Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200-1920: Family, State and Church

History of Emotions
Palgrave Studies in the
Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920

Family, State and Church
Edited by
MERRIDEE L. BAILEY
AND KATIE BARCLAY
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions
Series Editors
David Lemmings
School of History and Politics
University of Adelaide
Adelaide, Australia
William M. Reddy
Department of History
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina, USA
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions includes work that rede-
fines past definitions of emotions; re-conceptualizes theories of emotional
‘development’ through history; undertakes research into the genesis and
effects of mass emotions; and employs a variety of humanities disciplines
and methodologies. In this way it produces a new interdisciplinary history
of the emotions in Europe between 1100 and 2000.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14584
Merridee L. Bailey • Katie Barclay
Editors
Emotion, Ritual and

Power in Europe,
1200–1920
Family, State and Church
Editors
Merridee L. Bailey Katie Barclay
School of History and Politics School of History and Politics
The University of Adelaide The University of Adelaide
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions

ISBN 978-3-319-44184-9 ISBN 978-3-319-44185-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956409
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Acknowledgements
Our thanks to the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for

the History of Emotions, 1100–1800 at The University of Adelaide for
sponsoring the collaboratory on which this volume is substantially based
and for the support of many individuals associated with the CHE for their
contributions. We would particularly like to thank David Lemmings and
Charles Zika, leaders of the CHE Change programme, for their support.
Like all academic work, the labour of a swathe of unseen peer review-
ers, who provided double blind review, lies unseen and the editors would
like to thank them for their timely and helpful contributions. Katie would
particularly like to thank Jean McBain for her administrative assistance
towards the end of this project.
v
Contents
1 Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family to Nation 1

Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay
Part I Familial and Personal Rituals: Local and

Community Networks 21
2 Gift-Giving and the Obligation to Love in

Riquet à la houppe 23
Bronwyn Reddan
3 Intimacy, Community and Power: Bedding Rituals

in Eighteenth-Century Scotland 43
Katie Barclay
4 Late-Adolescent English Gentry Siblings and Leave-Taking

in the Early Eighteenth Century 63
Lisa Toland
vii
viii Contents
Part II Civic and Nation-Building: Power Created, Power

Reinforced 81
5 Shipwrecks, Sorrow, Shame and the Great Southland:

The Use of Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Dutch
East India Company Communicative Ritual 83
Susan Broomhall
6 Ritualised Public Performance, Emotional Narratives

and the Enactment of Power: The Public Baptism of a
Muslim in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona 103
François Soyer
7 Ritual Encounters of the ‘Savage’ and the Citizen:

French Revolutionary Ethnographers in Oceania,
1768–1803 123
Nicole Starbuck
8 Channelling Grief, Building the French Republic:

The Death and Ritual Afterlife of Léon Gambetta,
1883–1920 145
Charles Sowerwine
Part III Religious Rituals: Relationships with the

Divine and the Political 169
9 Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun’s Coronation in Late

Medieval Germany 171
Julie Hotchin
10 Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities.

Rethinking the Relation between Architecture and
Affect in Baroque Italy 193
Helen Hills
Contents ix
11 Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early

Modern English Convents 221
Claire Walker
12 Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional Salience

of Conversion Rituals 241
Jacqueline Van Gent
13 The Transformation of Sabbath Rituals by Jean

Crépy and Laurent Bordelon: Redirecting
Emotion through Ridicule 261
Charles Zika
14 Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power 285

Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François
Select Bibliography 305
Index 313
Notes on Contributors
Merridee L. Bailey is a Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of

Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide. She
works on the history of book culture and issues of socialisation and moral-
ity in late medieval and early modern England. She has previously written
on ideas about virtue and courtesy in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
England, and more recently has begun working on morality and emotions
in merchant practices in London, c. 1400–1650. She has written a book
on childhood in late medieval and early modern England, Socialising the
Child in Late Medieval England c. 1400–1600 (York Medieval Press, 2012)
and has written articles and book chapters for Viator, Journal of the Early
Book Society and The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban
Experience.
Katie Barclay is DECRA Fellow in the ARC Centre for the History of
Emotions, University of Adelaide. She is the author of the double award-
winning Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland,
1650–1850 (Manchester University press, 2011) and numerous articles on
emotions and family life. Her current research explores intimacy amongst
lower-order Scots.
Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern History at the University
of Western Australia and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow
attached to the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence
for the History of Emotions. She is editor of several studies of emotions,
including Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain,
1650–1850 (Routledge, 2015), Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Medieval and Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),

Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100–1800 (Brill, 2015), Gender and
Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order,
Structuring Disorder (Ashgate, 2015) (with Sarah Finn) and Violence and
Emotions in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2015), and is a general edi-
tor of the six-volume A Cultural History of the Emotions (Bloomsbury)
with Jane W. Davidson and Andrew Lynch. Her latest monograph, Gender,
Emotions and the Dutch East India Company, is forthcoming from
Amsterdam University Press in 2017 and she is now working on a new
study, entitled The Power of Emotions: Catherine de Medici.
Pieter François is Senior Lecturer in Digital History and the Director of
the Cliodynamics Lab at the University of Hertfordshire and is the
Research Coordinator of the Cultural Evolution Group at the University
of Oxford. He is one of the first historians who embraced and helped
shape a Cliodynamics research agenda and who promoted a scientific
approach to studying the past. After having published works on travel and
migration in the nineteenth century for a decade, in 2011 he co-founded
the ‘Seshat: Global History Databank’ project, which aims to be the pre-
mier home to test social sciences theories with historical and archaeologi-
cal data. His most recent work focuses on explaining the evolution of
social complexity and on big data approaches to studying history.
Helen Hills is Professor of History of Art at the University of York. She
has published extensively on baroque art, baroque theory, and gender,
religion and architecture. Representing Emotions: New Connections in the
Histories of Art, Music and Medicine, which she co-edited with P Gouk,
was published by Ashgate in 2005. The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan
Baroque Architecture and Sanctity was published in June 2016 by
Manchester University Press.
Julie Hotchin is Visiting Fellow in the School of History at the Australian
National University in Canberra, and an Honorary Associate Investigator
with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She is an
historian of medieval religious and cultural history, with a particular focus
on the intersections between women’s devotional, educational and intel-
lectual activities in late medieval Germany. Her research interests also
extend to the history of the book, especially women’s roles in manuscript
production, use and exchange; religious materiality; and the role of emo-
tions in shaping devotional experience. She is the editor (with Fiona
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
J. Griffiths) of Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in

Germany, 1100–1500 (Brepols, 2014) and her research has been published
in several refereed journal articles and book chapters.
Bronwyn Reddan is a PhD candidate at the School of Historical and
Political Studies at the University of Melbourne and is a postgraduate
member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions,
1100–1800. Her research examines the politics of love in early modern
French fairy tales and the historical significance of fairy tales as sources
that continue to shape modern understandings of emotion and gender.
Her publications on seventeenth-century French fairy tales include an
article on unhappy endings in Papers on French Seventeenth Century
Literature and an article on magical objects as metaphors for female
agency in Marvels & Tales (Fall 2016).
Charles Sowerwine is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of
Melbourne, Professorial Fellow in History at La Trobe University and
Honorary Associate of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the Université de
Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines, where he was Professor from 1996 to
2002. He is the author of Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in
France since 1876 (Cambridge University Press 1982; reissued 2008);
with Claude Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier, Une féministe dans l’arêne poli-
tique (Éditions Ouvrières 1992); and, with Susan Foley, A Political
Romance: Léon Gambetta, Léonie Léon and the making of the French
Republic, 1872–82 (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). A third edition of his
France since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic (Palgrave
Macmillan 2001, 2009) is planned for 2017.
François Soyer is an Associate Professor in late medieval and early mod-
ern history at the University of Southampton. He is the author of
Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and its Empire: The
Centinela contra Judíos of Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo (1674) (Brill,
2014) and The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King
Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496–7) (Brill, 2007).
Nicole Starbuck is a Lecturer in the School of History and Politics at the
University of Adelaide. Her main research interests include natural history,
cross-cultural contact and theories about human diversity in France,
Europe and Oceania from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth cen-
tury, particularly within the context of the French Revolution. She is an
associate investigator with the ARC Centre for Excellence in the History
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
of Emotions and Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project,

‘Revolutionary Voyaging: Science, Politics and Discovery during the
French Revolution (1789–1804)’. She is also the author of Baudin,
Napoleon and the Exploration of Australia (Pickering & Chatto, 2013).
Lisa Toland is Associate Professor at the John Wesley Honors College,
Indiana Wesleyan University, USA. She is an early modern English histo-
rian of the family, women and the culture of death and dying. She is cur-
rently working on a project related to child death and the corresponding
adolescent sibling grief at home and away at school.
Jacqueline Van Gent is an early modern historian at the University of
Western Australia and Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence
for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800. She has published work on early
modern religion, gender and colonial mission encounters, religious conver-
sions and emotions, and on gender in the Orange-Nassau family. Her pub-
lications include Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden,
(Brill, 2009); Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period:
Regulating Selves and Others (Ashgate, 2011, co-edited with S. Broomhall);
Gender and Conversion Narratives in the Nineteenth Century: German
Mission at Home and Abroad (Ashgate, 2015, with A. Schaser and
K. Rüther); The Indigenous Christian Evangelist in British Empire History
1750–1940: Questions of Authority (Brill, 2015, with N. Etherington,
P. Brock, and G. Griffiths); ‘Emotions and Conversion’, Special Issue of
Journal of Religious History (co-edited with S. Young), December 2015;
‘Gender, Objects and Emotions in Scandinavian History’, Special Issue of
Journal of Scandinavian History (co-edited with Raisa Toivo) forthcom-
ing, 2016. She has just completed Gender, Power and Identity in the Early
Modern House of Orange-Nassau (Routledge, 2016) and Dynastic
Colonialism: Gender, Materiality and the Early Modern House of Orange-
Nassau (Routledge, 2016) (both jointly authored with S. Broomhall).
Claire Walker is Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, where she
teaches medieval and early modern European history. She is the author of
Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France
and the Low Countries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and multiple journal
articles and book chapters on exiled English religious houses for women.
She co-edited with David Lemmings Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in
Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Most recently she has
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
co-edited a collection of essays on gossip with Heather Kerr, Fama and

Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe (Brepols, 2015).
Harvey Whitehouse is Chair of Social Anthropology, Director of the
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology and Fellow of
Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. He is generally regarded as
one of the founders of the Cognitive Science of Religion field. After carry-
ing out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua
New Guinea in the late 1980s, he wrote a trilogy of books developing the
theory of ‘modes of religiosity’ that has been the subject of extensive criti-
cal evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists
and cognitive scientists. More recently, he has focused increasingly on
developing transdisciplinary collaborations using methods as diverse as
ethnographic fieldwork, experiments, interviews and surveys in lab, field
and online settings, database construction, semantic network analysis,
brain imaging and agent-based modelling. In the process, his research
programme has expanded beyond religion to examine the role of rituals of
all kinds in binding groups together and motivating intergroup competi-
tion, including warfare.
Charles Zika is Professorial Fellow at the School of Historical and
Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, and Chief Investigator in
the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His interests
lie at the intersection of religion, emotion, visual culture and print in early
modern Europe, and at present focus on such topics as pilgrimage, com-
munal integrity, natural disasters and witchcraft. His most recent books
include The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in
Sixteenth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2007); The Four Horsemen:
Apocalypse, Death & Disaster (National Gallery of Victoria, 2012, co-
edited with Cathy Leahy and Jenny Spinks); Celebrating Word and Image
1250–1600 (Fremantle Press, 2013, with Margaret Manion); and Disaster,
Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, edited with Jennifer Spinks,).
List of Figures
Fig. 8.1 The Late Léon Gambetta—the funeral procession leaving

the Palais Bourbon, which housed the Chamber of Deputies.
Contemporary engraving. Courtesy look and learn.
Reproduced by permission 151
Fig. 8.2 Monument to Gambetta—Place du Carroussel.
Contemporary photograph. Courtesy look and learn.
Reproduced by permission 156
Fig. 9.1 Nun’s crown made from woven silk bands with embroidered
medallions, France (?), twelfth century. Reproduced with
permission © Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2009
(photo: Christoph von Viràg) 175
Fig. 9.2 Nun instructing a girl (detail). Kloster Ebstorf, Hs V3,
fol. 200v, c. 1480. Image courtesy of Kloster Ebstorf 177
Fig. 9.3 Wienhausen, painting in nuns’ choir of the heavenly
Jerusalem, detail with abbess Eveza and the convent founders,
c. 1330. Image courtesy of Kloster Wienhausen 178
Fig. 10.1 James Parson, ‘Human physiognomy explain’d: in the
Crounian lectures on musical motion for the year
MDCCXLVI’, Royal society (London) philosophical
transactions for the year 1746, XLIV, pt. 1, p. 53.
Photo: Helen Hills 194
Fig. 10.2 Giovan Battista D’Aula, reliquary of the blood of St John
the Baptist (1727), Naples, silver. Photo: Giovanni Tiralongo 196
Fig. 10.3 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Interior looking
towards liturgical east. Photo: Joseph Connors. By kind
permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale
Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro 200
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 10.4 The miraculous blood of San Gennaro, during the procession
for the feast of San Gennaro, September 2013.
Photo: Helen Hills 202
Fig. 10.5 Silver reliquary busts in their niches with bronze statues
above in the liturgical south side of presbytery, Treasury
Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Photo: Massimo Velo.
By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione
della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro 203
Fig. 10.6 Catacombs of San Gennaro, Naples. Photo: Helen Hills 204
Fig. 10.7 Silver reliquary of St Clare (1689; restored in 1759) in
the nave of Naples Cathedral outside the Treasury
Chapel prepared for procession of San Gennaro (4 May 2013).
Photo: Helen Hills. By kind permission of the
Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella
del Tesoro di San Gennaro 209
Fig. 10.8 Entrance gate from the organ loft, Treasury Chapel of
San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the
Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del
Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo: Helen Hills 211
Fig. 10.9 Bust of San Gennaro in the entrance gate of the treasury
Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the
Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del
Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo: Helen Hills 212
Fig. 10.10 Head of San Gennaro and ampoules of his miraculous
blood in the main gate of Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro
by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail. © Helen Hills. By kind
permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale
Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro 213
Fig. 10.11 Letter of a mysterious alphabet in the main gate of treasury
Chapel of San Gennaro by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail.
© Helen Hills. By kind permission of the
Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella
del Tesoro di San Gennaro 214
Fig. 13.1 Jean Crépy, A Description of the Witches’ Assembly
called the Sabbath, engraving, in Laurent Bordelon,
L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle
(Paris: Nicolas Gosselin and Charles Le Clerc, 1710), vol. 2,
between 306 and 307. The Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford, 12 Theta 1637 262
Fig. 13.2 Jean Crépy, Monsieur Oufle and the astrologers,
frontispiece engraving, in Laurent Bordelon, L’histoire
des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle
(Paris: Nicolas Gosselin & Charles Le Clerc, 1710), vol. 1.
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 12 Theta 1637 267
List of Figures xix
Fig. 13.3 Jan Ziarnko, Description and Depiction of the Witches Sabbath,
etching, in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau, de l’inconstance des
mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613),
following 118. By permission of University of Glasgow
Library, Special Collections 268
Fig. 13.4 Jan Ziarnko, Circle dance at the Witches Sabbath,
detail from Description and Depiction of the Witches
Sabbath, etching, in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau, de
l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris:
Nicolas Buon, 161), following 118. By permission of
University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections 271
Fig. 13.5 Jan Ziarnko, Circle dance at the Witches Sabbath,
detail from Description and Depiction of the Witches Sabbath,
etching, in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau, de l’inconstance
des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613),
following 118. By permission of University of Glasgow
Library, Special Collections 272
Fig. 13.6 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
The Feast of Fools, engraving, after 1570. New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www. metmuseum.
org, 2013.452 277
List of Tables
Table 14.1 Contrasting modes of religiosity 291
xxi
CHAPTER 1
Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family

to Nation
Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay
The relationship between ritual and the creation, maintenance and desta-
bilisation 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 investiga-
M.L. Bailey (*) • K. Barclay

Department of History, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Bailey, K. Barclay (eds.), Emotion, Ritual and Power in
Europe, 1200–1920, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_1
2 M.L. BAILEY AND K. BARCLAY
tions 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 understand-
ing 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 investigat-
ing 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 rela-
tionships 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 rela-
tionships 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 histo-
rians, 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 ritu-
als 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 contes-
tation 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 com-
plex engagement between emotion, ritual and power across these varied
domains. By identifying what he calls ‘the emotional economy of ritual’,
EMOTION, RITUAL AND POWER: FROM FAMILY TO NATION 3
Kiril Petkov argues that the late medieval ritual of the ‘Kiss of Peace’ not
only brought feuding parties back into social alignment with the commu-
nity, but also transformed turbulent emotions like hatred, anger and grief
into more manageable emotions like shame. It was the emotional invest-
ments 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 dimen-
sions 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 them-
selves operate, incorporating and testing new theories developed within
the multi-disciplinary field of emotions scholarship, and exploring ritu-
als 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 frame-
works and priorities. In this introduction, our aim is not to provide a com-
prehensive 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 transforma-
tion—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 caus-
ally 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 con-
cerns, but are an encompassing framework for interpreting human interac-
tion. 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 incor-
porate 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 rela-
tionship 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 ‘rou-
tines’ 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 com-
munication 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 estab-
lishment 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 ques-
tion 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 marry-
ing 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 pre-
cinct 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 tradition-
ally 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 differ-
ent 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
body be any more autonomous than the self’?18 Theorists in her tradition
emphasise the socially constructed nature of the biological, including the
emotional. For them, most or perhaps all bodily responses are learned
behaviours, or habits, sometimes performed unthinkingly but nonethe-
less products of their culture. Humans are not only taught what to feel,
but also what should trigger feeling. The effect of being overwhelmed by
emotion, or unable to control feeling, is a product of social relationships
and cultural context—even as it appears naturalised.19
Particularly within the humanities, such debates are influenced by mod-
els of selfhood that vary from those that believe in an independent a priori
self that is more or less informed by biology and culture, to those that view
selfhood as contingent, performed, practised or created in relation to the
other.20 One of the distinctive differences between these two types of self
are that a priori selves can feel independently of culture, but often have
to articulate that feeling using the norms and language of their upbring-
ing. In contrast, contingent selves usually (though not always) cannot feel
independently of culture; emotion is created through its articulation.
The scholars in this volume situate themselves in a range of positions
within this debate. Broomhall, Bronwyn Reddan and Claire Walker draw
on Scheer’s conception of ‘emotional practices’ in their chapters, where,
as for interactionist theorists, emotion is a product of social habitus and
so is culturally contingent. Jacqueline Van Gent situates the effectiveness
of Moravian rites across vastly different cultures in their ability to provide
catharsis to those who have experienced trauma, situating the efficacy of
such rituals in a universal biology that crosses culture. Harvey Whitehouse
and Pieter François conclude the volume in an Afterword that brings the
universalising perspective of evolutionary anthropology. Their chapter is
an invitation, or a challenge, to historians to consider comparing rituals
across historical contexts and to treat the constants in biology seriously.
Some historians will find Whitehouse and François’ call to take highly con-
textualised observations of rituals beyond the geographical and historical
zone in which they existed confronting, others will find it invigorating in
opening up new ways to address old questions.
When emotion is placed at the heart of ritual, the different frameworks
for engaging with emotion profoundly influence how scholars imagine
rituals to work. For evolutionary anthropologists, the emotional response
created in humans through their participation in rituals is informed by bio-
logical responses designed to ensure human survival by embedding people
in social networks, often through encouraging a diminishing of the self
along with a sense of powerful external force (God or the equivalent).21
For such scholars, this biological response is a form of emotional arousal,
where the higher the level of emotional arousal, the greater the level of
social cohesion, and ultimately fusion, amongst members of the group.22
The Afterword by Whitehouse and François discusses the implications of
this idea through Whitehouse’s ‘modes of religiosity’ theory and explores

the effect that different emotional conditions have on the intensity and
type of social cohesion. For some, a belief in the importance of emotional
arousal to ritual has led it to be the determining factor in a judgement of a
ritual’s efficacy—thus, it is posited that a ritual has died when it stops pro-
ducing emotion in its participants.23 In his chapter, Sowerwine explores
how the French public’s emotional involvement in the rituals that flour-
ished after Leon Gambetta’s death lost their ability to arouse intense emo-
tions as the political conditions in France changed.
For others, low-arousal rituals are not necessarily less effective; they
just produce different types of selves, social relationships and societies.24
Reddan, Toland and Broomhall explore rituals that could be said to
involve low levels of emotional arousal, partly because these rituals were
performed frequently and particularly in Toland’s case because the ritual
was designed to avoid the strong emotion produced by physical encoun-
ter. Yet, these chapters also point to the important role that these rituals
played in maintaining familial and institutional cohesion; the rituals they
explore assisted individuals in feeling connected both with other members
of the ritual community and with the collective identity formed within
that family or institution.
Whilst there are compelling reasons to investigate arousal levels, focus-
ing on levels of emotional arousal in ritual activities raises profoundly chal-
lenging questions for historians. The assumption that levels of emotional
arousal can be measured consistently across time and place is suggestive
of both a universality of human experience and an a priori self. This is
problematic for those who view the self as contingent. To start with, emo-
tional arousal is a slippery thing to measure, even in living participants.
Given that emotional effusiveness—that is, the extent to which emotions
are overtly displayed, gesticulated and expressed—is a known cultural vari-
able, determining levels of arousal is fraught. Moreover, most empirical
studies of emotional arousal have focused on emotional dysphoria cre-
ated through traumatic rituals, with a focus on memory formation as an
indication of arousal level or on rituals where participants are particularly
animated.25 None of the authors in this collection study the type of trau-
matic rituals normally associated with emotional dysphoria, such as tongue
piercing, blood-letting or scarification of the flesh, but the religious ritu-
als studied by Helen Hills, Hotchin and Walker all provide insights into
rituals that potentially produced heightened emotional states in the par-
ticipants. Zika’s chapter similarly demonstrates the heightened emotional
and physical arousal of participants in the witches’ Sabbath dance, which

both distorts the body and communicates heightened emotional and sex-
ual arousal.
Here the Afterword by Whitehouse and François offers scholars an
important perspective on the impact that the type of ritual and its fre-
quency have on emotional arousal. Responding to their insights gained
from carefully controlled psychological experiments, historical case stud-
ies and ethnographies, historians, who face the challenge of uncovering
emotional arousal in historical contexts, can nevertheless begin to investi-
gate the types of group cohesion different rituals might produce. Equally,
historians can make their own contribution to ritual studies by showing
the ways that social, community and family cohesion could be fashioned
in so-called low-arousal rituals. Moreover, scholars who view the self as
contingent can challenge the ritual as a space where the self is diminished,
arguing for its recreation in a new form through ritual action. As contin-
gent selves are usually imagined as porous and relational, this is perfectly
compatible with ritual as a producer of social cohesion.
The recent scholarly engagement with the relationship between emo-
tion and ritual is at least partly due to an interest in the concept of ‘collec-
tive emotions’ and their role in social change.26 Whilst collective emotions
can be conceptualised as a product of the sum of their parts, that is, as a
phenomenon where the same emotion is experienced simultaneously but
individually by a group of people, studies of ritual and its role in social
cohesion are suggestive of the possibility that emotions can be shared and
even contagious.27 In pursuing this approach, many of the chapters in this
volume contribute to one of the longest-running discussions in anthro-
pological literature on the nature of the distinctive emotional arousal, or
the effervescence of feeling, that comes from participating in a collec-
tive activity or that being part of a group incites.28 In order to address
this question, Sowerwine uses Barbara Rosenwein’s model of emotional
communities that locates feeling as a shared normative value. His chap-
ter explores the nexus between emotions in crowds and the creation of
national grief.29 Walker highlights the mimetic processes that enabled
emotional contagion to spread through her religious community, whilst
Van Gent similarly looks at collective memory and its associated rituals in
spreading religious revival. For these authors, as for Hotchin, the sensa-
tion of combining the individual self with both God and the religious
community was key to a participant’s personal sense of ritual efficacy. It
is worth noting that all of the methodological approaches taken in this
volume provide for the possibility of collective emotions, either through

