable presence of the divine. The ceremony itself adhered to the sequel of three confessions required at penance. The humbleness of the supplicant was exacerbated by his having to repeat three times the admission of guilt and his complete, unconditional surrender in the hands of his adversary. The form of the ceremony thus bore the features of the order and custom that the parties respected and through which they tried to accommodate each other to the imperative of peacemaking by invoking its protection. Second, while the formal procedure of the religious peace was preserved, its contents had been carried over into a new order. We are told little about the physical environment of the scene, except that it took place in the residence of the vice-legate, ‘in the chamber of the residence . . ., overlooking the public square.’ This was a secluded, private, and secular space, made official with the presence of a notary and witnesses, and the proximity of the square. The date selected, July 6, did not fall on any religious feast connected to peacemaking. Messer Lorenzo approached the Lamanno party in a humble and reverent manner, but he did not perform any ritual gesture. He spoke by himself and for himself, and as proxy for his family but without referring to any overarching frame, secular or sacred. The interaction was simplified. The encounter depended predominantly on verbal exchange. The ritual moment was preserved for the culmination of the ceremony, a position that stressed its unique meaning in the 13 Record from Archivio di stato di Macerata, fond Archivio della Curia generale della marca di Ancona, series Paci, quoted after Dante Cecchi, ‘Sull’ istituto della pax,’ 145–7.

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act and that redefined the dimensions of its social application and significance at the end of our period. The truly novel element was in the contents of the verbal exchange preceding the ritual kiss and determining its meaning. In its central part Lorenzo de Antici and Leonardo Lamanno focused exclusively on their own persons. Lorenzo demonstrated awareness of the otheroriented aspect of the misdeed and the harm it had caused to the other party. His approach was as far as one could go in reaching out to the ‘other.’ In the manner he acknowledged the wrongfulness of his action, he expressed sincere man-oriented remorse. The latter confirmed not only that the act in itself was evil, but that he should not have done it in the first place and would not do it in the future as well [se l’havesse a fare io nol farria]. The last words dissociated the wrongdoer, as a person, from his misdeed. Finally, by freely putting himself in the hands of his injured or insulted opponent, de Antici expressed confidence in his being a worthy individual and counted unreservedly on the protection awarded by Lamanno’s equally freely bestowed benevolence. His attitude was qualified by a sense of utmost respect to the personality of the other party.14 This type of respect was reciprocated in a thorough manner. Leonardo Lamanno reached out to bestow to the offender the acknowledgment of individual worth he had just received himself. He made sure the arrangement about the misdeed stood: what Lorenzo had done was outrageous, but it was something that qualified neither his person nor his inner self. The offender’s remorse implied that he was ontologically distinct from the evilness inherent in the offense. The proposal was accepted, and he was accorded the personal worth he was striving for. The expression of respect to and recognition of such a worthy individual, fallible but capable of realizing his mistakes and connecting to the injured on the level of worthiness, was finally embodied in the act of forgiveness with the kiss of peace.

14 For this kind of respect see Stephen A. Darwall, ‘Two Kinds of Respect,’ Ethics, 88 (1977), 36–49; Darwall defines it as ‘appraisal respect.’

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The reconciliation of Macerata captured a momentous development in the evolution of the emotional economy of the rites of peace that seems to have been a prevailing practice by the end of our period. Despite assertions to the contrary, ritual did not lose its relevance in the resolution of interpersonal conflict. Arguing about the disappearance of the ritual kiss, scholars seem to confuse its vanishing from public record with its demise as an effective tool of the peace. Ritual formalism and the emotions it embodied continued to play an important role in the alleviation of grievances in the beginning of the early modern era. The kiss of peace remained the central emotive device of ritual peacemaking.1 The perseverance of ritual was due to a significant extent to its emotive potential and its capability to embody the emotion work accompanying peacemaking. This function of ritual obtained regardless of the strength of the legal frame and the pressure applied when the rite was performed in public. The efficacy of ritual emotionality throughout the period can be said to posses two dimensions, a stable and a dynamic one. From the first perspective, ritual reconciliation with the kiss appeared as a way to guarantee the social agreement, minimizing the prospect of conflict by providing for the parties’ emotional satisfaction. Smooth progress to this outcome depended on establishing common expectations about the terms of the interaction as a type of cooperative activity, including the demand for restraint and redistribution of social valuables, such as salvation, honor, or respect, on both sides. Unless supporting factors were involved, these expectations were by no means stable. Coercion in its premodern forms, from peer pressure to collective enforcement of the bonds of custom and the law, to direct intervention of the authorities, did not always fulfill the task of an 1 De Waardt, ‘Feud and Atonement in Holland and Zeeland,’ 37, argues that by the beginning of the early modern period ritual in peacemaking had all but disappeared. The cases from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Holland he quotes, however, all contain ritual elements. True, ritual changed both its form and meaning, but remained conspicuous as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century.

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efficient stabilizer of social arrangements. Even when a certain amount of coercion was exercised, expectations were thought of as more properly stabilized by the sentiments. As a kind of social joint putting the diverse aspects of social life and individual experiences together, sentiments needed to attach to the same arrangement. They had to be generated and attuned to mesh, in order to stabilize expectations efficiently.2 Ritual fulfilled that task. To refer one last time to Manzoni, while in his account audience and injured alike were overwhelmed by the natural goodness in their hearts, without Fra Christoforo’s trepidation and emotion work to consciously generate appropriate feelings, there would have been no reconciliation. And without ritual, which moderated feelings to mesh, there would have been no peace. The dynamic part of the efficacy of ritual emotionality has to do with the nature of the feelings elicited in the ritual encounter, the social link embodied in the sentiments managed through ritual, and the target of the emotional economy of reconciliation. The discussion of the gradual changes in all three spheres highlights a major shift in the role of the sentiments, above all the moral emotions, in interpersonal interaction. Throughout the period, the primary moral authority of the medieval West, the church, consistently promoted, independently and with the support of the secular authorities, the policy of integrating the social emotions as dispositions of the individual person. The ritual kiss, with its multiplicity of obligatory connections, with its capacity to embody sociability, and with its affective potential, was at the spearhead of this social project. It is only logical that at the moment when respect for the other party in the reconciliation appears to have become the essence of the ritual action, the ritual tool began its withdrawal from the public sphere. Its ‘privatization,’ which is usually explained in the contexts of the civilizing process, religious decency, and the rise of bourgeois morality, can also be interpreted as the sign of the first, if rudimentary, success in the accomplishment of the task of merging emotionality and morality in the premodern individual. Once mutual respect sank into the personalities of the ritual actors, and the social morality determining the valence of interpersonal conflict penetrated their affective worlds, the 2 On meshed emotions as a crucial factor for stabilizing agreements see Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. A Theory of Normative Judgement (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 262.

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kiss switched its operation into the sphere governed by individual dispositions. For a number of reasons that lie outside the scope of this inquiry, the new field of operation of the kiss was now the domain of the private. The transformative effects of the kiss were not limited to the emotional worlds of the ritual actors. With the kiss, Leonardo Lamanno and former foes turned into fratelli et parenti. During the premodern period, this concept had more than an empty ring to it, legally and socially considered. It kept reappearing in ritual peacemaking with the kiss in diverse contexts and situations. It was, after all, one of the factors undergirding the efficacy of the ritual kiss. The ritual kiss seems to have been able to effect a proper transformation of identity on a certain level, a crucial characteristic of the ritual interaction and a development to which I turn in the next part.

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PART THREE

BUILDING IDENTITIES

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INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE

BUILDING IDENTITIES Atant vit une aumaire ouvrir/et une wivre fors issir Qui jetoit une tel clarté/[con] un cierge bien enbrasé. Tot le palais enluminoit, une si grant clarté jetoit. Hom ne vit onques sa parelle, que la bouce ot tote vermelle, Par mi jetoit le feu ardant. Molt par estoit hidosse et grant; Par mi le pis plus grosse estoit/que un vaissaus d’un mui ne soit. Les iols avoit gros et luissans/come deus esclarbocles grans. Contreval l’aumaire descent/et vint par mi le pavement. Quatre toisses de lonc duroit/et la keue trois neus avoit, C’onques nus hom ne vit grinnor. Ains Dius ne fist cele color/ Qu’en li ne soit entremellee; desous sanbloit estre doree. Vers le chevalier s’en venoit; cil se saine quant il le voit. Apoiés estoit sor le table/et quant il vit si fait dyable/ Vers soi aproimier et venir, isnelement por soi garnir/ A misse la main a l’espee. Ancois qu’il l’eüst fors jetee, Et la grans wivre li encline/del cief dusqu’a la poitrine: Sanblant d’umelité li fait/et cil s’espee plus ne trait. ‘Jo ne le doi,’ fait il, ‘tocier/puis que le voi humelïer.’ La quivre adés ver lui venoit/et plus et plus s’en aproimoit, Et cil adonc se porpensa/que s’espee adonques traira/ Por icel fier serpent ferir/que il veoit lui venir. Et il serpens le renclina/et sanblant d’[a]misté mostra. Il se retint, ne le trait pas; et li serpens eneslespas/ Desi es dens li est alee. Et [cil] trait del fuere l’espee; Ferir le vaut par la potrine. La guivre autre fois le rencline, Vers lui doucement s’umelie. Il se retint, ne le fiert mie/ Il l’esgarde, pas ne s’oublie/ne de rie[n] nule ne fercele, Et si a molt grant [se] mervele/de la bouce qu’a si vermelle/ Tant s’enten[t] en li regarder/que d’autre part ne pot garder. La quivre vers lui se lança/et en la bouce le baissa. Quant l’ot baissié, si se retorne. Et li Descouneüs s’atorne, Por li ferir a trait l’espee. Et la guivre s’est arestee, Sanblant d’umelité li fait. Encliné l’a puis si s’en vait, Et cil a soi son cop reti[e]nt. De molt grant francisse li vient Que il ferir ne le valt mie/por ce que vers lui s’umelie. Ensi s’en est la guivre alee; en l’armaire s’en est rentree/ Et l’aumaires aprés reclot. Renaut de Bâgé, Li Biaus Descouneüs, ll. 3127–3199

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A popular motif in high- and late-medieval fiction, the episode with the kiss between the serpent-woman and the knight in Renaut de Bâgé’s thirteenth-century romance, differs from the established pattern in the genre. The encounter in the enchanted city was decisive for the characters’ identity. The kiss that the beautiful Esmerée, here in the guise of a hideous serpent, stole from the Fair Unknown’s lips set the noble maiden free from the spell of her malicious suitors. She regained her body and with it her social rank and status. In spite of the continuous allegiance of her vassals she was able to fully assume her role as a queen only after her ritual rebirth through the kiss. As for the Fair Unknown, the kiss led to the revelation of his name, Guinglain, and the names of his parents. The acquisition of kin affiliation dispelled the shadow of illegitimacy from the royal status he was destined for. The ritual act integrated the characters through the bodily transformation of the maiden and through the discovery of a genealogy, a place in history, and thence a distinct personality of the knight.1 Not a faithful slave of literary authorities, Renaut might have taken delight in playing with the genre’s conventions, but he was less free to play with the social conventions of his day. His account was embedded in a specific socio-cultural environment, the ritual practices of early thirteenth-century French society. For him the kiss was primarily a rite of identity building, just as it was in a roster of rites of transition, from baptism and vassalage to ordination, liturgy, and royal coronation. A later version of the romance, Thomas Chestre’s 1 Renaut de Bâgé, Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Descouneüs; The Fair Unknown), ed. with an introduction by Karen Fresco, trans. by Colleen P. Donagher (New York and London, 1992), 184–90. For a thorough discussion of the implications of this type of kiss according to several interpretations see Philippe Walter, Le Bel Inconnu de Renaut de Beaujeu: Rite, mythe et roman (Paris, 1994), 267–94, and the older studies of Walter H. Schofield, ‘Studies on Libeaus Desconus: Disenchantment by Means of a Kiss,’ Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 4 (1895), 199–208 and Richard Loomis, ‘The Fier Baiser,’ Studi Medievali, 17 (1941), 104–13. See also, most recently, Beatrice Amidei, ‘Il tema del fiero bacio nel Bel Inconnu e la sua permanenza nella tradizione canterina,’ Quaderni di Acme, 23 (1995), 9–38. Schofield identifies some 34 variants of the tale of the kiss with the monster. The traveling motif of the kiss of the serpent-woman is systematically studied as a literary phenomenon by Emma Frank, Der Schlangenkuss. Die Geschichte eines Erlösungsmotivs in deutscher Volksdichtung (Leipzig, 1928), which, despite its name, covers a broad sample of Western literary and folk-tale versions. The most recent discussion of Guinglain’s identity, by Donald Maddox, Fictions of Identity in Medieval France (Cambridge, 2000), 99–109 is a strongly literary endeavor and despite its professed aims contributes little to the issue as I approach it.

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Lybeaus Desconus, is perhaps the best confirmation of the travelling motif ’s contextual dependence. Writing about two centuries later, Thomas, or his model, rendered in a different way the original from which both he and Renaut borrowed. The serpent’s humble countenance, the signs of respect and friendship, and the triple attempt to kiss disappeared in Thomas’s narrative. The monster’s human head, its instantaneous change into a naked maiden after the kiss, and Lybeaus’s startled reaction to the outcome of the metamorphosis were facets of a changed vision of ritual’s capability to enact identity transformation and the essence of identity itself.2 Renaut and Thomas clearly had different social and cultural frames of reference. From a modern standpoint the ritual actors in the scene with the kiss were loci of decision making, maintaining equilibrium between individual agency and social context. The outcome of the ritual encounter was in part predetermined and in part a consequence of their own choices. Continuity and change of personality in the process of acquisition of identity complemented each other. Continuity was supported to a significant extent by the characters’ bodies, here integral parts of their selves, and by their adherence to the prescriptions of an external social code. The serpent mesmerized the knight with its red mouth of a courtly lady. The rules of chivalry—do not harm someone who shows you deference—had the knight in their grip. Corporeality and respect, coded within the same discourse, carried over core elements of the actors’ personalities into new identities. Change, for its part, was a function of embodiment, too, depending on the corporeal transformation of the maiden and the embodied mechanism of the kiss. There are further similarities with Renaut’s characters’ achievement of the predicament of the person as a self clad in a condition. There are further differences from the way Chestre saw the relationship between ritual and identity building. Esmerée, aware of her true self, restored her identity not just by reacquiring her human body but by socializing it by means of dressing appropriately. In Renaut’s world, the ‘social skin’ mattered. Two centuries later, Chestre’s maid, even accounting for the shock that her nakedness delivered to the stunned hero, did not need such trappings. She was what she was as she was: an accomplished person defined within the 2 M. Mills, ed., Lybeaus Desconus (London, 1969), 197–99. For the date of the English version see ibidem, 66–8.

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boundaries of her physical husk. She did not need the validation of status conferred by clothes. Clothes were attributes and not an integral part of her social person as it had been the case in Renaut’s narrative. While Renaut’s maiden was identified through her social skin, for Chestre social and physical skin coincided. Moreover, Chestre’s knight felt it was socially inappropriate to ‘connect’ to another individual by catching a glimpse of the maid’s naked body. Renaut’s knight, in the grip of other types of social convention, easily let himself get involved in a gesture with an even more intimate character than the bashful gaze of Chestre’s knight. Moreover, Guinglain, who just learned who he was, had years of knightly toil ahead to realize himself. For Renaut, therefore, much more than for Chestre, ritual produced a new personality only in conjunction with social validation. The thirteenth-century selves who became conscious of their place in society and history needed society’s confirmation of the significance of that identity before they could exercise the autonomy that went along with it and acquired their social roles. In the early thirteenth-century version of the scene, the discovery and/or awakening of the self, achieved in the ritual interaction with another self, was only part of the acquisition of identity. Social approbation conditioned its fulfillment. By the fifteenth century the grip of the social over the self had been relaxed. In light of these observations it is worth noting that the episode with the kiss bears close resemblance to the rites of peace. After all, the encounter between Guinglain and the serpent-woman was a peacemaking scene. The sentiments of the knight, uneasiness, anxiety, and fear of betrayal, and the serpent’s humility and signs of friendship, make the typical palette of reconciliation. In terms of attachment to the rules of the ritual encounter, the serpent’s submission [umelité ] forced the knight to spare it, for ‘one did not strike those who humiliated themselves.’ In terms of form, before kissing, the serpent approached the knight three times, according to the pattern of penitential peace adopted in secular reconciliation. There was a structural analogy between the kiss of the serpent-woman and the ritual kiss of peace. The resemblance was not coincidental. The building of identity appears to be a common ground of the various rites in which the kiss was involved. Part of the task of peacemaking was to reconstruct enduring identities for the ritual actors who redesigned their relationship in the interest of the social peace. Several dimensions

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of the identity building process can be detected in the working of the rites of peace. As an action, the rites of peace integrated self and person into a new identity by unifying diverse substantive and relational visions in a single practice. The multiple obligatory connections borne by the kiss gathered different strands of personality and selfhood from a variety of domains. Subjected to constant reinterpretation, the kiss retained a stable function as a matrix ordering the relationships in which continuity and differentiation, the two basic processes of identity building, were being reproduced. Last but not least, as a representation, the kiss bridged the space between human agency and social structures by supplying symbolic referents for the loose network of associations within which the integration of the social person was achieved. The kiss of peace thus allows us a glimpse into the ritual construction of identity in the context of peacemaking. The premodern identity of peace, as I see it, was a two-tiered construct, conforming to the model of inscribed and acquired features. As with most models it was an evolving, historically contingent structure affected by three sets of factors. It was controlled by a series of discourses that, in their turn, were sustained by a set of society- and epochspecific institutions, and was constituted in the actors’ relations to enduring and relatively stable, though not immobile, external referents. The discourses, grounded in law, religion, courtesy, civility etc., charted the normative parameters within which ritual interaction was to be understood in accordance with the dominant model of identity construction. The institutions embodied by various ecclesiastical and lay authorities acting from within the church, the city, and the feudal structures anchored individual identity in time and space. They instantiated the discourses and reified the symbolic referents that in ritual action appeared as presentations and representations. The core of the ritual production of identity, however, were the links which the rites of peace established between individual actors and the referential fields on which they drew for their personality. The most universal of these was the numinous itself. Less lofty, but not less influential, were the ritual representations of the family, the clan, and the social collectives identified with corporate groups of different orders. Chapter Seven comprises an exploration of the modes in which the rites of peace constructed the links between the ritual actors and the paradigmatic referents to which the reconciling individuals and groups related to organize their personality. What I am searching

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for is not so much diverse identifications as the logic of relatedness— that is, the patterns of accommodation to the symbolically (re)presented social paradigms and the techniques of their ritual appropriation by individuals and groups. The chapter is structured around three basic mechanisms of relatedness, namely, exchange, presentation, and representation, and examines the shifts in the sociocultural environments causing them to morph into each other. Chapter Eight focuses on another dimension of relatedness, the relationship of the actors to themselves. This relationship can be thought of as the ritual integration of self and person through the body. The discussion of the phenomena of sincerity and integrity and the ritual arrangement of the individual’s motivational structure are the central preoccupation of this chapter. My task in Chapter Nine is to dissect the relation to particular ‘others’ as an identity-building device. Here I attempt to disclose some of the rules governing identification through roles, and the construction of ‘others’ as ends in light of the ritual actors’ own aims and purposes. In the concluding section I briefly review the findings of this part as manifestations of a set of processes in the course of which ritual identity was constructed, defined, resolved, and stabilized.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

IDENTITY FROM WITHOUT

‘Man,’ Ernst Troeltsch wrote once, ‘is an individual-in-relationto-God.’1 This definition contains the fundamental conception of humankind flowing from the teaching of Christ. In many ways, it sums up the medieval understanding of man. For the medieval mind, man was in essence an otherworldly being facing the deity on his or her own, stripped of the protection of corporate structures.2 While an indispensable starting point, in reference to the subject matter of this inquiry this postulate is somewhat reductionist. Moreover, it has been expounded almost exclusively in terms of substance. For my purposes the heuristic value of Troeltsch’s definition lies in the dynamic nature of the concept, in its ‘in-relation-to’ part, on three counts. First, it helps explain the accommodation of premodern practices to the discursive frames within which people sought to explain identity. In the traditional view of the medieval self, the core of the person was perceived as lodged in an immutable, immortal soul. The early modern era transplanted this core onto the mind and constructed it in a less tangible way, seeing in it the awareness of the unique identity bounding the whole together. Both discourses leave open the problem of the building-blocks of the individual. Meanwhile, in accounts controlled by them the transcendental self frequently appears as only a part of the person, the rest being constituted by the body and the complex relationships with the outside world that supplied the conditions of social existence.3 The links to the body and society emphasize the importance of relatedness in both discourses. The body was of particular importance, for, as Paul Connerton has convincingly argued, it was the locus of compressed sociality sedimented 1 This is the fundamental premise of Troeltsch’s major work, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, in his Gesammte Schriften, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 1922). 2 See Louis Dumont, ‘A Modified View of our Origins: the Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism,’ in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge, 1996), 93–122. 3 For the concept of the medieval person and the unity of body and soul see most recently Caroline Walker Bynum, The Ressurection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995).

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on it by the dominant structures of the communicative community encompassing the individual.4 Second, there are reasons to challenge the static, substance-oriented notion of the carrier of the self as a thing [res] coterminous with the soul, the body, or the mind in medieval practice and adopt a more complex, dynamic, and relationally oriented concept of identity. In the context of ritual, a process by definition, the notion of the self as the hub of the bodily and socially sustained physical and psychological relations among different temporal stages of the person’s evolution deserves more attention. Hence, if the concepts of the person’s soul, spirit, and emotive dispositions were not constants, but products of the medium of the interacting body, the relational perspective begins to make more sense than the medieval theorists were inclined to allow for.5 Third, when the premoderns ‘discovered’ the self as a focal point of identity, self-awareness was very often a mediated phenomenon, not an inner experience arising from within.6 Even more importantly, as we shall see, the sociality for which ritual relatedness stood was only rarely grounded in immediate contexts and was by and large informed by long-term, abstract, and extra-contextual structures. Among the most influential of these was the deity to which Troeltsch’s definition referred, but there were other, no less important referents as well. These considerations point to the significance of relatedness and the ritual process as a means of mediation in the construction of medieval identity. Not a new subject, this analytical field has been over-examined insofar as man’s identity in relation to God is concerned. It has been, however, much less explored in the context of the ritually built linkages between man, the ‘other,’ and society, which lay at the heart of identity construction as an ongoing process.7 4

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember. For two examples see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,’ in Michael Feher, Ramona Haddaff, and Nadia Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One (New York, 1989), 160–220, and René Nelli, ‘Love’s Rewards,’ ibidem, Part Two, 218–230. 6 On the twelfth-century ‘discovery’’ of the self, rather than the ‘individual’ see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’ in her Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), 82–109. 7 For a discussion of modern developments see Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteen Century (London and New York, 2000). I am discussing self-identity of course, not social identity or per5

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The Transactional Self I would argue that from the point of view of ritual relatedness, the self and the person were transactionally constituted through embodied social relationships and through corporeal coalescence with the spiritual force of the divine.8 The soul of the medieval Christian, as it appeared in acts of ritual peacemaking, was not a monad but a complex hub of interacting forces. This postulate was supported by theory and enacted in practice. The reigning Aristotelian and postAristotelian concept of the soul maintained that the latter was not so much a ‘thing’ as a principle of relatedness, organizing the functioning of ordered matter. To give but one demonstration of the practical embodiments of this concept, in legal ritual, as we have seen, the soul appeared as a compound of moral responsibilities and juridical rights and obligations. The rites of peace embodied the transaction in which the compound self was constituted and enacted as a totality. They articulated sameness and similarity, binding like to like, regardless of whether the likes were annihilated in the ensuing totality or a degree of discreteness and distinctiveness was preserved. The ritual construction of the transactional self followed formalized patterns. Since the times of Durkheim and Mauss, sociological discourse considers the primary ones under the categories of ‘exchange’ and ‘representation.’ Later theory modified the second concept to extract from it another variety, presentation. As Samuel Kinser put it succinctly, from performative point of view, which was never lost in ritual, presentation was participation, while representation was a spectacle; presentation was deductive and categorically abstract, based on types, while representation was rooted in the inductive and categorically concrete.9 The boundary between the main forms was sonality, which has long been seen as defined in terms of relation. For a forceful argument see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), who places all emphasis on power and authority. In literary theory two works stand out: Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth Century Romance and Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, 1990). 8 The category of transactional self is analyzed by Bruce Knauft, ‘Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substance and Natural Metaphors,’ in Feher et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, 190–280. I use the term ‘coalescing’ as opposed to ‘attachment’ and ‘commitment,’ after Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners. 9 Samuel Kinser, ‘Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nurenberg, 1450– 1550,’ Representations, 13 (Winter 1986), 1–41.

