Д-Р ИЛИЯНА БЕНИНА Д-Р НИКОЛА БЕНИН
Medieval Self-Coronations. The History and Symbolism of a Ritual
Jaume Aurell, University of Navarra
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Contents
List of Figures page vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 Self-Coronation As Ritual 36
Part I Heritage 59
2 Consecration without Mediation in Antiquity 61
3 The Hand of God 85
4 Symbolic Self-Coronations in Byzantium 96
5 The Sacralisation of Carolingian Accessions 127
6 Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian Christocentrism 147
Part II Infamy 173
7 Roger II of Sicily: Imagining Self-Coronation 175
8 Frederick II of Germany: Desacralising Rituals 196
Part III Convention 219
9 Alfonso XI of Castile: From Self-Knighting
to Self-Crowning 221
10 Peter IV of Aragon’s Self-Coronation:
A Conventionalisation Programme 242
11 Charles III of Navarra: Juridical Implications
of Self-Coronations 274
12 Early Modern Dramatisation: The Road to Napoleon 296
Conclusion 302
Index 318
Acknowledgements This research began in 2010, while I was finishing my monograph Authoring the Past: History, Politics and Autobiography in Medieval Catalonia (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Rereading Peter IV of Aragon’s autobiography, I was struck, once more, by the passage in which the king narrates his selfcoronation, performed in 1336 when he was sixteen years old, and the liturgical ordo he later commissioned to fix the ritual as an established ceremony for his successors. When I discovered that story, I could not understand how such a meaningful historiographical passage, and Peter’s impressive liturgical ordo, complete with miniatures, had been virtually unknown by scholars beyond the few Catalan specialists on that king. Figure 26 of this book, coming from one of the manuscripts of that liturgical ordo, shows King Peter holding the crown just before crowning himself under the passive gaze of the bishop. In the long time it took me to write this volume, I have benefited from the generous help of many colleagues and friends. My analysis and understanding of the ritual of self-coronations necessarily developed from an interdisciplinary approach from history, symbolic anthropology, political philosophy, art history, theology and liturgy. Thus, this book falls within the framework of the Religion and Civil Society project of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra (Spain). It owes a great deal to the comprehensive dynamic of this project, to the intense debates of the almost biweekly seminars and to frequent conversations with my colleagues. I particularly appreciate the advice I received from the head of the project, the political philosopher Montserrat Herrero. My research has greatly benefited from visits to various campuses of the University of California. At UCLA I learned much from the advice of the historians Patrick J. Geary, Lynn Hunt and Teófilo F. Ruiz, and from the anthropologists Andrew Apter and Sherry B. Ortner. During my stays at UC Berkeley I spoke with the historians Anthony Adamthwaite and Martin Jay and the anthropologist Geoffrey Koziol. Finally, I crowned this book in a fruitful stay at Stanford University, thanks to the invitation of Marisa Galvez, who was generous with advice as well as hospitality. xi In the middle of my research, I developed some of my theories in the seminars held at Johns Hopkins University, where I found alwaysinspiring advice from Gabrielle M. Spiegel and her colleagues of the department of history, and at Wesleyan University, where I largely benefited from the comments of Gary Shaw, Ethan Kleinberg and their colleagues in history and anthropology. In the course of this project, I learned from many colleagues from numerous disciplines. I thank Michael Axworthy and Rolf Strootman for their suggestions for the chapter on antiquity (Chapter 2); José Marin Riveros and Patricia Varona for information on Byzantium (Chapter 4); Jinty Nelson, my brother Martin Aurell, János Bak, Björn Weiler, Mirko Vagnoni, Stefano Manganaro and Nikolas Jaspert for their comments on the chapters on the Carolingians (Chapter 5), Sicily (Chapter 7) and Germany (Chapter 8); Adam M. Kosto, Paul Freedman, Alfons Puigarnau, José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Flocel Sabaté and Marta Serrano-Coll for their feedback on the chapter on Aragon (Chapter 10); Julia Pavón, Eloísa Ramírez, Juan Carrasco, Ángel Sesma and María Narbona for their input in the chapter on Navarra (Chapter 11); Laura Delbrugge and Álvaro Fernández de Córdova for their contributions to the chapter on Castile (Chapter 9); Peter Burke and Pablo Vázquez Gestal for their help with the chapter on early modern coronations (Chapter 12); Robert A. Rosenstone and Kalle Pihlainen for necessary theoretical perspectives; and Philippe Buc and Lynn Hunt for the shifting but always stimulating relationship between history and anthropology. I particularly thank the anonymous readers of the previous drafts for their comments and suggestions: my initial daze in receiving their advice turned into a genuine appreciation when I began working hard on their (literally) hundreds of suggestions. To work with Cambridge University Press has been an enjoyable example of professionalism. My deepest thanks go to Elisabeth FriendSmith and Atifa Jiwa. I also thank Gabriela Alba for her efficient job on the index. Finally, I greatly appreciate the enthusiastic support of my parents during the long process of the writing of this book. Their love for culture, books, history and tradition has always been a genuine impulse for my dedication to history. Earlier versions of some chapters of this book have already appeared as: ‘The Self-Coronation of Peter the Ceremonious (1336): Historical, Liturgical, and Iconographical Representations’, Speculum 89 (2014): 66–95 (with Marta Serrano-Coll); ‘The Self-Coronations of Iberian Kings: A Crooked Line’, Imago Temporis 8 (2014): 151–75; ‘Strategies of Royal Self-Fashioning: Iberian Kings’ Self-Coronations’, in Self-Fashioning xii Acknowledgements and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Laura Delbrugge (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 18–45; ‘The Self-Coronation of Frederick II: A Non-sacred Consecration’, in Political Theology in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Discourses, Rites, and Representations, ed. Montserrat Herrero, Jaume Aurell and Angela Miceli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 245–66; and ‘Charles III of Navarra’s Oath and Coronation: The Juridical Implications of Self-Coronations’, in Le sacré et la parole: le serment au Moyen Age, ed. Martin Aurell, Jaume Aurell and Montserrat Herrero (Paris: Garnier, 2018), 227–49.
Introduction
Non aspettar mio dir più ne mio cenno:
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio
Dante, Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, Chant 271
In a small room in a corner of the Getty Villa in Los
Angeles,
a gorgeous full-body bronze sculpture of a young athlete
crowning
himself with an olive wreath, dating back to Greece from
between
300 and 100 BC, is on display. The museum’s catalogue calls
the
figure The Victorious Youth (see Figure 1), and describes it
in these
terms:
In the traditional pose of a victorious athlete, a relaxed
and confident youth
crowns himself with a wreath, probably olive. The olive
wreath was the prize
for a victor in the Olympic Games and identifies this youth
as a victorious
athlete. He may have carried palm branches, another
attribute of victory, in
his left hand. The figure’s eyes were once inset with stones
of glass paste to
create a naturalistic impression. This statue probably
commemorated an
athletic triumph at Olympia, where the olive wreath was
given as a prize.
It may have stood in the sanctuary there or in the athlete’s
hometown.2
Although this is a self-coronation in an athletic rather
than
a political context, the statue’s iconographic motif proves
that the
ancient world was familiar with the custom of placing a
crown on
one’s own head.3 From the start of the Christian era, this gesture
of
1 ‘I do not give you sign or word; // free, upright and
whole is thy will; // ‘twere a fault not to
act according to its prompting; // wherefore I do crown and
mitre thee over thyself’
(Virgil’s declaration to Dante at the Paradiso’s thresholds,
in Dante, Divina Commedia,
Purgatorio, Chant 27, verses 139–42). See Ernst H.
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 483–95. 2
Catalogue, Getty Villa museum in Los Angeles, available at
www.getty.edu/art/collection/
objects/7792/unknown-maker-statue-of-a-victorious-youth-greek-300–100-bc/
(accessed 29 March 2017). 3 I do not intend to engage with
the intensive historiographical debate on the meaning of the
gesture of this statue, which I noticed on my first visit to
the Getty Villa museum. Rather,
1
Figure 1 The Victorious Youth, a statue of an athlete
crowning himself
with an olive wreath, 300–100 BC. Bronze with inlaid copper.
The
J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California.
© Getty
Images. The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).
I just take it as iconographic data for this book, taking
into account its most probable sense.
The text describing the statue has actually changed several
times in the past few years, and
the latest inscription states that the victorious athlete
‘is about to remove his wreath’ rather
than ‘crowning himself’. The most extensive work on the
sculpture is Carol C. Mattusch,
The Victorious Youth (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 1997). She
adds another example of
the apparent self-crowning in a figure of the goddess Eros
(Mattusch, The Victorious Youth,
9, figure 9).
2 Introduction
royal self-coronation has conventionally been considered a
transgression of tradition on the part of the sovereign who practises it. The
sovereign who puts a crown on his own head clearly defies
the priest,
to whom it naturally falls to act as mediator between the
divinity that
confers temporal power from above and the person receiving
this
authority on earth. The popularity and spread of the rite of
selfcoronation reached its zenith with Napoleon’s imperial selfcoronation in
Paris on 2 December 1804, an event that achieved
world notoriety in large part because of the monumental
painting by
the court artist Louis David, currently on display at the
Louvre (see
Figure 2).
The scene actually represents the coronation of Empress
Josephine
by the emperor, but activates an inevitable reference to the
transgressive gesture of Napoleon’s self-coronation that preceded it.
Figure 2 Coronation of Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of
NotreDame de Paris on 2 December 1804, by Jacques-Louis David, 1807.
Louvre Museum in Paris, France. © Musée du Louvre, Dist.
RMNGrand Palais / Angèle Dequier.4
4 Complete information on this painting may be found in
Antoine Schnapper and
Arlette Sérullaz, ‘Le Couronnement de l’Empereur et de
l’Impératrice, 169 à 181’, in
Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825, ed. Antione Schnapper and
Arlette Sérullaz (Paris:
Ministè
re de la Culture, 1989), 399–432.