the diminishing of the self in favour of the group or in the formation of
a contingent self that is made in relationship with the other. Emotions
here are still felt in individual bodies, but, either as products of the wider
culture or through the ritual process itself, emotions are collectively con-
ceived and experienced.
Making Power
As a key mechanism for emotional transformation, ritual is implicated in
processes of social change and, through this, in the creation, maintenance,
evaluation and destabilisation of power. Through maintaining social cohe-
sion, ritual can ensure social stability and continuity of identity; through
its ability to create new emotions or to redirect emotion, it can also cre-
ate new forms of cohesion and new groupings.30 It is implicated in the
nature of social structure itself, by informing the character of the social
bond between individuals. Many of the authors in this collection address
the interaction between power, emotion and ritual by exploring power as
a relationship between actors. Power here is conceived of in formal terms
as the ability of an individual or institution to exert power over others, to
exercise authority and to enable things to happen.31 Who had the power
to orchestrate rituals, and thus influence emotions, goes towards the heart
of seeing rituals as acts that were fundamentally implicated in the creation,
maintenance, display and revision of power dynamics.
Rituals are used to bind individuals, families and nations together,
reaffirming wider norms, values and political processes, contributing
to social stability as well as the preservation of established power rela-
tions. Soyer demonstrates how a public baptism was used (or at least was
an attempt) by a monarch to bring his unruly subjects into line, whilst
Hotchin argues that crowning rituals invested nuns into wider community
norms and values, bringing them into an orderly relationship with their
convent. As she explores, this occurred at a time when female religious
were grappling with shifting ecclesiastical requirements and power rela-
tions. For Broomhall, the ritual activity of letter writing by VOC officials
reinforced power dynamics within the complex hierarchy of this organisa-
tion. Affective language in these letters was part of the staging of some-
one’s place in existing power relations. Her case study looks not only at
the potential rituals have to disrupt power but also at how they can make
existing power more secure.
Yet, ritual actors can also resist or reframe ritual to allow for new forms
of expression and thus new power relationships in society. As Sowerwine
demonstrates in his discussion of processional rituals commemorating the
death of French Republican Leon Gambetta, and as Walker describes in
her study of English Jacobite nuns, rituals allow for the creation of alter-
native political communities, producing new types of patriotism and resis-
tance to dominant power structures. Another case in point is Starbuck’s
analysis of ritual encounters between French explorers and the indigenous
peoples of the New World. Here the ritual of engagement was a fraught
process, where one group initially attempted to assert power over another
who were unfamiliar with the meanings inherent in the rituals used. Later
explorers felt less need to so significantly assert their belief in their superi-
ority and rituals of encounter adapted to reflect a desire for a different type
of power relationship between these groups. Yet, the relationship between
ritual and power could be complex—rituals did not always produce the
desired effect, particularly if they were subverted by a subordinate group.
Van Gent demonstrates how ritual practices could provide a space for
European women to exert authority in a male-dominated institution, but
notes that on being adapted in a colonial context, indigenous women were
not able to use them to the same effect.
Rituals were not just implicated in public forms of power, but could
also shape the dynamics at home or amongst individuals. Reddan explores
how gift-giving rituals during courtship impacted on the power dynamics
within the subsequent marriage. Toland highlights how a reformulation
of the leave-taking ritual was also a renegotiation of the power relation-
ship between siblings. Power here is conceived of more locally as agency
and resistance rather than the ability to shape the will of others, and ritual
appears less stable, as something that allows individuals to negotiate the
symbolic meaning of ritual systems. Yet, as the earlier discussion suggests,
rituals remain collective endeavours that bind individuals into wider struc-
tures; interactions that complicate and dissolve individual identity, as well
as shaping it. Agency within rituals, as within much of society, is still a
mutual endeavour. Conversely, as Hills notes, a focus on power and mirac-
ulous events can overstate the power of the ritual itself. For Hills, the ritual
and the miracle are not identical. She argues in her chapter that whilst the
Treasury Chapel in Naples has typically been read as symbol of the power
of its patrons, a reading of the architecture in relation to the miracle of the
liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood challenges a model of ritual as pro-
ductive of civic power. For Hill, the architecture signified not the power
of the patron, but the miracle itself, emphasising the significance of the
materiality of architecture, blood and ritual to emotion and power. In this
she disrupts ordinary lines of power, by articulating power, emotion and
ritual as operating in unison, created as whole.
Through these processes, emotions become politically important;
they become powerful. In being used to create social cohesion and social
order, the uses of emotion are political acts.32 Interactionist theorists go
further, arguing that as all emotion is culturally constructed (and not just
directed), emotion itself is political. The importance of social discourse—
or symbols—to the shaping of self ensures that all acts of selfhood arise
from current political structures and that the emotional self is born out of
a process of regulation and control. Bourdieu referred to this as ‘symbolic
violence’, where the individual is discursively compelled to shape them-
selves in predefined ways, and where resistance arises from the interac-
tion between competing discourses and materialities.33 However, as Soyer
argues in his discussion of public baptisms, symbols can be saturated with
multiple and complex messages that provide space for manifold uses of the
same ritual symbols by both those who control the message and those who
receive and resist it.
One of the key dynamics to emerge from this volume is that rituals do
not operate at a single level, but speak to multiple social and power rela-
tionships simultaneously. The marriage ritual is a case in point. It is a cer-
emony that creates both a religious and a legal bond, bestows adulthood
on the participants, marks them as members of their community whilst
creating a new household unit, and directs the appropriate power dynamic
and the nature of emotion in future married life. It is a ritual which directs
everything from how an individual should feel in the everyday to their
relationship with the church and state. In this, it reflects the multiple
roles that many human beings simultaneously hold, from lover, wife and
mother to church-goer and subject/citizen in a hierarchy of communities
from local to national. As Barclay suggests in her chapter, it is the ability
of ritual to intricately tie together an individual’s local emotional invest-
ments, such as in the family or in Soyer’s example in religious belief, into
bigger social and political structures, such as church or state power, that
enables the longevity of the ritual’s efficacy. In saturating ritual symbols
with multiple and complex meanings, rituals utilise longstanding feelings
in new ways and for new uses. This both enables social change and invests
new, and also established, power structures with authority.
Ritual Contexts: Familial, Political, Religious

As this suggests, the embeddedness of rituals across and between differ-
ent domains is an important feature of the emotional power of rituals.
The interconnected nature of ritual, and indeed medieval and early mod-
ern society itself, becomes startlingly clear when the attempt is made to
categorise rituals into discrete domains. Yet, partly for reasons of con-
venience, but also because core domains play a key role in shaping the
meaning of ritual and the production of emotion and power, this volume
is divided into three sections. Part 1, ‘Familial and Personal Rituals: Local
and Community Networks’, includes chapters by Bronwyn Reddan, Katie
Barclay and Lisa Toland, which show how rituals located in familial and
domestic settings reveal their embeddedness in both local and wider com-
munity networks. Part 2, ‘Civic and Nation-Building: Power Created,
Power Reinforced’, takes local and community networks onto a larger
stage, with chapters by Susan Broomhall, François Soyer, Nicole Starbuck
and Charles Sowerwine. This section highlights how formal institutional,
civic and political power is reinforced through ritual processes, and yet
requires individual emotional engagement to produce cohesive social
order. Part 3, ‘Religious Rituals: Relationships with the Divine and the
Political’, picks up on this latter theme by looking at religious rituals in
chapters by Julie Hotchin, Helen Hills, Claire Walker, Jacqueline Van
Gent and Charles Zika. Here, the chapter by Sowerwine which appeared
in Part 2 engages in a conversation with Walker’s chapter on the venera-
tion of relics which held powerful personal and religious messages as well
as deeply political ones. Rather than promoting clear divisions in terms
of how rituals are performed and function, the conceptual division of the
chapters demonstrates the rich vitality and strength of rituals when they
are investigated within (overlapping) social, cultural and political domains.
Across these three parts, the authors range across rituals that acted as
large-scale spectacles, including public baptisms, state funerals and reli-
gious processions, to official rituals, such as marriage, and the making of
perpetual vows by nuns, to personal and familial rituals, such as gift-giving
and leave-taking. The collective outcome of this scholarly activity has not
produced a simple answer to how ritual, power and emotion interact in his-
torical moments. As the varied nature of the contributions suggests, what
is revealed is the diversity of ways in which social power relationships have
arisen within, and through, ritual practices in the past, and the importance
of emotion in understanding how this happened. The c ollection finishes
with an Afterword by Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François which pro-

vides an evolutionary anthropological perspective to the question of ritual
and relates this to the findings generated by the preceding chapters in the
collection.
As a volume that brings together historians, art historians, anthropolo-
gists and literary scholars, as well as drawing on a range of theoretical
approaches and methodologies, a wide range of sources are put to use,
not only in providing evidence for ritual practices but also as ritual prac-
tices themselves. The bedrock of historical research—letters, institutional
records, print culture—is transformed here from simply texts to be mined
for data to emotional objects implicated in ritual practices. Broomhall and
Toland explore the role of letter-writing as ritual processes. Soyer demon-
strates how the pamphlets that describe public baptisms were themselves
part of the ritual process, designed to expand its effects to the furthest
corners of the nation, whilst Zika demonstrates how ritual can be trans-
formed through print, drawing representation into ritual process. Other
contributors such as Hills, Hotchin, Walker, Barclay, Sowerwine and Zika
offer timely reminders that objects, art and architecture are vital sites for
exploring the ways in which emotions are created, expressed and rein-
forced. Ritual symbols take on material dimensions.
For these authors, the irreducible materiality of objects is central to
the efficacy of the ritual for its participants. For the nuns in both Walker’s
and Hotchin’s chapters, the materiality of the martyr’s relics as they were
processed through the convent’s cloister, and the crown and veil which
was present at a nun’s coronation, were powerful representations of the
divinity of the ritual experience. Zika’s chapter teases out the importance
of where ritual participants were placed in relation to ritualised objects and
the most important ritual figure of all, Satan. As Hotchin shows, some
ritual objects were intensely personal, while other objects, such as the rel-
ics discussed by Walker and Hills, were necessarily shared by everyone
taking part in the ritual.
In Sowerwine’s chapter, we even see the process through which mate-
rial objects are imbued with ritual meaning and how objects take on new
power and emotional significance in relation to the creation of a new r itual.
Gambetta’s body parts were removed and held, first for scientific reasons
and then amongst a small circle of people, before becoming objects of
national veneration. The transformation of body parts into objects of deep
meaning and adoration stretches back centuries in Christian Europe. That
Sowerwine traces a similar process in the supposedly secular society of
nineteenth-century France is testament to the potency of material arte-