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murky and the latter two were frequently amalgamated into a single practice, but they will serve as working concepts in the discussion that follows.10

Exchange In ritual exchange, the individual became part of the ‘other’ and lost parts of itself, acquiring a new composite identity. The simplest model of this type were the rites of reconciliation with the kiss of peace enacted between religious and lay people. By the beginning of the eleventh century, ritual peacemaking that fits the definition of exchange appears frequently in monastic cartularies. I have already discussed its legal formalism. The law, however, was only part of the act. The origins of these rites were in the ritual affiliation of lay folk with the religious communities. The practice stretched back at least to the fifth century, at a time when monasticism began its long history in the Western tradition.11 The kiss of peace was the central element of the ceremony of affiliation. It was performed as a rite of initiation and transition at the time of entry into the relationship and frequently thereafter. Throughout the Carolingian period it was indispensable at the regular caritas ceremonies celebrated in common by lay and religious ‘brothers’ to renew their mutual bond.12 If anything, the need to repeat the rite regularly confirms the observation that early medieval identity and the rank and status it was staked on were thought of as a fluid and dynamic construct subject to constant, unpredictable substance changes. By the late tenth century and especially in the aftermath of the monastic and Gregorian reforms, some of these practices were gradually suppressed. Shared ritual life was restricted to areas where the presence of laymen did not threaten the ecclesiastical control of the sacred and the pollution caused by intimate contact with the world did not contaminate the domain of the divine. In such conditions, 10 For the principal forms of enactment of totality see William Ramp, ‘Effervescence, Differentiation, and Representation in The Elementary Forms,’ in N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller, eds., On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London and New York, 1998), 141ff. 11 Adalbert Ebner, Die klösterlichen Gebets-Verbrüderungen bis zum Ausgange des karolingischen Zeitalters. Eine kirchengeschichtliche Studie (Regensburg, 1890). 12 For the shared ritual life of lay folk and monks see also Bernhard Bischoff, ‘Caritas-Lieder,’ in his Mittelalterliche Studien. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1967), vol. 2, 56–74.

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ritual affiliation with the religious corporations was transformed into an exclusive reward for lay people. Reconciliation with the kiss, one of the ways to enact such relationships, was most common in terminating conflicts with lay folk belonging to the emerging knightly class. The new meaning of the affiliation resulted from the development of a new functionality of the rites of peace. They were linked to the termination of conflicts over property rights, which proliferated as the church began its withdrawal from the system of customary gift exchange with lay society. In return for ending a calumnia, the knights received the ‘benefit’ of the religious society, with all the privileges of prayer, burial, and masses for their souls it entailed. This is a well-known practice; yet the implications of its ritual form have not been properly explored. A typical example from the house of St. Julian of Tours sheds light on the major features of the transaction. Sometime in the eleventh century, a certain Wimundus of Magny-le-Désert donated to the monks of St. Julian the decima of Habloville, for the good of his and his relatives’ souls [ pro anime sue parentumque remedio]. After his death, his son Adam inherited his father’s possessions [honor]. Seduced by his greed and influenced by the advice of ‘malicious people,’ he contested the deal and seized [saisivit] the property. The monks held their own, having the legal title on their side. The conflict dragged on until Adam, inspired by God, let himself be persuaded by his amici to quit the claim and officially reinvest [resaisivit] the monks. At the settlement, the abbey was represented by Wido, prior of St. Julian’s house at Ferté-Macé. To him Adam made his ‘gift’ [donum] of investiture, for the salvation of his soul and the souls of his family. Through Adam’s kiss of peace, they all received the benefit of the religious society. For their part, the monks were to possess the property in ‘brotherly peace.’13 The agreement was confirmed by Adam’s wife and two sons and duly witnessed. To secure the transaction, the monks gave Adam six solidi and added smaller amounts for his wife and sons. Although full descriptions of that type are rare, this seems to have been the standard procedure in eleventh and twelfth-century resolutions of calumniae.14 13 Per pacis osculum beneficium abbacie et societatem loci sibi et suis accepit, sique decimam a Sancto Juliano et monachis ejus jure possidendam in fraterna pace confirmavit, see Denis, ed., Chartes de Saint-Julien de Tours, 29–30, n. 19 14 See another typical gift case from 1136–1140 in Martine Garrigues, ed., Le premier cartulaire de l’abbaye Cistercienne de Pontigny (XII e–XIII e siècles) (Paris, 1981), 133–4, N. 61.

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What went on here under the legal cover of firmantia was more than a simple business transaction. The ‘benefit’ of affiliation with the monks was a special type of symbolic capital that can be best described as a kind of grace. Lay people had no access to it on their own nor was it doled out indiscriminately to corporate groups. Wimundus had secured a fraction of it by virtue of his ‘gift.’ Apparently, Adam, who might or might not have been included in the agreement, sought to extend his grip on it. He and his eleventh- and twelfthcenturies fellow-heirs, although entitled to some rights pertaining to alienation of property as clan members, had limited access to the grace that the principal benefactor obtained with his gift. The grace was the counterpart to the legal liability taken at the moment of the transaction and was therefore attached to those liable to keep their end of the agreement. The contract was a perfectly balanced total exchange between the monastic community and the individual benefactor. More important, in this context the transaction was an instance of rudimentary individuation. The affiliation enacted through the ritual act differentiated the clan member from the rest of his kin.15 From now on, he or she was, in a tangible sense, more of an ‘individual-in-relation-to-God’ than his or her relations. Differentiation was possible because the affiliation drew on the concept of individualized liability of the soul and was enacted corporeally, through the body and the ‘gift’ as a material extension of corporeality. Although opinions about their exact nature differed, in the high medieval religious discourse both soul and body were understood as somewhat discrete substances capable of sustaining coherence and distinctiveness through time. Integration through grace acquired in ritual reinforced discreteness. With the enactment of the ritual obligation, the engagement of the body and the soul represented the corporate clan member as a partly individualized sole being that had lost some of the corporate kin features sustaining its identity in exchange for grace. Through the same ritual that made him or her ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ of the religious, the lay individual separated from his or her primary blood collective.

15 On the kiss as a device of differentiation see Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Kiss Sacred and Profane,’ 210–36.

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The Corporate Self Given that grace concerned primarily the soul, the separation, the loss it entailed, and the new integration into a different collective were played out on the level of the self and were on this account highly problematic. This statement may seem too theoretical and Augustinian, but there is enough evidence that in the high medieval kin group the self and the identity it perpetuated were not an individual possession. Long under discussion, this issue has only recently been conceptualized. In John Bossy’s expression, the self was subsumed in the corporate whole; Caroline Bynum termed this condition of existence ‘seeking incorporation in groups.’16 From the standpoint of the ritual practice of peace, both statements need to be qualified. The position they share seems to allow for a self already possessing a degree of distinctiveness and discreteness betrayed in the capability to ‘seek’ incorporation, that is, act. Action bounds. I would therefore adopt this stance with the qualification that the self was the corporeal whole in action. As in the theologically constructed concept of the tripartite and yet unified divine, the corporate human self was thought of as present in any embodied sole ‘persona’—in full. Although practice evidenced it at an early time, this concept was not put forth explicitly in the poetic and theological discourses before the end of the twelfth century. It gained wide currency around the time of the Fourth Lateran Council. Wolfram of Eschenbach captured it perhaps best in Willehalm; his injunction could well have defined the situation back in the eleventh century. ‘What marvels God sends me!’ exclaimed Willehalm at recognizing, in the midst of combat, his brother Arnalt, who drew him on the grass and reached to kiss him. ‘Here I had to defend myself against myself, and when I rode this joust against you, I was fighting against my very self !’ [hie muos ich mich mîn selbes wern . . . mit mir selbem ich dâ streit]. ‘That is the truth,’ responded Arnalt, ‘My self has unwittingly waylaid my self. . . . Our separate selves may well be reckoned one, and anyone looking for two hearts here would find only one, for my heart was your heart ever, and your heart must be mine.’ [mîn lîp mîn selbes lîbe vâr . . .].17 The reference to the body (lîp —translated ‘heart’ by 16 John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution,’ 29–61, esp. 35; Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’ 82–109. 17 Heinzle, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, 29; translation in Passage, The Middle High German Poem of Willehalm by Wolfram of Eschenbach, 81.

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Passage) and the ways it was engaged is telling. The gesture to end the fight and confirm shared kin identification was to reach out and kiss. In Willehalm as in its prototype, Aliscans, the kiss defined the essence of the family bond as a corporeal and a metaphysical totality understood as a ‘sameness’ informing the identity of individual kin members. Wolfram’s image was one of total identification, body and soul. Although a poetic exaggeration, it draws our attention to the ritual enactment of the sameness which, being coterminous with kin corporeality, sustained medieval collective identity. Disentangling the complexities of the discourses controlling the ritual life of the family as the medieval corporation and collective of peace par exellence goes beyond the task of this work. It suffices to mention here that it fed, on the one hand, on ancient Roman and Germanic concepts of peace and protection as the equivalent of blood relationship and, on the other hand, on the notion of the Christian community of believers as unity in Christ-as-Prince-of-Peace.18 By the beginning of our period the basic premise enabling incorporation was still the idea of a shared substance. The ritual kiss was a component in a sequence activating a kind of sensory, corporeal memory borne out by that substance. Through it the awareness of identification with the collective was actualized. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s rendering of reconciliation between kin members, Bren’s mother Tonwein tried to convince her son to restore the peace with his brother Beli by embracing and kissing him, shedding tears and pleading on Beli’s behalf. When that did not help, she bared her breasts and implored him to ‘remember’ [memento fili memento] the milk he sucked, the pains she suffered to deliver him, and the womb in which he was conceived and from which he exited.19 The purpose of this injunction was to activate the awareness of a shared substance lodged in the body. The baring of the breast as a tangible reminder of filial duty is commonplace in medieval litera18 For early Germanic concepts of the family as a unit of peace and protection, defining the very meaning of peace as ‘blood relationship,’ see the undeservedly forgotten work of Horst Kusch, Caritas und Pax im religionskirchlichen Bereich des Althochdeutschen (Diss., Leipzig, 1947), esp. 192–236. There is a lucid summary of the most recent scholarship in the field in D. H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge, 1998), 12–20. The best survey is William Jervis Jones, German Kinship Terms (750–1500) (Berlin and New York, 1990), 80–106. 19 Griscom, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, 284–6.

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ture. Geoffrey’s rendition, however, went beyond the topos. Tonwein was trying to awaken the ‘memory’ of a corporeal identity that was an organic feature of Bren’s self-as-whole. It went back to the time before he had acquired consciousness and self-awareness, back to when he was not, in any case, was not anything separate from his mother. He was called to ‘remember’ through her body, her milk, and the pain she suffered. The pain that gave rise to remembrance of wholeness was a reference to corporeality as the bearer of the identity that was supposed to be borne by Bren’s body and the memory it supported. Such identity was corporate, innate, embodied, and not erasable. It could be obliterated or ‘forgotten’ on a cognitive level if conscious stirring of sensory memory did not keep it awake through the mediation of ritual, but it never left the individual. Geoffrey’s account recalls Lambert’s version of Heribert’s and Henry II’s reconciliation, in which the ‘blood-stained heart’ retained the ‘memory’ of the offence, and Wolfram’s ritual union in which the body/heart carried the corporate sameness. It is intriguing to note the connection which this interpretation of the functionality of ritual practice had to the contemporary theory of memory. Resting on the post-Aristotelian tradition, the latter treated memory as a physiological problem. According to a widely shared postulate, the heart, and by extension the body of which it was a corporeal part, could remember just as well as the brain, by receiving external impressions, ‘emotionalizing’ them, and relaying them to the brain to store and ‘rationalize’ them.20 Against this background, ritual remembering was an essential part of the communicative process that integrated the individual. Though often discussed under ‘memory,’ the phenomenon of sensory integration could be more aptly described as ‘remembrance,’ rather than ‘memory’ in its modern perception. Remembrance was intimately connected to ritual; of other differences between the two forms of memory there will be word later. What matters at this point is that, led by such ritually awakened ‘memories,’ Bren mitigated his anger and reconciled with his brother through the kiss that turned them into friends [amici ]. The building of identity through artificial ‘blood relationship’ was inscribed in the social code governing the political uses of the kiss 20 See a short survey in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 48ff.

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throughout the Middle Ages. Such was the ‘brotherhood by adoption,’ which Canute, beginning to quail, proposed to Edmund Ironside in the heat of their single combat. It was enacted by a kiss of peace.21 In Raoul de Cambrai the ritual kiss of peace turned the feuding clans into ‘brothers’ and ‘close relatives.’22 Significantly, it was Jacques Le Goff, who otherwise dismissed borrowings between the referential fields of the kiss, who formulated most explicitly the theory that blood relationships were the paradigmatic form on which the bond of vassalage, also partly staked on the ritual kiss, was patterned.23

The Dynamics of Ritual Identity In this referential mode the ritual exchange of peace involving the self-as-whole entailed two major consequences. They cannot be adequately explained in terms of the anthropological constants I have been working with thus far. The products of the ritual interaction were dynamic phenomena and stemmed from the individual’s linkages to the evolving social networks in which ritual operated. First, embedded in the discourse of ‘brotherhood’ as it was, the ritual kiss functioned as a semantic code bridging two qualitatively different social paradigms at whose juncture the new identity was born. The blood family was a natural body reproduced traditionally. The incorporation of the family into the clan and the larger, not exclusively blood-related, familia, did not change the referential thrust of the ritually constructed ‘brotherhood.’ Affiliation with the family was an act of aggregation within a traditionally stratified social unit stable through time. The religious communities, for their part, were artificial, functionally determined and reproduced entities. The transition from one form to the other was consequential for the person as a relational entity, even though, or perhaps because, most of the ties with the primary group were preserved. The central part of the period during which ritual affiliation through exchange dominated the framework of peacemaking, the late eleventh 21 Thomas Forester, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of Henry of Huntington, comprising the History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry II; Also, the Acts of Stephen, King of England and Duke of Normandy (London, 1853), 196. 22 Ami et parent; frere; serons comme prochain parent; see Kay, ed. and trans., Raoul de Cambrai, 319–21. 23 Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rites of Vassalage.’

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and the early twelfth centuries, was a time when Western societies were switching from a traditionally stratified to a functional mode of differentiation. In such conditions a stand-alone relationship with legitimating external structures led to a partial identity loss. With the adoption of functional differentiation, individual persons loosened their links with their primary social totality. From identity’s point of view, they became displaced. The possibilities for social actualization became too complex for interaction to be based on identification through a single totality that gave meaning to all relationships. The shift forced the social person to affirm identity by interacting on an individual level as a sole being.24 Through ritual affiliation with another type of collective, the individual developed features of agency, freeing themselves from the hegemony of the kin group as the ultimate meaning-producing social structure. Under such circumstances, agency generated in the ritual act of peace meant a wider scope for acquisition of identity. This entailed a new perception of the manner in which social conflict was resolved. Actualization in the traditional, family-dominated system meant self-affirmation through the norms of kin values, rank, and status. With the transition to a functional, multi-systems world, self-actualization bred opposition to some of these traditional norms. In the context of this study, the crucial social norm that came under pressure was the blood feud or the violent reaction to any threat to property, life, limb, or honor pertaining to the domain of the family. Second, even within the multi-options world, the self-as-whole could not exist as an internally integrated sole being. It lacked the discrete identity that would allow it to enter into independent relationships with other individuals. Options there were, but choice was limited. The limitations were imposed by the necessity to affiliate through familiar categories in order to maintain or increase the level 24 There are some thoughts in this vein in Otto Langer, ‘TELEIA FILIA und amicitia spiritualis,’ in Georg Wieland, ed., Aufbruch—Wandel—Erneuerung. Beitrage zur ‘Renaissance des 12. Jahrhunderts’ (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1995), 46. The theory is in Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 5ff. and 14–17. Luhmann applies his theoretical framework to explain the transition from traditional to modern society, which in his case meant mostly the eighteenth century. I would suggest, in line with Langer’s hints, that the concept is applicable whenever one deals with the dissolution of traditionally stratified social subsystems under the pressures of functionality. A conceptual overview of the period in terms close to my inquiry is R. I. Moore, ‘Family, Community, and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform,’ in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 30 (1980), 49–70.

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of predictability. A complete break, a plunge into an unfamiliar and thence a less predictable world would have simply been too radical, threatening the vulnerable being with destruction. The world of the social person had to be familiar to shield the individual from the chaos of social contingency. Hence the longing of the self for coalescence with other selves and the pain of separation from the traditional collective. The process of ritual coalescence engineered to satisfy that need and repair the partial loss of identity followed in principle the trajectory of the rites of passage. It was sustained by a notion of corporeality that, just like the self, extended beyond the boundaries of the individual body. It included the person’s and the clan’s bodies and the material possessions linked to the individual. Yet the soul was an individual possession, one for which each and every one of the family members was individually responsible. The linked ‘others’ in the collective had duties and obligations towards each other’s souls, but did not have shared possession over the ‘inner being.’ With the gift for the benefit of one’s own soul, differentiation occurred, presented as a tangible division of the up to then collective, indivisible self. Ritual re-identification thus began with separation. The principal theorists of transition via rites of passage, Van Gennep and Turner, have termed it separation from society and/or the group.25 I would rather see it, following Maurice Bloch, as an act entailing dichotomization of the corporate self-as-whole within the person of the benefactor.26 Relational construction of identity within the framework of more than one sub-system caused the fragmentation of the collective social person. The individual self, or the soul, until that time undistinguishable in the pool of the kin collective, stood apart by virtue of the bond with the divine, which it and only it now possessed. Lacking discreteness, however, it suffered from incompleteness and sought to anchor itself into another corporate body. The process of incorporation was not a simple switch and did not eliminate liminality. Rather, liminality was redefined as an extended process of rearranging priorities to fit the affiliation with new social bodies. In Adam of Magny-le-Désert’s case, that body was the saintly, 25 A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London, 1960), Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (London, 1969). Both authors work within the framework of functional anthropology. 26 The phase of separation as dichotomization has been explained by Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge, 1992), 6.

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corporate body of the holy men. Adam entered their artificial ‘brotherhood’ with the kiss of peace, which facilitated the process by mobilizing the familiar kin definition of the meaning of the rites of incorporation. At the end of the process, Adam was a new person, for the kiss initiated him into the brotherhood of those possessing grace and imparted in him the transcendental identity which his soul was to carry to the end of his life and beyond. The two-step sequence of peacemaking and aggregation through which Adam’s reconciliation within the monastic community was enacted was not a universal phenomenon.27 Far more common were simple donations. They obligated God but did not entail the ‘benefit’ of the monastic society or, in my rendition, the acquisition of new identity traits. Part of the explanation of this hierarchy of affiliation lies in the specifics of the third functional stage in the passage into a new identity. Incorporation into the religious community was a transcendental counter gift. It obligated the benefactors to support, defend, and promote the well-being of their new corporate ‘brothers.’ This was of crucial importance not only for the security of the transaction, but also for the identity of the new warrior class, the landed estate of the knights who were the most likely to benefit from the kiss of incorporation in peacemaking with the monks. The act of incorporation transcended the boundaries of the self and affected the social person. It legitimized the knights as milites Christiani rather than simple raptores. The new knight, the defender of peace, was consecrated by contact by his ritual entry into the monastic ‘brotherhood.’28 Artificial brotherhood on such terms was the earliest model of ritual identity building during our period. It was constructed through an exchange leading to organic integration of the institutions of the family and the monastic community. Through the ritual kiss, the device carrying the implications of the organic link, the discourses controlling the relations between individuals misrepresented the monastic community as part of a continuum stretching between the blood family and the transcendental. 27 Even the heads of secular society, kings and princes, were treated in a different manner by the end of this period. See Peter Willmes, Der Herrscher- ‘Adventus’ im Kloster des Frühmittelalters (Munich, 1976), and Joachim Wollasch, ‘Kaiser und Könige als Brüder der Mönche. Zum Herrscherbild in liturgischen Handschriften des 9. Bis 11. Jahrhunderts,’ Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 11 (1984), 1–20. 28 For the mechanisms of this particular manner of acquiring grace see Michel Andrieu, Immixio et consecratio: La consécration par contact dans les documents liturgiques du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1924).

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This model, constructed in the framework of lay-religious relationships, fitted the social structures of the beginning high Middle Ages and was transported to address conflicts between lay persons as well. The religious discourse, institutionalized by the church, maintained that the social bonds between lay neighbors were sacred. If a breach occurred, it was the individual’s duty to repair them. A breach was trespass against the divine and necessitated compensation and satisfaction. Satisfaction fitted into another dimension of the religious discourse: sacrifice. Within the framework of sacrifice, ritual reconciliation opened another gateway through which the individual, by means of ritual exchange of gifts, absorbed and was absorbed into the sacred. Such was the case of Geoffrey (Gaufredus), a miles residing in the vicinity of the abbey of Noyers. During a private war between two clans of the region in 1104, Geoffrey killed a certain Phillip (Phillipicus), a juvenus of an important local family. The young knight’s kinsmen, greatly saddened and grieving [dolor magnus . . . valde contristati ], conceived a deadly hatred towards Geoffrey and burned in desire to avenge their slain relative: that is, they declared a state of formal feud. Geoffrey, feeling threatened, sought to make peace. After several unsuccessful attempts, he enlisted the abbot of Noyers to help him. With presents, entreaties, and reminding the raging nobles of Phillip’s soul, the abbot managed to secure reconciliation. To fulfill its conditions, Geoffrey ritually affiliated himself with Phillip, by now in the otherworld, and his living kin. The means were a gift of land to the abbey of Noyers, which was to support a monk who would pray for the deceased’s soul, and the ritual kiss. The manner of the affiliation is highly instructive. Geoffrey first exchanged some rights he had in the vicinity of Noyers for a plot of land. He then donated the land, in the presence of the mother of the victim and his kin, to the abbey for Phillip’s soul; at this they all kissed and forgave [ignovit] him.29 With the gift, Geoffrey fulfilled an obligation to the deceased that was his kin’s responsibility. With the kiss, he assimilated himself to them and gained access to the divine through the ‘person’ of Phillip. Even more important was the 29 Chevalier, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Noyers, 345–7, N. 320. The episode is discussed in detail, from a legal anthropological perspective, by Stephen D. White, ‘Feuding and Peace Making in the Tourraine around the Year 1100,’ Traditio 45, (1986), 195–263, but without analysis of the ritual reconciliation.

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nature of the ‘gift.’ There were tangible reasons for the preliminary exchange of rights for land, other than the monks’ interest in acquiring yet another piece of real estate. The gift had to be objectifiable and corporeal, an extension of Geoffrey’s corporeal self, to enable the affiliation with the kin of the victim. This assumption seems plausible if we think of Geoffrey’s ‘gift’ as a sacrificial expiation. As the person bearing the expenses of the ceremony, he was a ‘sacrifier.’ The act of giving a part of himself that associated him with the victim endowed Geoffrey with sacred features.30 The religious discourse transformed Phillip’s wergeld into something more than economic compensation. As a sacrifier Geoffrey was closer to the religious community, Phillip, and God himself than any of Phillip’s relatives. This made him a necessary, but perhaps also a desired, addition to the family to which the ritual kiss affiliated him, in addition to the social dimension, the making up for depleted manpower, and the economic reason, having Geoffrey bear the expenses of the services for the salvation of Phillip’s soul.31 Such a scheme was a workable solution within the religious discourse dominating the high Middle Ages. In cases such as that of Geoffrey, the kiss was an economical rite, concentrating in one act sacrificial affiliation, legal settlement, and counter-gift. The knight made his gift to the divine mediator; in exchange, he received the counter-gift of the injured clan’s forgiveness. The concept of ‘gifts,’ circulating with or without mediation between the parties to the conflict made the system operational regardless of the nature and context of the exchange. In Geoffrey’s case the gift had to be a thing, an extension of his self, reciprocated with the counter-gift of 30 None of the numerous definitions of sacrifice, as controversial and mutually exclusive as they are, does undermine the structural features of the act which I employ here. The most stimulating discussion remains that of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. by W. D. Halls (Chicago, 1967), 9, 53, 62. The literature on medieval gift, in all of its incarnations, is quite large; for an excellent recent survey see Arnould-Jan A. Bijsterveld, ‘The Medieval Gift as Agent of Social Bonding and Political Power: A Comparative Approach,’ in Cohen and de Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations, 123–56. 31 Peace transactions had a doubly transformative effect, due to the fact that the dead were involved, and because one of the central aims of the conflict management procedure was to transform the social conditions that have caused the conflict in the first place. See the excellent analysis of Patrick Geary, ‘Exchange and interaction with the dead in early medieval society’ in his Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London, 1994), 77–94, and 125–62 esp. 159. Transformation, of course, would have the greatest impact when involving the person.