Introduction 3
Notably, Pope Pius VII appears in the painting as a passive
spectator, an attitude reflected in the apparently melancholy smile on his
face. Received through heredity, election, military victory
or usurpation, royal dignity is usually established through a solemn ceremony
of investiture that tends to take multiple ritual forms. In
the postConstantinian Christian world, the recognition of self-coronation as
a transgressive gesture presupposes the belief that the king
should
receive sacred authority, with the necessary mediation of a
priest,
solemnised in the ceremony of the investiture of the
sovereign.
It is obvious that between the relaxed and confident figure
of the
Greek athlete and Napoleon’s authoritative gesture lies a
complex
evolution of historical context, ritual forms and
iconographic motifs
through which self-coronations have been enacted and
represented –
a multilayered development this book examines and
interprets.
Though Napoleon’s self-coronation in 1804 is generally taken
to
have been an extraordinary event that broke the long
tradition of
kings being crowned by bishops, research shows that the
ritual of
self-coronation was already known and practised by Christian
European kings. Thus, considering both the imaginary
representations and the ceremonial experience of self-coronation, and in order
to reflect on its symbolic meaning and its ritual dimension,
this book
focuses on the self-coronations imagined and/or performed by
sovereigns. It traces the origins of these specific rituals and their
continuity and discontinuity, as well as their evolution from exceptionality to
normativity, from ancient civilisations to the present,
particularly
focusing on the Middle Ages. It narrates the long history of
selfcoronations, highlighted by placing the chronological accounts of
self-coronations in their own particular context. It
challenges previous assumptions, since it shows that self-coronations began in
the
very distant past, that they were not extraordinary events
at all, and
they were not as transgressive or non-conventional as we
might
perhaps want to imagine. It poses two essential questions:
one historical –‘What is the long-term story of royal self-coronations?’–
and the other anthropological –‘What does self-crowning
reveal
about the operation of ritual, and what is its symbolic
meaning?’
***
One may naturally question the ability of coronations to
generate
social transformations, especially if one considers the
ostensibly
passive role of the king during the ceremony, as traditional
scholarship on the subject has argued. Richard A. Jackson notes that ‘the
king seems to play a role definitely minor’ during the
ceremony of
4 Introduction
his own investiture.5 Meyer Fortes states that ‘the part
played by
ecclesiastical dignitaries in these ceremonies is
significant’ and that
‘the occupant of [the] office cannot legitimately install
himself.’
6
That priests make kings in Europe, Africa and Asia has been
posited
by scholars who have published comprehensive approaches to
the
topic, such as Arthur M. Hocart and, more recently, David
Graber
and Marshall Sahlins.7
Royal investment in the different kingdoms of medieval
Europe
was usually composed by an addition of ceremonies. The most
common were the unction and the crowning by the bishop.8 The
normative structure of the ceremony requires that, at the
climax of
the event, the bishop places the crown on the king’s head,
as most
medieval Western European iconography shows (see Figure 3).
This practice was certainly normative in England, France and
Germany, and was quickly adopted in Sicily and Jerusalem. In
those
5 Richard A. Jackson, ‘Le pouvoir monarchique dans la
cérémonie du sacre et couronnement des rois de France’, in Représentation,
pouvoir et royauté à la fin du moyen âge, ed.
Joël Blanchard (Paris: Picard, 1995), 237–51, here 237. 6
Meyer Fortes, ‘Of Installation Ceremonies’, Proceedings of the Royal
Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1967): 5–20, here 6
and 11. 7 Arthur M. Hocart, Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927) and David
Graeber and
Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (Chicago: Hau, 2017). For a
general vision of medieval
kingship see, among others, Henry A. Myers, Medieval
Kingship (Chicago: Nelson-Hall,
1982) and Bernhard Jussen, ed., Die Macht des Königs
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). 8 Classical works on medieval coronations include:
Cornelius A. Bouman, Sacring and Crowning
(Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1957); János M. Bak, ed.,
Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern
Monarchic Ritual(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990); Richard A. Jackson, Ordines
coronationis Franciae. 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995);
Joachim Ott, Krone und Krönung (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern,
1998); Janet L. Nelson,
Politics and Ritual in EarlyModern Europe(London: Hambledon
Press, 1986). For coronation’s
connection with political and legal theory see Fritz Kern,
Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956); Frederic W. Maitland, Roman
Canon Law (New York: Burt
Franklin, 1968); Walter Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance
and the Idea of Kingship
(London: Methuen, 1969). For a more specific analysis of
medieval European coronations
see Percy E. Schramm, A History of the English Coronation
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1937);
Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the
British Monarchy (London: Harper
Collins, 2005); H. G. Richardson, ‘The Coronation in
Medieval England: The Evolution of
the Office and the Oath’, Traditio 16 (1960): 111–202; Ernst
H. Kantorowicz, ‘Inalienability:
A Note on the Canonical Practice and the English Coronation
Oath in the Thirteenth
Century’, Speculum, 29 (1954): 488–502; Paul L. Ward, ‘The
Coronation Ceremony in
Medieval England’, Speculum 24 (1939): 160–78; Eloísa
Ramírez, ed., Ceremonial de la
Coronación, unción y exequias de los reyes de Inglaterra
(Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra,
2008); Richard A. Jackson, Vive le Roi! (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press,
1984). For analyses of the long-term continuity of the
political symbols see Ernst
H. Kantorowicz, ‘Oriens Augusti – Lever du roi’, Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 17 (1963):
117–77; Percy E. Schramm, Der König Von Frankreich. 2. Das
Wesen Der Monarchie Vom 9.
Zum 16. Jahrhundert(Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1960); Jacques Le Goff,
Eric Palazzo, Jean-Claude Bonne and Marie-Noël Collette,
eds., Le Sacre Royal a L’epoque De
Saint-Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).
Introduction 5
European kingdoms other forms of coronations were not
practised at
all, with the possible exceptions of the intriguing story of
the autoinvestiture of King Cnut (1016–35)9 and the self-coronation of
Figure 3 The Coronation of Edward III. Miniature by Loyset
Liédet,
Chroniques de Jean Froissart, c.1470–5. BNF, Ms. Fr. 2643,
fol. 12.
© Bibliothèque nationale de France.
9 Henry of Huntingdon documents that Cnut enthroned himself
at the seashore. Since he was
at the peak of his power, he ordered the incoming tide not
to presume to wet the ruler of
England. The tide, however, rose and soaked the king. Cnut
then regretted his arrogance
and humbly recognised that the power of earthly kings was
worthless and that the only one
6 Introduction
Richard I of England in 1189,10 both clearly seen as
opprobrium. From
the thirteenth century onwards, departure from established
tradition
was not really an option for the French and English, since
they could
not truly become kings in the medieval and early modern eras
until they
had been anointed and crowned by the bishops. But the
variety of
rituals of coronations and, crucially, the diversity of the
places in
which they were performed, show that the French, English and
German models should not be taken as conventional elsewhere.
Thus, this book aims to demonstrate that at some points in
the
Middle Ages, and particularly in some areas, such as Iberia
and other
Central and Northern European kingdoms, the coronation by
the
bishop was not the more common or even orthodox or
conventional
ritual of investiture. In these kingdoms, coronations by
bishops were
replaced by coronations by the kings themselves, or other
forms of
worthy of the name was He who ruled the universe.
Consequently, Cnut never again wore
the gold crown that he had given himself and put it on the
head of Christ crucified instead
(Robert Deshman, ‘Christus Rex et Magi Reges: Kingship and
Christology in Ottonian and
Anglo-Saxon Art’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976):
367–405, here 404–5). Matthew of
Paris relates the same story in his Chronica Majora when
telling of Cnut’s death. He confirms
that ‘rex quoque deinceps nunquam coronam portavit; sed
coronam suam super caput
imaginis Crucifixi componens, magnum regibus futuris
praebuit humilitatis exemplum’–
‘the king never wore the crown again; it was put on the head
of a Crucifix image, offering
a great example of humility for future kings’ (Matthew of
Paris, Mattaei Parisiensis, monachi
Sancti Albani, Chronica majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard
[London: Rerum Britannicarum
Medii Aevi Scriptores, Rolls Series, Kraus Reprint, 1964],
vol. 57: 1, p. 510). The tale seems
to have some basis in reality, since in 1023 Cnut recorded
in a charter to Christchurch,
Canterbury, that he laid ‘the royal crown from my head with
my own hands upon the altar of
Christ in Canterbury’ (Agnes J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon
Charters [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1956], 159, n. 82, 407). A posterior list
of Canterbury donors states that
Christ’s crown was kept on the head of Christ in Canterbury
(William A. Chaney, The Cult of
Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from
Paganism to Christianity [Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1970], 139). Cnut’s regret for
having put the crown on his
own head sends the message that self-coronation was not
approved of in England at the time
Henry of Huntingdon and Matthew of Paris wrote their
chronicles – the mid-twelfth to midthirteenth centuries. 10 The chronicler
Roger of Howden records that Richard I’s ceremony of investiture,
performed on 13 September 1189, consisted of the usual
anointing by Baldwin,
Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet, at the moment of coronation,
Richard himself picked
up the crown and handed it to the archbishop, instead of the
bishop taking it from the
altar. However, the bishop actually placed the crown on the
king’s head, with the
assistance of two nobles: ‘Deinde ipse [the king] cepit
coronam de altari, et tradidit
eam archiepiscopo, et erchiepiscopus posuit eam super caput
illius, quam duo comites
sustinebant propter ponderositatem ipsius’ (Roger of Howden,
Chronica. Magistri Rogeri
de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs. 4 vols. [Oxford: Macmillan,
1870], 3:11). In later
coronations, the archbishop would take the crown from the
altar in order to place it on the
king’s head. Yet it is not clear if Richard I finally
crowned himself or if he just took the
crown from the altar (as the chronicler says) before the
bishop put the crown on his head.
In any case, whether or not this was an innovation, it was a
real gesture of self-affirmation:
John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1999), 107.
Introduction 7
investiture, more than we tend to think. Perhaps the time
has come to
revise a paradigm so deeply established, not only in the
popular imagination that sees Napoleon’s self-coronation as the paradigm of
originality, unconventionality and transgression, but also in scholarship.