facts in ritual. Hills develops a different argument, reading materiality and
architecture beyond the traditional discourse which has focused on mate-
rial objects and buildings as fixed, static and tangible items. Her chapter
opens up the discussion on materiality to consider sacred objects as not
just symbols of social relationships and power, but active agents in their
own right. As all of these chapters demonstrate, these items were part of
the emotional landscape of the ritual, as important to creating and sustain-
ing the ritual’s emotional power as any other component, and so act as
critical sources for historical study.
Conclusion
At this moment throughout the social sciences and humanities, and par-
ticularly in the field of history, there is a desire to understand what emo-
tions are doing. To what extent does emotion act as a driver of historical
change and to what extent can we uncover the experience of emotions;
(how) can emotions be historicised? Fundamentally, the question which
is driving much of this recent activity, even if it is not one that is often
explicitly articulated, is what compelling evidence would permanently shift
the historical debate towards including emotions history in all historical
fields of enquiry? Traces of this are already beginning to emerge within the
scholarship on the history of medieval Europe, the history of religion, the
history of law and the history of the family.34 As this collection demon-
strates, ritual too provides a rich and fertile field to explore and understand
culturally variant emotions. The chapters in this collection demonstrate
that we have moved away from thinking about emotions as byproducts of
ritual to showing how emotions are integral to rituals, even driving them,
and thus are integral to understanding power, self-identity, community
and hierarchy. The study of rituals, when it is alert to the emotions which
are woven into and through ritual activities, presents an opportunity to
explore profoundly important questions about people’s relationships with
others, the divine, with broader power dynamics and, importantly, their
own identity. This volume highlights the contribution that historians,
art historians and literary scholars make to ritual studies and emotions
scholarship through their context-specific knowledge of the societies and
periods in which these rituals were performed and the far-reaching social,
cultural and institutional importance of ritual practices and the emotions
that produced and informed them.
Notes
1. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans.
Joseph Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1912, trans. 1915]).
2. On emotions informing structures of power, see William Reddy, The
Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Katie Barclay,
Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland,
1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011);
Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming
of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008).
3. Renato Rosaldo, ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural
Force of Emotions’, in Text, Play and Story: The Construction and
Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. Stuart Pattner and Edward
Bruner (Washington DC: American Ethnological Society, 1984),
178–98.
4. Discussions of ritual cross a broad array of domains. This list gives
some suggestion of the scope: Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Nicholas
Terpstra, The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social
Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); Jelle Haemers, ‘A Moody Revolt? Emotion and Ritual
in Early Modern Revolts’, in Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th–
16th Century), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardins and Anne-Laure Van
Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 63–82; James A. Epstein,
Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in
England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion,
Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011); Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), Death,
Ritual and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989); David Cressy,
Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in
Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried and Patrick J. Geary (eds), Medieval
Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
5. Recent examples include: Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and

Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Sergio Bertelli, The King’s

Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,
trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2001).
6. Marcello Fantoni, ‘Symbols and Rituals: Definition of a Field of
Study’, in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian
Urban Culture, ed. Samuel Cohn, Marcello Fantoni, Franco
Franceschi and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013),
15–40; Gerhard Jaritz (ed.), Ritual, Images, and Daily Life: The
Medieval Perspective (Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2012). Studies on
rituals in urban settings have been a particularly fruitful area of
inquiry.
7. Kirik Petkov, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self and Society in the High
and Late Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
8. Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the
Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010); Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of
Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London:
Routledge, 1997).
9. Some useful surveys include: Erika Summers-Effler, ‘Ritual Theory’,
in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, ed. Jan E. Stets and Jonathan
H. Turner (New York: Springer, 2007), 135–53; Axel Michaels and
Christoph Wulf, ‘Emotions in Rituals and Performances: An
Introduction’, in Emotions in Rituals and Performances: South Asian
and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity, ed. Axel
Michaels and Christoph Wulf (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–21;
Pamela E. Klassen, ‘Ritual’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 143–61.
10. Summers-Effler, ‘Ritual Theory’; Thomas J. Scheff et al., ‘The

Distancing of Emotion in Ritual (and Comments and Reply)’,
Current Anthropology 18(3) (1977): 483–505.
11. John Borneman, ‘Tonight: European Rituals of Initiation and the
Production of Men’, in Emotions in Rituals, ed. Michaels and Wulf,
292–305; Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive
Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press,
2004).
12. Summers-Effler, ‘Ritual Theory’.
13. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Randall Collins, Interaction
Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Randall Collins, ‘Emotional Energy as the Common Denominator
of Rational Action’, Rationality and Society 5 (1993): 203–30;
Joseph O. Baker, ‘Social Sources of the Spirit: Connecting Rational
Choice and Interactive Ritual Theories in the Study of Religion’,
Sociology of Religion 71(4) (2010): 432–56.
14. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Maria
Gendron and Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘Reconstructing the Past: A
Century of Ideas about Emotion in Psychology’, Emotion Review
1(4) (2009): 316–39; Jonathan H. Turner, ‘The Sociology of
Emotions: Basic Theoretical Arguments’, Emotion Review 1(4)
(2009): 340–54.
15. Batja Mesquita, Nathalie Vissers and Jozefien D. Leersnyder,

‘Culture and Emotion’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social &
Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, vol. 5 (Oxford: Elsevier,
2015), 542–9. See also Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie
Livingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy and Barbara
H. Rosenwein, ‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of
Emotions’, American Historical Review 117 (2012): 1487–531.
16. Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, 1506; Maria Gendron, Kristen
A. Lindquist, Lawrence Barsalou and Lisa Feldman Barrett,
‘Emotion Words Shape Emotion Precepts’, Emotion 12 (2012):
314–25; Turner, ‘The Sociology of Emotions’; Jan Plamper, ‘The
History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara
Rosenwein and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2010):
237–65; Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History
of Emotions’, Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–32; Andrew Beatty,
‘Current Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field’,
Emotion Review 5 (2013): 414–22; Maria Gendron and Lisa
Feldman Barrett, ‘Reconstructing the Past: A Century of Ideas
about Emotion in Psychology’, Emotion Review 1 (2009): 316–39;
Susan J. Matt, ‘Current Emotion Research in History: Or Doing
History from the Inside Out’, Emotion Review 3 (2011): 117–24;
Anna Wierzbicka, ‘“History of Emotions” and the Future of
Emotion Research’, Emotion Review 2 (2010): 269–73.
17. Evelyn Tribble and Nicholas Keene, Cognitive Ecologies and the

History of Remembering: Religion, Education and Memory in Early
Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
18. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that What
Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to
Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51(2) (2012):
193–220, especially 207.
19. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 207.
20. William Reddy, ‘Historical Research on the Self and Emotions’,
Emotion Review 1 (2009): 302–15; Christina Howell, Mortal
Subject: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); Gilles Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition (London: Continuum, 1994).
21. Brian Hayden, ‘Alliances and Ritual Ecstasy: Human Responses to
Resource Stress’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26(1)
(1987): 81–91; Harvey Whitehouse, ‘Ritual and Acquiescence to
Authoritative Discourse’, Religion, Brain & Behaviour 3(1) (2013):
76–9; Harvey Whitehouse and Jonathan A. Lanman, ‘The Ties that
Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion and Identification’, Current Anthropology
55 (2014): 674–95.
22. Harvey Whitehouse, ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor, and

Memory in Melanesian Initiation Cults’, in Religion and Emotion:
Approaches and Interpretations, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 133–48.
23. Collins, ‘Emotional Energy’.
24. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity; Goffman, The Presentation of Self;
Richard Handler, ‘Erving Goffman and the Gestural Dynamics of
Modern Selfhood’, Past and Present Supplement 4 (2009): 280–300;
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (London: Routledge, 1999); Caroline Braunműhl,
‘Theorizing Emotions with Judith Butler: Within and Beyond the
Courtroom’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
16(2) (2012): 221–40; Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, ‘Taking
Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities, and Subjectivities’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 433–52;
François Berthomé and Michael Houseman, ‘Ritual and Emotions:
Moving Relations, Patterned Effusions’, Religion and Society:
Advances in Research 1 (2010): 57–75; Jennifer A. Johnson, ‘The
Window of Ritual: Seeing the Intentions and Emotions of “Doing”
Gender’, Gender Issues 26 (2009): 65–84.
25. Uffe Schjoedt et al., ‘Cognitive Resource Depletion in Religious

Interactions’, Religion, Brain & Behavior 3(1) (2013): 39–86.
26. Christian von Scheve, ‘Collective Emotions in Rituals: Elicitations,
Transmission, and a “Mathew-Effect”’, in Emotions in Rituals, ed.
Michaels and Wulf; Glen Pettigrove and Nigel Parsons, ‘Shame: A
Case Study of Collective Emotions’, Social Theory & Practice 38(3)
(2012): 504–30; Sven Ismer, ‘Embodying the Nation: Football,
Emotions and the Construction of Collective Identity’, Nationalities
Papers 39(4) (2011): 547–65.
27. Steven Connor, ‘Collective Emotions: Reasons to Feel Doubtful’,
History of Emotions annual lecture given at Queen Mary, University
of London, 9 October 2013.
28. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
29. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
30. For discussion, see David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
31. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 152. For a discussion, see
Louise Lamphere, ‘Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict among
Women in Domestic Groups’, in Women, Culture and Society, ed.
Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1974), 97–113; Michael G. Smith, Government in
Zazzau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 18–20.
32. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling; Eustace, Passion is the Gale.
33. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972), 191; Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a
Kind of Practice’, 208; Summers-Effler, ‘Ritual Theory’; Barclay,
Love, Intimacy and Power, introduction.
34. Susan Broomhall (ed.), Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities
in Britain, 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 2015); Katie Barclay,
‘Emotions, the Law and the Press in Britain: Seduction and Breach
of Promise Suits, 1780–1830’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies
39(2) (2016): 267–84; Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of
Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille,
1264–1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Joanne
Bailey, Parenting in England: Emotion, Identity and G eneration
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Corrigan (ed.), Religion
and Emotion.
PART I
Familial and Personal Rituals: Local

and Community Networks
CHAPTER 2
Gift-Giving and the Obligation to Love

in Riquet à la houppe
Bronwyn Reddan
‘I have the power, Madame’, said Riquet of the Tuft, ‘To give as much intel-
ligence as one can have to the person I love the most. And since you are,
Madame, that person, it is up to you whether you have that intelligence, it
is yours if you are willing to marry me.’1
The exchange of marriage gifts is a longstanding ritual in many cultures.

In the above dialogue between the protagonists in Charles Perrault’s 1697
fairy tale Riquet à la houppe (Riquet with the Tuft), Riquet’s offer of intel-
ligence in exchange for a promise of marriage defines marriage as a recip-
rocal relationship imposing emotional obligations on husbands and wives.
This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre

of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800 (project number
CE110001011). I would also like to thank the editors, as well as Professor
Charles Zika, Jean McBain and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable
remarks on this chapter.
B. Reddan (*)
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, VIC, Australia

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_2
24 B. REDDAN
The implied condition of the gift, that Madame will reciprocate the love
Riquet offers her by accepting his proposal, emphasises the emotional sig-
nificance of gift-giving as a ritual creating an interpersonal relationship
between the gift-giver and the gift-recipient. Although Perrault identifies
love as the motivation for Riquet’s gift, it is, like all gifts, not a disinterested
or benevolent offer, but part of a social system of exchange that imposes a
reciprocal obligation on Madame.2 This obligation requires that Madame
match the generosity of Riquet’s gift by giving him what he desires: a lov-
ing marriage. A similar offer is made to the heroine in Catherine Bernard’s
1696 version of the Riquet tale. Her Mama is offered intelligence if she
agrees to marry the ugly Riquet, but unlike Perrault’s Madame, Mama
is unable to reciprocate her husband’s generosity. The emotional bond
created by the ritual of gift-giving is the focus of this chapter. Reading
Perrault’s tale in light of Bernard’s version, I argue that gift-giving is an
emotional practice designed to create the ‘right’ emotions in the gift-giver
and the gift-recipient. The emotion in question is the obligation of love
associated with early modern marriage.
In seventeenth-century France, the ‘right’ emotion associated with
marriage was the subject of much debate (see also Chap. 3). In the 1690s
salon milieu in which Bernard’s and Perrault’s versions of the Riquet tale
were composed, this debate proposed a radical rethinking of the institution
of marriage that challenged its traditional role as a strategic social and eco-
nomic transaction. This counter-discourse revived a concept of marriage
articulated in mid seventeenth-century salons that reinterpreted the medi-
eval courtly love tradition to define marriage as a personal choice based on
love. This concept of marriage rejected the traditional model of marriage
on the basis that it was incompatible with love and imposed unjust restric-
tions on the liberty of women.3 The production of French literary fairy
tales was closely associated with this salon counter-discourse, with more
than 100 tales appearing between 1690 and 1709. Although Perrault is
the most well-known fairy tale author from this period, two-thirds of the
tales produced during this first vogue of French fairy tale publication were
written by women.4 Bernard’s tale reflects the pessimistic view of love
and marriage found in a number of these tales.5 Bernard’s Riquet, who
offers the same gift to the heroine as Perrault’s Riquet, but imposes an
obligation to love that she cannot fulfil, succeeds only in obtaining a wife
who despises him. Their asymmetrical gift exchange fails to produce an
emotional bond between husband and wife. By contrast, the reciprocal
exchange in Perrault’s tale creates a companionate marriage in which the
GIFT-GIVING AND THE OBLIGATION TO LOVE IN RIQUET À LA HOUPPE 25
emotional bond softens the transactional nature of early modern marriage.