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giving up the no less tangible revenge, also a demonstration of collective selfhood. The gift concept informed the exchange process of identity building throughout the high and late Middle Ages. The injured knight in the eleventh-century Flemish story of St. Ursmar made his ‘gift’ to God by giving up the sentiments of revenge, and reconciling with his enemy, the whole sequence being condensed in the ritual kiss. At the other end of the period, in a story of Boccaccio’s, Aldobrandino (the injured) made the ‘gift’ [ picciol dono] of his forgiveness, that is, his right to exact revenge, to Tedaldo, the friarmediator and representative of the divine [a reverenza a Dio].32 Through the familiar concept of sacrifice, the religious discourse governed the meanings of the traditional system of ‘gift’ exchange involving divine mediators, but the multidimensional referential field of the ritual kiss bore on the legal discourse as well. From very early in the period, the transactional construction of identity within the gift tradition supported by religion was buttressed with the concept of legal obligation inherent in the kiss. It seems that in high medieval peacemaking none of the three discourses, the traditional, the religious, and the legal, could function independently. The peace act was staked on the kiss to mobilize all of them in a hub of interconnected obligatory relations structured by the discourse of exchange. It took time, however, for this construct to encompass the meanings of the ritual act. The complexity of the situation is illustrated in the reconciliation, some time in the last quarter of the eleventh century, of the knight Richard, the son of Geoffrey Belin, with the monks of St. Serge and St. Bach. Richard had sold the church of Rablay to the abbey, but later changed his mind and seized it back. The monks obtained a mandate from the local bishop to suspend the divine service in the church. Seeing his income rapidly disappearing along with whatever spiritual benefits there had been from the possession of the church, Richard repented, appeared at St. Serge, and handed his wadium to abbot Daibert to reinvest him with the property. The abbot granted him the benefit of the community, kissed him ‘with the customary kiss,’ and had all of the attending monks kiss him as well. Unlike the case of Adam discussed above, however, the incorporation within the monastic ‘family’ and the link with the divine enacted with the ritual kiss of religious brotherhood were not sufficient to close the 32

Boccaccio, Decameron, Third Day, Seventh Story ed. Branca, 396.

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deal. The monks had already had trouble with Richard, and securing the investiture in perpetuity without further complications was a must. They wanted the strongest guarantee available, and to make Richard liable to keep his end of the deal asked him to pledge his fides. The knight apparently agreed, and to receive his fides abbot Daibert kissed him again.33 The ritual affiliation could not by itself support the peace contract; only putting the rite into legal context would ensure its proper working. Acquiring a degree of transcendental identity did not guarantee the legal transaction. The two acts stood apart, embedded in two separate narratives, subjected to interpretative schemes substantiated through one and the same formal embodiment, the ritual kiss. All the same, the separation of the kiss of ‘brotherhood’ from the ritual kiss constituting the legal act of security signified a shift in the position of the discourses controlling the interpretation of the kiss as a peace ritual between blood kin. The traditional family frame embodied in concepts such as ‘relative’ and ‘brother’ was now complemented by the bonds constituted within the legal discourse. Having a long pedigree by the eleventh century, this development gained speed as the high Middle Ages wore on. It testified to the increasing trend to replace the traditional blood ties with the artificial bonds of ‘friendship.’ Although habitually referred to as interchangeable terms, the ritual ‘brothers’ and ‘friends’ reflected two levels of affiliation, a traditional and a functional one. The kiss of friendship [amicitia] added a contractual dimension to the traditional bond of kinship, which of itself did not always guarantee the peace even between blood relations. Two examples will suffice to make the point. The ritual reconciliation with the kiss of the Burgundian royal family in the Nibelungenlied was presented in terms of reunited friends.34 Blanchefleur in Aliscans was William’s ‘relative,’ but the count referred to her as ami only after she repented and the siblings were about to exchange the kiss of peace.35 By the late twelfth century, the evolution of the legal discourse employing the concept of amicitia and its related constructs reflected a redefinition of the fundamental bond informing the idea of the family 33 Iterum ob conservatione fidei adversus monachos veraeque fraternitatis abbatem reosculatus est; see Chauvin, ed., Cartulaires de l’abbaye Saint-Serge et Saint-Bach, 85, N. 101. 34 Bartsch and De Boor, eds., Das Nibelungenlied, 182. 35 Rasch, ed., Aliscans, 172.

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as basic institution of the peace. The shift from ‘relative’ to ‘friend’ did not mean negation of the family/clan paradigm. In a definitive way, however, it marked the rise and the increasing significance of two other powerful ritual mechanisms, presentation and representation.

Presentation and Representation In the context of reconciliation, presentation and representation shared one signal feature: both allowed for establishing a bond with the ‘other’ based on the totality ritually made in the persons of both parties, that is, it rested on the concept of self-as-whole. Ritual practice operating on the principle of representation transformed the triadic relationship of offender-divinity-victim, which we saw functioning through the mechanism of exchange. Representation promoted the idea of the existence of a shared substance made efficacious through ritual recognition. In the exchange model, the links with the numinous and the other party were construed in two separate acts. People made their peace with the divine and then entered into quasi-kin relationship with the other party, or vice-versa. One act mediated for another. In the (re)presentation model, ritual operated shared codes, which produced similarities binding like to like without mediation. Their templates were ritually extracted and appropriated in a single act. Ritual reference to the divine and the family through the concept of (re)presentation had broad implications for identity building in peacemaking. While perpetuating the high medieval construct of the referential totalities as poles of a continuum, it did redefine their relationship. In reconciliation following the monastic model, the concept of sameness (in the family resulting from blood ties) was abstracted from the traditional frame as a device facilitating identification with the divine. With the substitution of presentation for exchange, the idea of the divine as embedded in the human soul promoted the actors’ identification with each other to portray them as members of an extended artificial family. Freed from the strictures of exchange, which limited the scope of the ritual transaction, presentation enlarged the concept of family to cover humanity. Through presentation, men could be true brothers in Christ, realities of rank and status notwithstanding. Both presentation and representation enhanced the role of

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equality in the ritual bond of peace and the larger frame of human relations. The idea of personhood in Christ is primordial in Christianity— it is present in the Gospels—but it did not enter the practice of secular peacemaking until after the adoption of (re)presentation allowed the religious and legal discourses not so much to extend or complement as to overlap with the traditional, family-based model of social relatedness and identity. The reconciliatory practices during the Peace of God at the beginning of our period were the first instances when we see these concepts as the exclusive instruments informing social identity. Thereafter, outbursts of ritual peacemaking in the wake of major religious movements chart the evolution of (re)presentational practices. In Ademar of Chabannes’ account of the peace council of Limoges in November 994, for example, the ritual kiss of peace followed the sermons of the bishops who kissed between themselves. Then, in an act mirroring the performance of the high clergy, the lay people indicated their participation by kissing one another. On another occasion, Ademar specified that ‘the bishop began to give the peace, and they all offered the kiss of peace to each other as if at mass [sicut ad missam] so that they might remain in the peace of Christ and in harmony, and that peace might be upon them and upon all the people.’36 Ademar’s narrative, perhaps the most vivid of contemporary records, relates a manner of (re)presentation almost undistinguishable from the one used in the liturgy, the central rite of Christian identity building. As in the mass of Ademar’s time, on both occasions pastors and flock stood ritually apart. The benediction and farewell kiss, in timore et amore Dei, was a standard feature in the conclusion of tenth- and eleventh-century synods attended by ecclesiastics only. The kiss at the peace councils was apparently exchanged in the same

36 Leopold Delisle, ‘Notices sur le manuscrits originaux d’Adémar de Chabannes,’ in Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et des autres bibliothèques, vol. 35 (1895), 267–8 and 271–2. The cases are mentioned without discussion by Cawdrey, ‘The Peace of God,’ in Past & Present, 46 (1970), 50. About Ademar and his writings on the Peace of God see Richard Landes, ‘Between Aristocracy and Heresy,’ in Head and Landes, eds., The Peace of God, 184–218. On Ademar’s central work see also Pierre Bourgain, ed., Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon (Turnholt, 1999) and Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

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manner as the kiss at mass.37 Did that mean that the obligatory relationship with the deity entered through the kiss at mass was transplanted in secular relations to sanctify the latter? The setting of the final act of the peace council had overtones that had been preserved in the meaning of the liturgical kiss in the half millennium since the time of Pope Innocent I’s (401–417) early emphasis on uniformity in Roman liturgy as a means to papal supremacy. The crowd had gathered to hear the constitutions of the peace and legalize them, that is, give them customary validity by obligating themselves before the Highest Judge to keep to their stipulations. If we add the do ut des reconciliation to the picture the reference to the divine in that model appears qualified by a set of conditions that differed from the strictly ecclesiastical mode of representation. The difference implies structural instability in the workings of the (re)presented social peace as a ‘mirror’ image of the ecclesiastical construct, to use Don Handelman’s terminology.38 Indeed, peace relationships by (re)presentation were precarious. Judging from Rigord’s account of the religious movement of the White Hoods in the region of Puy around the year 1183, there was a popular disapproval of reconciliation and forgiveness for no better reason than common humanity in Christ. It was a marvel that someone could really count on this premise to quell violence and to override the drive for revenge. ‘It was a great marvel,’ wrote Rigord, ‘that the people carrying the hood with the sign felt secure, so secure that if someone met the murderer of his own brother, he would promptly forgive him the death of his brother, receiving him with tears in the kiss of peace, and would take him home to dine with him.’39 Rigord put his finger on the main issue that undermined the efficacy of representation in the individual appropriation of the religious discourse. His injunction is that without the support of the law and social validation, reconciliation staked on the religious discourse alone would hardly stand. 37 See Herbert Schneider, ed., Die Konzilsordines des Früh- und Hochmittelalters (Hanover, 1996), 315, Ordo 7. The phrase and the kiss appear regularly from that moment, c. 800 to Ordo 12, dating from the late eleventh century. Afterwards it can only be seen in Ordo 23, a reflection itself of an earlier model. 38 Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Toward an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge, 1990). 39 Quoted after the excerpt in Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden, 464–6. Huberti provides a translation of the Chronicles of Saint Denis and samples of related sources, ibidem, 462–7. The event is dated differently, from 1180 to 1183.

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Moreover, residing outside of the security provided by the structures of traditional governance, feud and coercion, it was dangerous, unpredictable, and destructive. And yet, the people under the sign of Agnus Dei felt so secure that they relied on the relationship built on representation and, perhaps, on the emotion work betrayed by tears to inform their total social personae. They remitted the personal sentiments of revenge, regardless of the pressures of tradition. The emotional disturbance surfacing in tears testified to the integration of the forgivers’ personalities around the represented reality. They could afford to disregard the social validation of acts of peacemaking by the discourses controlled by the community. They could forgo the protection afforded by the traditional, institutionalized mechanisms of legal settlement. The ritual identification through presentation was strong enough to overcome the vagaries of contingency and the pressures of structure and endow the individual with sufficient agency—until one realizes that it was viable only because it was entrenched in the validation of the shifting, fluid, and unstable group that stood as the embodiment of the (re)presented totality. There are reasons to believe that the detached individual would not have been capable to cross the collective judgment of the traditional community on that matter. Those who did, like Giovanni Gualberto, became saints but theirs were feats of exceptionality. The common folk followed a different pattern. Security came because the individual acted in a neatly defined and coherent although temporary group. The White Hoods were a pacis confoederatio, a semi-institutionalized extension of the Peace of God movements of earlier centuries. Clothed in white, with a metal image of the Virgin on their chests, they wrapped themselves with the tangible vestments of a corporate identity that provided an external referent for their social personae. The identification buttressed the dissociation from the norms of the traditional community, guarded and enforced, although for different reasons, by the clan collective and the authorities. To the traditional mind, as for the authorities, there was a danger lurking beneath the pristine white garments and the kiss of forgiveness constructing the new collective identification. The peace group from which it stemmed was a collective that did not rest on traditional foundations. It fed on functionality foreign to the traditional mindset, steeped in the customarily sanctioned procedures of the feud and conflict resolution through settlement as it was. The

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disapproval voiced in the ‘great marvel’ remark of Rigord’s was a common response to ritual reconciliation lacking the validation of traditional norms. It kept reappearing time and again, in narratives on the Alleluia movement, during thirteenth-century Franciscan pacifications, and in the Bianchi movement of 1399. This disapprobation created a clash on a larger scale than the one sustained by the separation based on exchange. The functional groups organized on the principle of presentation supplied a role shield for the individuals and protection that transcended the strictures of the social environment. Despite its beneficial effects, it undermined the positions of both the traditional community and the authorities. The short life span of such collectives before the thirteenth century testifies to the power of the traditional social referents of ritual that countered, quite successively, the attempts of the practitioners of the religious discourse to secure the hegemonic role of functionally (re)presentational communities in peacemaking. The thirteenth century appears to be the turning point in the redefinition of the relationship between the ritual referents. Although haltingly, peace practices validated by functional (re)presentation acquired sufficient social approval. So did the individual identities to which such practices gave rise. Discourses followed suit. Perhaps the best example of this development is the entry, by end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, of the ritual kiss of peace in the Tale of the Forgiving Knight. A crucial development accompanying the change was the transformation of the concept of organic memory as the link sustaining the practice of interaction through exchange between actors and totalities into another kind of incorporated memory, the phenomenon of remembrance as an instance of ritually controlled practice of (re)presentation. The causal relationship between these shifts merits consideration.

Memory and Remembrance: A Discursive Overview In the Tale of the Forgiving Knight the recollection of past action was the point at which embodied ritual ‘flipped’ the organizing principle of personality. The ‘memory,’ or rather the remembrance, that switched the matrix of identity from one to another of the paradigms appropriated by the ritual agents appeared already in Ceasarius

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of Heisterbach’s early thirteenth-century blueprint of the tale. In his version, in a casual way, ritual remembrance [memoria] redefined the forgiving knight as a moral being. Two features characterize Caesarius’s remembrance. First, it was a process triggered by the sensorial perception of another action, Christ’s bowing of His head; beholding Him, the knight wondered why he deserved such a honor and, searching his memory, arrived at the recollection of the act of forgiveness he had performed long years ago.40 The gesture of the numinous, an act of recognition with ritual dimensions, mobilized the knight’s awareness of himself as an agent in history, thereby conferring a distinct personality on him. Second, beholding the gesture of Christ and ‘remembering,’ the knight reintegrated himself around the only instantiation of moral agency constructed within the religious narrative on peace and reconciliation present in his past. The act of forgiveness had been forgotten, for the knight had existed continuously with the identity sustained by the traditional culture of his class, based on the institutionalized feud. Now the principles encoded in forgiveness became the foundation of his personality. The recollection of forgiveness, just like the ritual act itself, was a point of discontinuity at which the environment of the feud ceased to inform identity. It is worth noting that the act of forgiveness had been a transient moment. The act of its remembrance, however, was presented as having lasting effects upon the knight’s personality.41 Connecting to the one instance of moral actualization we know about, the knight dissociated himself from the worldly values of revenge organizing his personality and embraced the moral values of peace and forgiveness. Remembrance integrated him around a new identity. Continuity, that basic identity trait, was reconstructed within the discourse interpreting the ritual gesture of the divine as an act of social approval saturated with the morals the numinous stood for. In the motivational structure of the being organized by such a moralized remembrance, the identity of homo faidosis dissipated to enable a new construct to take over.

40

Strange, ed., Caesarii Heisterbacensis Dialogus Miraculorum, 99. On memory as active restructuring of the past, although in a different context see Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994). The same work contains an excellent overview of modern approaches to medieval memory, ibid., 9–22. 41

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The type of remembrance displayed in Caesarius’s account became a staple feature in later medieval religious discourses, where the distinction between memory and remembrance was gradually worked out and the dignified bow of the head was replaced by an affectionate kiss. Unlike the theory of memory, practical remembrance triggered by the kiss was not a widely popular theme and the manner of its construction in ritual action has to be inferred from casual references. A work of practical mysticism that dealt with the issue of remembrance as a corporeal action and linked it indirectly to ritual peacemaking was Duke Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines. Composed in 1354 as a devotional treatise aiming to relieve the author’s anxieties over having lived an immoral life and now seeking a mystic reunion with Christ, the Livre offered a few paragraphs on the subject of memory. The best excerpt is in a digression on occasion of the Holy Week, the time to remember the Lord and grieve for His passion and death. This intriguing passage contains an important terminological distinction within the duke’s conceptualization of the notion of memory. This overlooked subtlety played an important role in the late-medieval religious discourse on reconciliation. During Holy Week, intimated Duke Henry, we ought to remember [souvenir] the sufferings of Christ for humankind, especially in church, where sermons and chants remind us of the tortures that His sweet and tender body endured for us. To connect to Christ at the culmination of his sufferings, however, at the moment when His blood gushed forth from His pierced heart, the duke wished for a different kind of remembrance [remenbrance]. ‘Alas!’ he lamented, ‘Let our evil and prideful hearts be pierced by that same lance that passed right through Your heart oh Lord, in remembrance of the precious blood that issued from Your humble and meek heart. . . .’ He asked for the gift of tears, to shed them for Christ as Christ’s blood had been shed for humankind.42 The use of two different terms for memory, souvenir and remenbrance, was not a mere stylistic twist. The phenomenon that today we call ‘remembering,’ Henry’s souvenir, was an act happening in the mind. It was stimulated by talks, chants, and sermons but was a pas42 Alas! Bien deverons de parfond coer plorer et lesser entrer en nostre malveis et orgoillous coer un poi de celle lance qe passa per mye vostre coer, siqe, en remenbrance de preciouse sanke qe de vostre humble et debonair coer a grande foison issi; see E. J. Arnould, ed., Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster (Oxford, 1940), 95–6.

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sive internal reaction to external sensation. The memory identified with remenbrance had a more pronounced quality of practice, affected the heart, and was born from and within the embodied and emotionally saturated actions of wounding and tear shedding. Souvenir was an internal cognitive reaction to sensorial experience; remenbrance was an emotion and an action in one, a kinetic phenomenon uniting interior and exterior in a single moment of ritual self-identification. The difference between the two was in kind. They complemented and opposed each other at the same time as distinct modes of efficacious representation. The idea of remembrance as opposed to memory in the manner Duke Henry used it had long roots in the theoretical explications of the mass where its appeared ever more often, albeit not always conceptualized, as the fifteenth century progressed.43 To mention but one of the earlier cases, John Lydgate, commenting on the ritual kissing of the pax in the 1430s, observed that the kiss was a spur to remember Christ’s passion.44 The incorporation of the mature notion of remembrance as a fusion of action and emotion into the discourses of peace, however, was a complicated affair, since its primary component, embodied action, ran counter to the evolution of the ritual moment. As a fully developed concept, presenting peace as an appropriation of the divine paradigm, remembrance appeared in Peter Idley’s mid fifteenth-century account, where it stirred the trespasser to repentance. Idley’s interpretation of ritual efficacy squared well with the current of late-medieval piety witnessed in Henry’s mystical treatise, as well as with a series of contemporary representations of the rites of reconciliation at mass. Idley’s remembrance supported the concept of a mediated, sensory action, the reflection on which impinged on individual self-awareness. The besieged knight saw pious folk headed for the church on Good Friday, and ‘remembered it was longe gon/ sithe he herde onythyng of Goddis seruice/ ffor matyns ne messe herde hee noon,/ Wherof his herte dide soore gryse;/ And in his minde ’gan to contryve and deuyse’ to go and do penance.45

43

See Charles Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions, and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany,’ Past & Present, 118 (1988), 25–64. 44 See his poem ‘On kissing at Verbum caro factum est,’ in Lydgate’s Minor Poems, 117, ll. 30–2, quoted after Rubin, Corpus Christi, 106. 45 D’Evelyn, ed., Peter Idley’s Instructions, 166.

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The message is cryptic and gives away few clues about the nature of the sentiment of bad conscience, which was born in the heart of the trespasser and from there was passed onto his mind, to suggest that we are dealing with an ontological phenomenon. Yet Idley, just as Gower for whom ‘the heart devises wicked thoughts,’ kept the mind into the body. I will venture a conjecture and suggest that the motivation to repent was a representation of the moral action spurred on by the visual impact of acts of ritual penance. It was inspired by the influential theory of memory defined around the middle of the thirteenth century by scholastic theologians. As an externally derived impression, Idley’s ‘remembrance’ was a reflection of the scholastic model. In it, memory was a disposition, a proclivity of the actor’s habitus. It was the key concept linking conceiving of goodness with the practice of doing it. Memory was the fundamental factor in the preservation, formation, and exercise of moral virtues.46 The sensory ‘remembrance’ to which it was assimilated by Idley fulfilled the same task. In Idley’s practical ethics, remembrance was not the decisive moral factor in conflict resolution. The do ut des element was strong, and in the vein of the fourteenth-century versions of the Tale the act of the forgiver was motivated not so much by remembrance as by love. The ritual union with the kiss of love and peace first between the human actors and following that between the forgiver and Christ dominated the scene. Although remembrance and love were both elicited by sensory perception of pious action, for Idley love, ‘Cherite’ and the unity it created remained the factor that made possible the extraction and appropriation of the divine substance through presentation. Still, it was in the act of remembrance that the transcendental goodness lodged in the God-like self penetrated the person of the ritual actor and helped actualize his identity in the frequent, persistent doing of charity, concluded Idley, for ‘he that in Cherite daily doith dwelle,/ He abideth in God and God in hym/ In soule and body, lyffe and lym.’47 46 I am following the findings of Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 64ff., 156. This study, the best inquiry into the learned concepts of medieval memory to date, does not go into the nature of late medieval ‘remembrance.’ A larger section in Carruther’s newer work, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images (New York, 1998), deals with remembrance but not in the context of practice. 47 Ibidem, 167.

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Peter Idley’s Instructions poured new wine in old casks, but during the following half-century remembrance seems to have established itself as the concept informing the meaning and function of the ritual sequence of reconciliation in spite of the gradual disappearance of the kiss between the reconciling parties. A conspicuous example of this development is one of Johannes Pauli’s highly popular chapbooks. Pauli was a prolific moralist who switched camps in the beginning of the religious debate of the Reformation. His renditions of the Tale of the Forgiving Knight are worth a closer look, for, among other things, they present us with instructive cases from the early stages of the evangelical rethinking of the late-medieval discourse on ritual efficacy. Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst, one of the influential late-medieval collections of exempla, was first printed in 1519. It contains two versions of the Tale. The first is a variant of Giovanni Gualberto’s story. Unlike the medieval tradition that had its beginnings in Caesarius of Heisterbach, Pauli’s anecdote rendered the episode of reconciliation in the vein of the first Life of Gualberto, where the kiss of peace had not been mentioned at all. Corporeal action in Pauli was reduced to the offender’s falling on the ground. There was no bodily interaction between forgiver and forgiven or between God and the human actors. The intervention of the divine was limited to a bow of the head, as in the original story. The second exemplum is a story of a ritual reconciliation orchestrated by one of the greatest Franciscan preachers of the fifteenth century, Giovanni Capistrano, and took place in Germany. In this version, a woman whose brother had been slain was so moved by Capistrano’s peace sermon that she forgave the murderer, took his hands, and kissed them for the sake of the hands that had been crucified for her (Christ’s hands).48 Given Pauli’s ingenuity as a writer and the long medieval tradition of the Tale, the faithful rendition of the story in the manner it had been told in the early twelfth century was hardly accidental. Perhaps a clue for the explanation of this return to the origins is the offender’s plea to be spared ‘in remembrance of the suffering of Christ that is dear to us.’ Unlike the high medieval tradition that had in its grip Peter Idley, in Pauli’s narrative remembrance [ gedechtnis], not love or charity, provided the texture of the reconciliation. 48

Hermann Österley, ed., Johannes Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst (Amsterdam, 1967), 386–7, Ns. 692 and 693.

