The relationship between ritual and the creation, maintenance and destabilisation of power has not gone unexplored by historians, art historians and anthropologists, given the centrality of ritual to religious practice and to institutional structures both across time and throughout the world. 1 Yet the place emotion holds in the relationship between ritual and power—indeed, that emotion should be one of the analytical tools historians turn to in order to understand power dynamics—has received less systematic attention. 2 It is only recently that the emotions, rather than the ritual, have moved to the centre of the academic debate. This shift in focus has in part been motivated by Renato Rosaldo’s observation that some rituals are formed to manage emotions (such as grief) as much as rituals are designed to create emotion in the participants. 3 It has also been influenced by a swathe of new methodologies and theoretical approaches emerging from across the humanities and social sciences that have rejuvenated investigations into what emotions are and how they work in organising, mediating and constructing social, cultural and institutional relationships.
The time is therefore ripe for a volume which engages with this new emotions scholarship and asks historians to apply them to our understanding of ritual and its wider relationship with different forms of power. This volume spans the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, across Europe and its empires, and rethinks medieval and early modern ritual. It brings together historians, art historians and literary scholars to provide insight into one aspect of the role of emotions in European history by investigating the nature of the relationship between emotion, ritual and power in a range of contexts from the family to the nation. Each chapter in this volume showcases the different approaches, theories and methodologies that can be used to explore emotions in historical rituals, but they all share the goal of answering the question of how emotions act within or through ritual to inform balances of power in its many and varied forms.
Medieval and early modern Europeanists, in particular, have long seen ritual as a key device for interpreting and understanding past people’s relationships with hierarchies, given that highly structured, large-scale rituals were performed frequently in diverse contexts across religious and civic domains. 4 For a long time, the overriding preoccupation that medieval and early modern historians had with ritual was its role in the creation and negotiation of political power and the spread of hegemonic Christianity. That rituals were implicated in political, civic and religious power relationships has therefore long been recognised, with a considerable body of work providing insight into the uses of religious and royal rituals to reinforce church, state or monarchical power. 5 For many European historians, the Reformation became a focal point for examining how rituals in both Protestant and Catholic contexts, along with the attendant attitudes towards them, were transformed to greater or lesser degrees. From the 1970s onwards, the growth in social and cultural history began to shape the study of rituals in new ways. Historians expanded their interest in rituals outwards to consider the role rituals played in daily life and in familial and domestic settings. These rituals, and the settings in which they were performed, were shown to be just as implicated in the creation and contestation of power, hierarchy and identity as rituals performed in civic spaces, cathedrals or at court. 6
More recently still, historians have begun to re-evaluate the complex engagement between emotion, ritual and power across these varied domains. By identifying what he calls ‘the emotional economy of ritual’, Kiril Petkov argues that the late medieval ritual of the ‘Kiss of Peace’ not only brought feuding parties back into social alignment with the community, but also transformed turbulent emotions like hatred, anger and grief into more manageable emotions like shame. It was the emotional investments that individuals had in the ritual activity of the ‘Kiss of Peace’, as well as the corporeal practice of the Kiss, that brought the bodily dimensions of emotion (feeling) into line with the social obligation to ‘keep the peace’. That emotion was felt ensured the ritual’s efficacy over time. 7 Susan Karant-Nunn’s Reformation of Feeling explores how new ritual practices were designed by Lutheran Reformers to enable the feeling they thought essential to the Reformed faith. 8
This body of work is significant in treating emotion as an integral dimension—and sometimes the driver—of ritual practices rather than as a useful byproduct of a ritual event, and this edited collection belongs to this tradition. However, the authors in this volume take these debates further by exploring the domains in which emotions and rituals themselves operate, incorporating and testing new theories developed within the multi-disciplinary field of emotions scholarship, and exploring rituals in terms of collective emotions, emotions as performative acts, and the embodied and material nature of emotions. Importantly, emotion is not just viewed as a central component of human experience which needs to be understood, but also as a driver of social change, directing human behaviour and power relationships.
