Matthew Paris and the Royal Christmas: Ritualised Communication in Text and Practice

Summary

One of the most attractive reasons for studying thirteenth-century England is the excellent opportunities for comparative studies. The rich administrative evidence allows us to ask and answer questions that must necessarily remain opaque in more data-poor areas. At the same time, as historians such as Nicholas Vincent and Bjorn Weiler have shown, the interdisciplinary, analytical approaches developed in continental historiography can help us unpack the riches of the English sources and restore complexity and depth to our understanding of the medieval past. In this paper I will be looking at the way in which the English evidence can help further the vexed question of the relationship between rituals-in-text and rituals-in-practice. A decade ago Philippe Buc inaugurated a vigorous and fruitful debate amongst historians of medieval ritual with the publication of his The Dangers of Ritual. Buc argued that the descriptions of rituals found in narrative sources were so circumscribed with political interests, and so informed by classical and scriptural models, that they can only with great difficulty be used as evidence of actual ritual performance. One of the topics covered in the resulting debate has been the numerous accounts of disturbed royal solemnities found in the English narrative sources, such as Matthew Paris's Chronica majora. Geoffrey Koziol has argued that these stories reveal the difficulties that the post-Conquest kings of England, unlike their Capetian rivals, faced when trying to use ritualised actions to buttress their dignity and authority.