More specifically, these supposed conventional forms of
coronation
were not practised in Denmark and Norway until the second
half of the
twelfth century, in Bohemia until the thirteenth century or
in Poland and
Scotland until the fourteenth century, and they were only
occasionally
practised in other European kingdoms, especially in Wales
and Ireland.
Iberian rulers temporarily adopted unction and coronation or
occasionally abandoned them. Unction and coronation were introduced, sought
out and petitioned for by kings across the Latin West
without a particular
chronological or special regularity and uniformity.11 The
general perspective provides one of the key data for this project.
Consequently, we should clarify the difference between the
notions of
‘coronation’ and ‘self-coronation’, and examine the
historical and symbolic
implications of the latter term. While the French, English
and imperial
coronations by the bishops and the Pope have been largely
examined,
expanding this particular model to all the Western kingdoms,
the allegedly
unconventional strategy of self-coronations deserves more
attention. Some
primary sources speak clearly of the essential difference
between coronations and self-coronations, beginning with Charlemagne’s initial
reluctance
to be crowned by the Pope. According to Einhard, if the
emperor ‘had
known beforehand the [P]ope’s plan, he would never have
entered the
church [to be crowned by the Pope]’.
12 The Franks believed Charlemagne
owed his title of emperor not to papal coronation but to an
acknowledgement of his power by the people he ruled.13
11 For detailed evidence on the European kingdoms’ different
rhythms of the adoption of
the installation ceremonies see Matthias Becher, ed., Die
mittelalterliche Thronfolge im
europäischen Vergleich (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2017).
For Scandinavian kingdoms see
Philip Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden,
1130–1290 (Leiden: Brill, 2007),
388–400; Elisabeth Vestergaard, ‘A Note on Viking Age
Inaugurations’, in Coronations:
Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak
(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 119–24; Erich Hoffmann,
‘Coronations and Coronation
Ordines in Medieval Scandinavia’, in Coronations: Medieval
and Early Modern
Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990),
125–51. For East-Central European kingdoms see Aleksander
Gieysztor, ‘Gesture in the
Coronation Ceremonies of Medieval Poland’, in Coronations:
Medieval and Early Modern
Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990),
152–64; Paul W. Knoll, The Rise of the Polish Monarchy
(Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1972), 27, 38–40, 65–6. 12 Einhard, Vita Caroli
Magni, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger (Hannoverae: Impensis Bibliopolii
Hahniani, 1965), 32 (chapter 28). 13 Percy E. Schramm,
Kaiser, Könige und Päpste. 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1968),
1:215–63, and Janet L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in The
Cambridge History of
8 Introduction
Further evidence of the difference between coronations and
selfcoronations, and their respective symbolic implications, comes from the
chronicler William of Malmesbury, who documents that on
29 January 1121 Henry of England married Adeliza of Louvain
at
Windsor. The next day, as Ralph d’Escures, Archbishop of
Canterbury,
was presiding over Adeliza’s coronation, he
noticed that the king was seated on his throne wearing the
crown. Furious that
another man had anticipated a duty he should have carried
out himself, he went
up to the king, just as he was, in his holy pallium. The
king rose, out of respect for
him. Ralph said: ‘Who crowned you?’ The king excused
himself, saying he did not
know. ‘You have been crowned unlawfully,’ Ralph said.
‘Either you must take off
your crown, or I will not celebrate [M]ass.’‘No, lord
father,’ answered the king,
‘correct the error, and do what should be done.’ Ralph
therefore put out his hands
to take off the crown [‘Illo ergo manus ad auferendum
diadema compnente’], and the
king began to untie the fastening at his chin.14
Malmesbury views Ralph’s angry action as a result of the
archbishop’s
conviction that ‘when something was done that affected the
rights of his
church, he would resent it and seek a sharp revenge.’
15 Kings were not
expected to put on their crowns habitually or casually. This
is what
Archbishop Gervais wanted to emphasise when he crowned
Philip I of
France in 1059: ‘Taking the staff of Saint-Remi, he
explained quietly and
peacefully how the election and consecration of the king
pertained especially to him[self] as successor to the holy Remigius, who had
baptized
and consecrated Clovis.’
16
A fourth testimony comes from the nineteenth century, when
Henry de
Saint-Simon argued for the hegemony of his own class of
nobles, which he
identified as possessing the same dignity as the old Peers
of France. Thus,
he stated, without their agreement, it was impossible for
the king to be
crowned:
Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. James H.
Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 211–51, here 231. 14 William de
Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: The History of the English Bishops, 1:
Text and Translation, ed. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M.
Thomson. 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 2009), chapter 1, 71, 1–4 (here pp.
210–13). The story is also
told by Eadmer of Canterbury; see Historia novorum in
Anglia, ed. Martin Rule (London:
Rolls Series, 1884), 292–4. See Robert Bartlett, England
under the Norman and Angevin
Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 127. The story
is also told in Eadmer,
Historia novorum, 4:292; Geoffrey Koziol, ‘England, France
and the Problem of Sacrality
in Twelfth-Century Ritual’, in Cultures of Power: Lordship,
Status and Power in TwelfthCentury Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995), 124–48, here 138. 15 Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum,
211. 16 See Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power,
Lordship, and the Origins of
European Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 158, who takes
it from Jackson, Ordines coronationis Franciae, 1:217–32.
Introduction 9
The king cannot bear the great weight of the crown except
with the aid of those
who have placed it upon his head and who support it there.
That is to say that the
great affairs of the kingdom ought to be equally shared with
them in writing, in
counsel, in power because they equally support the Crown;
that without them
there is no important sanction, no law, no new structure;
that they are those who
come closest to approaching and supporting the Crown and are
even the only who may
place their hand upon it, that is to say, who may join
together with the king, establish
laws with the king, coexecute the most important things with
him, constitute,
colegislate, and validate, authorize by the power, by virtue
of the whole nation
residing in them, all that it pleases the king to do with
their concurrence.17
From these accounts, it would appear that the practice of
self-coronation
was viewed as a transgression of the norm, leading to a
generalised idea that
might have actually artificially projected Napoleon’s legendary
selfcoronation in 1804 back to those performed during the Middle Ages.
Yet, as I try to show in this book, the assumption of
self-coronations as
a transgressive ritual is valid only for French, English and
German kingdoms, where the ceremonial norm of the king being crowned by the
bishop
was firmly established, particularly in France, where it
became a symbol
‘for the principle that political authority was sacrosanct’.
18 But this was not
the case for other kingdoms of medieval Europe, which
witnessed very
different ritual formulas of accession, self-coronations
among them. Here
also appears the anachronism of projecting our modern ideas
about ‘secularisation’ back to the Middle Ages which, once again, leads to
multiple
misunderstandings.
Historians do not use the word ‘coronation’ to describe
accession
rituals in medieval Europe because they consider it
misleading. Apart
from the fact that more occurs in this ceremony than the
specific gesture
of the coronation by the bishop, the reduction of the royal
accession to the
‘coronation’ would exclude other ceremonial forms such as
selfcoronations – which have not necessarily been conceived as ‘transgressive
rituals’.
19 I think the modern word ‘coronation’ can be obstructive
because it stresses one particular act. This complicates our
approach to
coronations in non-inaugural circumstances. For instance,
the Germans
felt the need to invent the term Festkrönung to designate
events medieval
17 Saint-Simon, ‘Mémoire succincte sur les formalités
desquelles nécessairement la renonciation du Roy d’Espagne’, in Escrits inédits
de Saint Simon, ed. Prosper Faugère. 6 vols.
(Paris: Hachette, 1880), 2:1, 179–408, here 212–13 (emphasis
added). 18 Koziol, ‘England, France and the Problem of Sacrality’, 148. 19
Johanna Dale has examined medieval chronicles to see how inaugurations were
described
and, although chroniclers occasionally do use the word
‘coronation’ or linked words (i.e.
‘crowning’), they more often prefer other terms, particularly
those linked to anointing or
consecration: see Johanna Dale, Inauguration and Liturgical
Kingship in the Long Twentieth
Century: Male and Female Accession Rituals in France,
England and the Empire (Suffolk:
Boydell & Brewer, 2019), chapter 3.
10 Introduction
people simply called ‘coronations’. Other historians have
highlighted the
double meaning of the concept of ‘accession’: ‘The Latin
word “accessio”
can be translated into English both as “accession” (i.e.
enthronement or
the adoption of royal status) and as “access” (i.e. the
right of non-royal
persons to approach or petition the person seated on the
royal throne).’
20
In any case, no one can deny that the specific gesture of
‘putting the
crown on the king’s head’ has a special relevance relating
to the other
ceremonies of the investiture, because of its intrinsic
symbolic meaning
and ritual dramatisation. Then, the decision of who places
the crown on
the king’s head in the ceremony of investiture is not a
trivial choice, since
the formula of royal investiture as declared in the first
imperial ceremonials clearly states that ‘the Pontiff [or bishop] must stay at
the altar and
put the diadem on the emperor’s [or king’s] head.’
21 In opposition to
what is usually believed, there are multiple forms of transferring
the
office of the kingdom to an individual apart from
ecclesiastical
mediation.22 Björn Weiler has analysed the theme of the rex
renitens, in
which ‘reluctant kingship was not merely confined to being
hesitant
before assuming office; it could also, and just as
frequently, include an
unwillingness to accept the trappings of office, that is the
title, insignia,
or ceremonial of kingship’, as happened with Saint Ladislaus
of
Hungary, Henry I of France and Godfrey I of Jerusalem.23
Jacek
Banaszkiewicz gives details of Conrad II of Germany’s
peculiar investiture – or its propagandistic narrative – in which four
petitioners with
a separate claim and an individual complainant approach the
king.
Conrad had to attend to these four claimants – a peasant, an
orphan,
a widow and a vagabond – before being anointed.24 Philip
Lane details
some of the ‘rituals of ruling’ in medieval Scandinavia, in
which ‘the
20 Nicholas Vincent, ‘Royal Sacrality in England,
1154–1272’, in El acceso al trono.