This chapter suggests that a lack of reciprocity is the reason why the gift
exchange in Bernard’s tale fails to produce the loving marriage expected
by Bernard’s Riquet.
Riquet à la houppe is a seventeenth-century literary fairy tale without
any known folkloric antecedents.6 The gift exchange between Riquet and
the heroine is the pivotal moment around which the narrative of the tale is
structured. In Bernard’s and Perrault’s versions of the tale, the story com-
mences with the birth of two characters with opposing character flaws: a
beautiful but stupid heroine and an ugly but intelligent prince. The prince,
Riquet, attempts to woo the heroine by offering her the gift of intelligence
in exchange for a promise to marry him in one year. Once the heroine
accepts Riquet’s gift, her personality is transformed and her sudden mas-
tery of the art of conversation attracts a rival suitor who is both hand-
some and charming. A year elapses, and when Riquet returns to collect his
bride, she is unable to decide whether to fulfil her promise to marry him.
It is at this point that ideological differences between the two versions of
the tale emerge. In Perrault’s tale, Riquet informs the heroine that she has
the power to physically transform the person she loves. When the princess
declares her love for Riquet, he becomes the most handsome and charm-
ing man she has ever seen and the tale ends with the celebration of their
wedding. The marriage produced by their union is a reciprocal relation-
ship based on mutual affection. In choosing to love Riquet, Perrault’s
heroine bestows her gift of beauty on a husband who has the power to
give her an equally valuable gift. Lacking the power to transform Riquet
into a more desirable husband, Bernard’s heroine is forced to accept an
‘odious husband’ she cannot love. She cannot choose to reject him unless
she is willing to endure the social isolation caused by her lack of intelli-
gence.7 The tension between these two versions of the marital relationship
provides a fascinating insight into socio-political shifts in the concept of
marriage in early modern France.
Gift-Giving as a Reciprocal Emotional Practice

As a social ritual illustrating the power relations of the society in which the
gift is exchanged, gift-giving creates a contract between the gift-giver and
the gift-recipient based on the norm of reciprocity.8 This contract imposes
three obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive and the
obligation to reciprocate. Of these three obligations, the obligation of reci-
26 B. REDDAN
procity is critical to understanding the social nature of gift-giving. When

performed correctly, the obligation of reciprocity creates a continuous cycle
of exchange between the gift-giver and the gift-recipient. In offering a gift,
the giver indicates their intention to create a personal relationship with the
recipient and their willingness to be bound by the obligation of reciproc-
ity. When a recipient accepts a gift, they accept the reciprocal obligation to
return the gift. A gift is therefore never ‘pure’ or ‘freely given’, but a stra-
tegic social instrument that establishes a social bond between the gift-giver
and the gift-recipient.9 This social bond obliges the gift-giver and gift-recip-
ient to act in accordance with the social expectations governing the relation-
ship established by their exchange. Riquet’s gift to his future wife does more
than provide her with intelligence; like all gifts exchanged between prospec-
tive marriage partners, it offers himself to her as a husband. Her acceptance
of the gift indicates her willingness to accept Riquet as her husband.
In early modern France, the strategic exchange of gifts was used to
sustain relationships between friends, neighbours, kin and co-workers, and
create relationships of obligation such as marriage and patronage (see the
parallel discussion in Chap. 4). Natalie Zemon Davis and Sharon Kettering
examine the social significance of gift-giving as a compulsory, reciprocal
practice in their social histories of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
France.10 Like Marcel Mauss’ seminal essay on gift-giving, Davis concep-
tualises the metaphorical or symbolic aspect of gift-giving as ‘gratitude
engendering obligation’, interpreting the gratitude inspired by gift-giving
as a social binding tool in sixteenth-century France.11 But unlike Mauss,
Davis argues that there is no universal model of the stages of gift-giving,
proposing instead that gift-giving is a relational mode shaped by the sta-
tus, gender and wealth of the individuals exchanging gifts. This suggests
that the meaning of gift-giving is not stable and that the ritual exchange
of gifts, such as marriage gifts, may have different meanings at different
times even if they are based on the same principle of reciprocal exchange.
In sixteenth-century France, the ritual exchange of marriage gifts
included gifts recorded in the marriage contract, namely the dowry pro-
vided by the bride’s parents, the husband’s counter-gifts of promises to
give his wife clothing and jewellery, and coins or rings exchanged by the
bride and groom during the marriage ceremony.12 In Renaissance Italy,
the payment of a dowry was legally interpreted as a payment to the hus-
band that replaced a daughter’s inheritance. According to Jane Fair Bestor,
the husband’s reciprocal obligation to present his bride with wedding
ornaments was reinterpreted by jurists as a loan for a specific, limited use
rather than a gift by the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.13
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber interprets the Renaissance dowry as only one
part of the exchange of marriage gifts, an exchange she argues was recip-
rocal only in a symbolic sense as the gifts provided to the bride remained
the property of the husband and his heirs.14 The exchange of marriage
gifts in early modern France and Italy defined marriage as a strategic social
and economic alliance between husband and wife, their families and the
broader community. Gift exchange functioned as a symbol of the bond
created between husband and wife, but the precise nature of this bond var-
ied depending on how they negotiated the patriarchal framework under-
pinning early modern marriages.15
The unequal distribution of power in early modern relationships of
obligation was often concealed by the emotional bond created by the
exchange of gifts. Kettering’s examination of patronage in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century France emphasises the importance of the emotional
bonds that could be created by gift-giving. Although it was a relationship
underpinned by self-interest, Kettering argues that the obligatory reci-
procity of the patron–client exchange created a personal bond between
noble patrons and their clients. Using the rhetoric of gift-giving, clients
declared their gratitude, affection and undying fidelity to their patron and
these promises of faithful service were matched by the patron’s bestowal
of largesse, or material generosity. The ‘polite fiction’ of gift-giving
masked the transactional nature of patronage by emphasising the perfor-
mance of expressions of loyalty, gratitude and indebtedness by patrons and
clients. Over time, the personal relationship between patron and client
might develop into an affective relationship, but any emotional bond was
separate to the obligation of reciprocity: the patron–client bond did not
endure if reciprocity was not maintained.16
Evidence that the ritual of gift-giving in early modern France created
personal bonds between gift-givers and gift-recipients is an example of
how the performance of ritual can be used to create a particular emo-
tional response in ritual participants. This interpretation of ritual as an
emotional performance is based on Monique Scheer’s conceptualisation
of emotions as a kind of practice,17 and Renato Rosaldo’s argument that
rituals ‘serve as the vehicles for processes that occur both before and after
the period of their performance’.18 Scheer’s idea of emotion as practice
focuses attention on the doing of emotions as well as the having of emo-
tions. The idea of emotion as the embodiment of action emphasises the
fact that emotions require effort and must be created using practices such
28 B. REDDAN
as rituals. According to Scheer, emotional practices are ‘things people do

in order to have emotions’,19 and rituals manipulate body and mind in
order to achieve a particular emotional state.20 In relation to the ritual of
gift-giving, this means that husbands and wives exchange gifts in order to
evoke the love they are expected to feel for their spouse. This interpreta-
tion of the gift-giving ritual reads the reciprocal obligation of exchange
in light of social expectations of the marriage relationship and the idea of
love associated with it. The enactment of this reciprocal obligation is not
a natural or instinctive performance, but a set of learned behaviours that
change as the social definition of marriage changes.
This chapter reads the different meanings attached to the exchange of gifts
in Bernard’s and Perrault’s versions of the Riquet tale as a set of ‘amorous
scripts’ interrogating the obligation of love expected of husbands and wives
in seventeenth-century France.21 In this context, the emotional relationship
created by the performance of the gift-giving ritual becomes more important
than the gifts exchanged. In offering a gift to his intended future wife, Riquet,
as the gift-giver, performs the emotion associated with the type of relation-
ship he wishes to have with his wife. In accepting Riquet’s gift, the obligation
of reciprocity means that Riquet’s wife, as the gift-recipient, is expected to
reciprocate the love he has offered to her in accordance with the seventeenth-
century definition of marital love. If she fails to return Riquet’s love, she has
failed to fulfil the reciprocal obligation she accepted by accepting his gift. In
Perrault’s version of the tale, the heroine’s fulfilment of her reciprocal obliga-
tion transforms her ugly suitor into the most handsome prince in the world.
According to the two morals to this tale, it is only by loving Riquet that
Perrault’s heroine is able to produce this transformation: her love either turns
him into a handsome prince or it allows her to see him as one. It is her choice
to love Riquet that effects this transformation. In Bernard’s tale, the issue of
reciprocity is more complex. Although the heroine does marry Riquet, her
newfound intelligence makes her unable to love him, and the tale ends with
a pessimistic critique of marriage as a source of unhappiness for women. The
second part of this chapter examines this divergence on the issue of reciprocity
in relation to seventeenth-century ideas about love and marriage.
Early Modern Marriage as an Emotional

Institution
Unlike the contemporary Western concept of marriage as a private relation-
ship between two individuals designed to fulfil their needs for love, sex and
intimacy, marriage in early modern Europe was primarily an economic and
political institution designed to create a strategic social alliance between the

couple and their families. Love was not the primary motivation for mar-
riage, but early modern husbands and wives did expect to develop an emo-
tional connection with their spouse after they married.22 These ideas about
marriage were symbolised by the exchange of gifts by prospective marriage
partners. The important role of marriage as a mechanism for the transfer
of property meant that, particularly in aristocratic families, the exchange
of dowry gifts was carefully negotiated by the parents or close relatives
of the couple. These negotiations focused on the social status and wealth
of the bride and groom, and emphasised the definition of marriage as an
economic alliance sealed by the exchange of property such as land, animals,
equipment, cash, clothing and household goods.23 The details of this prop-
erty transfer were recorded in marriage contracts that stipulated the types
of gifts exchanged between husband and wife, and the terms upon which
the exchange occurred.24 This reciprocal material exchange transformed
the couple into a single economic unit with shared property as the basis for
the establishment of a separate household. This mutual reciprocity did not,
however, establish marriage as an equal partnership, as a husband contin-
ued to exercise legal authority over his wife’s property and person.25
In early modern France, the traditional exchange of dowry gifts was
often accompanied by the exchange of small tokens of affection by the
couple, such as flowers or items of personal clothing, during the courtship
period.26 The gifts exchanged by Riquet and his future bride exemplify the
use of a more personal form of gift-giving to create an emotional relation-
ship between the couple before the formal negotiation of their marriage
contract. These efforts to develop an affective connection between hus-
band and wife reflect an increasing emphasis on the emotional dimensions
of marriage. The companionate idea of marriage that developed during
this period was not incompatible with traditional marital duties of mate-
rial support and reproduction. The difference introduced by the compan-
ionate model was the identification of love as the proper motivation for
marriage. But as we see in Perrault’s Riquet tale, the emotional model of
marriage did not displace the traditional role of marriage as a moment
of material exchange. Riquet’s marriage is negotiated by the reciprocal
exchange of gifts and it is this exchange that makes it possible for the
heroine to love Riquet.
In seventeenth-century France, marriage was understood as an institu-
tion blending economic self-interest and emotional fulfilment: marrying
for love and marrying for economic reasons were not mutually exclusive
ideals.27 The legal definition of marriage as a sacrament and a civil contract
30 B. REDDAN
reflected this complex idea of marriage. Canon law promulgated following

