Celebrate with us, and familiarize yourself with the newest book on political liturgies!

This volume is an outcome of multiyear cooperation within PSALM-Network, which stands for Politics, Society, and Liturgy in the Middle Ages. PSALM is the academic society that explicitly intends to bring together scholars who usually do not confer at the same venues and to offer a locus of debate and different methodological approaches to issues at the intersection of the political, social, and liturgical history of the Middle Ages. If you would like to maintain contact with us, please register to the society at www.psalm-network.org 

The goal of the book, alongside the mission statement of the PSALM-Network, was to build a bridge between two usually separated areas of knowledge—liturgical scholarship and political theory. The political role that rituals can play, is well acknowledged in the academia, especially after the so-called ‘performative turn’ in the humanities, which has led many scholars in recent decades to pay more attention to rituals and ceremonies as important driving forces in society. In their vigorous investigations, however, most historians have chiefly studied ‘non-religious’ritual behaviour, largely glossing over liturgy. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, on the other hand, asserted already in 1946 that ‘it is really no longer possible for the mediaeval historian […] to deal cheerfully with the history of mediaeval thought and culture without ever opening a missal’. Yet liturgy has never truly entered the mainstream of historians’ training in academia, and many medievalists still research political culture without considering to consult a liturgical book.

Obviously, this is not to say that liturgy has been neglected as a topic of research. But its study was long the privileged domain of theologians, liturgists in particular, especially those associated with the so-called Liturgical Movement. Encouraged by this latter intellectual stream, scholars have for around two centuries focused on accurately tracing the various ways in which worship in Christian Churches developed, and they have collected huge amounts of source material. Most of these scholars have been active members of Christian communities. These explorations were therefore not simple antiquarianism: most often the scholars were motivated by contemporary pastoral concerns. The predominant incentive for this research was to reform worship in contemporary Christian denominations rather than understanding past societies through a study of liturgy. Amongst these pastoral concerns, the interest in political activities did not figure highly. This was a consequence of changes in society occurring since the nineteenth century, as political institutions, both outside and inside Christian Churches, largely became secularized, thus moving religious and political practice further apart. Furthermore, the idea that religion as an area of private or personal conviction standing apart from the secular arena, has increasingly gained ground in twentieth-century philosophy, sociology, and even in Christian theology itself. The predominant interest of liturgists has thereby not very much been the study of political meaning of past worship practices.

For many scholars of political culture, therefore, liturgy still remains an arcane discipline, not widely accessible to the uninitiated. It is indeed challenging to achieve ‘liturgical literacy’ in the multifarious and nuanced Christian practices. Nevertheless, dozens of medievalists have crossed the bridge in order to fully enter the experiential and cognitive world of the medieval reality. In the recent years Yitzhak Hen, Helen Gittos, Henry Parkes, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Sean Griffin, among others, have analyzed the interaction liturgy had with particular aspects of medieval sources or societal life. Yet overall, for all the increasing curiosity, different interests in liturgy still seem to remain disconnected from one another and fields of actual liturgical study are still often methodologically sealed off from other disciplines within medieval studies. This book contributes to opening up this field more broadly to a wider group of scholars. It does so by binding together different concrete examples of liturgical sources or concepts which are used to analyze societal phenomena of political significance. This is indeed one of the few collected volumes on the topic of liturgy and politics. Moreover, this book connects more frequently analyzed regions (e.g. England, Capetian France, Hohenstaufen Empire), with regions that are often more neglected in Anglophone medieval studies (e.g. Poland, Kievan Rus’). It also offers multi-faceted analyses of versatile sources that have received lesser attention in liturgical studies (e.g. vestments, calendars, or art objects). Importantly, this volume makes its analysis from the perspective of venturing beyond the main narratives established in this field by Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz.

Kantorowicz remains one of the most significant twentieth-century medievalists whose impact reaches far beyond the field of medieval studies. He strongly influenced contemporary philosophy, sociology, the political sciences, and theology, to name a few adjacent disciplines. Even though the Poznań-born historian was neither the first to utilize liturgical sources in his studies of medieval political culture, nor the first to master all the nuances of premodern Christian worship, he most clearly expressed the need to embed liturgy more prominently into the historian’s curriculum. Over seventy-five years after Kantorowicz’s rallying cry, the incorporation of liturgy into historical training has still not been fully realized. However, it is not our desire to simply repeat Kantorowicz’s call to duty but to further bridge the division between liturgical scholarship and historians interested in political culture who, generally speaking, still often neglect liturgical sources in their research. Kantorowicz’s treatment of liturgical phenomena, as inspiring, illuminative, and influential as it is, also contains the constraints of previous scholarship, which we aim to challenge in this volume.