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An attempt to glimpse its possible meanings would lead us to the conceptual background of the idea as elaborated in Luther’s theory of the sacrament. Pauli seems to have rested his vision of the efficacy of ritual on premises either derived from or very similar to Luther’s teaching. As David Sabean put it, the emphasis of Luther’s Gedächtnis lay on remembrance as a holistic exercise that integrated the person into a unity in faith and good works—forgiveness being, of course, a major constituent of the latter. Thus, from a functional perspective, remembrance shared some features with memory. In terms of the constitution of the person, however, and its role in organizing personality, late-medieval remembrance was quite different from the organic, ontological high-medieval memory and from memory in the modern sense of the word. It was lodged in the body like organic memory, but drew its meanings from a domain outside of the person. It was a mediated experience inseparable from corporeal interaction. The integration achieved through it depended on repeated engagement in the ritual act that created it by a participatory presentation of Christ’s life and death.49 For the purposes of this analysis, this is a concept of cardinal importance. Remembrance of the divine sufferings integrated the person by linking self and sociality, provided stability and consistency to the person’s motivational structure, and thus mediated the relationship of the parties of the reconciliation. It depended on presenting ritual action as a sacrament and was the central factor in building ritual identity. The shift from identity rooted in organic memory, stimulated and awakened by action, to kinetic remembrance coterminous with action and emotion was a reflection of the changed perception of the mode of the relationship between individual and society. It was a critical transformation. It expanded the area for realization of the individual, for it was a move from substance to agency. In Andrew Strathern’s metaphor, it was a reorientation of the individual from a ‘horizontal’ perspective of identity in which the self as substance was submerged in the collective of embodied beings to a ‘vertical’ mode in which identity emerged in the agent’s links to God and society presented as embodied chronotopes.50 49 David W. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1986), 48–9. 50 Andrew Strathern, ‘Keeping the Body in Mind,’ Social Anthropology, 2:1 (1994), 43–53.

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Identity and Urban Peace: The New Brotherhoods One of the most dynamic premodern ritual environments, that of the highly developed urban centers of northern Italy, furnishes instructive material corroborating the conclusions derived from the analysis of the discursive constructs of ritual peacemaking. The middle decades of the thirteenth century witnessed the building of pressures in the Italian cities. From the functional-social viewpoint of ritual, these resemble the restructuring of French feudal societies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The maturing of the communes in their transition to city-states was the impetus for a reorientation of ritual as a cultural interface. Yet another adjustment of the ritual practice of identity building in the environment of the evolving urban worlds became visible by the sixteenth century, with the emergence of the precursors of the modern state system. From a ritual point of view, three thirteenth-century developments deserve closer scrutiny. First, the reconciliatory records of the Italian communes and citystates document a clear shift in the perception of the constitution of the ritual bond. The ‘quasi-relative’ status resulting from eleventhand twelfth-century reconciliation all but disappeared. The phrase ‘brother and friend’ remained as a trope exclusively in nonlegal evidence. It kept reappearing, for obvious reasons, in times of high religious fervor, such as the 1233 Alleluia or the Bianchi peace movements in 1399. In everyday practice, however, the ‘brotherhoods’ recorded in notarial documents were explicitly and separately negotiated. The perception of the bond established by ritual cannot therefore be explained as a straightforward progression in which the concept of ‘friend’ supplanted that of ‘brother.’ Rather, one may speak of layers of social uses according to the intensity of the notion of relatedness connoted by the two terms. Thirteenth-century ‘brotherhoods’ were characterized by a lower intensity of the connotation ‘blood family.’ The intensity diminished with the horizontal spread of the concept, which by that time characterized a substantially wider social referent. Nonetheless, in the context of peace and reconciliation, the ritual brotherhoods of ‘friends and brothers’ were sustained by contractual bonds grounded on corporeality. Such notion of ‘brotherhood’ entailed liability by proxy, obligating the members of the group to comply with the terms of the peace pact concluded by the individual representatives of the clan. Also, whereas the older, more intense concept of brotherhood

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was organically carried inside the body, the new brotherhood was as easily lost as it was acquired through membership in the group that transcended traditional loyalties. These shifts are important enough to merit further scrutiny. The diminishing intensity of relatedness might not seem such a radical change until one realizes that it developed against the background of amicitia as a socially constructed and legally defined contractual bond. As the Florentine Statutes of 1281 had it, interpersonal peace was a real contract, not only in form but in substance.51 The feud continued to be a tacitly recognized playground of traditional loyalties and identities, but the reformulation of the peace bond was part of the authorities’ strategy for incorporation of the body politic within the new power structures. If amicitia was statutorily defined as a specific type of contract, it exited the domain regulated by the customary law of the blood collective and was subjected to urban legislation. The law could dissolve it and lessen the backup of the collective to individual violence. This development is seconded by data from the Low Countries.52 The statutory regulation of the degree to which ‘friends’ constituted a part of the clan was a function of the authorities’ involvement in the regulation of the feud. The advance of the communal legislation gradually curtailed and by the end of the period almost eliminated the participation of ‘friends’ in vendettas, but during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were still active in the frequent and violent family conflicts.53 Second, ritual peace was a crucial feature of the new urban institutions, the lay religious confraternities structured as ritual ‘brotherhoods.’ The ritual life of this new form of association widened the scope of individual relatedness through representation. Confraternities have been studied extensively in recent decades, and the referent of their ritual life is quite clear.54 Beginning to take shape around the 51 Ana Maria Enriques, ‘La vendetta nella vita e nella legislatione fiorentina,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. VII, 19 (1933), 201. 52 Espinas, ‘Le guerres familiales à Douai au XIIIe et XIVe siècles,’ 415–73. 53 In 1268, Ghino Velluti was assassinated because his consorteria were ‘friends’ of the Rossi. Cino Dietisalvi, who masterminded the attack that took the life of Lipo Mannelli eighteenth years later, and revived the vendetta was related to, but was also known as ‘friend’ of the Velluti; see Chapter Two. 54 The basic work is Gilles Gerard Meersseman, Ordo Fraternitatis. Confraternite e pieta dei laici nel medioevo, 3 vols. (Rome, 1977–79). For a fine recent overview see Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2000).

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middle of the thirteenth century, they embodied formal networks of citizens exercising in self-discipline of conduct through prayer and penitence. Organizing the popular devotional impulse, the confraternities became a tangible expression of the Italian urban centers’ fundamentally religious character. Their professed function was to achieve pacification of the cities, so that ‘all who have hatred revert to peace and harmony.’ Their major political activity, in the beginning at least, was to mobilize resistance to the quasi-institutionalized factions which tore asunder the civil fabric of the communes, and help achieve some sort of social reconciliation. The confraternities achieved this task by constructing corporate bodies that drew on membership from across the cities’ professional, social, and residential divisions. The flagellants, in particular, saw peace as the central task of their ritual program. To quote Ronald Weissman, Florentine flagellants, through their ritual celebration of peace, safeguarded the spiritual peace of the larger community. By the fifteenth century, or at some places by the sixteenth century, lay confraternities were educating their membership in the practice of civic government and culture.55 The incorporation in confraternities was a socially approved practice consistent with the ideal of the larger corporate body of the city within which they developed. As Nicholas Terpstra has demonstrated, the Bolognese ‘Compagnie Spirituali’ were the only organized lay groups dedicated solely to expressing the local conviction that theirs was a holy city, loved and sometimes chastised by God. This was a widespread perception throughout the Italian urban world. Confraternal piety, in particular that of the flagellants, encouraged corporate identification with Christ’s disciples, lay friends of the Signore.56 Establishing a ‘friendship’ with God, enjoying his patronage, individually or as a member of the group, was the highly desired goal of fourteenthcentury Florentines as indeed of all urban lay ‘brothers.’57 The bonds between the confraternity brothers, on the one hand, and the corporate body of the confraternity and the city, on the other hand, were validated and embodied in confraternal ritual. It is telling 55 Both Weissman and Terpstra emphasize this point in different contexts; see Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1978), 43–105, for the republican orientation of the confraternities. 56 Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, 1995), Prologue. See also Mario Fanti, ‘Gli inizi del Movimento dei Disciplinati a Bologna e la Confraternita di Santa Maria della Vita,’ Bolletino della Deputazione di storia patria per Umbria, 66 (1969), 181–232. 57 Ibidem, 71ff.

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that the affiliation with the group, the affirmation of corporate identity, and the daily existence of the individual as an incorporated person all hinged on the rites of peace. To temporary suspend differences of rank, status, class, estate, wealth, and power, was the ultimate example of the appropriation of the paradigm of communality. It has been argued that the identification with the divine emerges most clearly in the two rituals of foot washing and flagellation.58 I would suggest that the ritual life of the flagellants revolved in no lesser degree around the kiss of peace. The brotherhood of the apostles united in the peace that Christ ‘breathed’ into them constituted the body to which the flagellant ‘brothers’ assimilated themselves through the kiss. This was a common feature of confraternal life, reappearing in the statutes of the ‘brotherhoods’ ever since the first processions of the disciplinati in 1260, which sparked the movement. The waves of public penance rolling through the Italian cities throughout the late Middle Ages kept it alive and left vivid imprints on the memory of the contemporaries.

Ritual Representation and Visual Imagery The confraternal statutes expounding the centrality of the kiss of peace in confraternal identity building are complemented by a series of images, reflections of the observers’ reaction to the ritual representation of peace. The visual imagery of the rites of peace captured what struck the public as really important. In a contemporary version of Giovanni Villani’s short account of the movement of the disciplinati in 1310, there is a miniature illustration dominated by two ritual activities, flagellation and the kiss of peace. The flagellants are naked above the waist; their vestments, bodies, and faces are depicted in a uniform fashion, as multiplied mirror images of a single prototype.59 Conventions of space, type of representation, and artistic talent notwithstanding, the imagery of collective identification and the focus of the artist on the rites of peace is striking. Dispensing with all signs of inequality, rank, and status 58

Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 61ff. Luigi Magnani, La Cronaca figurata di Giovanni Villani, ricerche sulla miniatura del trecento (Città del Vaticano, 1936), Table 1; Giovanni Villani, Istorie fiorentine di Giovanni Villani cittadino fiorentino, fino all’ anno MCCCXLVIII (Milan, 1802–3), vol. 4, 216. 59

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conveyed by clothes, nakedness put the disciplinati outside of the normal social intercourse. They were equal to the extent they were embodied. The body and the ritual kiss carried the identity of any single brother as an integral part of the corporate whole, but this type of uniform identification situated the group outside of society. The concept informing the author’s vision was shared by another artist, the anonymous author of a late thirteenth-century fresco in the cemetery church at Terni. There, a pair of youths kneel in front of a heavily armed archangel, having cast their weapons on the ground, embracing and kissing each other. The avatar of the divine, towering high above them, lifts the folds of his long white robe and lays it on the heads of the reconciling men, uniting them in the bliss of heavenly grace. The pair is dressed in a similar fashion and their faces look alike, resembling that of the heavenly mediator.60 By contrast, in a variant of the reconciliatory scene in a mid-fourteenth century Sienese painting on the predela of a panel dominated by the mystic marriage of St. Catherine, the ritual actors are pronouncedly individualistic in style and attributes. Their clothes, headdresses, and colors set the reconciling humans apart. Only the kiss under the patronage of the angel brings them together. The impression of separation, discreteness, and distinct individuality is not an isolated feature of the predela. It is supported by the imagery of the rest of the panel. The victory over evil, as Lois Drewer aptly pointed out, represented either in reconciliation under the enveloping wings of the archangel or in the defeat of the ugly creatures from Hell, was aesthetically linked to the dominating theme, the drama of individual salvation represented by the mystic marriage of the saint.61 These three images, a small sample of the rich imagery of ritual reconciliation, are as different as they are alike. The latter two take us away from the issue of confraternal life but not from the concepts it stood for. They exemplify the late-medieval evolution of the appropriation of the divine paradigm through its representation in the rites of peace. The first two pictures are a reflection of the thirteenth-century imagery of a collective, corporate identification with the sacred paradigm described above, whether directly or through 60 Copy in Lois Drewer, ‘Margaret of Antioch the Demon-Slayer, East and West: The Iconography of the Predella of the Boston Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine,’ Gesta, 32:1, (1993), 17. I would like to express my gratitude to Ms. Drewer for directing my attention to her study. 61 Drewer, ‘Margaret of Antioch,’ 12.

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its avatars, the angels and apostles. Their symbolism is subsuming and typological. They derive meaning deductively, from a participatory representation of identity staked on the generic type of peacemaking. The third image points towards a social environment in which the confraternities grouped together in one relatively loose structure a number of discrete individuals creating personal networks of linkages to one another and God.62 In contrast to thirteenth-century corporate piety, the peace rituals of late-medieval and Renaissance confraternities were a reflection of a changed mode of social representation. Descending from twelfthcentury structures and perpetuating thirteenth-century models, as a social institution the fourteenth-century confraternity provided a ritual space for suspension of the conflicting and competitive personalities and obligations ensuing from the intensely individuated character of its members’ connection to the divine. The peacemakers might have still been ‘one person in Christ,’ but in relation to each other they exhibited the discrete features of high-profile individuality. In other words, person and individual were no longer coterminous. The evolution of individualism necessitated a stronger emphasis on personality, which entailed a new level of equality to ensure the coherence of the civic body. Individuals acquired equality as persons in Christ; a feat they achieved in the act of ritual peacemaking.

Peace Ritual, Civitas, and Conjuratio Reiterata This observation leads us to the third development, the dynamic political dimension of the phenomena I have traced thus far. In modern terms the ritual imagery of the reality represented in the peace rites of collective identification with Christ’s disciples reflected a stage in the transition of the commune as a sworn association of individuals to civitas, the corporate body of the city-state. Given that the early commune was commonly referred to as pax and concordia, it is hardly surprising that peace rites played an important role in the physical enactment of the concept of sworn community in the first place. In the extant traditions of the northern Italian cities, the constitution of the communes of Piacenza and Milan was presented as resulting from a mass ritual reconciliation between the urban nobil62

Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 74–82.

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ity and the popolo. According to the anonymous source informing Giovanni Codagnello’s account of the origins of the commune of Piacenza in 1090, in the heat of an armed conflict between commoners and milites, Christ intervened to instill mercy and piety in the two camps. The warring parties suddenly became aware of their foolishness, worthlessness, and insanity. Weeping and beating their chests, shouting aloud ‘Peace! Peace!’ knights and commoners rushed toward each other to embrace and exchange the kiss of peace. The ‘universal peace and concord,’ which ensued from that miraculous intervention of the divine and the mass of individual reconciliations following in its wake, laid the foundation of the commune.63 A fourteenth-century authority, Codagnello is well-known for his imaginative approach to his sources.64 His account betrays a perception of ritual reconciliation later than the events recorded. All the same, there are reasons to believe that Codagnello’s rendition preserved traces of the early history of the commune. In the account of another fourteenth-century author, Galvaneo Fiamma, the series of private reconciliations on the eve of the First Crusade, most probably in 1095, enacted through ritual kisses ‘in the streets and on the squares’ of the city, were the foundation of the commune of Milan.65 The ‘universal peace and tranquility’ following the reconciliation between the feuding parties spanned the transitional period of the constitution of the commune, from about 1090 to the 1130s, when the communal systems in Lombardy were more or less institutionalized with the appearance of the consulate.66 On both occasions our sources conceived of the commune as a political body and a legal structure. In view of the legal implications 63 Giovanni Codagnello, Annales Placentini Guelfi, MGH SS, vol. 18, 411–2. On the political and religious situation in Piacenza at the time see Domenico Ponzoni, ‘Situazione della chiesa Piacentina al tempo del concilio di Piacenza,’ in Il Concilio di Piacenza e le Crociate (Piacenza, 1996), 121–53. Ponzoni sums up the arguments of Pierre Racine, Plaisance du X e à la fin du XIII e siècle (Paris-Lille, 1980), 68–9 and Luigi Canetti, Gloriosa Civitatis. Culto dei Santi e società cittadina nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1993), vol. 1, 138. 64 See Holder-Egger in Neues Archiv, 16 (1891), 253ff. 65 RISS, vol. 11, coll. 627, ch. 153. Galvaneo’s account was written in the first quarter of the fourteenth century but preserves traces of an earlier source like Codagnello’s chronicle. 66 For a discussion of both cases from a legal point of view see Gerhard Dilcher, Die Entstehung der lombardischen Stadtkommune. Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Aalen, 1967), 135–41. See also the criticism of Hagen Keller, ‘Die sociale und politische Verfassung Mailands in den Anfängen des kommunalen Lebens,’ Historische Zeitschrift, 211 (1970), 34–64.

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of the ritual kiss and its accompanying rites, this is hardly coincidental. The sources on which Codagnello and Fiamma drew derived the emergence of the commune from the juridico-political implications of private reconciliation under divine patronage enacted in ritual. I suggest that this type of presentation was among the most archaic features in our authors’ accounts and testifies to the authenticity of their renditions. The legal dimension of the peace rites, the kiss featuring prominently among them, established a temporary citywide peace during which the urban parties and factions worked out a functioning mechanism of government and civic representation. The ritual act of peace triggered the community-building process with the self-obligation through oath, validated in the liability-producing kiss of peace and guaranteed by the divine. The enactment of large-scale peacemaking created a commonwealth ex nihilo. The ritual actors pooled their resources to erect a collective agency built on the dissipation of private conflict and held together by the only institution available, the liability of self-obligation. The kiss of peace, as Codagnello’s and Fiamma’s sources would have it, was the gateway to communal life by virtue of the liminal but obligatory association it created and the validating paradigms it evoked. The ritual moment was thus a quasi-institution and a surrogate for later formal structures for one more reason. It has been stated that the ritual peacemaking in the two Lombard communes was a coniuratio, a peace oath sworn by the entire population. What has not been noticed is that through the peace ritual the city dwellers linked the idea and practice of the city as an association of individuals to the concept and reality of the divinely inspired civitas as a super-personal corporation. While this seemingly self-contradicting assertion is not a new one in modern scholarship, the role of the rites of peace in its practical workings remains unnoticed or undervalued.67 Let us take the example of Milan. The peace of the association in 1095 was unique in the sense that it was a general peace and did not stem from a particular division preceding the event, thereby marking a new type of relationship. It was the culmination of a series of previous particular juramenta, enacted in 1045, 1067, and 1074.68 67

See for a review of the relevant literature Dilchert, Die Entstehung, 42ff. Italian historiography follows the conjectures of German legal scholarship, see the synthesis of Giovanni Tabacco, Egemonie sociali e strutture del potere nel medioevo italiano (Rome, 1979), 226ff. for the origins of Milan and Racine, Plaisance, vol. 1, 60ff. for Piacenza. 68 See Keller, ‘Die Verfassung,’ 61ff.

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It is remarkable that the highest level of legal and political commitment was reached through the ritual peace. The political product of the reconciliation with the kiss was an aggregate phenomenon transcending the sum of all acts of private peacemaking of the citizens. Individual interaction defined the peace act as an extension of the traditional practices of private peace, the house-peace of customary law, and the Langobard treuga. Its enactment in the social environment of the emerging commune, however, was a qualitatively new development. In Piacenza, according to Codagnelo, all began with a shared emotion, an upheaval which one ‘had to be made of stone’ to shy away from. Despite their social roles, ranks, and statuses, burghers, nobles, and clergy engaged in a single ritual act that by virtue of its legal and referential polisemy redefined their identity. The ambiguity of the ritual obligation sustained the coexistence of two forms, association and incorporation, in an ongoing transformation of civic identity. The rites of peace embodied the new identity and ensured the continuation of the commune by being the composite form of a coniuratio reiterata. As a corporate entity, the high medieval city depended for its existence on the legal linkages between its members and the social whole they constituted. An important feature of these bonds was their temporary and conditional character. As a consequence, for the city to exist as such it had to continuously and formally renew itself as a coniuratio. The initial act of ritual ‘creation’ was not sufficient to keep it going. The renewal of the contract therefore was not just a festive commemoration of the inception of the city. It was a legal and political affair with tangible implications for the urban dwellers’ status as citizens. Wilhelm Ebel reminded us that the obligations and responsibilities of civic life had to be enacted over and over again, for the legal bonds that wove together the fabric of urban society were thought of as subject to expiration.69 The reenactment continued long after the citizens had established and internalized the concept of the city’s corporate identity. In terms of customary law, the city for a long time remained a coniuratio reiterata rooted in the arbitrariness of Willkür and in the principle of the socially canonized sic volo, sic jubeo.70 69 Wilhelm Ebel, Der Bürgereid als Geltungsgrund und Gestaltungsprinzip des deutschen Mittelalterlichen Stadtrechts (Weimar, 1958). 70 Or, as Ebel put it, ‘eine selbst stets erneuerte Willkür,’ ibidem, 4.

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Although Ebel’s observations were based on urban legal structures in the German-speaking regions of the Empire, his conclusions hold good for the northern Italian cities as well. As late as the fourteenth century, northern Italian cities were at least nominally under imperial sway and participated in a shared legal discourse. Although differing from the legal mechanisms of civic renewal that Ebel investigated, the rites of peace and reconciliation are just as good an illustration of his perceptive insight. Unlike the regular reenactment of civic unity and the aggregate identity it entailed through the sworn oath of the entire eligible population, the ritual enactment of peace was a sporadic phenomenon involving selected groups and individuals. Still, three features made it a type of constitutive act of coniuratio reiterata on a par with the oath of citizenship. First, peace ritual intervened in times of internal discord that threatened with destruction the very concept of the city as a willful association. The inter- and intra-city conflicts during the Alleluia movement and the Guelf-Ghibelline struggles, as well as the moments of sharpened apperception of the concept of the city as patria, were routinely accompanied by waves of interpersonal reconciliation as presentation of civic identity. Second, ritual peacemaking reenacted the moment in which the city was initially created as a social, legal, and political entity. Piacenza, again, is a case in point. Ritually ‘created’ with the ritual kiss in 1090, as a social and legal entity it was legally re-created on at least one more recorded occasion. In May 1233, after a prolonged intracity conflict, representatives of the warring parties, twenty on each side, gathered together in the main square and, under the instigation of the Dominican Leo who served as an external mediator, exchanged the kiss of peace.71 The peace of 1090 lasted for years, the one of May 1233 until the following month, but in functional and typological sense both represented the same phenomenon. The private reconciliations mediated by Cardinal Latino Malabranca in Tuscany and the Romagna in 1278–1280 and the numerous private peacemakings arranged by the angeli pacis and by Emperor Henry VII in the beginning of the fourteenth century followed the same pattern.72 71

Giovanni Musio, Chronicle, RISS vol. 13, quoted after Carl Sutter, Johann von Vicenza und die italienische Friedensbewegung im Jahre 1233 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1899), 26–27. 72 Cardinal Latino’s activity in Tuscany was already mentioned in reference to Florence; see also the pacification of Faenza and Bologna, according to Pietro

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Third, personal peacemaking was a liability taken by all citizens alike, causing them to become aware of themselves as personalized representations of the supra-personal unity ingrained in the law that enabled the transition of association into corporation. Once the transition was completed, the role of interpersonal peacemaking as representation of the communal coherence declined. This does not mean that ritual peace stepped off the foreground of urban life. It continued to be carefully staged under the watchful eye of the officials of the corporate body and later under the urban rulers, for two major reasons. First, ritual reconciliation helped represent, propagate, and inculcate in people’s consciousness a new type of civic identity, the conception of the individual citizen as a social person in relation to the authorities. Through the rites of peace with which the individual citizen integrated him or herself into the totality of the city, a process developed that slowly but decisively marked urban identity as a derivative of corporate membership. Second, the orchestration of ritual peace between private citizens was the ultimate proof of the legitimacy of the city government.

Peace Ritual and Political Legitimacy Legitimacy was of paramount concern for the urban authorities. In the long run, the thirteenth-century transformation of occasional private peacemaking into a public institution had profound consequences for the political dimension of urban lay piety. This phenomenon cannot be characterized as contingent and episodic. The great Italian peace movements, the Alleluia of 1233, its later offshoot in 1239, the penitents of 1260, the pacification wave of 1278–80, the movements of 1310, 1315, 1335, and the Bianchi of 1399 were all intimately connected with issues of power and Herrschaft. The transition from reconciliation between private citizens to peacemaking as a device of power legitimization is perhaps best illustrated in the Alleluia movement. Its most conspicuous figure, Giovanni of Vicenza, began his career as a reformer of private life and a preacher of morals and peace in interpersonal relationships, and ended up Cantinelli in Francesco Torraca, ed., Petri Cantinelli Chronicon [AA. 1228–1306] in RISS, vol. 28, 29–31. For Bologna see Gina Fasoli, ‘La pace del 1279 tra i partiti Bolognese,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. 7, 20 (1933), 49–75.