the last session of the Council of Trent in November 1563 defined mar-
riage as an indissoluble sacrament that could be validly constituted by the
mutual consent of the couple; parental consent was not required.28 This
definition of marriage was challenged by the French state’s assertion of
secular jurisdiction over marriage during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In 1556, 1578, 1629 and 1639, the Parlement of Paris regis-
tered legal instruments creating a body of civil law that defined marriage
as a contract requiring parental consent.29 The statute of 1556 banned
clandestine marriages (secret marriages made without parental consent)
and raised the age of consent from 20 to 30 for men and from 17 to 25
for women. The 1578 Ordinance of Blois required the officiating priest
to obtain proof of parental consent. The 1629 Code Michaud required
parental consent for the remarriage of widows aged 25 or younger. In
1639, the Parlement of Paris registered a decree that summarised the 1556,
1578 and 1629 provisions and made parental consent a requirement of all
marriages regardless of the age of the couple or any previous marriage.
In the following decades, judges in the Parlement of Paris consistently
asserted state jurisdiction over marriage by overruling disputed decisions
from ecclesiastical courts. By the end of the seventeenth century, marriage
was increasingly defined as a civil contract rather than a religious one.30
The patriarchal legal framework established by the French state’s
codification of marriage as an economic institution subject to parental
control was explicitly rejected by salon counter-discourses on love and
marriage. These counter-discourses proposed the reformulation of mar-
riage based on equality between the sexes and personal choice based on
love. Marrying to satisfy family obligation or choosing a spouse based
on his socio-economic status rather than his personal merit was explicitly
rejected by this critique of seventeenth-century marital convention.31 A
series of letters exchanged by Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de
Montpensier, and Françoise Bertaut de Motteville between 14 May 1660
and 1 August 1661 exemplified this criticism of marriage as a patriar-
chal institution. Montpensier, who was in the unusual position of being
a single woman in control of substantial inherited wealth, refused several
marriage proposals, including one from her younger cousin Louis XIV.32
In her letters to Motteville, she developed a vision of a utopian community
without marriage where women controlled their destiny and their prop-
erty.33 Marriage, which Montpensier rejected as a form of slavery from
which women must deliver themselves, was only allowed on the basis of
love, and people wishing to marry would be required to leave the com-
munity.34 This pessimistic view of marriage as an institution that limited
the liberty of women by granting power over their lives to men underpins
Bernard’s version of the Riquet tale.
Bernard’s criticism of love and marriage as sources of unhappiness for
women is part of an explicit authorial strategy to use her writing to ‘show
only unhappy lovers to combat, as much as I could, the penchant we have
for love’.35 Bernard articulated this intention in the preface to Le Comte
d’Amboise, the second in a series of three novels published between 1687
and 1696 under the title Les Malheurs de l’amour (The Misfortunes of Love).
In the preface to the first novel in the series, Éléonor d’Yvrée, Bernard
explained her decision to present the ‘malheurs de l’amour’ as a desire to
challenge the dangerous impression created by novels that reward virtuous
and delicate lovers with happy endings. Instead, Bernard put her heroes in
situations so sad that no one will envy them.36 The pessimistic ending to
Bernard’s Riquet tale, which is embedded in the third novel of the series,
Inès de Cordoue, reflects this authorial intention.
Fulfilling the Obligation to Love in Riquet à la

houppe
Although there is much debate about whose version of the Riquet tale
came first, it is likely that both Bernard and Perrault were aware of the tale
by the other due to the frequent circulation of salon tales in oral or manu-
script form prior to publication.37 This chapter adopts Elizabeth Wanning
Harries’ position that the tales should be interpreted as rival stories told
in a salon one afternoon.38 The most striking difference between the two
versions of the tale is the contrast between Bernard’s pessimistic critique
of marriage as a patriarchal institution and Perrault’s optimistic interpreta-
tion of marriage as a reciprocal relationship.39 This ideological divergence
is illustrated by the different consequences associated with the gift-giving
ritual. In both tales, the moment of exchange sets the tone for the nature
of the marriage relationship between Riquet and the heroine. The asym-
metrical exchange in Bernard’s tale represents gift-giving as a coercive,
self-interested transaction. The marriage produced by this exchange is a
loveless union in which husband and wife are bound to each other solely
by the relationship of obligation created by their exchange of gifts.
32 B. REDDAN
The reciprocal exchange in Perrault’s tale depicts gift-giving as an emo-

tional practice softening the transactional nature of marriage. The her-
oine’s counter-gift of beauty balances Riquet’s gift of intelligence, and
perfects the bond between husband and wife by allowing them to remake
each other in their own image.40 The opposition of male intelligence and
female beauty, which Patricia Hannon refers to as the ‘mind-matter antith-
esis’ underpinning Perrault’s tale, evokes the Aristotelian association of
men with the mind and women with matter in philosophical debate about
the nature of women in the querelle des femmes (quarrels about women).41
In this context, both versions of the tale resolve the problem of female
intelligence by confining it within the sphere of marriage. Both heroines
depend on their husband for the gift of intelligence, and that gift is con-
ditional upon their acceptance of marriage and the patriarchal authority of
their husband. The difference between the tales lies in the nature of the
marital relationship between Riquet and his newly intelligent wife.
The male hero, Riquet, initiates the gift-giving ritual in both tales.
As the gift-giver, Riquet has the power to create a personal relationship
with the gift-recipient, a power he uses to acquire a beautiful and intel-
ligent wife. Bernard and Perrault present two very different ideas about
the nature of this exchange: Perrault’s Riquet anticipates the gift of his
beloved’s hand in marriage as an exchange that will make him ‘the happi-
est of men’,42 whereas Bernard’s Riquet is more pragmatic. At their first
meeting, Bernard’s Riquet commands Mama to stop (arrêtez), informing
her that he has something unpleasant to tell her and something agree-
able to promise her. The unpleasant thing is the fact that despite Mama’s
beauty, the inferiority of her mind causes people to disregard her. The
promise is that he will give her the intelligence she desires if she agrees
to marry him. All the advantage of the exchange belongs to Riquet: he
gets a beautiful and intelligent wife, while Mama’s intelligence causes her
nothing but unhappiness. She does not have any attachment to her hus-
band other than the relationship of obligation created by her acceptance
of his gift and her newfound intelligence makes her acutely aware of his
defects.43 When confronted with Mama’s reluctance to fulfil her promise
to marry him, Riquet tells her that she has a simple choice to make: marry
him or return to her former (stupid) state. Mama agrees to the marriage
only because she cannot bear to give up being intelligent.
The direct language of Riquet’s proposal to Mama is different from the
indirect speech used by Perrault’s Riquet. If Mama wants to have intel-
ligence, she must love Riquet and she must marry him. Bernard’s Riquet
explicitly invokes the language of obligation (il faut) to express the condi-
tional nature of his gift. It is more difficult to untangle the precise nature
of Mama’s reciprocal obligation. When Riquet offers his gift, he identifies
two separate obligations, ‘[1] [y]ou must love Riquet of the Tuft, that’s
my name; [2] you must marry me in one year’, but then immediately
refers to the condition being imposed on Mama in singular terms: ‘that’s
the condition that I impose on you’.44 The fact that Riquet’s reference to
‘the condition’ immediately follows his articulation of Mama’s obligation
to marry him suggests that marriage is the condition imposed on Mama
and that an obligation of love is subsumed within this condition. Riquet’s
response to Mama’s subsequent infidelity supports this interpretation of
Mama’s reciprocal obligation. When Riquet takes away Mama’s intelli-
gence during the day (the time she was spending with her lover), he does
so because although Mama fulfilled the literal terms of the exchange by
marrying him, she breached the spirit of her reciprocal obligation by using
her intelligence against him to engage in adultery.45 Mama’s failure to love
her husband aligns her experience with salon counter-discourse on mar-
riage that questioned the compatibility of love and marriage.
The transactional nature of the gift-exchange between Riquet and
Mama in Bernard’s tale illustrates the asymmetrical power relations
embedded in the traditional model of marriage as socio-economic trans-
action. Riquet’s blunt proposal emphasises the material advantage of the
match and, unlike Perrault’s Riquet, he does not express any emotional
investment in Mama’s acceptance of his proposal. Riquet’s wounded reac-
tion to Mama’s obvious revulsion for him after their marriage suggests
that he did expect that his gift would create an emotional bond between
himself and Mama.46 Riquet’s gift was successful insofar as it created a rela-
tionship of obligation, but a lack of reciprocity in the exchange prevents
the creation of an emotional bond between husband and wife. Mama’s
promise to marry Riquet in exchange for intelligence was not truly recip-
rocal because Mama acted out of ignorance and fear rather than generosity
or gratitude.47 She is unable to comprehend the implications of the gift
until after she has repeated the verse that Riquet tells her will teach her
how to think:
Love can surely inspire me

To shed my stupidity,
One need only know how to love:
Here I am, ready.48
34 B. REDDAN
Mama’s repetition of these four lines puts her in an impossible situation.

The act of repetition creates the intelligence she needs to decide whether
to accept Riquet’s gift. Mama therefore accepts the gift before she can
decide whether she should accept it and is thus bound by the obligation of
reciprocity to someone whose gift she does not want to return.49
Mama’s inability to perform the right emotional response demanded by
her acceptance of Riquet’s gift means that their relationship is unbalanced:
she resents his generosity and he despises her lack of reciprocity. Mama
cannot fulfil her reciprocal obligation to love Riquet as her disgust for his
physical deformity prevents the formation of an emotional bond between
the couple. Unlike Perrault’s heroine, she possesses no magical gift to rec-
oncile herself to the marriage and is forced to choose between two equally
unpalatable options: marry a man she despises or face rejection by the man
she loves.50 Paradoxically, it is the verse that Riquet tells Mama to repeat
that seals his fate as an unhappy, unloved husband. Mama’s repetition of
it does indeed inspire her to love, but she is not inspired to love Riquet.
Riquet’s attempt to create a particular emotional response in Mama fails
because she is unable to match his gift of intelligence with an equivalent
act of generosity. Riquet punishes Mama for her lack of reciprocity by
taking away her intelligence during the day and then transforming her
lover into a hideous gnome. Unable to distinguish between the man she
loves and the husband she hates, Mama’s intelligence is rendered worth-
less by her husband’s vengeance.
When Riquet punishes Mama for her failure of reciprocity, he converts
his gift from the register of exchange to the register of coercion.51 His
attempt to control Mama by depriving her of the ability to converse with
her lover, while retaining for himself the benefit of an intelligent wife,
highlights the self-interested nature of his gift: ‘when I [Riquet] gave
you intelligence, I presumed I would enjoy it’.52 Riquet’s assertion of his
power as Mama’s husband reflects the patriarchal power structure of early
modern marriage. In seeking to control his wife, Riquet exercises the legal
right seventeenth-century husbands had to demand obedience.53 When
this strategy fails, his vengeance prompts Bernard to end her tale with a
wry observation about the zero-sum nature of marriage for early modern
women: ‘in the long run, all lovers become husbands’.54
The optimistic ending to Perrault’s tale does not share Bernard’s pes-
simism that love inevitably leads to unhappiness. His tale concludes with
two morals emphasising the power of love as an emotional counter-balance
to the transactional nature of early modern marriage. The first moral,
which claims that Perrault’s tale is not really a story because it is true,
emphasises the transformative power of love as an emotion that makes the
object of affection beautiful and intelligent.55 This moral suggests that the
gift exchange between Riquet and Perrault’s heroine is a metaphor for the
transformative effect of falling in love. The second moral characterises love
as an illusion that causes lovers to see what they want to see in their beloved.
According to this moral, Perrault’s Riquet is not actually transformed into
a handsome prince, but the effect of love means that the princess no longer
sees his faults.56 Yet, regardless of whether love is a transformative or an
illusory force, the ending to Perrault’s tale reinforces the patriarchal nature
of early modern marriage. Like Bernard’s Mama, Perrault’s princess has
limited choice about whether to marry. The intelligence she desires is only
available to her as Riquet’s wife, so her choice to love him is dictated by her
circumstances as well as her personal inclination. Her love for her husband
makes submission to his authority more palatable, but it does not change
the patriarchal nature of their relationship.
Negotiating the Obligation to Love: Conclusion