Many scholars dealing with Kantorowicz hint that the author of The King’s Two Bodies himself had two incarnations. The disruption between the ‘two historians in one person’ started with Kantorowicz’s flight from Nazi Germany in 1938. After that, he increasingly distanced himself from his pre-World War II intellectual and political activities. But the question remains: who was he in Germany? Norman Cantor’s assertion that he was a Nazi, or at least sympathetic to National Socialist ideology has been shown, by Robert L. Benson and most recently by Robert E. Lerner, to be a profound misrepresentation. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Kantorowicz in his earlier years was a German nationalist, which he proved on the World War I battlefields, university courses, and most influentially in his bestseller book, Friedrich II. Kantorowicz’s first monograph depicted a messianic figure of the past, a ruler awaited in the twentieth century by the members of the Geheimes Deutschland group, whose ideals were shared by Kantorowicz.

As a disciple formed in the Stefan George circle, Kantorowicz was highly attentive to what we today call symbolic power. It is no wonder then, that liturgical phenomena associated with rulers were primarily perceived by Kantorowicz as legitimization strategies. Moreover, he tended to place Christian rituals within broad anthropological models, such as the concept of Germanic sacral kingship, which was imbued at his times with nationalistic ideas. The broad anthropological brush often used to paint various rituals in cultures distant in time and space also seems to obscure the details of the rituals’ context and meaning. For all the insight of Kantorowicz’s works, the specific, local, and temporized meaning conveyed by the analyzed phenomena are often hyperbolic. For example, the Carolingian laudes regiae were, according to Kantorowicz, attempts to create theocratic order and manifestations of medieval ruler worship. In Kantorowicz’s words: [the laudes regiae] display, as it were, the cosmic harmony of Heaven, Church and State. The question could then be raised: is this not an exaggerated reading of liturgical litanies begging victory and long life for a ruler and his entourage?

Definitively not, at least if one subscribes to the secularization paradigm, as Kantorowicz did. This is the second context of his other persona and embodies the predominant presuppositions of many past studies dealing with medieval liturgy, which we also challenge in this volume. One of the general definitions of the secularization paradigm claims that religiously defined political power belongs only to traditional and non-rational societies, but fades away in modernity. The acceptance of this paradigm propelled scholars to create linear and unilateral narratives about premodern Europe, in which secular civic power came to dominate the modern period. It was a story about transformations of supposedly traditional societies, in which politics was religiously grounded, to the supposedly secular age of today. As a consequence of accepting this paradigm, liturgical phenomena were commonly explained as a means of ‘churchifying’ the essentially secular political power or adopting Roman imperial ideology.

Kantorowicz subscribed to the secularization thesis and paved the way for its acceptance in the field of medieval history, most evidently by writing the King’s Two Bodies. This is a book with many narrative lines, but the grand narrative within this opus magnum is the transformation of cultural markers: from liturgy, predominant before c. 1100, through the law of the high medieval period, to the nearly autonomous humanism of the later Middle Ages. Thus, for Kantorowicz, liturgy was the essential part of an enchanted world. It offered the potential to ground politics before becoming obsolete as less theologically ingrained ideas took over the predominant role of ordering society.

Whereas some of the anthropological models used in medieval scholarship on liturgy, such as the previously highly influential sacral kingship model, have been rejected by scholars, the secularization paradigm has only recently started to be called into question. Philosophical deliberations as well as a global analysis of empirically verified phenomena have thrown doubt on the view that secularity is the default mode of existence in the twenty-first century. In the face of changing paradigms in both contemporary humanities and also the world, Kantorowicz’s secularization narrative demands reassessment.

Taken as a whole, this volume contributes to the dismantling of the secularization paradigm as enforced by Kantorowicz. It offers examples in favor of the thesis that liturgy remained a central political marker across Christian Europe during the period in which Kantorowicz argued for its decline. In doing so, the book contributes to a growing interest in the political significance of ecclesiastical rituals in the high Middle Ages, a period which, as Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton have recently commented, is finally starting to receive much deserved attention from researchers interested in liturgical phenomena.

One disclaimer though is still necessary, put also in the introduction to the book. The contributions in this volume do not offer a comprehensive overview of how liturgy interacted with societal dynamics, and nor do they outline an entirely new narrative about their evolutions. Yet, together all these different pictures do irrefutably attest that throughout High Middle Ages, and all across Christian Europe, the use of liturgy in the societal arena was preeminent and common: be it as a political tool, as a framework for understanding, or as an expression of societal attitudes, of core values, or of theologies of the political. From England to Jerusalem, from Benevento to Denmark: if one only looks closely enough, political liturgies pop up everywhere. Therefore, while seeking to move beyond the legacy of Kantorowicz’s grand narrative, this volume confirms his another assertion that ‘liturgy… is today one of the most important auxiliaries to the study of medieval history’. Seventy-five years after Kantorowicz made this claim, the study of liturgy remains essential to the medieval historian. Indeed, it is key to understanding the functioning of medieval Christian societies.

Thank you very much for your attention!