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asserting himself as a political leader.73 The connection between peacemaking and political power was manifest in the activity of the Franciscan and Dominican friars who worked alongside him. Brother Leo, a Milanese by origin, was another of the politically active figures.74 This political potential was further developed by Pietro of Verona, who converted the amorphous, easily dissolving peace movements into an enduring phenomenon with the establishment of the tertiary orders. The process he began was stabilized with Raniero Fasani’s creation of confraternal structures.75 Finally, Emperor Henry VII’s Romzug in the beginning of the fourteenth century demonstrated the extent to which lay authorities relied on peacemaking for their legitimacy.76 The pacifying efforts of the friars and the specially authorized agents of the papal curia, the angeli pacis, among whom cardinal Latino Malabranca was the highest ranking, complemented but also competed with the activity of the communal authorities. As already mentioned, control of private peacemaking was one of the legal expressions of the descending of the imperial ban into the domain of communal jurisdiction. The problem with this transition was that legally speaking the communes were utterly illegitimate.77 Their appropriation of imperial rights after the disintegration of Staufen authority, around the middle decades of the thirteenth century, was a natural process but it was fraught with technical problems. The major one was that, possessing little legitimacy of their own, the communal governments laid their bid for monopoly on power wide open to contestation. Urban political parties and individual citizens did not hesitate to exploit that to the detriment of communal unity and the public order. In such conditions, peacemaking emerged as a major source of legitimacy. It sustained the very existence of the urban regimes as corporate social and political bodies. The link between peace and 73

Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy. Sutter, Johann von Vicenza, 26, n. 5. 75 See the good survey of Giancarlo Angelozzi, Le confraternite laicali. Un’esperienza cristiana tra medioevo e età moderna (Brescia, 1979), 1–71. 76 Henry’s main task during the Romzug was pacifying Italy: see numerous occasions of his intervention in communal and personal conflicts in MGH Leges, 4 Constitutiones, vol. 4, part 2. 77 For the concept see Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Geselschaft (Tübingen, 1922), who entitled Chapter 8 the ‘Non-legitimate Herrschaft of the commune.’ For a more dynamic analysis of the evolution of the concept see Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1978), vol. 3, 1–102. 74

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legitimacy emerged most clearly in the authorities’ response to the penitent movement of 1260. The governments of the Umbrian communes Perugia and Foligno, those of Bologna, Parma, and Padua in papal Romagna, and those of Emiglia Romana with Rome herself welcomed the flagellants. The signori of the city-states, however, saw in the movement direct threat to their authority and forbid the penitents entry into their cities. The flagellants were barred from Manfred’s Regno, from the march of Ancona, and from Crema, Cremona, and Milan under Marquis Ugo Palavicino. The latter feared, according to the keen observation of the Ghibelline author of Annales Placentini, ‘that he’ll lose his power’ [ut marchio perderet dominium].78 In the march of Treviso, the penitent movement could only spread after the death of the sons of Count Ezzelino, who had banned it from the city. In Ferrara, in 1269, Marquis Obizzo D’Este issued a series of decrees against ‘public or private scourging’ in the city and its contado.79 The signori had grasped well the associative character of the peace movements as well as the fact that they drew legitimacy directly from the divine. Either way, the peacemakers circumnavigated and undermined the tyrants’ right to rule, the sources of their legitimate Herrschaft and their social role as mediators in urban conflict. The peace movements represented the citizens as amici, individuals legally bounded by acts of their free will for cooperation and cohabitation. The rites of peace stressed their equality and responsibility as agents of the peace, not as subjects of the peace-imposing ruler. In times of trouble, when the survival of the commune was at risk, the former issues outweighed all other political considerations. In the eve of Montaperti, the bishop of Siena extolled the citizens to kiss and become ‘friends’ [che tutti sieno amici insieme].80 But in the ever scheming minds of the signori, if peace were to be, it had to be mediated by themselves alone. Not by coincidence, the more subtle signori of latter times engaged personally to arrange the reconciliation of their subjects. In 1399, for example, Francesco Novello, the Carrara ruler of Padua, went as far as personally intervening to end feuds between simple peasants in his contado, having them kiss one another on the mouth.81

78

MGH SS, 18, 512. Ludovico Muratori, Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi (Bologna, 1965), vol. 6, 471. 80 Ceruti, ‘La battaglia di Montaperti,’ 40. 81 Quoted after Benjamin C. Kohl, Padua under the Carrara, 1318–1405 (Baltimore, 1998), 290. 79

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The intimate link between the peace movements and the stability of the communal regimes is clearly spelled in the Annals of Padua: ‘in that time began the freedom of Padua, that is, in the vigil of St. Martin.’82 The power to mediate evolved in power to rule, as the Alleluia had shown. The papal program of pacification in the late 1270s was founded on precisely this premise. The quashing of communal disorder emerged as the chief legitimizing device in the course of the papal acquisition of the Romagna. The communal authorities saw it the same way. Communal government as a way of representation of the urban association drew vital support for its legitimacy from the divinely validated peace ritual that it shared with the peace movements. Once the message took hold on urban politics, the public authorities could work on representations designed to transform the city from a free association into a corporate body under their command. For, unlike the peace movements, the authorization to use coercion resulted directly from the associating citizenry’s will to peace, and could be appropriated by the corporate body that stood for the citizenship. The evolution of the angeli pacis, the special legates of the curia, into paciarii, officers of the peace operating as part of the city structures was, among other things, an illustration of the process of solidifying governments secure in their legitimacy. By the end of the thirteenth century, the thrust of the peace movements had been transformed. In Harald Dickerhof ’s apt expression, once aiming at ‘Herrschaft through peacemaking’ it became ‘peacemaking through Herrschaft.’83 In terms of practical politics, the city had constituted itself as a corporate body, and could enforce the peace as legitimately and as effectively as the invocation of the divine and the ritual associations of its citizens had done in the previous period of urban history.

Ritual Peace and Obedience The exercise of Herrschaft to bring about peace and stabilize the super-personal corporations that peacemaking legitimized was a basic 82 In quello tempo cominciò la libertà di Padoa, cioè nella vigillia di san Martino, see RISS, n.s., vol. 8, part 1, 227, col. 2. I am indebted for the survey in this paragraph to Meersseman, Ordo Fraternitatis, I, 450–63. 83 Harald Dickerhof, ‘Friede als Herrschaftslegitimation,’ Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 59 (1977), 360–89.

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process in the building of early modern civic identity. Reproducing this identity in the mind and conduct of the individual citizen was an ongoing effort of late-medieval and Renaissance urban governments. Max Weber’s classic formulation of Herrschaft as the evocation of obedience captures its essence best.84 In the city-corporation whose head and sole bearer of legitimate power was the prince, obedience reigned supreme in the construction of the hegemonic representation of citizenship. The representation of ritual reconciliation was accordingly modified to reflect and propagate the promotion of obedience to the status of civic disposition. The idea and practice of civic peace as the major preoccupation of the Renaissance Italian city-state has been the subject of numerous studies. It was a multi-dimensional construct, however, and the implications of interpersonal reconciliation is perhaps the least studied of its aspects. By way of conclusion, I will explore a specific representation of ritual peacemaking in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florentine political theology that was built on the matrix of the tale of the forgiving knight. In several Renaissance Florentine versions of Gualberto’s story, the kiss of peace was allotted a place in the ritual sequence. The most popular renditions were those of a play performed in Florence on the saint’s feast day. Local variants of the play follow different scenarios and liven up the plot with many additions, but they all agree on the major points. As in the standard narrative of the Tale, the dramatic peak of the play came as Giovanni, burning in desire for revenge, raised his hand to strike the murderer. Despairing of his life, the latter fell on his knees and entreated Giovanni to spare him, pointing to Christ’s example. Moved by the plea, Giovanni lifted the knight up and with the words ‘I forgive you and want to give you peace’ [A te perdono e vôti render pace] took him by the hand and led him to church to thank God. There they prayed with thankfulness, Giovanni for being made stronger through the act of forgiveness, the knight for avoiding sure death. The crucifix bowed his head in recognition. Giovanni noticed the act of divine approval, went out of the church, kissed his enemy, and set him free [ poi lo licenza].85 84 Weber, Wirtschaft und Geselschaft, 122–30. See also the illuminating discussion in Sabean, Power in the Blood, 21–31. 85 Alessandro D’Ancona, ed., Sacre representationi dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI (Florence, 1872), vol. 3, 139–43. The fragments I use are from a late fifteenth-century version and three versions from 1554, 1555, and 1561.

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Solidly linked to the late-medieval notion of civic interaction, the play set apart the ritual resolution of the conflict from Giovanni’s conversion as an act of affiliation with the divine. The kiss of peace, the secular reconciliation, and the achievement of the social peace it stood for were a thing apart from the integration of Giovanni’s personality by the transcendental. His mind already made up, Giovanni led the offender out of the church to exchange the kiss and thus legally terminate the conflict. The sacred space was separated from the act of peace, thereby rendering it a secular affair. Peacemaking was no longer based on the do ut des principle, nor was it oriented toward the future. Rather, it followed in the wake of identification through remembrance awakened by human prayer but actualized by the sanction of the divine. Bodily interaction was reserved for the human actors; the numinous retained a detached stance. This representation of the reference to God had two levels, a moral and a political one. Unlike the high medieval cases documented by different versions of the Tale, the moral dimension of the Florentine play maintained that persons integrated through their unique remembrance of the divine were capable of moral acts on their own, without counting on retribution or retaliation. The political dimension also strengthened the distance from the high medieval models. Most importantly, the play implied that the moral act in itself was not a sufficient condition for the resolution of the conflict. Giovanni was a true agent in choosing forgiveness over revenge; but that was a display of a moral rather than a political agency. The sanction of the divine finalized it, not the actor’s decision or the approval of the audience whose participation was not required or expected. The legal instrument enacted in the ritual kiss that the deity authorized was actually outside of the sacred sphere. Against this background, the mystification of the source of agency cannot deceive us. The authorizing divine was a mirror image of the city authorities, appropriated by them to buttress their legitimacy. The validation of the act by Christ’s salute was but a faint reflection of the sanction of the divine in the original story. Mediated by the government of the city that had identified itself with the numinous, the legally validating ritual act of reconciliation took place only after the permission to act had been given by the politically appropriated deity. Thus, one and the same gesture, a stable practice that endured through the centuries and was modified and transformed to answer local needs, at times reverting to its original form, in the end was

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employed to serve diametrically opposite purposes. The practices of the acephalous high medieval French and Italian political societies fused in one ritual legality, association, and affiliation with the divine to back up their pleas for moral behavior as the basis of the social order in times of transition. The late-medieval political discourse of the Italian city-states dissociated ritual morality, harmony of thought and feeling, and the divine from legal ritual to assert the rights of the secular authorities to appropriate agency and promote order at any price. The shift to functionality was completed. Having institutionalized themselves as the head of the corporation, the urban authorities closed the discursive loophole that afforded the individual the power to do and undo peace at will. Attempting to mold individual identity through a new pattern of representation was an important part of this new social policy that relied on duty and obedience.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

IDENTITY FROM WITHIN: SELF AND PERSON

In the late-medieval collection known as The Little Flowers of St. Francis, there is a story about brother Juniper and his reconciliation with a man whose rage the friar had provoked. Inflamed with the spirit of charity, Juniper had cut off the foot of a live pig and prepared a savory dish to fulfil the wish of one of his bed-ridden fellow-brethren and fortify him against the sickness. Seeing his animal badly maimed, the owner of the pig took to the friary in a fury, shouting angrily at the brothers that they were ‘hypocrites, thieves, false knives, and wicked rogues.’ His charge aimed at the friars’ image of saintly men; Juniper’s crime, he implied, had exposed their real identity. The insults did not offend the friars bent on humility, yet St. Francis’ attempts to mollify the greatly scandalized man came to naught. Concerned with the Order’s reputation, Francis then commanded Juniper to seek out the man, humiliate himself, and appease him by offering to make full amends. Juniper, although astonished to see that his act of charity caused such a trouble, ran to obey the orders and confronted the master of the pig, who by then was ‘raging beyond measure, boiling with anger, and overcome with fury,’ with the joy of his cheerful countenance. He first sought to conciliate the man by telling him the story of the sick friar’s wish. It did not help. Patiently, the friar told the story a second time believing, in his simplicity, ‘that he had not heard aright’ the other’s angry response. Failing again, Juniper changed the tack radically. He suddenly fell on the raging man’s neck, embracing and kissing him, and told him anew how he had acted for the charity’s sake alone. At this point, the author tells us, the man was so overcome by Juniper’s simplicity and humility that ‘being come to himself, fell on the ground’ before the friar, not without many tears, and asked to be pardoned for the insults he had heaped on the brothers. He then took the pig, killed it, cooked it and carried it with much devotion and offered it to the friars as amends ‘for the wrong he had done them.’1 1

The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 175–8.

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This story can be read as a series of dichotomies—social, religious, and literary—enfolding on different discursive levels. What matters most for our purposes are the factors that led to the resolution of the conflict. Given Juniper’s character and his act, behind which we can see the friar’s unwillingness to conform to social practices based on private property, there seems to have been little in the way of verbal intercourse that brought about reconciliation. Despite the author’s assertions about friar Juniper’s otherworldly person, the enraged man remained immune to his demonstrations of ‘simplicity and humility.’ The sudden, unexpected exposure to the ritual kiss was the decisive moment in the interaction. It was through the kiss that the man ‘came to himself ’ and turned from wrath to peace. Even if we are dealing with a colloquial expression, the context within which it operated is telling. It was ritual, not the friar’s ‘simplicity,’ that had provoked the conflict in the first place and kept it going thereafter, nor his ‘humility,’ which we only see in the compliance with Francis’ request that accomplished the task of collapsing the barriers of insult and injury sustaining the conflict. The ritual kiss overcame the gap that separated the action of the friar and the motivations behind it from the standpoint of the owner of the animal. The kiss of peace ‘translated’ for the furious man the code that had been up to then incomprehensible and which rendered the friar’s conduct an act of charity. Unlike the friar’s verbal harangue, the kiss was capable of penetrating the shell of worldly values dominating the man’s concept of socially acceptable action and reaching to the powerful organizational principle that lay hidden beneath it. In a forceful manner, ritual stripped the socially validated vestments in which the person was clad and laid bare his true self. That self, it appears, was able to connect to the ‘simple and humble,’ God-inspired nature of the social persons of the friars unified by their godly selves.

Ritual Unveiling of Identity: The Medieval Model In this narrative, reconciliation and social intercourse became possible due to the ritual ‘discovery’ of the substance point at which the interlocutors could meet. On the one hand, ritual clarified friar Juniper’s personality in the opaque perception of his opponent, since it made transparent that his public person was an extension of his moral self. It accomplished something words could not do. It was a proof that his intentions had been honorable and that he had acted

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with integrity. The kiss dispelled the shadow of duplicity, which the other party’s perception of the friar’s identity had created. On the other hand, under the impact of ritual and in the manner of the new lay piety propagated and exemplified by St. Francis, the raging man became self-conscious. Having received the kiss, he apperceived his true nature, his self, and the essence of his own identity as well as that of the friar. Through this act, as Marcel Mauss wrote at a time when the issue was being problematized, he acquired the attributes of a moral person.2 Having been awoken to the identity staked on the moral self, the man then reintegrated himself around it and adopted a new personality, expressed fittingly in his apology, amends, and new attitude toward the friars. The story underscores the multidimensional functionality of the ritual kiss on the level of identity. The conflict resulted from miscommunication due to the different levels on which the complex person of the layman confronted the one-dimensional, unified personality of the Franciscan. Leveling the ground to the unified self within, and dispensing with roles and personality defined by sociality, ritual eliminated the source of trouble. Sustaining the link between self and person, the kiss structured the communication in a manner that reorganized the internal hierarchy of the ritual actors around the ‘inrelation-to-God’ concept lodged in their selves. In this religious narrative, constructed to serve the needs of the Franciscan propaganda of the faith, the ritual act of coming to one’s self was not an act of the person’s will. It was a forceful unveiling of what lay down below the skin’s surface and the verbal discourse, covered up by social conventions. The ritual kiss that made the discovery possible was a convention itself, but one which, using the body as an instrument, stimulated revelation and ‘remembrance’ of the basic constituents in the composite nature of the person. The kiss produced a kind of ‘personality shock’ imposed from the outside to reintegrate the person around a new identity pole. Friar Juniper resorted to the kiss after he had despaired of bringing about reconciliation cognitively, by verbal entreaties revealing the reason behind his action. Ritual appeared to be the only communicative device capable of peeling off the layers of sociality wrapped around the layman’s self. A host of examples conforms to this pattern of peace interaction. The kiss that Emperor Henry II and arch2 Marcel Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Person,’ in Carrithers et al., The Category of the Person, 19.

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bishop Heribert exchanged in private unmasked the emperor’s true self and revealed the archbishop’s self as well. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln seized and shook King Richard’s tunic to make the king smile and received him in the kiss of peace, revealing the king’s real self. Richard himself delivered a forceful harangue to make Emperor Henry VI shed tears and kiss him, seized by the realization that the noble self of his prisoner was in fact no different than his own self. In all these cases the kiss was able to rearrange the components of the person on the basis of two premises. First, ritual worked because it was the self, not so much the social person, that provided the locus of the person’s identity, morality, and goodness. Second, goodness, although seen as ingrained in the basic building-block of personality, was socially immanent. The individual could be unaware, or self-unconscious, of it. The godly self was a potentiality, a disposition that could or could not be realized. Its actualization as an organizing principle of identity was contingent and depended on a proper intervention for its awakening. These observations highlight the importance of ritual in the extraction of the moral principles of premodern personality. The mode of interaction and the consequences for the identity built on it depended on the efficaciousness of the social tools mediating the encounter. In ritual, the godly self was called to action to integrate the person. This was possible because ritual confronted the person with a socially determined depository of goodness that defined its contents and boundaries. To take my case further, I argue that, from the point of view of interpersonal interaction, the godly self did not exist outside the sphere of ritual practice; the self was because it was a self in action.3 This does not mean that the self was ‘constructed’ by the social matrix of ritual, however, as the constructionists would assert. The ritual interaction unveiled only the moral dimensions of the self; what lay beyond remained unknown. The revealing of the godly self in the ritual kiss conformed to the principle of aesthetic coordination, demanding that the nature of the message and the nature of the means of communication be in concert with one another. The self that reached out in the kiss could only be a moral self. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that in the Franciscan discourse discussed above, as indeed in any ideal Christian discourse, the interaction of individuals became possible due to the link that ritual 3 For a succinct definition of this model see Steven Lukes, ‘Conclusion,’ in Carrithers et al., The Category of the Person, 299.

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established between their selves seen as ontologically similar, if not the same, by virtue of their otherworldly nature. This is a particular illustration of the general rule that for interaction to become possible individuals should connect on a certain level of equality. In the modern Western tradition, this concept is based on the idea of equaling the individual and the person and the ensuing postulate that all individuals are equal as persons, hierarchy and inequality being conceptualized as attributes of their social roles. The self, for its part, stands for individual uniqueness and irreduciblility. This construct, however, became the dominant operative base of civil society only with the emergence of the post-Enlightenment nation-state and the rule of law.4 By contrast, premodern ritual interaction and its rules appear to rest on a typologically different phenomenon, one in which the self was seen as a social actor on a par with the person, capable of interacting and asserting itself vis-à-vis the social and the collective. All this happened within the acknowledged legal and power frameworks of the group and was conditioned by the capability of the media of interaction to decode and reveal the actors’ selves. Sociality was not limited to entering the scene only in transactions between persons; it operated just as efficiently on the level of self. On this level, equality as the fundamental precondition of social interaction was not a principle external to the ritual encounter. It was the shared social code inscribed in the interacting selves; a code coterminous with ritual action itself. The predictability of social interaction was thus a function of the acquisition of control over the discourses informing the contents of the self in action, that is, over the selection of the cultural registers capable of extracting the moral self from the individual or collective whole.

The Architectonics of Ritual Identity Although one cannot build a comprehensive picture of the structures of premodern identity by discussing only the rites of peace, some of its dimensions can be discerned. 4 A useful survey of different constructs of personality is still Victor Barnouw, Culture and Personality (Homewood, 1973).

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Let me begin with the contexts within which the earliest case studies of reconciliation enfolded. If Codagnello kept true to the wording of his source, the discovery of one’s self was the precondition for the large-scale reconciliation in Piacenza in the 1090. Knights and burghers moved from armed confrontation to reconciliation and lasting peace not merely by being persuaded or forced by the intervention of the divine. They ran to make peace after having come to themselves, that is, after having been brought to the apperception of their own ‘worthlessness and foolishness’ and having experienced remorse over that sorry condition. As the conflict was provoked by the contradictory demands for social preeminence and political control over the city, both parties were equally implicated in the discord that ensued. Accordingly, both sides were led to experience the same feeling of personal and collective deflation. Despite appearances, a closer reading of the episode leaves the impression that the resolution of the conflict through the intervention of Christ was not the result of an attempt to shift responsibility and transfer all agency to the transcendental. This became a standard feature in later accounts.5 In the early model, individuals were not expected to have their personalities ontologically integrated around the concept of godliness. While the intervention of the divine as an external matrix of moral integration was absolutely necessary for normal civic intercourse, the concept of common good shifted the emphasis in a more mundane direction. Codagnello’s narrative allows us to extract the principles of the logic of identity construction revealed in the course of ritual interaction. To begin with, the spirit of the account is closely related to the political construct extolling the virtues of communal life. In Codagnello’s rendering, the sense of worthlessness reflected the destructive effects of the social alienation of the two political camps. In terms of relatedness, the conflict caused the organic self, represented by the city as its primary social unit, to fall apart. Yet the separate selves divided by strife could not exist independently. They were worthless and helpless individuals. They were not yet discrete personalities. The commune was the source of goodness and morals integrating the citizens, for it alone possessed discreteness and completeness. Its 5 See the early fourteenth-century reconciliation in Daniel Waley, ‘A Blood Feud with a Happy-End,’ 51–3.

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individual members were able to have these qualities only as potentialities, as dispositions reflecting the faculties of the collective body. The operative concept behind this injunction was the idea of a collective self-as-whole. In terms of substance, the knights’ and the burghers’ value as social persons depended on their being organically connected members of the urban body politic. The idea of urban society as conceptualized by the account was interdependent with the idea of the nature of the person. It reflected a stage in the development of personality in which the collective self was the social person. It confirms that the individual had significance only if actualized exclusively in the form of a corporation sole, collective self-as-whole. At the juncture of the particular—the political agenda of the urban world—and the general—the concept of the self-as-whole—the rites of peace entered to erect the organic city from the mingling bodies of its constituents. Maintaining the integrity of the social self, on the one hand, and its individual components, on the other, necessitated the re-insertion of the individual selves into the corporate whole. A rite of aggregation and incorporation, the ritual kiss of peace repaired the damage caused by the attempts to assert the acquisition of social agency and independence by any unit distinct from the collective entity of the city. Paradoxically, ritual’s legal implications introduced dynamics into this somewhat static reconstruction of the relationship between the self and the social person. As we have seen, the obligatory connections of the kiss of peace as a legal rite gave rise to personal liability. Long before the time the citizens of Piacenza kissed to establish their commune, Henry II’s law of peace obligation had stipulated that liability taken with the kiss of peace entailed bodily responsibility. The contract sealed with the kiss was supported by the individual’s own body. The ritual actor could not substitute another in case of judicial duel and his perjury after the kiss entailed the loss of his own hand. No other person of his kith and kin bore the responsibility or could assume the liability. For the purposes of this investigation, it matters little that the letter of the law could not be and in reality was not enforced in the intra-communal conflicts. The principles underlying it reflected the legal ritual’s inroads into the idea of the collective self-as-person and the shifting of attention to the self as defined by the human body, narrowly seen as an entity confined within its surfaces. This legal frame constructed the body and, as we shall see later, through it the

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self, by limiting corporeal boundaries and defining what belonged to the individual and what did not. Within the legal discourse governing the rites of peace, the individual self acquired features of a social person. That type of personality was operative in punishment, but the responsibility entailed a changed emphasis in the conceptualization of personal identity. Legal ritual was the instantiation of a larger discourse designed to chip away at the collective self, steadily deconstructing it to isolate and expose the individual self to the hegemonic pressures of the public powers appropriating the concepts of law and functional ordering of society. The analysis of the interaction through the rites of peace in the beginning of our period thus reveals one dynamic and two static dimensions in the architectonics of high medieval personality: the operation of sociality through the principle of the self-as-person, the ritual individuation through the body, and the social actualization through the collective whole. I will proceed by considering these features separately, and then reintegrate them in model personalities to define the contours of the evolution of the modes of ritual identity building.

