Ritual experimentation

Abstract

By re-enacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem, the ritual of the first episcopal entry thus combines reenactment and adventus - but this is not to say that, when seized by political power, this ritual of entry serves only to exalt the person of the sovereign ; on the contrary, the case of Louis XI and his retracted entries betrays the fact that ritual can also test the limits and contradictions of power. Distancing itself from the inevitable teleology of the ceremonialist school, the session explores the possibility of ritual experimentation, notably through an analysis of the surrender of the burghers of Calais in 1347. Following Jean-Marie Moeglin's lead, the tradition of the amende honorable, and thus traces of sovereign humiliation, are found behind the inconsistencies of Froissart's speech, suggesting that it is the failures of ritual that make political events. Such are the conditions of ritual experimentation, since it is up to ritual to deny itself as such, thus opening up the very possibility of its overthrow.

Contents

• " This becomes a ritual " : rhythms, ritornellos and perplexities
• 1347, l'affaire des bourgeois de Calais (Jean-Marie Moeglin, Les bourgeois de Calais. Essai sur un mythe historique, Paris, 2002)
• Displacements and anachronisms : " One thinks one is reading a page from the history of the finest times of the Roman Republic, placed by adventure and as if by mistake in the middle of the history of chivalry " (Chateaubriand, Études historiques, 1831)
• To put " on new foundations the old question " : what really happened in Calais on August 4 1347 ?
• Froissart and the others : a case of inversion of the memorial relief of acts of textual production of the event
• Behind the event, the tradition of honorable amends and sovereign humiliation
• " The repetition that is the essence of the [ritual] phenomenon accommodates very well an incessant movement of emergence, resurgence and, above all, metamorphosis " (Daniel Fabre, " Le rite et ses raisons ", Terrain, 1987)
• Deditio, reconciliation ritual and harmiscara (Jean-Marie Moeglin, ("  Harmiscara / Harmschar / Hachée. Le dossier des rituels d'humiliation et de soumission au Moyen Âge ", Archivum latinitatis medii Aevi, Bulletin Du Cange, 64, 1994)
• La colère et la grâce (Claude Gauvard, Condamner à mort au Moyen Âge, Paris, 2018)
• Répétition des ordonnances de réforme monétaire et surgissement de la majesté (Sylvain Piron, " Monnaie et majesté royale dans la France du ^XIVe siècle ", Annales HSS, March-April 1996)
• La formule de l'émerveillement : exercices d'orfèvreries textuelles (Sébastien Barret and Benoît Grévin, " Regalis excellentia ". Les préambules des actes des rois de France au ^XIVe   siècle (1300-1380), Paris, 2014)
• Political ritual and Christian liturgy : loca, tempora, personae, res
• A ghost ritual ? The dismemberment of the ritual chain and liturgical remnants
• When ritual failures become political events (Cremona, 1311)
• The end of the long Middle Ages ? In the years 1760, the theatrical apotheosis of the Bourgeois de Calais and the beginning of the age of suspicion
• Bretigny and Voltaire, or erudition and philosophical history at the origins of Modern skepticism
• All in all, the Calais affair " is a paradoxical ritual insofar as it is part of the ritual itself to deny itself as such " (Jean-Marie Moeglin)
• Reenactment and adventus : the ritual of the first episcopal entry re-enacts Christ's entry into Jerusalem
• Ritual transformation and ceremonial text : a teleological critique
• Ritual is not intended to exalt the person of the sovereign, but to test the limits and contradictions of his power
• Louis XI, the king who didn't want to be king
• " But he, having passed through the city gate, immediately avoided the public square by circuitous routes, and hastened as fast as he could to the dwelling which had been prepared for him " (Thomas Basin, Histoire de Charles VII et de Louis XI)