Concepción y ritualización (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra,
2017), 167–90, here 168. 21 Reinhard Elze, Ordines coronationis imperialis
(Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung,
1960), 18 (Pontifical of Mainz, in which is included the
Ordo Coronationis of Ottonian
kings). 22 A good number of them are gathered in Björn
Weiler, ‘Crown-Giving and King-Making
in the West ca. 1000–ca. 1250’, Viator 41(1) (2010): 57–88.
23 Björn Weiler, ‘The Rex Renitens and the Medieval Idea of Kingship, ca.
900–ca. 1250’,
Viator 31 (2000): 1–42, here 7. On a related approach for
ecclesiastical offices see
Timothy Reuter, ‘Pastorale Pedum ante Pedes Apostolici
Posuit: Dis- and Reinvestiture in
the Era of the Investiture Context’, in Belief and Culture
in the Middle Ages: Studies
Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 197–210. 24 Jacek Banaszkiewicz, ‘Conrad II’s “Theatrumrituale”:
Wipo on the Earliest Deeds of the
Salian Ruler’, in Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle
Ages: A Cultural History. Essays in
Honour of Paul W. Knoll, ed. Nancy van Deusen and Piotr
Górecki (London: Tauris
Academic Studies, 2009), 50–63, and Ludger Körntgen,
Königsherrschaft und Gottes
Gnade. Zu Kontext und Funktion sakraler Vorstellungen in
Historiographie und
Bildzeugnissen der ottonisch-frühsalischen Zeit (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2001), 136–47.
Introduction 11
crown was normally placed by nobles’ under the archbishop’s
supervision; in others, ‘German emperors conferred the crowns on Danish
princes or kings in return for an act of submission.’
25 Dusan Zupka
offers a variety of rituals of accession enacted by Central
European
rulers in Germany, Bohemia and Hungary. He describes several
forms
of these ceremonies, whose variation depended on specific
occasions
and circumstances. The sources do not always allow us to
identify
clearly demarcated boundaries among them: Erstkrönung,
Festkrönung,
Mitkrönung, Beikrönung, Unter-Krone-gehen and Kronentragen,
among
others.26
Another variation of the alleged conventional ritual (the
bishop crowning the king) is the practice of self-coronations. When a king
decides to
crown himself, this gesture not only has symbolic
implications which
affect the content of the ceremony, but it also reshapes the
entire ritual
and subverts participants’ expectations. So the self-crowned
kings analysed in this book, such as Alfonso IV of Aragon (1328), Alfonso XI of
Castile (1332), Peter IV of Aragon (1336), Charles III of
Navarra (1390),
Martin I of Aragon (1399) and Ferdinand I of Aragon (1414),
were using
their agency to emphasise their authority as well as their
autonomy in
temporal matters over the sacred hierarchy.27 Certainly,
there can be
many types of self-coronation, as many as there can be
self-investitures.
In the first place, the self-coronation could occur in the
context of the
royal consecration Mass, which would therefore be a properly
sacred
context. That was the case with the fourteenth-century
Iberian kings,
whose self-coronations preserved all the ceremonies
established by the
rituals, except at the solemn moment of the actual crowning,
when the
kings placed the crown on their heads themselves. In the
second instance,
25 Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden, 389, with
other examples in 388–400. 26 Dusan Zupka, Ritual and Symbolic Communication in
Medieval Hungary under the Árpád
Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 38. 27 Perhaps Henry I the
Fowler, king of East Francia (919–36) and founder of the Ottonian
Dynasty should be added to this list. It seems that
Archbishop Heriger of Mains offered to
anoint him according to the usual ceremony, but he refused
because he wished to be king
not by the church’s authority but by the people’s acclaim.
Nevertheless, scholars agree
that the evidence is insufficient to assert this: Weiler, ‘Rex
Renitens and the Medieval Idea
of Kingship’,5–6; Johannes Fried, ‘Die Königserhebung
Heinrichs I. Erinnerung.
Mündlichkeit und Traditionsbildung im 10. Jahrhundert’, in
Mittelalterforschung nach
der Wende 1989, ed. Michael Borgolte (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1995), 267–318;
Ernst Karpf, ‘Königserhebung ohne Salbung. Zur politischen
Bedeutung von
Heinrichs. I. Ungewöhnlichern Verzicht in Fritzlar (919)’,
Hessisches Jahrbuch für
Landesgeschichte 34 (1984): 1–24; Walter Schlesinger, ‘Die
Königserhebung Heinrichs
I. zu Fritzlar im Jahre 919’, in Fritzlar im Mittelalter.
Festschrift zur 1250-Jahrfeier(Fritzlar:
Magistrat der Stadt Fritzlar, 1974), 121–43, here 137–8;
Schramm, ‘Vom Tode Karls
des Grossen (814) bis zum Anfang des 10. Jahrhunderts’, in
Kaiser, Könige und Päpste,
2:303–4. See the previous notes on the rex renitens.
12 Introduction
self-coronation may be orchestrated directly by the king
crowning his heir
without resorting to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as
happened in some
Byzantine and Carolingian investitures. Finally, there may
be a selfcoronation (or, more properly, a ceremony of wearing the crown)
without
the presence of a sacred minister or any ceremony and
therefore, strictly
speaking, without consecration, as appears to have been the
case with
Frederick II in Jerusalem.
Previous scholarship has rarely analysed self-coronations.
Carlrichard
Brühl uses the concept of self-coronation in 1984, in an
article which
referred to the practice of self-coronation by kings and
emperors from the
thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.28 Hans E. Mayer
documents the
(supposed) self-coronation of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen
in
Jerusalem in 1229.29 Teófilo F. Ruiz discusses this in his
article on the
self-coronation of Alfonso XI of Castile in 1332, connecting
it with the
concept of (de)sacralisation.30 Marta Serrano-Coll and I use
the concept
in our historical and iconographic analysis of Peter IV of
Aragon’s selfcoronation in 1336.31 Finally, Christopher Clark and Philippe Buc
have
published valuable articles on the self-coronation of
Frederick I of Prussia
(1701).32
In addition to the analysis of these ceremonies of
self-coronation, this
book also focuses on what the Byzantinist André Grabar calls
‘celestial
coronation’ or ‘symbolic coronation’ (couronemment
symbolique) to refer
to the imaginative iconographic dimension of the ritual of
self-coronation
developed in the East by ancient and medieval empires such
as Persia and
Byzantium.33 Rather than the emperor being crowned by the
priest, those
28 Carlrichard Brühl, ‘Les auto-couronnements d’empereurs et
de rois (XII–XIXe siècles)’,
Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres 128(1) (1984):
102–18, and Carlrichard Brühl, ‘Kronen- und Krönungsbrauch
im frühen und höhen
Mittelalter’, Historische Zeitschrift 234 (1982): 1–31. See
also the section ‘Selbstkrönung’,
in Ott, Krone und Krönung, 127–8. 29 Hans E. Mayer, ‘Das
Pontifikale von Tyrus und die Krönung der lateinischen Könige
von Jerusalem’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 21 (1967): 141–232. 30
Teófilo F. Ruiz, ‘Une royauté sans sacre: la monarchie castillane du Bas Moyen
Age’,
Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilizations 39 (1984):
429–53. 31 Jaume Aurell and Marta Serrano-Coll, ‘The Self-Coronation of Peter
the Ceremonious
(1336)’, Speculum 89 (2014): 66–95. 32 Christopher Clark,
‘When Culture Meets Power: The Prussian Coronation of 1701’, in
Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth
Century, ed. Hamish M. Scott and
Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
15–35; Philippe Buc,
‘1701 in Medieval Perspective: Monarchical Rituals between
the Middle Ages and
Modernity’, Majestas 10 (2002): 91–124. 33 André Grabar,
L’Empereur dans l’Art Byzantin (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1936), 112–22.
See also Andrea Torno Ginnasi, L’incoronazione celeste nel
mondo bizantino (Oxford:
Archaeopress, 2014). A rich and interdisciplinary approach
on the relationship between
images and ritual is presented in Bild und Ritual, ed. Claus
Ambos, Petra Rösch and
Stefan Weinfurter (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010).
Introduction 13
societies developed the iconography of the divinity Ahura
Mazda (in
Persia) or Christ himself (in Byzantium) crowning the ruler.
This peculiar
iconography conveys the idea of the divinity of the
sovereign, who need
not be crowned by the priest-mediator because he already has
direct
access to God. Yet paradoxically, and contrasting with these
symbolic
self-coronations, we have historical evidence that the
ritual of coronation
was performed by the priest or the patriarch in most cases,
in both Persia
and Byzantium.
***
I have used three different primary sources for analysing
the ritual of selfcoronation: historiographical, liturgical and iconographic
imprints.
First, and guided by my own work on medieval historiography
in the
book Authoring the Past, I have employed the descriptions
written by
witnesses of those coronations as well as the historical
narratives produced by chroniclers at the time or shortly after the event. The
use of
narrative texts in the analysis of the ritual connects with
debates around
the correct understanding of these sources to enter the
substance of the
rituals. Here the core of the issue is divided into two main
problems: first,
on the veracity of the sources and, second, on the danger of
projecting
modern interpretive categories back to the medieval spirit
of these
sources. In his study on the rex renitens, Weiler gives one
of the keys for
approaching the first of these dilemmas:
Many of our sources contain anecdotes, legends, and episodes
which bear little or
no resemblance to what we know to have happened. At the same
time, their veracity
is of only marginal concern here. Although an awareness of
the wider background
will be useful, it is not our primary aim to establish
whether a king had really been
reluctant, but rather why a particular author may have
described him as such.34
To deal with medieval self-coronations is thus not only to
try to establish what really happened, especially when we can base our
historical
knowledge of the event on a variety of sources – as in the
case of Peter
the Ceremonious’ self-coronation, for which we have the
narrative
account, the liturgical ordo and some iconographic
representations. It is
also, and crucially, to learn how a particular ritual of
self-coronation was
represented and interpreted by people at the time or by the
next generations of chroniclers.