Defining Ritual
That the interaction between ritual and power, and latterly emotion, has been a key topic within sociology, anthropology, history, history of art, psychology and a number of other fields for some time is well known. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, when surveying the work on this topic, one not only has to engage with several large literatures but also scholarship that has evolved with some very different assumptions, conceptual frameworks and priorities. In this introduction, our aim is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the wide-ranging literature in these fields—such work is available elsewhere—but to analyse some of the key conceptual issues that a study of this nature raises and how they relate to the chapters in this collection. 9
Perhaps any study of ritual requires it to be defined. Rituals can be found across all societies and cultures on a spectrum that ranges from those that are time-consuming to those that are quick, those that invite euphoric or dysphoric emotional arousal or indeed boredom, and those that involve hundreds or even thousands of people to those that involve a much smaller number of participants. At its most formal, rituals have been understood as an established set of actions, usually subject to repetition at lower or higher frequencies, that enabled some form of transformation—whether that was the creation of social cohesion or the marking of a change in status across the life cycle. Such ‘ceremonial’ rituals have been viewed as ‘sacred’, in the sense of not being everyday events, and/or liminal in suspending the everyday and marking a moment of transition between two different states. 10 Whilst such rituals can vary enormously, they have typically been seen to involve emotional ‘energy’, to be causally opaque in that there is no obvious reason explaining why many of the ritualised elements are present, and embodied through synchronised movement or repetitive action. For scholars in this tradition, ceremonial ritual is distinct from ‘routine’. Indeed, the desacralisation of ritual and the move to routine has been identified as one of the key shifts from early modern to modern life. 11
For other scholars, however, rituals are not simply discrete events that serve a particular social function and that are set apart from everyday concerns, but are an encompassing framework for interpreting human interaction. For one of the key founders of the field, Émile Durkheim, ritual was the very basis of society—it was the ‘collective effervescence’ produced through ritual that created social cohesion and group identity, placing ritual at the heart of social life. 12 For his followers, ritual therefore became much more encompassing than discrete and transformative events, to incorporate the repetitive interactions and performances of everyday life that enabled society to function smoothly. 13 Under this ‘interactionist’ model, all social encounters are performative, drawing on broader social rules and guidelines around how people communicate. Such performative rituals are successful not necessarily when the interacting subjects are transformed from one state of being to another, but when their engagement allows a successful presentation of self to the other. Such everyday rituals are as essential to the creation of self and society as the rarer ceremonial rituals. At the same time, their social function, and perhaps particularly their relationship to power, is in many respects distinct, especially given that they are not always expected to have a large-scale collective dimension.
The authors in this volume have taken an encompassing view of ritual. Individual chapters range from rare and sacred rituals to everyday ‘routines’ that nonetheless have social, cultural and emotional efficacy. At one end of the scale, François Soyer and Charles Sowerwine’s respective studies of public baptism and state funerals look at classical ‘sacred’ rituals, large-scale, rarely performed and implicated in the making of national power relationships. At the other end, Susan Broomhall’s exploration of communication rituals amongst members of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) looks at an everyday social practice as ritual. Like other rituals explored in this volume, letter and report-writing is central to the establishment of social cohesion and corporate identity—its location in the everyday did not diminish its social effects. Lisa Toland’s chapter similarly explores letter-writing as a ritualised element of leave-taking amongst the eighteenth-century English gentry. Her chapter raises the valuable question of how the ‘everyday’ can be defined. Letter-writing or, indeed, leave-taking may not have been activities that occurred on a day-to-day basis, but her chapter demonstrates how these ritualised events were woven into the fabric of daily rhythms and domestic patterns. Moreover, as Katie Barclay’s contribution on bedding rituals suggests, the efficacy of ritual lies not only in the power of the infrequently performed ritual itself, but also in the fact that participants subsequently repeated elements of ritual behaviour in everyday contexts. In the tradition of interactionist theorists, some of the contributors to this volume therefore challenge the boundaries between the sacred and the profane as a model for understanding ritual efficacy.
The rituals in this volume also convey the different scales on which rituals occur. Barclay’s study of bedding rituals amongst the lower orders would have been culturally salient for a large proportion of Scotland’s population, which in 1700 was around one million and in 1800 about two million, yet most rituals were small-scale, incorporating only a marrying couple and some friends and family. Similarly, Nicole Starbuck’s ritual encounters in Empire often involved only a few individuals, but they drew on traditions that were performed routinely in France. In contrast, Soyer’s study of the public baptism of a Muslim convert shows how the event drew thousands of spectators and hundreds of processing participants to a baptism that involved only half a dozen actors, including the convert himself. The scale of the group involved in the nun’s coronation rite in Julie Hotchin’s study is much smaller. For the second half of the fifteenth century, an average community may have held around 30 nuns. In some exceptional cases, abbesses were directed by their bishop to restrict the community’s size to 100 women, but the coronation ceremony would always have been small, not least as the members of the community were enclosed and their movement, for the most part, was restricted to the precinct of their monastery. Charles Zika’s chapter offers another perspective by showing imagined ritual communities performing witches’ Sabbath rituals, a ritual process which expanded to incorporate readers through the writings of Laurent Bordelon and in the full-page engravings of Jean Crépy. The communities formed and shaped through ritual therefore vary enormously in this volume, requiring different types of ritual strategies and behaviours, and with different implications for the operation and practice of emotion.
Understanding Emotion
The disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that have traditionally been at the forefront of research into emotional phenomena, namely moral philosophy, sociology, anthropology and cognitive psychology, have operated on a number of different assumptions about how emotion should be theorised and even defined. 14 When historians began to pay serious attention to emotions history in the 1980s, much of this existing scholarship was picked up and trawled through for theoretical insights into the nature of emotions. During the early phase, a great deal of attention was paid to the debate over whether emotion was biological and universal or socially constructed. Recently, however, a more sophisticated approach has been taken by both humanities scholars and scientists, acknowledging that emotion is located in both domains.
A growing body of empirical work suggests that there are ‘universal constituents of emotions’ (but not universal emotions) which cultural groups have the capacity to take and arrange into systematically different emotion practices. 15 Moreover, there is some work in neuroscience and the cognitive sciences that supports longstanding humanities claims that culture and language affect not just the communication of emotion but also the experience of it. 16 There is also increasing recognition that biology (and not just ideas about biology) is a product of environment and culture; that the body is considerably more plastic than previously appreciated. 17 As the historian Monique Scheer asks, ‘why should the...