City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe

Abstract

"City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe," edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson, is reviewed.

City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe. Edited by BARBARA A. HANAWALT and

KATHRYN L. REYERSON. Medieval Studies at Minnesota 6. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. xx + 331 pp.

This book is a "patchwork quilt" of chapters, taken from papers given at the University of Minnesota in 1991. It promises "new insights regarding the quality of medieval urban life, the shared values and the relationship between urban ceremonial and . . . art, literary, and liturgical forms" (p. ix). The book is really about the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It focuses exclusively on western Europe (Britain, France, the Low Countries, Spain, and Italy) during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Some of the authors describe great civic spectacles as community-creating experiences. Lawrence Bryant, in his essay on Paris and London during the Hundred Years' War, assumes that a "correspondence between political realities and the symbolism of the spectacle [in Paris] enhanced their ritual and unifying function" (p. 24). Elizabeth Brown and Nancy Regalado in their essay on Philip the Fair's La grant feste . . . note that "spectacle thus joined king and city in a festive experience of communitas" (p. 56).

The tradition of the church could also be used to create social cohesion. Gerard Nijsten, writing about the Duke of Guelders, notes that "as one body, the town united around Christ's body . . . and the statue of the Mother of God in a show of internal unity" (p. 244). So important were church festivals for civic pride that, when conquering frontier towns, the duke presented processional candles decorated with his coat of arms in order to ingratiate himself with townspeople. Teofile Ruiz presents evidence from the Constables of Jaen on the Granada frontier to show how rulers used religion for their own political ends: by identifying the nobility with important events in the life of Jesus, the rulers wooed divergent groups within the city into submission, while distinctions between commoners and elites were all but eliminated. Benjamin McRee's contribution on the Guild of St. George at Norwich provides proof of how religious guilds and confraternities reordered society in horizontal cells, contributing to the religious life of the church and indirectly helping to diffuse potential political unrest. By contrast, David Nicholas shows how religious processions at Ghent sometimes became so rowdy that they had to be discontinued by municipal authorities. Lorraine Attreed documents the ways in which royalty called saints and their feast days into service by staging entries and pageants to coincide with them. Participation in these ceremonies is easy to document; their general effect is a matter of interpretation.

There is other material in this book of interest to church historians. Bram Kempers's article on the use of icons of the Virgin to celebrate victories at Siena shows how cathedrals served different social groups as space for religious rites. James Murray's brilliant essay on the "liturgy of the Count's advent" at Bruges demonstrates how, in 1384, Philip the Bold and Lady Margaret of Burgundy used the ceremony to their political and economic advantage. Maureen Flynn's essay on the persistence of ritual mortification in Spain is proof of the tenacity of social custom, despite official disapproval. Sheila Lindenbaum's article on the London Midsummer Watch is useful in understanding social forces in pre-Reformation England.

The authors pay some attention to social theorists (Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Elias, Levi-Strauss, Gramsci, Foucault) who identify the creation of harmony in the urban community as the objective of urban ceremony or, alternatively, describe public ceremony as a means by which political authorities reinforced the hierarchy and prevented rebellion. These theorists provide only props: they disappear under the cover of rich detail, derived from very different kinds of sources. Generally, these essays take the middle ground in their conclusions: "rulers and ruled alike became implicated in a web of habitual social practices through which . . . power was exercised and simultaneously disguised" (p. 173). The institutional church and clergy receive less attention; the political power behind the urban spectacles takes the stage. The authors often fail to appreciate the importance of laughter and personal enjoyment provided for townspeople on these civic occasions as an outlet from plague and warfare.