As for the second issue, the projection of modern
interpretive categories,
Buc has alerted historians to the danger of constructing
their interpretations of medieval rituals on modern social scientific models
rather than on
medieval hermeneutics and theological models. This was
especially
34 Weiler, ‘Rex Renitens and Medieval Ideas of Kingship’, 3.
14 Introduction
notable in interwar Germany, where Percy E. Schramm
developed his
work. In his influential Dangers of Ritual, Buc opens a
lively debate
between history and anthropology of the rituals to medieval
studies,
which I analyse in Chapter 1.
35 Buc’s perspectives are particularly useful
for my own theories on the practice of self-coronations
since this book is
in part an inductive demonstration that ‘the ceremonies that
the early
modernist takes for granted were not central to medieval
kingship at all
times and in all places.’
36 As I argue, it is wrong to take the coronation
enacted by the bishop as a model for ceremonies of royal
accession in the
Middle Ages, as a plurality of ceremonies, self-coronations
among them,
existed.
One of Buc’s main conclusions is that ‘medieval sources
seldom present a ceremony as it actually happened.’
37 Yet Buc does not promote
scepticism towards these sources because, though subjective,
they constitute our only access to medieval rituals. The same heuristic
scepticism
could be actually applied to all narratives and
historiographical texts used
as sources of all aspects of the past.38 Yet the very
existence of narratives
implies the explicit recognition of the ritual, as well as
its relevance
beyond its actual enactment. More properly, these narrations
of the
rites by the medieval chroniclers ‘meant not so much to
report a ritual
as to influence how a ritual would come to be interpreted.
... It was not
some magical power of ritual but rather a ritual’s reception
that shaped
society and politics’.
39
Buc concludes that the process of interpreting ritual began
at the time
of performance and continued thereafter.40 To be sure, the
record of
a ritual constitutes an event in itself: although of a
narrative nature, it
35 Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual(Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–28.
See also David A. Warner, ‘Ritual and Memory in the Ottonian
Reich: The Ceremony of
Adventus’, Speculum 76 (2001): 255–83; Timothy Reuter,
‘Pre-Gregorian Mentalities’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994): 465–74; Mayke
de Jong, ‘Power and Humility in
Carolingian Society: The Public Penance of Louis the Pious’,
Early Medieval Europe 1
(1992): 29–52; Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State:
Authority and Atonement in the Age of
Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009). A good example
of how medievalists have applied these ideas is presented in
the detailed analysis of one ‘case
study’; see Simon MacLean, ‘Ritual, Misunderstanding, and
the Contest for Meaning:
Representations of the Disrupted Royal Assembly at Frankfurt
(873)’, in Representations of
Power in Medieval Germany, 800–1500, ed. Simon MacLean and
Björn Weiler (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2006), 97–120. 36 Buc, ‘1701 in Medieval
Perspective’, 94. 37 Buc, ‘1701 in Medieval Perspective’, 110. 38 Jaume Aurell,
Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 155–76. 39
Buc, ‘1701 in Medieval Perspective’, 110. 40 Philippe Buc, ‘Ritual and
Interpretation: The Early Medieval Case’, Early Medieval
Europe 9 (2000): 1–28, here 4.
Introduction 15
generates a new historical reality, as we consider its
effects on its audience.
The act of remembering ‘changed the very nature of what
would be
preserved’.
41 As David A. Warner argues:
In any case, whether the ritual in question actually
occurred or not, the ability to
impose a particular reading on it implied a kind of power or
authority, which, in
the case of literary account, had the potential to increase
as the event itself receded
into the past and competing, nonliterary accounts faded.42
Compared to legal briefs, notarial documentation and
chancellery
records, narrative sources are probably less reliable from a
strict heuristic
point of view. But they convey more accurately the richness
of cultural
manifestations, and the historian should not discard them
because of their
heuristic ambiguity or epistemic complexity. Actually, in
some of the selfcoronations analysed in this book, particularly those of
Frederick II of
Germany and Peter IV of Aragon, we explore how the informant
has
manipulated the historical account to articulate an approach
to reality in
order to achieve certain political aims. Thus, the story
narrated by the
chronicler should be contrasted with other documents. This
comparative
analysis of sources, though useful, nonetheless cannot
provide a detailed
and definitive reconstruction of the facts. Since the
question of whether
the ritual narrated ‘really happened’ and ‘in what form’ is
certainly
relevant but unanswerable in the end, it is perhaps more
useful to analyse
what criteria might have led a chronicler to include an
account of a ritual
in his historical narrative, how these criteria affected the
content of his
work and how the narration was shaped and the event
remembered.43
In addition to narrative accounts, I have also used sources
of a liturgical
nature: missals, pontificals and ordines and, for the
fourteenth century
onwards, the books of ceremonies or liturgical
collections.44 Since verbal
and gestural ritual are too easily corrupted by the passage
of time, lapses
of memory and deliberate falsifications, ecclesiastics
firstly and rulers
later commissioned liturgical ceremonials, before or after
the events, in
order to establish and validate the ritual performed in the
ceremonies of
41 Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and
Oblivion at the End of the First
Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994), 177. On the literary
implications of the remembering see Brian Stock, The
Implications of Literacy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15–25. 42
Warner, ‘Ritual and Memory in the Ottonian Reich’, 256. 43 David A. Warner,
‘Thietmar of Merseburg on Rituals of Kingship’, Viator 26 (1995):
53–76, here 75. 44 For an interesting comment on the nature
of liturgical text as sources see Johanna Dale,
‘Inauguration and Political Liturgy in the Hohenstaufen
Empire, 1138–1215’, German
History 2 (2016): 191–213. See also Johanna Dale, ‘Royal
Inauguration and the
Liturgical Calendar in England, France and the Empire,
c.1050–c.1250’, AngloNorman Studies 37 (2015): 83–98.
16 Introduction
investiture. Some historians have turned to royal
consecration ordines for
insights about medieval kingship.45 These ordines were subsequent
to
royal consecrations since they first emerged in Carolingian
Europe.
Liturgical texts prescribe the actions and words during a
rite. The theological discipline of the liturgy, mostly applied to medieval and
early
modern religious ceremonies, has been of great value for the
interpretation of this kind of resource: any ceremony connected with the sacred
represents the liturgification of a ritual.46 Coronation
orders, liturgical
plays and the ceremonial scripts fill the signs of rulership
with life through
the codification of the most auspicious and politically
important ceremonies and spectacles of the Middle Ages.47 Though they are not
always
accurate descriptions of what really happened in a ritual,
ordines provide
us with primary evidence for the motives, perceptions and
beliefs of their
promoters and compilers. The ceremonial commissioned by
Peter the
Ceremonious to consolidate the specific gesture of
self-coronations (see
Chapter 10) has been particularly useful in my research on
this ritual.
Johanna Dale is right when she states that ‘the narrative
and liturgical
testimonies are rarely complementary’,
48 so that Peter’s propagandistic
programme – gathering narrative, liturgical and iconographic
evidence –
has provided us with an extraordinary ensemble of sources
and inspired
historical interpretations.
In my analysis of the ceremonies of the investiture through
liturgical
sources I have also used as a model some works published by
medievalists
interested in the ritual dimension of the coronations.49
Ritual studies has
45 Elze, Ordines coronationis, chapter xii (with an
exhaustive bibliographical annotation);
Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen âge
(Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum
Lovaniense, 1931–61) and Andrieu, ‘Die Ordines der
mittelalterlichen Kaiserkrönung.
Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kaisertums’, Archiv für
Urkundenforschung 11 (1930):
285–390; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in
Liturgical Acclamations and
Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1946); Walter Ullmann,
Liber Regie Capelle(London: Henry Bradshaw, 1961) and ‘Der
Souveränitätsgedanke in den
mittelalterlichen Krönungsordines’, in Festschrift Percy
Ernst Schramm, ed. Peter Classen and
Peter Scheibert. 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1964),
1:72–89; Otto Treitinger, Die
oströmische Kaiser- und Reichsidee nach ihrer Gestaltung im
höfischen Zeremoniell (Darmstadt:
Herman Gentner, 1956); Richardson, ‘The Coronation in
Medieval England’, 111–82. 46 Eric Palazzo, Liturgie et société au Moyen Âge
(Paris: Aubier, 2000); Matthew
Cheung Salisbury, ‘Establishing a Liturgical Text: Text for
Performance, Performance
As Text’, in Late Medieval Liturgies Enacted, ed. Sally
Harper, P. S. Barnwell and
Magnus Williamson (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 6. 47
János M. Bak, ‘Medieval Symbology of the State: Percy E. Schramm’s
Contribution’,
Viator 4 (1973): 33–63, here 41. 48 Dale, ‘Inauguration and
Political Liturgy’, 193. 49 Some excellent surveys on the different scholarship
approaches to medieval rituals appear
in Giovanni Isabella, ‘Rituali altomedievali: le ragioni di
un dibattito’, Storica 41–2
(2008): 165–91; Christina Pössel, ‘The Magic of Early
Medieval Ritual’, Early
Medieval Europe 17 (2009): 111–25; Geoffrey Koziol, ‘The
Dangers of Polemic: Is
Introduction 17
shifted between a comparative-presentist tendency,
privileging the analysis
of contemporary rituals in some traditional societies
preserved in different
places of Africa, America, Australia and Asia, and the very
influential
‘myth-ritual school’ of Cambridge in the 1920s–1930s,
entirely based on
ancient studies. Therefore, medieval and early modern
rituals did not fit
well between these two poles, so the scholars of ritual
studies have not
usually paid attention to those intermediary periods.
Nevertheless, three
very qualified exceptions serve as forerunners of current
medieval ritual
studies: Marc Bloch’s Les rois thaumaturges (1924), Ernst
Kantorowicz’s
Ladues Regiae (1949) and Percy E. Schramm’s Kaiser, Könige
und Päpste
(1968). In the 1980s, British medievalists, notably Janet L.