The Self as Person The perception of the person as a social phenomenon almost undistinguishable from the self was not a monopoly of the religious and legal discourses. It can be inferred from ritual practice in a variety of settings. For one thing, the frequency with which refusals to reconcile with the kiss occurred against the background of thin source coverage cannot be the effect solely of cultural myopia or the slack grip of coercion. One only needs to recall the knight in Ursmar’s story, the conflicts between the English King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the emperor in Duke Ernst and Guy of Warwick, Gautier and Bernier in Raoul, the grieving ladies in Wolfram’s Parzival, and some Flemish cases, to gather a rich sample from across cultural, social, gender, and political domains. Such evidence illustrates patterns in the actualization of the premodern self according to which, when the individual was under pressure, it was virtually impossible to disentangle his or her person and self from one another. The social person engaged in fides contracts was permeated by the ‘inner being.’ This was perhaps one of the reasons why the legally binding fides was rarely, if at all, engaged on trivial occasions. It was the last

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resort of the ritual actors, employed after all other options had been exhausted. The self was called to inform individual identity in exceptional circumstances only. The role of the self as a social agent is further illustrated by the legitimization of displays of anger at crucial junctures of the social interaction. By this transformation of affect into emotion, anger— the most powerful though short-lived mode of self-actualization— bridged the space between self and person. The identification of law and anger invokes an order in which society acknowledged the person as a unit dominated, organized, and mobilized by the self. A natural reaction of the ‘inner’ being, which could be provoked by extra-social and extra-cultural pressures, was sublimated and socially validated to display the crucial role of the self in organizing identity. For as long as legal grievance were legitimately expressed in anger outbursts, the order of the day identified the self as either the primary or at least a licit social agent. The model of individual identity construed in ritual in which the self fused with the person left enough traces to allow a partial reconstruction of its most visible features. The latter transpire consistently in the ongoing effort to eliminate contingency and increase predictability by ritual reorganization of the self. A close look at this process highlights the types of personality operated on through ritual intervention with the primary task of changing the social being by integrating the self around specific cultural codes. Two ritual engagements from 1095 capture moments of the attempt to gain a hold on the basic identity features of continuity, integrity, and sincerity transpiring in the ritual engagement of the self as the underlying factor of personality. The first is the case in which Gill of Seuly restored the church of St. Gundolf to the monks of St. Florent. The transaction, sealed with the ritual pledge of Gill’s fides, was a kind of contract known as convenientia. Most transfers of property being based on some sort of projection into the future, late eleventh-century convenientia was a transaction in which future relationships played a special role.6 It bore directly on the issue of identity, for continuity in time is one 6 See Paul Ourliac, ‘La ‘Convenientia,’ 413–23; and Pierre Bonnassie, ‘Les conventions féodales dans la Catalogne du XIe siècle,’ in Les structures sociales de l’Aquitaine, du Languedoc, et de l’Espagne au premier age féodal, Toulouse, 28–31 March 1968 (Paris, 1969), 187–219.

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of identity’s two essential traits. As the document reads, the monks did not seem to expect Gill to attempt to deceive them. All that concerned them was a change of his mind at some later time. Sincerity was not an issue. The problem was that the monks conceived of their noble partner, with good reason perhaps, as a social agent of the here and now. He was not expected to extend his existence in time unchanged. The social partner coterminous with self was seen by the monks as highly unstable. The continuity and hence the identity of the individual who was engaged in the convenientia being thus in a state of flux, the stability of the agreement itself was called into question. It is important to note that the individual was not seen as an ontological threat to the fabric of social relationships. Gill was not considered to be evil or wicked. The unpredictability of the self and the inability of the social to control it destabilized it in the eyes of the monks. This was the problem that the monks sought to eliminate by binding Gill’s fides, the most tangible expression of his self, to the terms of the transaction by a specific rite, the kiss of peace. The decision to create obligation with the kiss-fides in order to perpetuate the contract stabilized identity. It was conditioned by the monks’ mistrust of the capability of the secular form in which fides was routinely couched to properly operate the binding substance of the person. The interpretative framework of the traditional gesture, the handshake, rendered the self-as-person less predictable than the monks wished it to be. It lacked the powerful obligatory dimensions encoded in the kiss. The kiss-fides switched registers. It created an acceptable form of liability for it integrated the obligating act within the interpretative scheme of both the religious and the lay nobles. Through the kiss, the monks incorporated fides, the concept of liability, the self, and the person of their social partner into a discourse that guaranteed that the self-as-person would be perpetuated as a moral agent. The legal engagement with the kiss, modeled on the ecclesiastical, Christian concept of trust, identity, and retribution, ensured the construction of lay fides as religious faith, thus integrating the self around the conceptual domain of the deity. The discourse instantiated in the ritual kiss led Gill to the awareness that the welfare of his self, the soul pledged in the kiss, hinged on the continuous adherence to the terms of the contract he struck as a social person. It stabilized his self in time. Ultimately then, to guarantee the agreement the religious resorted to constructing a new identity for the lay noble by

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imposing on him a specific ritual form that fitted his personality into an appropriate interpretative discourse. In another case, the reconciliation of bishop Otbert and abbot Berengar of St. Lawrence in 1095, we are told that the public kiss sealing the peace between the prelates scandalized the audience. The two men had had their differences on the issue of reform and this was well known. Bishop Otbert had even been excommunicated by the pope. The kiss that Berengar gave him not only went against the grain of the abbot’s dedication to reform, but infringed on the postulate of not kissing excommunicates, stated in several church councils and part and parcel of contemporary canon law.7 As the story goes, the problem was not the abbot’s lack of integrity. The author of the Chronicle of the Abbey of St. Hubert, who recorded the reaction of the public, explicitly said that the people, that is, the zealot party of reform, marveled how such a staunch reformer as Berengar could compromise on this fundamental issue.8 For the audience, therefore, the reconciliation had little to do with sincerity. Their main concern was the continuity in Berengar’s social role and the lack of stability in his conduct. The abbot was seen as a bounded, coherent, and discrete being all along. Even if the author was imputing his interpretation on the observers, his own preoccupation with continuity is telling. Berengar, he claimed, had always been and remained a reformer; his conscience was clear. Innocence in the eyes of the Lord was the personality trait that supported Berengar’s identity throughout the conflict with the bishop and the subsequent reconciliation. Berengar did not change into a simoniac by accepting Otbert’s peace, nor did he kiss without integrity. The two apparently contradicting acts, the peace with Otbert and the abbot’s sympathy to the reform party, were both true and sincere. The contradiction is startling for the modern observer, but only because we operate with the category of the person as a distinct social phenomenon and the self as an ‘inner being.’ In Berengar’s situation the integrated self mattered more on the social stage than his public persona as a reformer. The condition of preserving integrity while committing oneself to two diametrically opposite causes was 7

Elizabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986). A. L. P. de Robaulx de Soumoy, ed. and trans., Chronique de l’abbaye de St. Hubert, dite Cantatorium (Brussels, 1847), 300–301. Commentary in John H. Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983), 34–6. 8

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possible only because the abbot’s personality was thought of as dominated by his self, which provided for a continuous identity by being a social agent in its own right. If that was the case, it mattered little that as a public being Berengar was subject to different and, as it turned out, conflicting validations. His position as abbot imposed on him the duty of taking care of the community. His identification with the reformers required continuous opposition to Otbert. The peace was a way to assert himself as head of the monastic community, with obligations to what mattered most to his self, God, and his patron, St. Lawrence. Identity in this case was carried by self, unified by the divine and the saint and actualized with the conscious adoption of a social role that precluded duplicity or insincerity. The fact that Berengar could choose between roles is significant. Choice implies the presence and acceptance of contingency. Berengar’s choice pitted the welfare of the collective against the validation of the social agency, juxtaposed the particular versus the universal. Making peace under the criticism of the group with which he identified himself focused his attention on what mattered for him most. It made him aware that his continuous self integrated by conscience was the true foundation of his personality and allowed him to play social roles where discontinuity was the rule, without actually increasing the unpredictability of the arrangement and jeopardizing his integrity. The last observation is crucial. Role-playing on such terms was a thorough reconstruction of the components of the social person in the act of the ritual obligation, pushing to the surface the divinely unified self. The level of contingency was drastically curtailed when the transcendental was constructed as its organizational principle. As our authors would have it, the actors exhibited little agency in the achievement of that feat. The divine integrated the self in the ritual act. Once its presence was attested to by employing the appropriate ritual form, the issues of sincerity and integrity did not apply any longer. The divine in the self was the paradigm of integrity, constancy, and stability in a world of perpetual flux. In a broader perspective, the divine in the religious account was the only source of agency integrating the self around a pole of stability. God was the most powerful conceptualization of the mode of ritual intervention in the ordering of the self that dominated the early part of our period, but it was not the sole factor. Family and clan bonds, real and imaginary, played the same role in lay interaction. With them, another concept came into play, the principle of co-substantiality.

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The last point leads us to the second feature testifying to the operation of ritual in the construction of self-identity. Form is crucial in every ritual model, but in the case of the kiss it was crucial because it was substance as well. Ritual engaged the most universal, overarching form available, the human body. The self-as-person was, above all, an embodied self. I have already dwelt on practices conveying the notion that the organic self depended on its body for its identity and the broadly conceptualized corporeality extending beyond it. The legal and moral carrier of the self, fides, was conveyed through bodily action in its two main forms, handshake and kiss. It is also worth remembering that there was a reflection of that practice on a theoretical level. In ritual praxis, embodiment unified self and person in action. At least one theory of the constitution of man, the influential and enduring premodern concept of the humors, conditioned social relationships on physiology.9 According to this scheme, corporeality extended the self into the social sphere, since the humors located in the body connected the self to the personality of the unified whole of the individual. On both counts the nexus of agency was the material, corporeal self. The self-as-person was not just in its body; it was of it. Ritual intervention was therefore efficacious on the level of self because it was a corporeal action. This entailed two important consequences. First, although bodily action normally expanded being in the social space, the self whose locus was in the body that ritual limited to its surfaces, as Henry II’s law prescribed, was a dissociated self. The collective ordering of the self diminished to the degree by which these boundaries hardened and solidified, increasing the level of selfawareness and thence autonomy. As a consequence, from a social point of view the autonomous self emerged as a problematic self and required rules for socialization. With the bodily dissociated self, the social transparency inherent in the self-as-person built within generally acknowledged norms, legalism for example, turned into opacity.

9 A good example of the durability of this tradition is Michael G. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999).

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With such a ‘de-codification,’ as Deleuze and Guattari refer to the process, the problem of social control arose.10 Second, in the hegemonic ideological discourse of the religious, the body was corruptible and corrupting flesh. By virtue of the failures of the flesh, the embodied self as a social actor was a contingent agent. Its embodiment constituted a permanent contingency because of the ‘natural’ propensity of the body to play host to the evil spirits of discord. The contingency of the body was due not so much to its inherent evilness as to its openness and ontological instability. As the quite substantial body of evidence preserved in monastic rules and visions throughout the Middle Ages suggests, the forces of evil used the body to direct the person and overcome the intelligent self. They did not absorb it, nor did they fuse with the self. They could, however, temporarily shut the self off from commanding the body’s obedience. The body acquired a degree of existential autonomy. Still, while the evil spirits could easily enter it, they could just as easily exit at the intervention of the peace exorcist or the prayers of fellow-humans.11 To confront these difficulties and close the loopholes in the architectonics of the social agent under such conditions meant revamping the intestinal contents of the self. In the high-medieval paradigm, it was the discursively constructed ritual intervention of the divine, not the conscious action on the part of the individual, which overcame contingency and actualized the person as a peacemaker. Perhaps the best illustration of the concept of the corporeal self as the nexus of contingency and therefore danger is Thomas of Cantimpré’s ‘intestinal’ hate that had to be physically expunged from the body of the obstinate knight before he became a moral person. ‘In πe πat pese may not be, If πou be oute of charyte; πen is gode of god to craue, πat πou charyte may haue,’ advised the author of the Lay Folks Mass Book, a Middle English treatise on the correct way and benefits of hearing mass at the moment when the pax board was passed along for kissing, ‘πere when πo prest [πo] pax wil kis, knele πou & praye πen πis.’ Charity, he went on, was threefold: one ought first to love God; second, to love oneself with a ‘priue loue, πat is nedeful to my 10 Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York, 1983). 11 See the cases quoted in Chapter Five.

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behoue, πo whilk loue is propirly by-twix my soule & my body,’ and the ‘thrid loue is with-outen to loue ilk neghtbur me aboute[n].’12 The second love was therefore not a passion, but a process, a coordinated action of body and soul, each of which was seen as having its own ‘will’ and ability to act independently. God had to intervene, by means of the ritual invocation of the kiss of the pax, and preclude any bodily action that would make ‘my soule spille.’ The high medieval ritual self was a composite unit, a consortium, as Caroline Bynum defined it, of the contingent body and the soul.13 The author was especially careful to preserve the soul from ‘spoiling’; but the soul was in an equal relationship with the body and did not integrate the individual by itself alone. Ritual involved the externally bounding factor, the numinous, achieved the integration forcing the components of the self to act with ‘assent’ and caused the consortium to function as a unified social whole. The assimilation of external phenomena therefore happened in the body as well as in the soul and was a process in which the self obtained integrity by aligning itself in some way with the ritual referent of the numinous. The alignment was accompanied with the absorbing, expelling, or molding of corporeal matter. Where there was visible expression of corporeal involvement, in tears, in convulsions, or in expulsion of smoke or ‘evil’ substances, there was the sign of peace. Predictability rested on tangible evidence; the body had to be disciplined from within.14 Peace following the ritual kiss, a corporeal gesture itself, was the ultimate confirmation that the intervention had been successful and that the godly selves had met and coalesced onto the matrix of the external paradigm that governed their interaction. The failure of ritual, on the other hand, was the failure of society to reach to the self and integrate it properly. Here lay a facet of the communica12 Thomas F. Simmons, ed., The Lay Folk Mass Book or the Manner of Hearing Mass with Rubrics and Devotions for the People in Four Texts and Offices in English (London, 1879), 50–53. The treatise is traditionally dated in the late twelfth century. It is not my purpose to engage the issue of its origins, but the primary version, as we have it, could not be earlier than the thirteenth century, judging from the mentioning of the pax-board. 13 Bynum, The Resurection of the Body, passim. 14 On the disciplined body in a more theoretical perspective see Arthur W. Frank, ‘For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review,’ in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Brian S. Turner, eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London, 1991), 36–102.

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tive function of ritual. The lack of integrity might have been detected where there was no corporeal expression of the impact the embodied action had on bodily contingency: at least that was what the discursive frame insisted on.

Ritual and Social Validation of Identity It is hard to pinpoint at what time this model began to break down and be transformed into another. For one thing, it was never as homogeneous and dominant in the ritual interaction as a glance at the extant sources would mislead us to believe. The institutions involved in peacemaking and the discourses they were connected with evolved at a different pace. If there really was a period during which personality was completely dominated by the self, it did not preclude role-playing and the existence of practices in which the person was the source of individual identity. Roles caused ritual identity informed by the self and the one ensuing from the social person to seep into each other. Assumed identity revolving around roles was in flux itself. Roles were signs that the links between the self and the person which determined identity in the early part of the period were becoming increasingly more complex. As a general trend, the self tended to dissociate from the person, and ritual identity was becoming reoriented, as in Berengar and Otbert’s case, to social roles. In terms of substance, too, there were significant differences between the high and late Middle Ages. With the objectification of the rules governing the definition of roles, there was a reformulation of agency in the construction of identity. We have seen that in earlier models the ritual integration of the social being was achieved through the action of the self, the inner being acting on a social level. As in Kierkegaard’s narrative, the self in ritual action entailing liability had an unified identity to the extent that it displayed constancy in its discourse and action, in the delivering on its past promises, and in the pre-enactment of a commitment for the future.15 These features were borne by the ritual instantiation

15 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lilian M. Swenson with revisions and a foreword by Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, 1971), vol. 2, 133, 211. See also the discussion of Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Post-Modernity (New Haven and London, 1997), 60–65.

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of the person as embodied motility. The body played an important role, since on it sociality encoded in legal ritual impressed continuity and sought to enhance differentiation, the other major feature of identity building. Spanning past, present, and future in the ritual act, the self was built in and through its body by organic memory. Memory turned the self into a historic phenomenon, conferring a distinct personal identity. In the late-medieval models, although the self could still be the prime mover of action and/or reaction, it was not the sole integrative agency and was not bounded on a sole interpretative matrix. In both models the person was actualizing itself in acts of social significance, but in the second model the validation of that significance might or might not be forthcoming, might or might not be based on the same frame of reference as the one employed by the self. Continuity and differentiation became subject to interpretation rather than residing in a rigid self-justifying frame. The meanings of the act of actualization varied, since the stable legal discourse had given way to multiple ideologies. The agency of identity building slipped from under the control of the self and emanated from competing social domains. Contrary to interactionists’ position, the increased presence of the social did not necessarily mean that ritual identity rested entirely on the continuity of other persons’ perception of personality. The increasing references to the free will of the parties to the reconciliation, a legal prerequisite by the thirteenth century, emphasized choice. The choosing of a course of action was still the domain of the self. Choice centralized the self and occasioned its continuity and unity. These were fragile constructs, however, since they were stabilized by the worth conferred on the act by the social. The validation of the latter was the measure of social control exercised through ritual. Hence, the identity of the person, self, body, and soul appears as a composite being in the making of which the integrated self and the perceptions of the social and the collective were in constant competition and cooperation. Varying within its contextual realizations, the objectification of the social control realized through role-playing was a step toward decreasing the contingency inherent in the acknowledgment of free will and choice. It codified and thereby limited the variety of modes of appropriation of the paradigmatic totalities on which individuals drew for their ritual identity. The major step in this direction was the discursive rendering of ritual action as self-discipline. It was a conse-

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quence of a shift in the production of identity in ritual that inserted sociality between the self and the person as a coordinating device. An example of the environment in which the new form emerged is the evolution of the discourse on courtliness and peace in the thirteenth-century manuscript tradition of Aliscans. The shift in the paradigms on which the rules of control and restraint governing the conduct of the courtly knight were based is clearly visible. The earliest versions, from the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, characterized the drive for conflict as ‘madness’ [ folie], as in Raoul. By contrast, the late-thirteenth century versions switched to ‘rusticity’ [ruistie].16 The explanation of asocial behavior shifted from a stress on individual psychology to a social connotation with a pronounced ethical dimension. Even though both terms were conventions subject to contextual appropriations and continued to be used in the late-medieval and early modern period to signify social transgression, their emphasis was distinct. ‘Madness’ momentarily discontinued the self and was a quality of the mind. Although since the late eleventh century there had been a trend to ontologize it, madness could still be a temporary slip as a result of which one put oneself outside of the normal social intercourse. It carried no ingrained implications for the social identity based on rank and status. ‘Rusticity’ was an implicit quality of the social person. It rendered the being ontologically different and lower down in the social hierarchy. This new paradigm, conspicuous in the mature romance tradition, highlighted ritual identity not so much as a role phenomenon as a quality of the person. In Wolfgang’s Willehalm and Parzival, triuwe and the integrity embodied in gemüete were integral parts of the hero’s person. They constituted much of the actors’ habitus and established it as the locus of self-discipline.17 I use the latter term to denote a technology of management of the social person different from both social control and control by the self. Unlike control by the self, which could be informed by non-social and extra-temporal factors, such as temperament, for example, self-discipline was a factor of the degree of compliance to outside intervention. Unlike social control, it did not allow for negotiation of roles and exploration of fissures in competing discourses. Being compressed sociality, ritual self-discipline enforced emotion work to maintain integrity. 16 17

Rasch, ed., Aliscans, 171. On habitus see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.

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The shift to the socially constructed person entailed a major consequence for the efficacy of ritual action. Its success depended on the intensity of the clash between individual grievances and the demands of the social. Ritual reconciliation as an identity-building factor became purely contextual. In cases of low-intensity encounters, usually occurring in cases of interaction dominated by a single basic paradigm of relatedness, the family or the religious confraternity, for example, ritual furthered the integration of the person around the moral principle it stood for. The self-disciplined person became the integrated, embodied instantiation of the hegemonic moral discourse. ‘Three things are needed to forgive your enemy,’ preached San Bernardino, ‘First, you have to forgive with your heart; Second, you have to forgive with words; Third, you have to forgive with deeds. Heart, words, and deeds. If one of these three is missing, you have not done anything.’18 Ritual made such persons aware of the standards of objective morality. It exposed rebellious selves to the punishing consequences of the breaches of that morality caused by deviant action and gave an opportunity to the person to express worthiness by externalizing most conspicuously in tears or in displays of shame the crushed and complying self. The person emerged as the dominant building-block of the integrated social being. It mastered the self, either by defining a strictly controlled domain for the self ’s action or by overcoming it. The courtly person overcame the self by relegating the source of angry outbursts below the social level of existence or down the social hierarchy. Giovanni Gualberto became stronger by staying his hand, sparing the offender, and forgiving him in a conscious act of following the moral discourse of peacemaking. The techniques of mastering the self differed according to context and discourse, but the end result was essentially the same: identity integrated in ritual equaled moral sociality and lay in the domain of the person as the subject of the interaction. The sufferings of the ritual actors ensured that nothing immoral remained as integrating principle of their persons. Ritual itself was a repetitive action embodying self-constancy in exercising morality. The ritual actor reintegrated him or herself, over and over again, around the pole of remembrance that permeated identity and stabilized the embodied individual. Yet if the intensity of the clash was sufficiently high to threaten the individual with disintegration however—something that happened 18

Cannarozzi, ed., San Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari, vol. 2, 230.

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when more than one paradigmatic totality with strong claims on individual identity was involved—ritual led to the dissociation of self from person and strengthened the self ’s autonomy. The interaction of individuals was reduced to the level of personality alone. Ritual ordered the external person, the social phenomenon rather than the moral being in its totality. Forgiveness did not apply on this level and reconciliation was never complete. Emotion work was reduced to suppressing the link between self and person, not the asocial emotions and affects. The internalized sentiments of conflict, the ‘old horded hate’ of Gower and Love God and Drede, lurked beneath the surface of personality ready to give rise to deadly ‘wratte.’ Nor did self-discipline apply. Peacemaking was governed more by the ethical standards of conduct than the internalized demands of morality. To preserve integrity, the individual shut itself up to embarrassment, guilt, or shame, which would have necessitated moral transformation. The linkages attaching it to the person severed, the self could not be reached and ordered through the moral discourse instantiated by ritual. Social control through ritual was helpless, too, for the dissociated self could always don the corporeal vestments of a role, ‘leave its true feelings at the church’s door’ as Gower put it. ‘I have kissed my neighbor,’ agreed Duke Henry of Lancaster in his Livre, ‘in the name of good friendship, yet I did not always have it my heart; sometimes I even wished his downfall more than his well-being.’19 Ritual was helpless; only coercion could cope with such pressures. In the conditions of the highly autonomous, dissociated self, without the support of social control and self-discipline, ritual lost its quality of a mechanism of interaction working on the principle ex opere operando. It retained the vestiges of efficiency in the new form of social disciplining, a practice that adopted many of the features of social and political coercion. With it, ritual identity was transferred entirely to the domain of the person, where the more efficient restraints imposed on individual sovereignty by the political authorities, the dissociation of private and public life, and the separation of morals from conduct gradually eliminated the necessity of ritual peace in public life.

19

L’autre beiser qe me deust, si est cely qe j’ai beisee mon proeme en manere de bon amystee, et n’ai mye cella entierment portee en ceur, mes a la foiye volu son damage plus qe son bien, et ceo a la foiye moustree en fait ou en dit, ou en touz diaux, qe pis vaut; see Arnould, ed., Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, 178.

