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The chapter explores the paradoxes of the abundant sources for the west, where only a limited proportion of the population understood the dominant written language of communication, Latin; and until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reams of fiscal and judicial records which survive come mostly from a fairly narrow band of senior clerics. But the clergy were not monolithic, and their impact on the actual practice of governance varied north and south of the Alps. Much depended on the extent to which principles of Roman law and the habit of living in towns persisted. Yet there is striking consistency both in the prerequisite virtues of a ruler propounded by clerical writers and in the essentials of inauguration ritual. The law which a king swore to uphold at his coronation was not made at will: he was expected to govern consensually and heed good counsel. Who could give such counsel and what constituted reasonable constraints on the king’s volition changed over time. In some realms, assemblies developed the authority to approve taxes and become law-makers in the late middle ages: the monarch’s exercise of his authority was tempered by popular demand.
This chapter describes and analyses the function of ritual in representing political ideas in Muscovy before the seventeenth century. The political life of Muscovite society was replete with rituals. The correlation of ritual and political ideas begins with the historical transformation of Muscovy and the development of a myth to account for it. The political rituals that realised most directly the myth of the Muscovite ruler and his realm were either contingent, prompted by circumstance, or cyclical, governed by the ecclesiastical calendar. The Church calendar dominated life throughout Muscovy. Apart from the numerous Church services that the tsar and the nobility regularly attended, there were five rituals of especial importance. These demarcated major junctures in the annual cycle and expressed the fundamental values of the Muscovite myth in highly marked settings. Two were non-narrative, the New Year's ritual and the Last Judgement ritual; three contained dramatised narrative, the Fiery Furnace ritual, the Epiphany ritual and the Palm Sunday ritual.
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