Nelson, connected medieval studies on investitures with the best of the
Cambridge
ancient studies developed in the 1920s and 1930s. At that
time, certain
French medievalists of the mentalités, notably Jacques Le
Goff and afterwards Jean-Claude Schmitt, Eric Palazzo and Philippe Buc, were
inspired
by classic historians of the first generation of the Annales
like Marc Bloch,
and they found their own path to medieval ritual and
liturgy. In addition,
Central European and American medievalists, including Gerd
Althoff,
Geoffrey Koziol, János Bak, Teófilo Ruiz and Patrick Geary,
also found
different ways to approach the rituals of accession, and
engaged themselves in an interesting debate on the nature of medieval rituals
and the
limitations of the negotiation with anthropological ritual
studies and
social sciences-oriented approaches.50 Finally, a new
generation of
scholars, such as Björn Weiler, Johanna Dale, Simon John,
Nicholas
Vincent, Christina Pössel and Simon MacLean, most of them
trained in
the British historiographical tradition pioneered by Timothy
Reuter and
Janet Nelson, have approached medieval rituals of accession
blending
narrative and liturgical sources, have provided a convincing
analytical
prospection, and have taken the best of the recent debate on
medieval
rituals just mentioned. Since self-coronations occurred
mostly in medieval Iberia, I have also based my research on the work of
scholars such as
Bonifacio Palacios, José Manuel Nieto Soria and Peter
Linehan, who
have analysed Iberian royal coronations in depth.51
Ritual Still an Interesting Topic of Historical Study?’,
Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002):
367–88; Philippe Buc, ‘The Monster and the Critics: A Ritual
Replay’, Early Medieval
Europe 15 (2007): 441–52. 50 Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon
and Favor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992);
Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
2003); Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Modern Europe;
Frans Theuws and Janet
L. Nelson, eds., Rituals of Power (Leiden: Brill, 2000);
Bak, Coronations; Geary,
Phantoms of Remembrance; Ruiz, ‘Une royauté sans sacre’. 51
Bonifacio Palacios Martin, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 1204–1410
(Valencia:
Anubar, 1975); Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of
Medieval Spain (Oxford:
18 Introduction
In addition to narrative and liturgical sources and to this
rich tradition
of scholarship, I have collected numerous iconographic
representations of
self-coronations. These primarily include reliefs,
sculptures, mural pictures and coins for the chapter on the forms of mediation
in antiquity
(Chapter 2), and miniatures, pictures and mosaics from the
Middle Ages.
Some of these images reveal coronations performed
historically while
most of them show coronations without historical referentiality,
as an
event imagined by artists or promoted by their patrons.
Nevertheless,
I deploy both forms of images, the referential and the
non-referential, as
examples of ‘symbolic’ or ‘heavenly’ coronations, and they
provide us
with keys to the meaning of self-coronations as well.
Relevant literature
has been published on the historical function of miniatures
and other
medieval images, especially those promoted by or connected
with royal
power. They teach us how to locate the images in their
textual and
historical context.52 This operation of ‘putting the events
and the images
in context’ shapes my research on self-coronations since, as
Robert
Darnton argues, ‘symbols work not merely because of their
metaphorical
power but also by virtue of their position within a cultural
frame.’
53
Understanding the specific ritual of self-coronation
involves comprehending both its metaphorical dimension (the general meaning
encoded
in this ceremony and its location in the entire system of
the nature of the
ritual to which it belongs) and the particular context in
which this dimension is enacted. Thus, we comprehend both its common system of
meaning and how this meaning is socially shared.
Nevertheless, the operation of taking the iconographic
sources for
historical inquiry should take into account the function of
the audience
of these images. Most of the images I have used as
historical evidence –
particularly those miniatures I discuss in the chapters
devoted to Iberian
monarchies – were limited to an aristocratic and clerical
audience. They
were usually placed in ceremonial books, which were read by
a small
audience (see Figure 4).
Clarendon, 1993); José Manuel Nieto Soria, ‘Dialécticas
monocráticas. El acceso al
trono y la legitimidad de origen’, in El acceso al trono.
Concepción y ritualización
(Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2017), 11–36. 52 Solid
literature on art history helps us understand the image in a particular
context: Carra
F. O’Meara, Monarchy and Consent (London: Harvey Miller,
2001); Anne D. Hedeman,
The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de
France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991); Robert A. Maxwell,
ed., Representing History,
900–1300 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2010); Henry MayrHasting, Ottonian Book Illumination (London: Harvey
Miller, 1991). 53 Robert Darnton, ‘The Symbolic Element in History’, Journal of
Modern History 58
(1986): 218–34, here 227.
Introduction 19
Figure 4 One of the pages of the Ceremonial de consagración
y coronación
de los reyes de Aragón. Annex to the Ordinacions de Cort,
second half of the
fourteenth century. Biblioteca de la Fundación Lázaro
Galdiano, reg.
14425, fol. 19 r. © Museo Lázaro Galdiano. Madrid.
20 Introduction
The subject and the composition of the image inserted in one
of the
pages of Peter the Ceremonious’ ceremonial, in which the
king crowns
his wife (see Figures 27 and 30), is strikingly similar to
David’s drawing
of Napoleon’s self-coronation (see Figure 2). Yet the former
was
designed for contemplation by a small ecclesiastical and
noble elite,
and probably just for practical purposes, while the latter
was intended
to be seen by multiple visitors to the ruler’s palace.
Actually, the later
story of both images validates their designers’ original
purpose. Peter’s
miniature was produced for a reduced contemporary audience
and for
a few scholars who have been fortunate enough to see the
manuscript,
which lies in a corner of the Lázaro Galdiano Library in
Madrid. By
contrast, Napoleon’s imposing painting is visited by
hundreds of
thousands of people a year in the Louvre museum in Paris.
Paradoxically, images related to ceremonies of royal
investiture usually
develop a more elaborate symbolic language so as to
reinforce the authority of the king. As John Elliott argues:
It is as if a form of ‘Avis principle’ operates in the world
of imagery and propaganda: those who are only second try harder. Where ... the
supremacy of the king
is taken for granted, political imagery can be studiously
understated, and there is
no need to deck out the ruler with elaborate allegorical
trappings.54
This would also justify the distinction between the symbolic
and ritual
self-coronations that govern the structure of this book.
Those powerful
kings who were able to perform self-coronations such as
Frederick II of
Germany, Alfonso XI of Castile or Peter IV of Aragon did not
need to
return to the iconographic motif of Jesus Christ crowning
the king, unlike
the Byzantine emperors or Roger II of Sicily.
***
Apart from these historical sources, this project has also
been framed by
methodological choices and theoretical assumptions such as
the emphasis
on political theology, the use of long-term chronology and
cultural comparative exercise, the concept of agency, and the use of the ritual
studies
and theories.
Political theology, as first developed by the political
philosopher Carl
Schmitt in the 1920s, is based on the analysis of the
transferences between
the spiritual and the temporal, the sacred and the profane,
the political
and the religious.55 It is therefore a useful methodological
tool that
54 John H. Elliott, ‘Power and Propaganda in Spain of Philip
IV’, in Rites of Power, ed.
Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1985), 145–73, here 151. 55 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four
Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985) and Political Theology II: The Myth of
the Closure of Any Political
Introduction 21
recognises the affinity between the systematic structure of
theological and
juridical concepts and the political consequences that this
resemblance or
analogy entails. This analogy is relevant because all
significant concepts of
the theory of the modern state are secularised concepts. For
instance, the
state of exception in modern jurisprudence would be the
secularised
version of the miracle in theology just as the ‘king’s two
bodies’ would
be the secularised version of the doctrine of the two
natures of Jesus Christ
in theology. The monarchical sovereignty would be the
secular version of
the monotheistic conviction in religion just as the idea of
utopia would be
the secularised version of paradise, and the communist ideal
would be
a secular version of chiliastic eschatology.56 As Schmitt
declared in his
foundational definition of the term in 1922:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state
are secularised theological concepts not only because of their historical development
– in which they
were transferred from theology to the theory of the state,
whereby, for example,
the omnipotent God became the omnipotent law-giver – but
also because of their
systematic structure.57
Schmitt offers a methodological tool that has also been
relevant for the
examination of the development of political and religious
ideas and
cultural practices. To be sure, Schmitt conceived this
methodology for
the analysis of the early modern and modern eras rather than
the medieval. Nevertheless, some medievalists have used it, more or less
explicitly,
in their studies, and scholars of law, theology and
sociology have
expanded it to their respective disciplines. Kantorowicz is
probably the
most relevant of them, in applying it to his monograph The King’s
Two
Bodies (1957), which he subtitled A Study on Medieval
Political Theology.
58
Theology (New York: Polity Press, 2014). See also the
epigraph on ‘Theologie Politique’,
in Henri de Lubac, Théologies d’occasion (Paris: Desclée de
Brouwer, 1984), 215–54, in
which he applies this methodology to the historical
evolution of the church. On the
theoretical and practical assumptions of this concept for
historiographical purposes see
two recent collective works: Montserrat Herrero, Jaume
Aurell and Angela
C. Miceli Stout, eds., Political Theology in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2017) and Karolina Mroziewicz and
Aleksander Sroczynski, eds.,
Premodern Rulership and Contemporary Political Power: The
King’s Body Never Dies
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). 56 A survey
of the definition and theoretical and practical implications of the concept of
‘political theology’ is presented in Montserrat Herrero, The
Political Discourse of Carl
Schmitt (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), chapter 8,
‘Political Theology’, 157–77,
here 157. See also Álvaro d’Ors, ‘Teología Política: una
revisión del problema’, in Sistema
de las ciencias, IV, ed. Álvaro d’Ors (Pamplona: Eunsa,
1977), 86–135. 57 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 58 Robert E. Lerner, Ernst
Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2017), 344–57, and György Geréby, ‘Carl Schmitt and Erik
Peterson on the Problem of
Political Theology: A Footnote to Kantorowicz’, in
Monotheistic Kingship, ed. Aziz AlAzmeh and János M. Bak (Budapest: Central
European University, 2004), 31–62.