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CHAPTER NINE

ENDS AND NETWORKS: RITUAL IDENTITY AND THE OTHER

Identity won through self-constancy in embodied action was sustained not only through a proper relation between self, person, and context, but also in and through the individual’s relation to other persons. This postulate reflects the basic premise of social interactionism, which reifies the role of ‘significant others’ who mediate to the sociological subject the values, meanings, and symbols of the culture in which the social actors live. In this theory, the ritual actor would still have an inner core, its self, but unlike the substance concept of the pre-Enlightenment’s self, it not only would evolve through time, but would also be subject to radical transformations due to the shifting perceptions of other persons of what one’s own self was like. The attentive reader might note that this conceptualization is a somewhat moderate version of the Durkheimian vision of the self. In its radicalized variant, postmodern constructionism conceives of the social actor as having no fixed, essential, or permanent identity; at most, the continuity of the self is sustained by identification within a stable discursive frame.1 In the following pages I will briefly discuss the impact of ritual on the other-related dimension of the individual actualized in a role. One of the oldest questions in sociology, the relationship between role, self, and person is a source of frequent confusion among constructionists and organicists alike. For simplicity’s sake, the problem can be reduced to the following question: Is the ritual actor merely a collection of roles made possible by the perception of others, or is there an organizing principle, which integrates and orchestrates the ritual actualization through any given social role? The issue is a lofty one, and although I cannot do it justice by analyzing peacemaking alone, no account of ritual identity building will be complete without considering it. Reconciliation through the kiss allows us to address two of its most problematic areas. The first 1 The two positions are aptly summed up in Allen et al., On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 97.

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is the substance controversy over embodied or otherwise self-integrated continuity of identity versus identity resting on the continuity of other persons’ perceptions of personal identity. The second bears on the type of interrelationship between the individual and the collective. Is the relationship a hierarchy of ends, that is, is agency delegated down the line by the dominant self or person of the ritual actor; or, is the attachment to the group a system of networks which allows for multiple origins and distribution of the agency acquired in ritual action?

Ontological versus Constructed Identity: Kudrun Let me begin with the first problem, introducing it through an episode in Kudrun, the thirteenth-century German romance. Abducted by the Norman Hartmut and refusing to marry him, Kudrun was forced to live the life of a washerwoman for five and a half years, until her brother and beloved finally arrived to rescue her. At the sight of the boat carrying the heroes, Kudrun, albeit not knowing who the strangers were, felt utterly ashamed to be seen in such a disgraceful state and wanted to run away. Her fears were hardly justified since the knights did not initially recognize her. Only eventually, in the process of a long conversation, did the parties realize each other’s identity and rush to embrace and kiss. Yet Herwig and Ortwin had a plan. Instead of setting Kudrun free at once, they left her to collect their army and launch an attack on the castle: a move consonant with their knightly ethos and sense of honor. Kudrun and her maid, a high-born lady herself, were left ashore to cope, the best they could, with their chores and their mistress’s anger. Anticipating her impeding freedom, however, Kudrun refused to do the washing. Reproached by her companion, she quipped ‘I am too noble ever to wash again for Gerlind [Hartmut’s mother—KP] and I will refuse to do such degrading service from now on. Two kings have kissed me and embraced me in their arms.’ Later, she added, ‘I am again a Princess,’ and ‘set the washing free,’ that is, she threw the queen’s linens into the sea.2

2

Mich kusten zwêne künige und ruochten mich mit armen umbevâhen and daz ich mac gelîchen einer küniginne; see Bartsch, ed., Kudrun, 253–4, translation in McConnel, Kudrun, 132–4.

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This intriguing episode highlights the centrality of ritual in the restoration of identity and the level on which it operated. Throughout the story Kudrun demonstrated acute self-consciousness. Her personality was integrated by the memory of her high birth and former social status. The self-consciousness she carried was the source of her ‘sadness’ in captivity and the ‘shame’ at the thought that her kin or friends could see her so debased. She’d rather be a servant forever, she declared, than allow herself to be seen in such a wretched state by someone who had known her before. The matrix of honor, mapped out by the socially constructed meanings of occupation, costume, and status mediated between self and person. It was the discursive frame sustaining the maiden’s self-consciousness as a noble lady to which her identity was hitched. In other words, there was a core inner being in Kudrun’s identity that was stable and continuous despite all tribulations. And yet, her self-identification was subject to social conventions. Turned washerwoman, Kudrun had lost her identity as princess, however strong her inner sense of identification might have been. It took the intervention of ‘significant others,’ her royal kin, embodied in ritual, to restore her identity. With the kisses of two persons of royal birth—note that that affirmed her status as their equal—Kudrun was transformed into a princess once again. What was the balance of the two factors? Kudrun’s subsequent actions provide us with a clue. She ratified her transformation and made it definitive, acquiring agency and subjectivity by exercising her power over the only object she could by ‘setting free’ Gerlind’s linens. Later she extended her actualization into her old-new identity by tricking Hartmut: offering him what she had staunchly refused thus far, her body. Two ritual actions, the kiss and the act of ‘liberating’ herself, symbolically shed Kudrun’s temporary ‘social skin.’ The pretended submission with stress on the body was an act of self-assertion vis-à-vis her abductor. All this integrated Kudrun’s disjointed personality, adjusting her varying, discontinuous public roles to her stable, continuous inner self. It is worth stressing the variety of domains from which identity features were gathered and the hierarchy of their significance in identity (re)building. Most of these were devices through which identity was carried over. The kiss, the lady’s beautiful body, pale skin, and fair face, and the rings she wore were all actions and artifacts mediating the transformation through different degrees of corporeality. It is also important that the idea of loss and restoration of identity

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linked embodiment to another organizing principle of personality, individual memory. Finally, the acts of acquisition and exercise of power and the ritually restored capacity of domination employed corporeality to complete the transformation process. Nonetheless, it is significant that part of the princess’s loss of identity was staked on lack. Lack ensued from the discontinued corporeal recognition of others, represented in Kudrun’s bodily separation from her peers, her royal brother, her betrothed, and her no less noble wooer. The body of the princess still carried the features of a noble lady and commanded the attention of her relatives. Ultimately this led to recognition triggered by another discursive frame, that of the features constituting the identity of a courtly being. The restoration of Kudrun’s identity was therefore realized primarily by overcoming the corporeal lack and the consumption of domination through a conscious manipulation of embodiment in the interaction with other corporeal actors. The ambiguity of the body, which both carried identity and could discontinue it because of lack due to isolation from other corporeal subjects, and which existed physically but was continuously reconstructed socially against the backdrop of dominant discourses, was a stable feature of the interaction with the kiss. Kudrun’s cognitive self existed as an awareness and a memory of past integrity. It was dissociated, however, and contributed only in part to her identity. Identity was built in the course of ritual corporeal interaction. The kiss exchanged with ‘significant others’ linked self and body. Judging from a casual remark of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, this seems to have been a high medieval development. The kiss that St. Martin gave the leper, observed the bishop, cleansed the poor wretch. That had been the case back in the distant past. The kiss that he himself gave to the afflicted ones who approached him healed him in his own soul. It affected his personality by carrying his self through the identity threshold of disgust.3 The body, as Foucault pointed out, was the locus of the dissociated self and was therefore as necessary to identity building as much as the disembodied self was. Corporeal identity was not a self-sustaining phenomenon, however; it depended on a network of embodied links operated by ritual. Whoever dominated the construction of these links determined the specifics of the identity-building process. If the validation of the ritual 3

Loomis, ed., Gerard of Wales, The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, 31.

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link was dominated by social institutions or discourses, which the parties to the reconciliation could appropriate but not control or shape, in the process the ritual link constructed the ritual partner and the placement of audience as ends through which the identity of the ritual actor was actualized. The ritual covenant was relatively stable but the actors remained isolated from each other. If meaning was subject to the ultimate validation of the participants in the ritual act and the observers, the construction of identity was enacted within a network. The level of contingency in the construction of identity increased; but the degree of coalescence between the ritual actors was high, and the parties to the reconciliation shared identities on a certain level. The transition from the one to the other model of identity, which has been partially explained as an example of the interrelation of ‘grid and group’ by Mary Douglas, is very complex, fraught with pitfalls, and in need of further research. Role-playing, performance, or Inszenierung in which identity was being reproduced in an ritual act of self-representation, has recently been explored in detail by Geoffrey Koziol, Gerd Althoff, and Peter Arnade, among others.4 Their findings, focused on power, chart the multiple political dimensions of this practice throughout the Middle Ages. I would like to expand on the models they develop by adding a few touches attempting to capture some of the features of peacemaking that went beyond the competition for power and affected total social practice. The awareness that there was a shift from engagement of the self to roleplaying was demonstrated by the increased sensibility to integrity and sincerity in reconciliation. Stressing intentional deception and lack of sincerity in the ritual partner was one of the major developments.

Integrity and Sincerity Intention, as we saw it in Berengar and Otbert’s story, played an important role as identifier of personality structures. William Longsword might not have doubted Arnulf of Flanders’ sincerity or expected him to change his mind so soon, but twelfth-century peacemakers knew better. Peter Abelard, the foremost twelfth-century theorist of intention, chose a different and, as it was, increasingly popular man4

Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter.

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ner of connecting intention to identity. Among the bitter memories that he shared with his readers in the History of my calamities was the verdict of the duplicity of his beloved’s relatives. The kiss of peace, he insisted, that the collective body of Heloise’s kin gave him to seal the peace agreement after the discovery of their affair had been given ‘to better to betray me.’5 Abelard was writing with hindsight, of course. We have reasons to believe that at the moment the agreement was struck it had been he, rather than his opponents, who had been having second thoughts as to the manner of its execution. Suspicious and self-centered as Abelard was, it is significant that he chose to emphasize lack of sincerity, rather than a subsequent change of mind. Around the time he wrote, an ecclesiastical man of affairs, Herman of Tournai, was one of the first commentators on Emperor Henry V’s ritual kiss with Pope Pascal in 1111 to stress the emperor’s ‘long-premeditated betrayal and perfidy.’ Like Abelard, Herman had an ax to grind, and just like the scholar he highlighted the issue of dishonesty in ritual interaction by making a point of the offender’s insincerity in proffering the kiss of peace.6 The high Middle Ages saw the intensification of references betraying an awareness of the vital importance of sincerity and integrity in ritual interaction. ‘The peace existing between us is integral,’ proclaimed count Otto of Tecklenburg in the charter that recorded his reconciliation with Gottfried of Arnsberg in 1257, ‘guaranteed by the kiss, and will be kept firm by us and all of our friends.’ He then added that to document his commitment, he had a charter composed, sealed with his seal, and given in the hands of the other party.7 The stress fell on the integrity of the covenant, resulting from the actors’ sincere commitment and the will to observe it in the future. The reference to the will was still a novelty in social interaction by the first half of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, the document above is representative for the legalistic discourse on integrity. Reflections of the legal thinking that structured it are found 5 Peter Abelard, The Story of Abelard’s Adversities. A Translation with notes of the Historia Calamitatum, by J. T. Muckle, with a preface by Etienne Gilson (Toronto, 1964). 6 Herman of Tournai, The Restoration of the Monastery of Saint Martin of Tournai, translated with introduction and notes by Lynn H. Nelson (Washington, DC, 1996), 119. 7 Integra quoque et osculo confirmata existit inter nos compositio ordinata, quam compositionem nos cum amicis nostris universis vulumus firmiter observare; see Westfälisches Urkunden-Buch. Fortsetzung von Erhards Regesta Historiae Westfaliae, herausgegeben von dem Vereine für Geschichte und Alterthumskunde Westfalens. Vol. 7. Die Urkunden des kölnischen Westfalens vom J. 1200–1300, bearbeitet vom Staatsarchiv Münster (Münster, 1908), 438, N. 968.

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in reconciliatory acts all over the continent until the end of the period. The trend to stress the crucial role of sincerity is clear. In the reconciliation of the nobles of Macerata, for example, sincerity was invoked three times in the terms of the agreement, all referring to the ritual act establishing the covenant.8 It is tempting to trace, at least in a snapshot manner, the contextual variations in the discourses in which integrity and sincerity were identified as central conditions of the ritual reconciliation, and to highlight some of the features the former shared. Perhaps the first thing to note is that the dichotomies inner/outer or public/private were only part of the story. Much more important was that the ritual kiss operated relationships within which the peace contract was stabilized by the adoption of new and enduring social roles. In the feudal epic El Cid, integrity was demonstrated in King Alfonso’s willingness to accept the Cid ‘with all his heart and soul’ [d’alma e de coraçón], the king’s inner being reaching out to confirm his words with the kiss.9 Apart from the legal connotations of the act—the Cid was pardoned and the ban of exile he was subject to was lifted—the scene enfolded in a setting that reintegrated the hero into the feudal hierarchy of the realm, reattaching him to his liege lord [natural señor]. The Cid restored his position of a vassal; Alfonso reestablished himself as his lord. The roles the parties to the reconciliation adopted to define their relationship in the future stabilized the integrity of their ritual peace. Roles could thus be subject to social governance beyond the control agreed upon by the ritual actors in the creation of the network within which identity was constructed. In Raoul of Cambrai, the new roles of ‘brothers’ adopted by Bernier and Gautier forged a new identity for the characters, its dimensions established and controlled by the collective entities of clan and estate and enacted immediately in the joint action against the king. Integrity in Melibeus, the classic thirteenth-century example of the ecclesiastical discourse on moral transformation in an urban setting, was staked entirely on role-playing to which the supplicants resorted to ‘connect’ to the forgiver. The ritual link established a social alliance in which the offenders became members of Melibeus’s extended kin, his consorteria. In a similar environment, 8 9

Dante Checci, ‘Sull’istituto della pax,’ 147. Hamilton and Perry, eds., The Poem of El Cid, 128.

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the reconciliation of the bishop and podestà of Assisi reinstated them as worthy incumbents of their respective offices; their identity derived from the roles they had to play by virtue of their rank and appointment. In the world of the feudal contract, in Silence, the king’s internal torments and his decision to act with integrity and spare Silence’s life followed from the realization of the political role the ruler had to play and the necessary preconditions—such as recognition—that went with it. Neither the king nor the barons were inherently evil or good; their selves and their social persons remained detached from the case. At stake was the king’s role as a defender of the law and the feudal contract. It was only one component of his public person, but the one that ensured the essential continuity of his social being. ‘Who would ever trust me again?’ asked the king in despair. Finally, in a more mundane setting and in a conflict of relatively low intensity, in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, the kiss between the pardoner and the host was the only act that informed the pardoner’s social identity as defined by his office. It was, as one might expect after having learned from the character himself what a sinful and corrupt personality he was, an identity entirely staked on role-playing.10 The integrity of the peace act in all these cases was sustained by the ritual actors’ identity as defined by the social roles they adopted in the course of the interaction and continued to exist in thereafter. The sociality that structured their relationship through roles was a represented practice emerging from a network of relationships of which the self was but a fragment interacting on an equal basis with other selves. Its rules were based on the objective realities of the discourses governing the instances of role-playing. The relationship was a minuscule particle of the social texture held together by the ideology legitimizing the roles. Identity reproduced in ritual-sustaining role adoption ordered personality in a manner similar to the one stemming from emotional outbursts socialized as transitional roles. On a typological and functional level, the similarity was complete. Ritual reconciliation was a mirror or reverse action going back from the social to the self. It reinforced the linkages between the two poles of the identity continuum and stressed its wholeness as a social phenomenon. 10 Robert A. Pratt, ed., The Tales of Canterbury, Complete Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston, 1966), 437; commentary in Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1989), 270.

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In the second place, one cannot help but notice the ambiguity of the relationships operated by ritual as an extension of the actors’ social roles. In Raoul and in Wolfram’s Parzival, ritual reconciliation pressed home the issue of integrity to ensure that the morals of the group were upheld and that nothing beyond or outside the value system on which the group staked its identification integrated personality. Embodied action triggered emotional reaction in order to assure that the self was not being preserved intact at the expense of the identity pool informing the other actors’ identities. Ritual was the guardian of group virtue; indeed, it constituted the group as a network. The postulate is valid in a number of other discourses and contexts of reference. It is supported by practically all examples from the rebelling noble sequence, but is perhaps best illustrated in the Macerata reconciliation. In light of Jorge Arditi’s recent reinterpretation of civility, the ritual respect embodied in forgiveness appears not so much as an example of the ‘civilizing process’ as an demonstration of social identification.11 By respecting each other, the Lamanno and de Antici clans staked their reconciliation on a pool of shared values from which both parties drew for their identity. The ritual kiss was an expression of the coalescence of identity among the members of the upper classes in the late-medieval and early modern West: the perfect case of horizontal relationship and network identity. In the third place, the openness of the structure allowed for an uneasy transition from networks to ends. The reformulation of identity in the course of the ritual reconciliation often resulted from the construction of a hierarchy in which the forgiving selves interacted with others with the exclusive purpose of rebuilding their own identity. Sincerity and integrity played a small part in this model, for in it the others were ends through which the self achieved actualization. Lack played a prominent role in this scheme. Alice in Willehalm forced her uncle into ritual reconciliation by reminding him that his conduct was lacking the qualities of role model that he, as a courtly man, was supposed to exhibit vis-à-vis the ladies and through which he maintained his dominance over them. The element of lack and contested domination was paramount in Donato Velluti’s story where the Velluti constructed their desire to actualize into a higher social role as lack, in this case lack of peace. The lack was made good by

11

Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners.

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the Mannelli’s ritual validation of the reconciliation and hence the Velluti’s social standing. Precisely for that reason the Mannelli rejected the reconciliation with disgust, intensifying the social distance and contesting the Velluti’s mild attempts at dominating not only the situation but its lasting consequences as well. In the blueprint of the forgiving knight tale, Giovanni Gualberto’s ‘overcoming himself ’ was his desire to break free from the tradition of the feud and assert his self by filling the spiritual lack informing his personality with the link to the divine established in the course of the reconciliation. The story spells clear the discursive attempt to exploit the void created by the suppression of revenge as a mode of actualization and build the morality of peace into the motivational structure of the lacking individual by integrating him within the discourse of the sacred.

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CONCLUSIONS TO PART THREE By way of conclusion I would like to sum up the main findings of this part from the point of view of the ritual kiss of peace as a functional device of identity building. In the first place, ritual stabilized identity. Stabilization was achieved by limiting the contingency inherent in the body and the dissociated self. Contingency generated within the person was ritually countered by exposure to incorporation or the construction of identity with reference to relatively stable external phenomena. Ritual thus produced the phenomenon of the ‘mirroring’ personality in which well-known cultural codes were incorporated into one’s motivational structure. The ‘mirroring’ personality, for its part, was often reduced to the ‘mirroring’ body, with its fundamental predilection toward consumption of external objects and an identity staked on self-(re)presentation through the qualities of the consumed objects. The predictability of the ritual actor increased dramatically in the course of the ritual ‘consuming’ of identity, since the socially constructed meanings of the appropriated objective totalities were considered to have become qualities of the person. Second, the ritual kiss reconstructed identity by reformulating past experiences. The kiss affected both cognitive and affective experiences, working on the continuity-discontinuity dimension of identity construction. The continuity of identity depended on experiences being integrated into some kind of continuum. Memory, the organizing principle of modern identity, could, and did act as an identity building device along that line throughout the period. Attempts to disregard its role push the argument somewhat further than our sources seem to allow. Rather than proclaiming memory as the lacking organizational pole of premodern personality, I would see it as only one of the principles operating past motivational structures. More important, it was complemented and had its role in the identity-building processes structured by the principles of the practice of remembrance. Operated by ritual and no less efficient in integrating personality, remembrance could override memory and reintegrate the person along a totally different set of experiences, thus giving rise to a new identity. Integration reconstructed identity by

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bringing together the disjoined personality through mediation between self and person. Once achieved, the integration in action served to sustain identity through time. The ritual action of peacemaking also resolved identity. The point has been frequently made in recent scholarship, mostly for criticizing the functionalist-structuralist paradigm of ritual identity resolution.1 In my opinion the criticism has been carried too far, especially in reference to the level on which the resolution was accomplished. While there is some truth to the statement that the fragmentation of the late-medieval self was enhanced rather than overcome in ritual, it appears that on another level resolution was still the most common outcome of the rites of peace. The dissociation of the self from the once dominant social totality by the beginning of the high Middle Ages and the increasing functionalization of society led to the acquisition of multiple social roles. The development of a more complex, multilayered personality resulted in tensions that could generate identity crisis. The ritual actors found themselves caught up in the conflicting demands of their social roles, cases well documented with the outbursts of grief and anxiety. The transformative and healing role of ritual in such cases, as in Parzival or Silence, was to resolve identity by limiting the options of the individual. The resolution was achieved on the level of the person and might or might not affect the self, which might remain just as fragmented, in expectation of resolution on another existential level. Finally, ritual defined identity by forcing actors to apperceive the boundaries of the territory within which the practices that operated the self and the person were effective. Establishing the content and limits of embodiment, socialization, and individuation, and the intensity of the links to larger totalities, the ritual kiss mapped out the conceptual codes within which identity was defined.

1 Sara Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London, 1993), 51.

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CONCLUSION

THE KISS OF PEACE AS PRACTICE

How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it sticks? Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, II, 3

At the time when modern critical inquiry was still in its infancy, Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of ritual studies, recognized that ritual reproduces society by reproducing individual dispositions that are at the same time corporeal, emotional, and cognitive.1 Since then, practitioners of a host of disciplines have applied, developed, modified, and challenged the Durkheimian paradigm. Scholarship has oscillated between refuting and rehabilitating it, unable to escape from engaging its implications. In spite of all effort, Durkheim’s insightful strategy for research has not been fully integrated into the expanding inquiry on ritual. The history of the premodern West in particular, albeit overcoming with an impressive tour de force the lag that left it behind in the field of ritual studies, has yet to fully utilize the potential of this deceivingly simple tripartite scheme. In the preceding chapters I have attempted to employ Durkheim’s construct to supply what seems to be an insufficiently developed facet of the inquiry into ritual by focusing on a narrow issue, the ritual kiss in medieval peacemaking. I have poised the kiss against the background of diverse contexts in a long-term perspective. My goal in the investigation of individual affective, cognitive, and corporeal dispositions has been, to borrow a phrase from Marshal Sahlins, to explore the implications of ‘the presence in culture of universal structures that are nevertheless not universally present.’2 The scrutiny of instances of ritual reconciliation and its discursive representation has borne out, I hope, evidence to the hypothesis I postulated at the 1 Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie (Paris, 1912), 552. 2 Marshall Sahlins, ‘Colours and Cultures,’ in Dolgin et al., Symbolic Anthropology, 179.

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beginning of the study. I have offered a model analytical strategy of the complexities of the process of insertion of social governance in interpersonal relations. The investigation of the sublimation of a specific ritual form to a hegemonic practice of the body in which the organizing principles of the social context were lodged seems to me an appropriate way to engage this problem. How apposite my approach has been and how pertinent the conclusions it led me to, the reader will decide. In the pages that follow, rather than sum up my argument I will try to extract some of the basic premises of the complex knot of relationships in which the kiss of peace entangled the ritual actors. Three issues stand out. First, of paramount importance are the ways in which ritual was employed as a strategy to alter being in the world. Second, the widely employed but poorly understood emphasis on the functioning of the kiss as an efficacious representation and a communicative device deserves more attention. And third, we should account for the accommodation of difference and contestation in the rearranging of peaceful relationships between individuals, groups, and society, a phenomenon David Kertzer has called, in a modification of Durkheim’s definition of ritual, ‘solidarity without consensus.’3 I will address these three problem clusters in turn. To reverse the existential condition and subjective status of the ritual actors characterized by the state of feud and formal hostility ranked high on the agenda of the ritual managers promoting reconciliation. A highly charged practice with strong implications of emotional attraction and corporeal aggregation, the kiss provided a versatile ‘implement’ with which the social codes governing conflict could be worked on. High intensity conflict in high- and late-medieval societies was a paradigmatic expression of the competition for subjectivity and the acquisition, accumulation, and preservation of the symbolic capital consisting of social respect, power, and prestige. It was thus as much structural clash as it was an individual problem. Quelling violence through reconciliation meant mending the fissures that had gaped in the social fabric as the result of insult or injury. I use the physical metaphor on purpose, for it conveys the essence of the transformative action of the kiss. Two premises underlay the functioning of ritual: the ambiguous, multi-referential field of the kiss

3

David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, 1988).