The first section of this chapter examined gift-giving as a social ritual
designed to create an emotional bond between the gift-giver and the gift-
recipient. The second and third sections analysed the seventeenth-century
idea of marriage as a reciprocal relationship negotiated within a patriarchal
framework using the case study of ritual gift-giving in the Riquet tales by
Perrault and Bernard. In writing different versions of the marriage rela-
tionship between Riquet and his wife, Perrault and Bernard present differ-
ent interpretations of the obligation of love associated with early modern
marriage. In Perrault’s tale, the successful gift exchange between Riquet
and his bride represents marriage as a reciprocal relationship where the
emotional bond between husband and wife softens the patriarchal struc-
ture of their relationship. This model of companionate marriage relies on
the exchange of marriage gifts to create the loving union that sustains
their partnership. In this tale, the ritual of gift-giving provides a mecha-
nism to create the right emotional relationship between husband and wife.
Their performance of the reciprocal obligation of love through the mutual
exchange of gifts allows their marriage to fulfil early modern social expec-
tations about the nature of this relationship.
The failed gift exchange between Bernard’s Riquet and his reluctant
bride illustrates the structural limits on the ability of early modern women
36 B. REDDAN
to negotiate the gendered power imbalance inherent in the early modern

marriage relationship. The unbalanced gift exchange between Riquet and
Mama represents marriage as an asymmetrical exchange causing unhap-
piness to both parties. The ritual of gift-giving cannot create the right
relationship between husband and wife because Mama cannot fulfil her
obligation to love her husband. Her inability to love Riquet means that
she cannot reciprocate his gift, and her inability to perform the right
emotional response causes her marriage to fail. Bernard’s criticism of the
asymmetrical nature of the seventeenth-century marriage relationship
reflects the pessimistic view of marriage associated with the seventeenth-
century salon tradition. The radical nature of her critique is illustrated by
the final sentence of her tale, a maxim warning that all lovers eventually
become husbands. According to Bernard, marriage means that all women
will eventually be unable to distinguish between the man they once loved
and their husband. Love, whether an illusion, a transformative force or a
source of unhappiness, does not alter the balance of power between hus-
band and wife.
Notes
1. Charles Perrault, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, in Contes Merveilleux: Perrault,
Fénelon, Mailly, Préchac, Choisy et Anonymes, ed. Tony Gheeraert,
Bibliothèque des Génies et des Fées 4 (Paris: Honoré Champion,
2005), 235. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.
2. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in
Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990),
1–7.
3. Joan E. DeJean, ‘Introduction: La Grande Mademoiselle’, in Against
Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle, ed. Joan
E. DeJean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 14;
Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social
Stratification in 17th-Century France (Princeton: Princeton
4. This figure is based on the revised version of Raymonde Robert’s
‘Tableau des contes de fées’, in Madame d’Aulnoy: Contes des Fées
suivis des Contes nouveaux ou Les Fées à la Mode, ed. Nadine Jasmin
(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 61–5.
5. Nadine Jasmin, ‘“Amour, Amour, ne nous abandonne point”: La
représentation de l’amour dans les contes de fées féminins du grand
siècle’, in Tricentenaire Charles Perrault: Les grands contes du XVIIe

siècle et leur fortune littéraire, ed. Jean Perrot (Paris: In Press, 1998),
227–32.
6. See note 37 below.
7. Catherine Bernard, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, in Contes: Mademoiselle
Lhéritier, Mademoiselle Bernard, Mademoiselle de La Force, Madame
Durand, Madame d’Auneuil, ed. Raymonde Robert, Bibliothèque
des Génies et des Fées 2 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 289.
8. Mauss’ essay, which remains the starting point for theoretical analy-
sis of gifts in a number of fields, emphasises the reciprocal nature of
gift-giving: The Gift, 1–5, 13–14, 39–41. See also Frank Adloff,
‘Beyond Interests and Norms: Toward a Theory of Gift-Giving and
Reciprocity in Modern Societies’, Constellations 13(3) (2006):
407–27; Alvin W. Gouldner, ‘The Norm of Reciprocity: A
Preliminary Statement’, in The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,
ed. Aafke E. Komter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
1996), 49–66; Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Principle of Reciprocity’,
in The Gift, ed. Komter, 18–25; John F. Sherry, ‘Gift Giving in
Anthropological Perspective’, Journal of Consumer Research 10(2)
(1983): 157–68.
9. Mauss, The Gift, 5. Lévi-Strauss also examines the strategic nature of
gift exchange as a ritual establishing social bonds between the gift-
giver and the gift-recipient: ‘The Principle of Reciprocity’, in The
Gift, ed. Komter, 18–23. Alvin W. Gouldner interprets the cycle of
exchange as the creation of indebtedness that structures social rela-
tions over time by maintaining social stability: ‘The Norm of
Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement’, in The Gift, ed. Komter, 63.
10. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 124–9; Sharon
Kettering, ‘Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France’,
French History 2(2) (1988): 131–2.
11. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, 9.
12. Ibid., 27–9.
13. ‘Marriage Transactions in Renaissance Italy and Mauss’s Essay on
the Gift’, Past & Present 164(1) (1999): 26–31.
14. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 215–39.
15. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, 28–9. See also note 54
below.
38 B. REDDAN
16. Kettering, ‘Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France’,

131–2, 138–42.
17. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is That
What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to
Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–5.
18. Renato I. Rosaldo, ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural
Force of Emotions’, in Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and
Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. Edward M. Bruner (Washington
DC: American Ethnological Society, 1984), 192. This latter point is
extended in several chapters in this collection, notably Chapters 3
and 9.
19. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’, 194 (emphasis in

original).
20. Ibid., 209–12.
21. Patricia Hannon uses this term to refer to textual instability in

Bernard’s tale arising from linguistic competition between Riquet
and his wife, but it works equally well as a description of the differ-
ences between Perrault’s and Bernard’s tales: Fabulous Identities:
Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1998), 129.
22. Suzanne Desan, ‘Making and Breaking Marriage: An Overview of
Old Regime Marriage as a Social Practice’, in Family, Gender, and
Law in Early Modern France, ed. Suzanne Desan and Jeffrey Merrick
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009),
2–9; François Lebrun, ‘Amour et mariage’, in Histoire de la popula-
tion française, ed. Jacques Dupâquier, Alfred Sauvy and Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1988), 300–12.
23. Desan, ‘Making and Breaking Marriage’, 3–9; Wendy Gibson,

Women in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1989), 42–5; Martha Howell, ‘The Properties of Marriage in Late
Medieval Europe: Commercial Wealth and the Creation of Modern
Marriage’, in Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle
Ages, ed. Miriam Müller, Sarah Rees Jones and Isabel Davis
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 31–54.
24. Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of
Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 60–1.
25. Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France, 59–62; Merry E

Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 296.
26. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, 28–9.
27. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 72; Dena
Goodman, ‘Marriage Choice and Marital Success: Reasoning about
Marriage, Love, and Happiness’, in Family, Gender, and Law, ed.
Desan and Merrick, 30–40.
28. Canon law also required the publication of banns and the presence
of two witnesses: Lebrun, ‘Amour et mariage’, 294; Sarah Hanley,
‘Family and State in Early Modern France: The Marriage Pact’, in
Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present,
ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 64.
29. This body of civil law also established other requirements in relation
to the publication of banns and the presence of witnesses.
30. Lebrun, ‘Amour et mariage’, 294; Hanley, ‘Family and State in
Early Modern France’, 64–5.
31. DeJean, ‘Introduction: La Grande Mademoiselle’, 14; Sophie Raynard,
La seconde préciosité: Floraison des conteuses de 1690 à 1756 (Tübingen:
Narr, 2002), 44–66; Joan E. DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and
the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), 21–2; Marcelle Maistre Welch, ‘La femme, le mariage et
l’amour dans les contes de fées mondains du XVIIe siècle’, Papers on
French Seventeenth Century Literature 10(18) (1983): 47–58.
32. DeJean, ‘Introduction: La Grande Mademoiselle’, 4–6.
33. Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans Montpensier and Françoise de

Motteville, Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande
Mademoiselle, ed. and trans. Joan E. DeJean (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 26–9.
34. Ibid., 43–9.
35. ‘Mon dessein était de ne faire voir que des amants malheureux, pour
combattre, autant qu’il m’est possible, le penchant qu’on a pour
l’amour’: Œuvres, tome 1: Romans et nouvelles, ed. Franco Piva
(Fasano: Schena, 1993), 239.
36. [J]’ai pensé qu’il vaut mieux présenter au public un tableau des malheurs
de cette passion que de faire voir les amants vertueux et délicats, heureux
à la fin du livre. Je mets donc mes héros dans une situation si triste, qu’on
ne leur porte point d’envie.
Éléonor d’Yvrée (Paris, 1687), ‘Avertissement’.
40 B. REDDAN
37. Lewis C. Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France,
1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 205–6.
38. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 35.
39. For a more extensive discussion of the ideological significance of the
opposition between Bernard’s pessimism and Perrault’s optimism,
see Monique Vincent, ‘Les deux versions de Riquet à la houppe:
Catherine Bernard (mai 1696), Charles Perrault (octobre 1696)’,
Littératures Classiques 25 (1995): 299–309.
40. But see P.E. Lewis, who argues that this exchange is not reciprocal
as Perrault’s tale identifies intelligence as being more important than
beauty: Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the
Writings of Charles Perrault (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), 38–9. Seifert also argues that the exchange is not truly recip-
rocal because Perrault’s heroine does not know about her gift-giving
power until informed of it by Riquet: Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and
Gender in France, 208.
41. Patricia Hannon, ‘Antithesis and Ideology in Perrault’s “Riquet à la
houppe”’, Cahiers du dix-septième IV(2) (1990): 106–7. But see
Alison Ridley, who argues that Perrault’s tale inverts the Aristotelian
mind-matter dichotomy: ‘From Perrault’s “Riquet à la houppe” to
Buero Vallejo’s Casi un Cuento de Hadas: The Evolution of a
Formidable Female Voice’, Neohelicon 39(1) (2012): 150–4.
42. Perrault, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, 237.
43. ‘[S]on esprit, qui lui devenait un présent funeste, ne lui laissait
échapper aucune circonstance affligeante’: Bernard, ‘Riquet à la
houppe’, 288.
44. ‘Il faut aimer Riquet à la houppe, c’est mon nom; il faut m’épouser
dans un an; c’est la condition que je vous impose.’ Ibid., 287.
45. ‘[V]ous avez subi la loi qui vous était imposée. Mais si vous n’avez
pas rompu notre traité, vous ne l’avez pas observé à la rigueur.’ Ibid.,
291.
46. ‘Le gnome s’apercevait bien de la haine de sa femme, et il en était
blessé, quoiqu’il se piquât de force d’esprit.’ Ibid., 290.
47. Mauss identifies generosity and gratitude as important elements of
the gift-giver’s reciprocal obligation: The Gift, 1–7.
48. Bernard, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, 288. The first two lines of the transla-
tion are from Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From
Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm: Texts, Criticism (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 718. The last two lines are my own
translation.
49. ‘[Q]uelqu’un qu’elle s’était engagée à épouser en acceptant ses dons
qu’elle ne voulait pas lui rendre.’ Bernard, ‘Riquet à la houppe’,
288.
50. Mama fears that if she loses her intelligence, she will also lose the
affection of her handsome lover. Ibid., 289.
51. Davis describes this type of failure as ‘gifts gone wrong’. The Gift in
Sixteenth-Century France, 67–84.
52. Bernard, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, 291.
53. Seventeenth-century French women were legally subject to their
husbands, who were allowed to correct their behaviour with physical
punishment as long as they did not draw blood or use a stick larger
than the diameter of their thumb: Wiesner, Women and Gender in
Early Modern Europe, 37; Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century
France, 61.
54. Bernard, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, 292.
55. Ce que l’on voit dans cet écrit,
Est moins un conte en l’air que la vérité même;
Tout est beau dans ce que l’on aime,
Tout ce qu’on aime a de l’esprit
Perrault, ‘Riquet à la houppe’, 239.
56. Dans un objet où la nature,