22 Introduction
Kantorowicz was aware of the dual nature of the concept,
which embodies both historical-temporal development and systematic-normative
structure. This normative structure allows the concept to be
applied to
the examination of any period, but particularly those after
the
Christianisation of the Roman Empire after the fourth
century.
Approaching medieval self-coronations under the light of
political theology allows us to discern parallels, contrasts, transferences,
transpositions,
filters and dualities between the temporal power exercised
by kings and the
spiritual authority proper to bishops. Political theology
avoids misunderstandings in the necessary dual approach – from the temporal to
the
spiritual – in royal coronations since ‘a world wholly
demystified is
a world wholly depoliticized.’
59 Philosophers of religion such as Mircea
Eliade and historians of kingship such as Arthur M. Hocart
have arrived to
the same conclusion after their ambitious comparative
approach: ‘When it
is prayed that he [the king] may defend the “fortresses of
God”, it is as... to
say whether these fortresses are material or spiritual. The
fact is, they are
both, for the material and the spiritual cannot be
separated.’
60 The question of the universality of kingship and its
eventual divinity has allowed
historians and anthropologists to approach it through
cross-cultural, multidisciplinary and cross-temporal comparisons, as visible in
the collective
volumes edited by Nicole Brisch, Rolf Gundlach and Hermann
Weber,
Franz-Reiner Erkens and Declan Quigley.61 This approach
promotes general visions and theories, so that anthropologists such as Michael
Puett
have related the conviction of the divinity of kingship with
the development
of and reaction to imperial policies.62
Kantorowicz’s article ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist
Concept and Its Late Medieval
Origins’, Harvard Historical Review 48 (1955): 65–91, is
another example of the efficacy
of political theology for interpreting medieval political
theory and practice, as
Kantorowicz opens the article by stating that the concept
‘mysteries of State’ is the result
of the infinite cross-relations between church and state (p.
31, emphasis added). 59 Clifford Geertz, ‘Centers, Kings, and Charisma:
Reflections on the Symbolics of Power’,
in Culture and Its Creators, ed. Joseph Ben-David and Terry
Nichols Clark (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977), 150–71, here 168. 60
Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1936), 160. 61 Nicole Brisch, ed., Religion and Power:
Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond
(Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago,
2008); Rolf Gundlach and
Hermann Weber, eds., Legitimation und Funktion des
Herrschers: Von ägyptischen Pharao
zum neuzeitlichen Diktator(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992);
Franz-Reiner Erkens, ed., Die
Sakralität von Herrschaft: Herrschaftslegitimierung im
Wechsel der Zeiten und Räume (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 2002); Declan Quigley, The Character of
Kingship (Oxford: Berg,
2005). 62 Michael Puett, ‘Human and Divine Kingship in Early
China: Comparative Reflections’,
in Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World
and Beyond, ed. Nicole Brisch
(Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago,
2008), 207–20.
Introduction 23
Thus, the practice of self-coronation, with all its symbolic
implications, serves as an excellent field from which to discuss the tensions
and transferences between these realms: spiritual and
temporal, religious and political, supernatural and natural, ecclesiastical and
civil
and transcendent and mundane. In addition, the use of the
political
theology allows us to evade the presentism and anachronism
that
might arise from applying contemporary concepts, such as
that of
‘political religion’, to medieval cultural phenomena.63 In the
public
sphere, a nuanced approach to the relationships between the
spiritual
and temporal spheres avoids in its turn artificial fusions
between the
religious and the political which could potentially damage
social
stability.64
My second methodological strategy assumes the long-term
approach
that compares the sixth century BC with its establishment of
the new
Persian-Achaemenid dynasty to Napoleon’s self-coronation in
NotreDame of Paris in 1804, although certainly privileging my own speciality
of medieval history, and its extensive geographical
framework from
Spain to Persia and from Sicily to Sweden. This broad
approach carries
the risk of falling into historical anachronism and
diachronism, but it
activates the aim of all historical narration, what Reinhardt
Koselleck
calls ‘the synchrony of the anachronism’: the historian uses
synchronic
and diachronic procedures simultaneously, ‘favoring
synchrony when
he describes, and diachrony when he narrates’.
65 As Alexander
Beihammer argues, ‘approaching rituals and symbolic
communication
as historical phenomena of longue durée stretching from the
early Middle
Ages to the early modern period and as phenomena shared by
different
cultural and religious spheres is no doubt a forward-looking
and futureoriented viewpoint.’
66
This tactic is not new in the scholarly approach to
ceremonies
of investiture. Traditional anthropology began working on
parallels
among the royal investiture ceremonies of kings from Africa,
Europe,
America, Asia and Oceania from different periods and ages,
namely
63 Philippe Burrin, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a
Concept’, History and Memory 9
(1997): 321–49, and Hans Maier, ‘Political Religion: A
Concept and Its Limitations’,
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (2007):
5–16. 64 Clifford Geertz, ‘Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example of
Funeral’, American
Anthropologist 59 (1957): 32–45, here 44–5. 65 Reinhardt
Koselleck, Futures Past (New York: Columbia University Press), 217. See also
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed &
Ward, 1989), 297, and Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 3 vols. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990), 3:220. 66 Alexander Beihammer, ‘Comparative Approaches to
the Ritual World on the Medieval
Mediterranean’, in Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in
Byzantium, ed.
Alexander Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou and Maria G.
Parani (Leiden: Brill, 2013),
1–36, here 7.
24 Introduction
Arthur M. Hocart,67 Meyer Fortes68 and Robert S. Ellwood.69
More
recent anthropologists such as Roy Rappaport and Catherine
Bell still
believe that there is something universal and common among,
‘say, rites
such as the Catholic Mass, the Sun Dance, the rites of
passage in the
deserts of Central Australia, Papua New Guinea curing
rituals, and
human sacrifice in Aztec Mexico’.
70 They have tried to explore ‘what
makes us identify some acts as ritual, what such a category
does for the
production and organization of knowledge about other
cultures, and how
we might assess the assumptions that create and constrain
the notion of
ritual’.
71 Francis Oakley has published a general review on the
nature of
kingship, arguing that kingship may be the most common form
of government known to humankind, beyond the formal differences among the
pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Japan, the Maya rulers of
Mesoamerica and the medieval popes and emperors of the
European
monarchies.72 All these general approaches demonstrate that
rituals have
been one of the privileged fields of anthropological
studies, beyond theoretical assumptions or methodological concerns supporting
their approach:
‘functionalism with authority, Marxism with contradiction
and change,
structuralism with binary contrast and equivalence,
phenomenology with
the construction of experience’, as Andrew Apter notes.73
Though I am aware of the limitations of the essentialist
method, I argue
that this comparative approach may be still revisited, not
only from the
geographical-synchronical terms within which it has been
traditionally
practised, but also in its chronological-anachronical
dimension – which
particularly interests me in my long-term approach to royal
selfcoronations. In this way I have tried to diminish the natural divergence
between ‘the theoretical and the observational language’, as
Wolfgang
Stegmüller puts it in his analysis of the language of theory
in the hard
67 Hocart took as a case study ceremonies performed ‘from
the Aegean to the Ganges’
(Hocart, Kingship, 98) and he enumerates twenty-five common
features of these royal
coronations. See also Reginald M. Woolley, Coronation Rites
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1915), 165–76, section ‘The Inter-relation
of the Different Rites’. 68 Meyer Fortes argues for the ‘confirmation for the
thesis in Hocart’s study, namely, that
installation ceremonies have much the same structure, use
similar procedures, and serve
broadly the same ends in all societies’ (Fortes, ‘Of
Installation Ceremonies’, 19). 69 Robert S. Ellwood,The Feast of Kingship
(Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973), 1–36. For African
ceremonies of investitures see Hilda Kuper,An African
Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1947), 72–87 and 197–225. 70 Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual
and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29. 71 Catherine Bell,
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. 72
Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
73 Andrew Apter, ‘The Embodiment of Paradox: Yoruba Kingship and Female Power’,
Cultural Anthropology 6 (1991): 212–29, here 223.
Introduction 25
sciences.74 Approaches on self-coronations actually
oscillate between the
two opposing points of view: synchronicity and
diachronicity.
Anthropologists privilege the study of culture as a system
of meanings
which encapsulates the primordial values of a specific
community. From
this point of view, coronation rituals may be read
synchronically and, as
a consequence, analysed like a text, as a coherent script or
a master
narrative that actors follow and participants believe.75
Historians, on
their part, privilege the specificity of each ritual, given
its particular
context, circumstances and the agency of its promoters. They
consequently proceed diachronically, acknowledging the manipulation,
artificiality and historicity of the ritual rather than its essentialist,
permanent
and universal nature. This approach adopts a perspective
through which
each ritual performance constitutes one link in a chain of
causes and
consequences extending through time.76
The progressive specialisation of modern historiography,
which has
privileged micro- rather than macro-historical approaches,
has alerted
us not to fall into abstract and, ultimately, imaginative
generalisations.
But recent historiographical trends argue in favour of a
more comprehensive chronological perspective, in order to establish reasonable
comparisons among agents from different places and ages, and to provide society
with historical models that may empathically connect with an
audience
beyond the academic world.77 Since my story of the
self-coronations is, in
the end, the genealogy of a ritual, it requires a
large-scale temporal and
comparative approach rather than a microscopic historical
analysis. This
larger-time-scale approach also facilitates a more
multilayered contextualisation of the ritual of self-coronation, within the
general system of
coronations. Thus, I have moved from the necessary detailed
historical
account of the singular events in each chapter to the
comparative and
comprehensive anthropological approach in the conclusions.
To take advantage of what each discipline has to offer, I
have tried, in
this book, to analyse like a historian and to interpret like
an
anthropologist.78 I have followed Marshall Sahlins’ attempt
to blend the
74 Wolfgang Stegmüller, The Structure and Dynamic of
Theories(New York: Springer, 1976), 24. 75 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Introduction’,
Representations 59 (1997): 1–13, here 8–9;
Lisa Wedeen, ‘Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for
Political Science’, American
Political Science Review 96 (2002): 713–28, here 716; Clark,
‘When Culture Meets
Power’, 15–16. 76 William H. Sewell Jr, ‘Geertz, Cultural
Systems, and History: From Synchrony to
Transformation’, Representations 59 (1997): 35–55, here 40.