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as a bodily practice, and the obligatory relations rooted in the physical experience it gave rise to. Multi-referentiality and ambiguity, two well-known characteristics of ritual, stressed on a symbolic plane in the studies of Camille and Frijhoff and seen exclusively as a clash of opposites by Koziol, were the basic precondition for the ritual creation of cross-cutting ties on several levels.4 I use the term ‘cross-cutting’ to connote not the establishing of social connections transcending the boundaries of collectives bounded by kin, class, estate, or settlement ties. Rather, I see it as referring to the set of positive linkages created by ritual among the basic meaning-producing paradigms of obligatory relatedness informing premodern existence, such as, on the one hand, love between the sexes and natural kin, loyalty in vassalage, and charity in the brotherhood in Christ, and, on the other hand, between these paradigmatic relationships and the conceptually defined norms governing conduct and social interaction. This conclusion runs counter to the symbolic base of the only coherent analytical scheme of medieval Western ritual offered thus far, Le Goff ’s study of the rites of vassalage, but I believe I have marshaled enough evidence to support my argument.5 Suffice it to recall the link between the seemingly inconsequential welcome kiss in Silence and the king’s desperate acknowledgment, ‘Ne doit trahir li hom qui baize!’6 By virtue of its ambiguity, the kiss borrowed effortlessly symbolic and non-symbolic features from many of the meaning-producing clusters of medieval relatedness to weave a complex net of ties across social and cultural boundaries. Ambiguity made it possible for different meanings to coexist and mutually reinforce one another, with a crucial functional consequence. Societies with cross-cutting ties between their segments, either conventionally defined as groups or as links between meaningrelated paradigms, tend to be less conflict-ridden internally.7 The cross-cutting network diminishes the intensity of conflict by dividing loyalties and multiplying allegiances, thus supplying a measure of options and choice, but also obligations and responsibilities, in the 4 Camille, ‘Gothic Signs and the Surplus;’ Frijhoff, ‘The Kiss Sacred and Profane;’ and Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor, especially his Conclusion, ‘How Does Ritual Mean?’ 5 Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rituals of Vassalage,’ 237–87. 6 Roche-Mahdi, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, 212. 7 On the concept of ‘cross-cutting ties’ see Marc H. Ross, The Management of Conflict. Interpretation and Interests in Comparative Perspective (New Haven and London, 1993), 22–3.

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ordering of the social relationships which individuals locked in singleallegiance meaning-producing collectives lack. The obligatory relations, as we have seen, were the primary principle informing the efficacy of the kiss of peace. The construction of a ritual cross-cutting network feeding upon ambiguity was not an exclusively cognitive, rationally organized, and goal-oriented phenomenon staked on symbolic premises. Nor did it presuppose acquisition of complete agency by the ritual actors. Structural agency—the pressure of the authorities and the group however defined—was even more pronounced in directing and utilizing ritual. Cross-cutting referentiality and its outcomes did, however, have an underlying premise. At the heart of all ritual referents of the kiss was the notion of corporeality. The medieval Western individual was until fairly late, as scholars have asserted and I myself have tried to demonstrate, on the one hand, much less limited by its corporeal constraints than its modern counterpart and, on the other hand, much more integrated according to a logic vested in corporeal signs. I have tried to explore some of the features of the types of selfhood and personhood through the concepts of self-aswhole, organic memory, and ritual remembrance. All three share the principle that social ties were perceived of as bodily facts, a premise that constructed an ample playground for the operation of the ritual kiss as a socially transformative practice. Moreover, the practical organization of the medieval collectives referred to in the ties created by the kiss operated on the notion of co-substantiality. Co-substantiality and corporeality entail ongoing traffic of material and immaterial forces between individuals and groups, regulated by ritual. Without negating a certain level of discreteness of the ritual actors, the intervention of the kiss of peace, an action upon and through the natural gateway of the mouth, rendered what Terence Turner called ‘social skin’ porous because it was entangled with the corporeality and the substance inherent in the ritual exchange.8 The concept of co-substantiality was appropriated in the sensory reception created by ritual interaction. It filled the ‘between,’ as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, interlacing the social and physical space separating the ritual actors with connections that made 8 Terence Turner, ‘The Social Skin,’ in Jeremy Cherfas and Robert Levin, eds., Not Work Alone (Beverly Hills, 1980).

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them not only contiguous but continuous as well. Meaning was the sharing of being.9 The ritual mechanism worked along the two social dimensions of medieval society, the horizontal and the vertical, and restructured the relations between the self, the collective, and the social. On the horizontal axle its function was restorative. Individuals and groups of roughly equivalent position who found themselves striving for, or defending a separate status, were linked together by ritual at the points where their organic beings were permeable. Along the vertical axle, ritual action was equalizing. The ritual give-and-take across corporeal margins defining the boundaries of status that were fortified with strong social emotions, such as disgust, compromised hierarchy by ‘opening’ the thresholds of the human frame and forged a new shared identity, that is, quashed conflict by efficiently altering being in the world. In both cases the kiss entailed peace, since it enmeshed actors in the sociality presented in shared corporeality. Finally, the kiss also affected being, at least since the laws of Henry II, by changing subjectivity in a reverse mode. Ritual played out its religious and legal-cognitive dimensions by ‘centering’ obligation on the organic individual represented in the soul and defined by his or her physical husk. In this way ritual peace contributed to individuation, deflated the extended corporate self entailing a larger field of violent reaction, and later related it directly to the authorities to facilitate its subjection and the incorporation of obedience. The ritual kiss thus physically inscribed the social order it stood for upon the ritual actors’ sensory perceptions. To stabilize the agreement, these perceptions, just like the emotional experiences engaged in ritual, had to be attuned to mesh, i.e., the ritual kiss was an efficacious representation to the extent it explicitly communicated the premises, rules, and norms of the engagement. On several occasions extant records confirm that the basic principles of the ritual act of the kiss were made explicit, through the one-time normative injunction of ‘brothers and friends,’ the goal-oriented rationality of do ut des morality, and so forth. Yet the ritual kiss, multi-referential as it was, could never attain the level of communicative capacity and ability to convey and explicate the variety of meaning that language offered. In the highly complicated area of conflict and peace, 9

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, 2000), 5.

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this might have been more of an advantage than a drawback. If we set aside the verbal formulas accompanying the ritual sequence of reconciliation of which the kiss was but a part, ritual did have its own function as a communicative device. But what and how did the kiss communicate, given its ambiguity and inadequacy to differentiate and explicate the contexts of its referential fields? The question of ‘what’ concerns the ability of ritual to address, embody, and translate certain ideas. The key to this activity, again, is to be sought in corporeality as the basic premise of ritual action. The engagement of the body implies that the nature of the links, which I suggest were the main creature and objective of ritual, was of the ‘untheorized’ sort, as Comaroff and Comaroff called it.10 Such generally inexplicable connections between the social-functional fields in which the rite worked, on the one hand, and among these and the meaning-producing paradigms of relatedness, on the other hand, can hardly be conceptualized. They rest on notions whose knowledge is implicit and inchoate. That is why, perhaps, the formal approaches of positivism objectified and thus sacralized them, empiricism (vide legal scholarship), attempting to rationalize, reduced them to fragments of what they stood for, and the symbolic approaches resorted to disregarding or even (in Le Goff ’s scheme) outright negating their existence. The problem with most, if not all, of these approaches arises from their failure to locate the functional ‘space’ in which the ritual kiss constructed the links between meaning and action. They find it difficult to situate ritual as a strategy for action, to follow Catherine Bell’s insight, as the practice mediating between two levels and leading from the inchoate, non-rationalized paradigms informing existence to the rationalized concepts structuring organized social action.11 We need not go the ‘collective unconscious,’ however, to decipher the workings of the mechanism of bodily actions signifying basic phenomena of social existence through the symbolically meaningful cultural code of the ritual kiss. What the ritual code seems to have promoted is a particular form of awareness of these paradigmatic forms of existence. Indeed, in a variety of cases we read that the actors ‘come to themselves’ or became emotionally ‘moved’ or ‘enlightened’ by the intervention of ritual. Even if conscious awareness did not occur, the ritual kiss was still an indispensable tool for reveal10 11

Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 71. This is the central postulate of Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritiual Practice.

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ing the ‘facts’ of paradigmatic relatedness held in the ritual actors’ ‘bodily container,’ as Casey termed it, by creating appropriate experiences.12 Such experiences could not be ‘understood;’ they were appropriated and reproduced in specific action. While there are a variety of ways to represent them, there are few other ways to experience them but in ritual or ecstatic rapture. The reason for this is that paradigmatic experiences of relatedness are rooted not in concepts but in perceptions produced by touching. Touching is the only sense that requires action to make perception, and thus the experience based on it, occur. When framed in an appropriate discourse, in the manner Valeri explicated the function of sacrifice, the kiss of peace was the action that led to the apperception of the most fundamental paradigms of existence through relatedness in the premodern Western societies, in their pristine and socialized, to various extents, forms.13 The apperception arose in the experience of mingling bodies, interacting along one of their most intimate fissures. This answers the question of ‘how’ the kiss communicated. Bodily interaction in ritual created situations in which such experiences could be produced and shared and in which the apperception of social principles, norms, and codes through the body was made possible. The more basic the paradigm, the simpler the experience it gave rise to in the process of its apperception. The most fundamental meaningful facts produced typical experiences. Indeed, the goal of the ritual kiss was to induce typical results, though, as we have seen the connection between experiences and their outcome was by no means stable and conventionalized. It was open to contestation, of which the abuse of the paradigms it helped to apperceive was the most lamented outcome. Abuse, however, was itself conventionalized in the paradigmatic example of Judas’s kiss and was only a facet of the possibilities for appropriating the ritual kiss. The salient issue is how and why a ritual gesture that existed as an inchoate but fundamental and almost reflexive practice embodying basic relatedness, and appropriated by authorities and groups to regulate and curtail interpersonal and group rights of violence, was adopted in turn by the ritual actors. When prescribed and enforced as the form of reconciliation, the interaction with the kiss clearly made the actors 12

Casey, Remembering, 146–80. Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1985), 340–48. 13

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acquiesce in the obligatory intentionality of ritual. This led to the transformation of liability into duty, affect into emotion, ethics into morality and, ultimately, to the transformation of power into hegemony that, through the embodied will of the actors, legitimated the might of the authorities into acknowledged right. There is little doubt, however, that with the lack of effective coercion example, persuasion, and injunction alone would not have succeeded in achieving the practically universal (with Sahlins’s qualification) integration of the kiss in the ritual scheme of peace making. I would venture to state that however strong the structural pressures of the social and the collective, the marked preference for a specific form out of the welter of options offered by custom and tradition would not have been possible without the reconciling parties’ own appropriation of the ritual kiss. In other words, the interacting individuals were just as implicated in its sublimation as were the authorities. The specifics of their participation should be sought in at least three directions and bear on the problem of the interrelationship of individual and group freedoms. Modern and post-modern societies have worked out a model of existence in which these two forms are mutually exclusive. Any extension of the social in the domain of individual liberty is believed to cause its restriction and vice versa. Three dimensions of the premodern ritual exchange, its existence as a form and as a process, and its character of corporeal co-substantiality, challenge this paradigm and present us with a different picture. The centrality of form in social interaction, of which the kiss was a particular instantiation, was a virtually universal feature of premodern cultures that continues to open new areas of exploration. In view of our subject matter, it is appropriate to borrow the apt formulation of one of the finest nineteenth-century legal historians, Rudolf Jhering, that ‘form is the sworn enemy of arbitrariness and the twin sister of the freedom [provided by the law].’14 Jhering’s statement was a generic reference to the formal institutions of the law and the codification of legal ideas; yet his postulate fully applies in the case of the ritual kiss of peace. Form, nowadays the epitome of constraint, appeared as the most solid guarantor of the freedom of the medieval individual. In the specific embodiment of the kiss form carried the sensations of familiarity and predictability. It shielded 14 Rudolf Jhering, Der Geist des römischen Rechts auf den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1883), vol. 2, part 2, 471.

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the individual from the chaotic, arbitrary intervention of competing social and supernatural forces outside of its control. Interaction with the kiss allowed for the construction of an environment in which people moved with ease, assimilating it to the familiar social spaces the control of which they had acquired since childhood. Masters of their own world, the ritual agents found in the formality of ritual guidelines for adjusting to the rules of the social intercourse and an opportunity to maximize the traditional rights and liberties stemming from the fundamental paradigms of relatedness reproduced in ritual. It is a truism that ritual embodied action. We have already seen the importance of action on a basic level, in the creation of experiences through apperception. No less important was the role of the ritual kiss in connecting apperceived experiences to the conceptual framework of conduct and all it entailed, from ethics to obligation. In the legal sphere, in particular, the ritual taking of liability and the acknowledgement of duty were the supreme expressions of the freedom of the sovereign individual to exercise his or her rights. The ritual actor might not have been free to change anything in the ‘script’ of the ritual sequence or the discourses and institutions controlling it. He or she did, however, have options when it came to the act of performing the kiss. The existence of choice and the awareness of the transformations occurring in the wake of the ritual engagement demonstrate the extent to which the kiss of peace was an embodiment of the principle of individual sovereignty and liberty. On the one hand, the state of obligation resulting from the ritually taken liability and duty was an action of self-limitation and self-restraint, an alienation of the fundamental rights of the premodern person to pursue justice on his or her own. There was no better demonstration of the existence of these rights than the willful, self-conscious parting with them enacted in ritual. On the other hand, there was the freedom to choose between forms. Choice manifested the active participation of the individual in drawing the lines around the territory of the self, to use Goffman’s concept, and in the construction of its ‘social skin.’ Finally, the corporeal co-substantiality both revealed and constructed in ritual points out a fundamental condition of the premodern existence that has been lost to the West since the Enlightenment: the complimentary character of individual and collective freedoms. Long misunderstood, this premise has been the bone of contention in heated debates on the specific nature of the subjection, oppression,

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and domination that emerged with the rise of the early modern state and its monopolization of all varieties of coercion.15 Leaving aside the issue that the social and the collective are not coterminous, ritual peacemaking seems to confirm that for the medieval individual to exist as a social person with all the rights and privileges this entailed the individual had to exist as a member of a group. Ritual interaction, aggregating the individual into a more or less defined associative or corporate entity, supplied the facets of personality that were indispensable for the former functioning as a social agent. Once again, the selection of a specific form mattered most. The higher the level and intensity of association and incorporation, the more unrestricted the access of the ritual actor to the rights and privileges guaranteeing personal freedom. These final observations do not exhaust the range of implications entailed by the ritual kiss of peace as a mode of social interaction. They do illustrate, however, that no hegemonic structure was erected by the efforts of the authorities alone. The process of constructing it involved participation in the course of which agency was contested, parceled out, and ultimately appropriated by all participants in the ritual exchange.

15 See for a discussion of two of the most important positions in this regard William Pencak, ‘Foucault Stoned: Reconsidering Insanity, and History,’ Rethinking History 1:1 (Summer 1997), 34–55.

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INDEX

Ademar of Chabannes 263 Agnus Dei 265 Albertanus of Brescia 152, 205, 316 Alexander III, Pope 64 Alfonso the Wise, King of Spain 33, 84 Alleluia 2, 226, 273, 281, 283, 286 Alphabet of Tales 197 Amator Porcarii, Roman citizen 224–9 amicitia 75–9, 99, 100, 261 Amiens 39 Ancona 231–3 Annals of Padua 286 Anonymous of Abingdorf 150 Antwerp 28, 34, 122–3 Arnulf of Flanders 39, 314 asseurement 91 auctorizamentum 58–60 Augustine 14 Baldus degli Ubaldi 34, 73, 84 Beaumanoir 73 Berengar, Abbot of St Lawrence 300, 305, 314 Bernard of Clairvaux 34 Bernardino of Siena 202–3, 308 Bianchi 2, 200, 205, 266, 273, 283 Boccaccio 260 Bourge 48 Bruno, Bishop of Hildesheim 50 Caesarius of Heisterbach 190–91, 267–8 Cantar del mio Cid 160–61, 175, 316 caritas ceremony 248 caritas/amor 66, 102, 110, 124–7, 130 carta pacis 85–6, 95–6 compositio 93 concordia 52–3, 74, 94 coniuratio reiterata 281–2 convenientia 52–3, 298–9 Cyprian 14 Cyril of Jerusalem 14 De Antici, noble clan 231, 318 deditio 101 disciplinati 276–7 Donato Velluti 221–4, 318 Douai 106 Du Cange, Charles 21

Dudo of St Quentin 39 Duke Ernst 112, 151–3, 162, 297 Earl of Toulouse 153 Eilhart of Oberge 184 emotion work 141, 187 Erec 226 exempla 143 festuca 40, 87, 121–2 fideiussio, fideiussor 40, 43, 63, 65, 69 fides, fides facta 38, 45–51, 54–6, 60, 66–69, 71–8, 80, 88, 92, 94, 100, 106–7, 109–110, 116–7, 127, 130–1, 261, 297–99, 302 firmantia 38–44, 47–9, 54, 66, 80, 250 Florence 29, 85, 221 Francesco Carrara 285 Frederick Barbarossa, German Emperor 62–3 Friar Juniper 290–92 Galbert of Bruge 41 Galvaneo Fiamma 279–80 Geoffrey IV, Abbot 43 Geoffrey of Manmouth 78, 151, 252–3 Gill of Seuly 48, 298–9 Giovanni Andrea 34, 84 Giovanni Codagnello 279–80, 295 Giovanni Gualberto 166, 189, 287–8, 308, 319 Giovanni Sercambi 205 Giovanni Villani 276 gratia 66, 71, 100–102, 130 Gregorio López 33–4 Grenoble 43 Guigo de la Mota, Count of Albi 56 Guigo Delphinus, Count of Albi 57 Guigo III, Count of Albi 43 Guillaume Durand 17, 18, 34, 84, 172 Guy of Warwick 153, 163, 181, 183–4, 194–6, 210, 297 Hegemony 9 Heloise 46 Henry II, German Emperor 28, 71, 74, 144–50, 164, 167, 253, 292–3, 296, 302, 327

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

354

Henry II, King of England 64, 71, 297 Henry IV, German Emperor 70 Henry of Dietz, Imperial noble 63 Henry of Lancaster, Duke 268, 309 Henry V, German Emperor 315 Henry VI, German Emperor 71 Henry VI, King of England 113 Henry VII, German Emperor 282, 284 Heribert, Archbishop of Cologne 144–50, 164, 167, 253, 292–3 Herman of Tournai 315 Hippolytus 13 Hugh II, Bishop of Grenoble 57 Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble 43, 56 Innocent I, Pope 14, 264 Innocent III, Pope 16 investiture 60, 66 Jacob’s Well 193–4 Jacques of Vitry 199 Jean Gobi 205 Johannes Pauli 271 John Beleth 16 John Gower 173, 309 John Mirk 192, 196 Kudrun

101, 181, 310–13

La Sauve Majore, Abbey of 42 Lamanno, noble clan 231, 318 Lambert of Deutz 144–50, 188, 253 Las Siete Partidas 33, 73, 102–3 Latino Malabranca, Cardinal and peacemaker 282, 284 laudatio 57–8, 66, 80, 92 Lay Folks Mass Book 303 Le Bel Inconnu 239–41 Lex Frisiorum 101 Liber exemplorum 197 Liber papiensis 74 Life of St Wulfstan 200 liminality 133 Little Flowers of St Francis 290–93 Lothar III, German Emperor 47 Louis VII, King of France 65 Louis VIII, King of France 113 Love God and Drede 172, 175, 309 Macerata 231, 318 Mannelli, noble clan 221–4 Manuel des pechiez 196 Marmoutier, Abbey of 52–5 Mathilda, Countess of Albi 57

Mauricius, Abbot 51 Miracles of St Ursmar 177–9 Montaperti, battle of 207, 285 Mont-St-Michel, Abbey of 42 Nibelungenlied 169, 175, 179–80, 261 Niels, King of Denmark 170 Noyers, Abbey of 50, 258–9 osculum interveniente 46, 81–5, 92, 127 Otto, Count Palatine 63 Paluccio Guatari, Roman citizen 224–9 Papal States 114 Pardoner’s Tale 317 Parzival 153, 170, 175, 181, 218, 297, 307, 318, 320–1 Pascal, Pope 315 Paul, apostle 13 pax [and concordia] 93–7, 102, 105, 269, 278 Peace of God 2 Peter Abelard 46, 314–15 Peter Damian 166 Peter Idley 192, 269–71 Philip the Good, Count of Flanders 120 Philip, Abbot 44 Picquigni 39 pignus 43 Pistoia 87 Rainaldo Corso 174, 230 Rainerius Perusinus 83 Raoul Glaber 39 Raoul of Cambrai 151, 155–7, 169, 175, 184, 209, 254, 297, 307, 316, 318 Renaut de Bâgé 239–42 Richard the Lionheart, King of England 151, 293 Richer 39 Rigord 264 Robert Mannyng 196–7, 202 Robert the Pious, King of France 70 Rolandino Passageri 84–5, 171 Rome 227–9 Rufinus of Sorrento 1, 3 Ruodlieb 77, 99, 103 Rupert of Deutz 150, 204 Sachsenspiegel 105 securitas 61–4, 93 Siena 207–9 Silence 213–218, 320–1, 325

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 Sobrado, Abbey of 62 Song of Aliscans 151, 157–9, 161, 163, 209, 225–6, 252, 307 Song of Songs 16 sponsio 52–3, 55–6, 66 St Catherine 277 St Francis of Assisi 152, 165, 171, 291–3 St Hubert, Chronicle of the Abbey of 300 St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln 151, 161, 212, 293, 313 St Julian of Tours, Abbey of 249 St Julian of Tours, Abbey of 44 St Laon at Thuars, Abbey of 50 St Lawrence, Abbey of 300 St Omer 106 St Serge and St Bach, Abbey of 58–9, 260 St Vincent in Le Mans, Abbey of 50 Statutes of Aalst 120, 122–3, 186 Statutes of Deurne 122 Statutes of Upstalboom 115 Stephen of Bourbon 196 stipulatio 55, 83, 87, 94, 109 Tale of Melibeus 101–2 Tale of the Forgiving Knight 29, 189–90, 194, 202, 266 Tertulian 13

355

Theobald, knight 52–4 Theodore of Mopsuestia 14 Thomas Becket, Archbishop 64–5, 71, 297 Thomas Chestre 240 Thomas of Cantimprè 199–201, 203, 303 treuga 71–5, 93–4, 131, 281 Tristan and Isolde 132, 152, 159, 181, 184 triuwe 171, 182, 218–19 Uggucio 73 Urfehde 88–91 Usatges of Barcelona 75 Uzerche, Abbey of 51 Velluti, noble clan Vendôme 52 voitval 209

221–4

wergild 93, 106–7, 128, 131, 259 Wetzlar 99, 111 White Hoods 264 Willehalm 152, 163, 181, 209, 227, 251–2, 307 William Longsword 39, 42, 314 Zoene [zoeve]

104

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CULTURES, BELIEFS AND TRADITIONS medieval and early modern peoples Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions is a forum for an interdisciplinary sharing of insights into past popular experience in the European and European-related world, from late antiquity to the modern era. The series covers studies in a wide range of phenomena, among them popular rituals and religion, art, music, material culture and domestic space, and it favors a variety of approaches: historical anthropology, folklore and gender studies, art- and literary analysis, and integrative approaches employing a combination of disciplines. It contains monographs, text editions (with translation and commentary), collections of essays on defined themes, acta of conferences and works of reference.

1. HEN, Y. Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10347 3 2. MEGGED, A. Exporting the Catholic Reformation. Local Religion in EarlyColonial Mexico. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10400 3 3. SLUHOVSKY, M. Patroness of Paris. Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10851 3 4. ZIOLKOWSKI, J.M. Obscenity. Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10928 5 5. POSKA, A.M. Regulating the People. The Catholic Reformation in SeventeenthCentury Spain. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11036 4 6. FERREIRO, A. (ed.). The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10610 3 7. SÖRLIN, P. ‘Wicked Arts’. Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden, 1635-1754. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11183 2 8. MITCHELL, K. & I. WOOD (eds.). The World of Gregory of Tours. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11034 8 9. FRIEDLANDER, A. The Hammer of the Inquisitors. Brother Bernard Déli-cieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century France. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11519 6 10. FRIEDMAN, Y. Encounter Between Enemies. Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11706 7 11. COHEN, E. & M.B. de JONG (eds.). Medieval Transformations. Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11728 8 12. TAYLOR, B. Structures of Reform. The Mercedarian Order in the Spanish Golden Age. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11857 8 13. ROLLO-KOSTER, J. Medieval and Early Modern Ritual. Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11749 0

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14. JONES, P.M. & T. WORCESTER. (eds.) From Rome to Eternity. Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550-1650. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12469 1 15. FROJMOVIC, E. Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other. Visual Representation and JewishChristian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12565 5 16. GODSALL-MYERS, J.E. Speaking in the Medieval World. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12955 3 17. PETKOV, K. The Kiss of Peace. Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13038 1

ISSN 1382-5364