77 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge
University
Press, 2014). 78 See an interesting example of this double
approach in Clark, ‘When Culture Meets
Power’.
26 Introduction
methods of history and anthropology rather than simply
searching for
more mutual collaboration between the disciplines: ‘The
problem now is
to explode the concept of history by the anthropological
experience of
culture so that the historical experience will surely
explode the anthropological concept of culture – structure included.’
79 Royal rituals share
‘universal characteristics of the symbolic construction of
authority and
also gain specific meaning through their adoption and
adaptation of
symbolic forms which organized non-royal life’.
80 Structure and symbol,
particularism and generalisation, system and individual, and
analysis and
interpretation naturally converge in my medieval
self-coronation
approach since, as Victor Turner argues, ‘we see the meaning
of
a symbol as deriving from its relation to other symbols in a
specific cluster
or gestalt of symbols whose elements acquire much of their
significance
from their position in its structure.’
81 Thus, one self-coronation must be
connected, in comparative terms, not only with its
particular historical
context and with the historical reality of other
self-coronations performed
in medieval Europe, but also with the whole system of that
ritual perceived as a ceremony of investiture. In this direction, I question,
in this
book, up to what extent self-coronations are a simple
‘variety’ of the ritual
of investiture, or rather are an ‘anomaly’ or ‘failure’ of
the form, or even
another kind of ritual.
Most of these questions require deep reflection on the
historical context
in which self-coronations were enacted. That is why I open
each chapter
with the temporal, geographical, political, social and
cultural circumstances of each self-coronation analysed. The exercise of
contextualising
each ritual is necessary so as to understand that the degree
of transgressivity of each event does not depend only on the nature of the
ceremonies
enacted within the ritual itself, but also, and more properly,
on the particular circumstances during which they were performed. In the Crown
of
Aragon, for instance, the most transgressive self-coronation
was probably
that of Alfonso the Benign, while his successors Peter,
John, Martin and
Ferdinand used the same ritual, following an ‘established’
tradition. Thus,
one understands Turner’s insistence on the ‘semantic
bipolarity’ of ritual
symbols which involves the diverse meanings resulting from
the different
circumstances in each ceremony.82 An accurate knowledge of
the
performance context is necessary to determine which
particular
79 Marshall D. Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), xvii.
See especially chapter 5, ‘Structure and History’, 136–56.
80 Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History and Power (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 188. 81
Victor Turner, ‘The Syntax of Symbolism in an African Religion’, Transactions
of the
Royal Philosophical Society 25 (1966): 295–303, here 295. 82
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),
69.
Introduction 27
connotations are intended, because ‘the same symbols have
varying significance in different contexts.’
83 As Clyde Kluckhohn puts it, myths and
rituals may convey symbolic realities, since they ‘may
express not only the
latent content of ritual [depending on the ceremonial
itself] but of other
culturally organized behaviours [depending on the context in
which the
ritual is inserted]’.
84
This leads to my scepticism regarding the alleged
transgressivity of selfcoronations. This label was probably established because
of the great
symbolic power of Napoleon’s self-coronation in 1804 and the
uncritical
projection of Capetian – and successively English –
coronation models
onto other medieval and early modern realms. Weiler
explains,
As a kind of historiographical commonplace, high medieval
European is often
equated with Capetian kingship. As with historians of
feudalism who experience
an existential crisis on realizing that in their chosen
region patron–client relationships did not resemble those of the Mâconnais,
many historians of kingship also
set their regional case against the image of kingship as
developed by the learned
denizens in and around St. Denis in the decades after the
1270s. ... That is, the
prestige claimed by the descendants of St. Louis may have
led modern historians
to project backwards in time a cultural hegemony that only
emerged, and only for
a short period, in the closing decades of the thirteenth and
the first quarter of the
fourteenth century.85
Medieval rituals are rather inserted in a general context in
which the
ritual behaviour and symbolic gestures become relevant, but
they may
passively express or actively react against their own
context. Rituals are
conditioned by tradition, since they must reiterate an
earlier performance,
and they depend on the precise repetition of specific words
or symbolic
gestures. Of course, there were variations in the rites, but
it is difficult to
find sources which describe the attendants’ reactions to
them. But we
have enough evidence to assert that the emphasis of the
medieval rituals
was placed on the ability to repeat certain formulas in the
proper order
and in the proper language. Nevertheless, it is also true
that some royal
rituals, such as the royal and triumphal entries in the
cities, ‘though with
certain recognizable elements maintained over long periods
of time, were
quite malleable, and the symbols displayed in these
performances quite
fluid. Exact reiteration, such as that of the Mass, was not
required:
changes and slight variations could occur’.
86
83 Turner, The Ritual Process, 53. 84 Clyde Kluckhohn, ‘Myths
and Rituals: A General Theory’, Harvard Theological Review
35 (1942), 45–79, here 54. 85 Weiler, ‘Crown-Giving and
King-Making’, 85–6. 86 Teófilo F. Ruiz, ‘The Symbolic Meaning of Sword and
Palio in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Ritual Entries’, Memoria y Civilización 12 (2009):
13–48, here 15–16.
28 Introduction
Thus, based on this long-term approach, I analyse the
(historical)
action-field context in which the ritual enacted is simply a
phase, and
the (anthropological) cultural context in which symbols
become
clusters of abstract meanings. I also include a third
approach, the
historical-genealogical perspective, which blends both the
event and
interpretations of the whole system. I do not merely
describe and
interpret each coronation, but also read its place within
the entire
cultural system of ‘self-coronation’– in the end, not a
cultural event
but a conceptual construction. Combining these three
approaches (the
action-field, the cultural context and the interpretation of
the cultural
system) allows me to clarify the meaning of the particular
symbols that
emerge from this complex ritual. They are full of cultural
rather than
material implications: what distinguishes self-coronations
from other
rituals is that their performance is not concerned, like
most traditional
rituals, with natural phenomena, technological processes,
human life
crises or the breach of crucial social relationships, but
with the emergence, legitimation and representation of the complex reality of
power.
In addition, this comparative approach helps gather the
three basic
coordinates in which all rituals are encompassed: the
spatial (the
physical and architectonic context, usually sacral such as
the cathedral,
but also civil, such as the royal palace), the temporal (the
development
of the ritual following the rhythm of the liturgy) and the
visual (the
iconographic representations and the artistic programme
conveyed in
the ceremony itself).
The third key concept I use in my reading of self-coronation
is an
emphasis on agency. Self-coronations are dense crossroads of
semiotically charged royal ceremonies that require both an anthropological and
a historical approach. They arise from a tradition that
obeys the symbolic logic of European kingship, anchored on the solid foundation
of
the culture of a given society, but at the same time they
are highly
purposive and manipulative, an opportunity to activate their
actors’
agency. This fits well with the formula proposed by Lisa
Wedeen and
Christopher Clark, who see the rituals as ‘processes of
meaning-making’
in which ‘the intentions and strategies of actors interact
with language,
ritual and other symbolic systems’.
87 As Gabrielle Spiegel argues, we are
experiencing a partial restoration of the concept of agency,
after the
double determinism of social (Marxist) and subsequently
cultural studies constructionism, via methodologies associated with the
linguistic
turn, postmodernism and post-structuralism:
87 Wedeen, ‘Conceptualizing Culture’, 713 and 716, and
Clark, ‘When Culture Meets
Power’, 16.
Introduction 29
Rather than being governed by impersonal semiotic codes,
historical actors are
now seen as engaged in inflecting the semiotic constituents
(signs) that shape their
understanding of reality so as to craft an experience of
that world in terms of
a situational sociology of meaning, or what might be called
a social semantics.
This shift in focus from semiotics to semantics, from given
semiotic structures to
the individual and social construal of signs – in short,
from culture as discourse to
culture as practice and performance – entails a recuperation
of the historical actor
as a rational and intentional agent.88
As Goethe wrote recalling the investiture of Joseph II at
Frankfort:
A politico-religious ceremony possesses an infinite charm.
We behold earthly
majesty before our eyes, surrounded by all the symbols of
its power; but while it
bends before that of heaven, it brings to our minds the
communion of both. For
even the individual can only prove his relationship with the
Deity by subjecting
himself and adoring.89
Thus, part of the interest and, as Goethe would say, the
charm of selfcoronation is that it responds to the action of individual agency
rather
than to social structures. In the end, the interest for
ritual studies among
medievalist since the 1990s, in which they have applied the
theories and
practices that emanated from symbolic anthropology during
the 1970s
and 1980s, is the result of an attempt ‘to move away from
structure and to
find new ways of talking about individuals’ agency’.
90 Historians and
anthropologists have argued, in one way or another, that ‘in
the institutions of a given society changes are slow and subtle;
transformations are
mostly the result of an adaptation to exigencies of the
moment, rather
than of conscious innovations.’
91 Yet some rituals show that sometimes
new traditions – or, at least, variations of traditions –
are shaped by
conscious innovations by individuals.
My own interest in issues associated with the concept of
agency has
materialised in my projects on authorship in the Middle Ages
and
modern historians’ autobiographies.92 Now, I see in the
practice of
self-coronation not only a palpable manifestation of human
agency
88 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Reflections on the New Philology’,
in Rethinking the New
Medievalism, ed. R. Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline
Cerquiglini-Toulet,
Joachim Küpper and Jeanette Patterson (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University
Press, 2014): 39–50, here 48–9. See also Amanda Anderson,
The Way We Argue Now:
A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006). 89 Johann W. Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe,
trans. John Oxenford. 2 vols. (London:
Bell, 1864), 1:168. 90 Pössel, ‘The Magic of Early Medieval
Ritual’, 125. 91 Marion F. Facinger, ‘A Study on Medieval Queenship: Capetian
France, 987–1237’,
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 3–47,
here 31. 92 Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’
Autobiographies (London: Routledge,
2016) and Aurell, Authoring the Past.
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