Aura mis de beaux traits, et la vive peinture
D’un teint où jamais l’art ne saurait arriver,
Tous ces dons pourront moins pour rendre un cœur sensible,
Qu’un seul agrément invisible,
Que l’amour y fera trouver.
Ibid., 240.
CHAPTER 3
Intimacy, Community and Power: Bedding

Rituals in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Katie Barclay
In 1778, David McKie, aged 22 and a teacher of English and writing

at Maybole in Ayrshire, brought a declaratory of marriage suit against
Margaret Ferguson, the daughter of a farmer and McKie’s 17-year-old
student, before the Edinburgh Commissary Court.1 McKie claimed that
Ferguson wed him in 1777 in a bedding ritual and asked the court to con-
firm this. Despite having the Kirk session clerk call banns in a regular man-
ner, the couple had not married in a formal ceremony in the church, but
in a private house in Irving. Ferguson claimed that she was seduced to the
house under the belief that she was to meet some friends from Maybole.
When she arrived, David was there with his cousin Andrew Blair, his
brother-in-law, John Crow, and the homeowner, Elizabeth Main. She was
addressed as the bride and induced to get into bed with David. Margaret
described taking off only her gown, whilst David insisted that she ‘not
only cast of her Goun but all her Cloaths and desired the Landlady to
This research was funded by the Australian Research Council DE140100111.
K. Barclay (*)
Department of History, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_3
44 K. BARCLAY
lend her a Night head dress’. Once in bed, the group left them alone for
a short time. Ferguson insisted this was less than ten minutes and nothing
happened during that time. McKie argued that they were alone for over an
hour and the marriage was consummated, evidenced by Margaret’s ‘pleas-
ant smile of Satisfaction’ and that she acknowledged being McKie’s wife
on the return of the witnesses.
After a time, Blair, Crow and Main returned with five additional wit-
nesses, three men and two women. Blair approached the bed, asking:
‘Who is this here? Young folks I think’. He then addressed the parties,
asking: ‘You David McKie, take this woman to be your married wife’.
McKie replied: ‘I do before God and these Witnesses’. The same question
was put to Ferguson, who replied: ‘Yes’. Blair addressed the crowd, say-
ing: ‘Friends, you hear and see this’. The parties then toasted the health
of the couple, who got out of bed and joined the party. Blair wrote lines
affirming the marriage and asked the witnesses to sign it. The witnesses
were reluctant to do so, seemingly because they were worried about fall-
ing foul of church discipline for participating in an irregular marriage, but
once assured that the local minister had approved it, they happily signed.
Margaret returned home and refused to cohabit with David, who raised
the suit. She argued that the ritual was a ‘mockerie’ and that she did not
believe it had any validity. The court disagreed, finding them married per-
sons, in a context where a regular (church-sanctioned) marriage ceremony
was not required for a legally binding marriage.
Bedding rituals have been and continue to be a common phenomenon
in many cultures across the world.2 Although the nuances of the ritual
vary from place to place, a bedding ritual usually incorporated a couple
being put to bed on their wedding night by their friends, family and wider
community. In sixteenth-century Germany, newlyweds were put to bed to
the sound of pipers and drums, as well as ‘obscene’ noises, and after the
wedding party withdrew from the bedroom, they continued to celebrate,
drowning out the expected sounds from the bedroom.3 In many places,
the family or community dressed the bride and groom for bed separately,
before bringing them together in the marital bedroom. Bedding cere-
monies might incorporate other rituals, such as decorating the bed and
bedroom with flowers or, as in Shakespearean England, playing ‘fling the
stocking’, where the bride threw a stocking into the crowd, giving good
fortune to whoever caught it.4 In sixteenth-century Sweden, after the cou-
ple were put into the bed, their family and friends sat on it and shared food
with them, before leaving them alone.5
INTIMACY, COMMUNITY AND POWER: BEDDING RITUALS... 45
In most of Western Europe, unless you were the heir to the throne, no
one watched the consummation itself. Instead, the bedding ritual symbol-
ised the community’s investment in the couple’s union and particularly
sexual intimacy. For many historians, the bedding ritual has been analysed
as standing in for the consummation of the marriage, being viewed as
a ‘marker of married sexuality’ and of marital fidelity.6 The association
of bedding rituals with bawdy songs, music and jokes has reinforced the
importance of sex in the interpretation of the bedding ritual, something
also known in Scotland, where fiddlers often chose ribald songs to play to
cover the noise of the expected sexual activities.7 Following this interpreta-
tion, the bedding ritual has been viewed as highlighting the importance
of sex as the basis of early modern marriage in the popular imagination, if
not that of the church. Yet, as Susan Karant-Nunn reminds us, the ritual
could hold other meanings, depending on the context. In Reformation
Germany, it not only stood for sexual consummation and conferred adult-
hood on the bride, but through its associated rituals endowed the bride
with her socio-economic rights and duties as housewife.8
This chapter explores the significance of the bedding ritual to the Scottish
lower orders and particularly in shaping the intimate relationship between
husband and wife, and the couple and community. As Margot Todd notes,
the Scottish Kirk’s investment in promoting regular marriage, performed by
Kirk ministers before the congregation, was not just due to their interest in
regulating the sin of sexual relationships beyond marriage. Rather, the Kirk’s
ceremony that drew on the Book of Common Prayer and was accompanied
by a wedding sermon ‘surround[ed] and define[d]’ the action of marriage,
ensuring that the church controlled the meanings and functions of that rela-
tionship.9 Moreover, through marrying in front of the congregation, the
marriage ceremony affirmed the ‘communal nature’ of marriage and the
faith, locating the couple and their family within the Christian community
(see the parallel discussion for baptisms in Chap. 6). In a similar way, the
rituals that surrounded the bedding ritual acted, in part, to define the nature
of the marital relationship that followed, shaping the nature of both intimacy
and patriarchal power. In this sense, the ritual was not only transformative,
marking the movement of the couple from single and separate individuals
into the married state, but determinative, helping to define the nature of
that transformation, with reverberations for intimacy in later married life.
This chapter places less focus on the emotions felt by participants during the
ritual than on the lessons in appropriate behaviour and feeling for later mar-
ried life taught by and to the participants through these rituals.10
46 K. BARCLAY
The eighteenth-century lexicologist Samuel Johnson defined intimacy

as ‘close familiarity’, a usage that continues to have particular resonance
in modern scholarship, where intimacy is often used rather vaguely to
refer to any relationship between people in close contact.11 Yet, as histo-
rians now recognise, the behaviours, emotions and interactions expected
between intimates are historically and culturally specific, as well as varying
across relationships.12 This denaturing of intimacy has allowed for a focus
on the implications of the personal for wider social life as well as looking
at the role of the intimate within public life.13 As within personal relation-
ships, political or cultural intimacy does not require equality or even a
consensus of belief, but rather emphasises a shared cultural framework for
interpreting experience.
This model draws on a social constructionist understanding of subjec-
tivity that highlights the ways in which broader culture provides a frame-
work for interpreting experience, including those of emotion and the
familial, but which also allows for change through the interaction between
individual experience and wider cultural frameworks.14 The significance of
this model of intimacy has even led Michael Herzfold to argue that the
nation state is a product of intimacy.15 In some ways, a model that incor-
porates the nation seems in opposition to one based on proximity and
personal familiarity, but both share a belief in the importance of interac-
tions at the personal level to shaping broader cultural norms and values,
and vice versa. Moreover, it is a model that reinforces the feminist adage
‘the personal is political’—intimate lives are politically significant.
Understanding intimacy as a cultural and political product arising
from larger social structures implicates the community within the cre-
ation of intimacy between individuals. This can happen through educa-
tion and shared values passed down across generations, within popular
culture and through experience (allowing room for contest and negotia-
tion), but it was also taught and informed through social rituals. The
marriage ceremony in all its forms was a particular opportunity for the
community to demonstrate their understanding of the nature of married
life and, through participating in marriage rituals, individuals located
their relationship within this wider cultural framework for intimacy,
allowing, at least in part, for it to define it. In doing so, marriage rituals
helped inform expectations for behaviour, emotion and power within
married life.
Bedding Rituals in Scotland
Marriage in eighteenth-century Scotland was formed by consent alone.

The law did not require any particular formalities for a marriage to be
legally valid, although those who did not follow the Kirk’s prescriptions
for ‘regular’ marriage could find themselves subject to church discipline.
Similarly, consummation was not legally necessary for a valid marriage,
although impotency could be grounds for annulment.16 Bedding rituals in
Scotland therefore were situated against a legal context that required little
formal celebration of marriage and placed little emphasis on sex as central
to the marital relationship. In this, they provide a vibrant example of com-
munities exploring and negotiating the meaning and terms of the marital
relationship to meet local needs and values, and using rituals within that
process. This is not to suggest that the Scottish public rejected the legal
position that consummation was unnecessary for a valid marriage, but
rather that through their rituals, they sought to make a richer and more
complex definition of marriage.
The prevalence of bedding rituals within eighteenth-century Scotland
has been difficult to uncover. Bedding rituals appeared in popular culture
from across the country, and ethnographers note it as a distinctive fea-
ture of Shetland marriage practices.17 The left-hand side of David Wilkie’s
famous painting The Penny Wedding (1818), whilst appearing to locate the
wedding festivities in a barn, is dominated by a large boxbed, hinting at
the central role the bed played in marriage festivities. A boxbed may also
appear in Alexander Carse’s homonymous work from the following year,
although obscured by the dancing revellers.18 Scottish songs have numer-
ous references to beds and bedding rituals: ‘To church they went and soon
were wedded,/With friends made merry and were bedded’.19 One ballad
that laments the death of a couple-beggar, that is, a defrocked minister
who provided irregular marriages for the poor, noted that for a guinea
and a crown, the deceased not only performed the marriage ceremony, but
‘very fairly coup’d them down, In his awn Bed’.20 Others described the
ritual in more detail, listing the singing, food and toasting that accompa-
nied being put to bed:
The laddies did whistle and the lassies did sing,

They made her a supper might have served a queen;
With ale and good whiskey they drank her health round;
And they made to the lassie a braw bed of down.21
48 K. BARCLAY
Most of the evidence of bedding rituals in daily life arise from the
Commissary Court records and come from the lower orders, living in
the Scottish central belt and south-west, also areas associated with high
rates of irregular marriage.22 Such cases were not representative of the
very poor, but tended to come from the trades, such as maltster or wright,
or the farming community. Such accounts of bedding rituals, like those
in popular culture, suggest that it was a relatively unstructured affair,
the key feature of which was that the couple were witnessed lying in bed
together. In the 1760s, Archibald Buchanan decided to acknowledge
his informal relationship with Helen Buchanan, went to her home and
declared that she was his wife, and insisted on sleeping with her that night.
Before this was agreed to, Helen made him sign a declaration acknowledg-
ing their marriage. They then called on a neighbour to witness them in
bed together, with Alexander observing that ‘he was now in Bed with his
Wife’.23 A few years later, when it became known that James Smith had
being paying nocturnal visits to Janet Syme, he ‘in presence of several of
their friends acknowledged the defender to be his lawful maried wife and
that evening bedded with her oppenly in her fathers house and when in
bed were drunk to by their friends as husband & wife’.24 Some of these
marriages were clearly made in the face of community pressure. A witness
to the marriage of Mary Carmichael and John Philp, her lodger, described
how he went to call on them early in the morning and ‘heard her imposed
on’. When he pushed on the door, he found them both in bed, whereby
he asked whether they were married. John said yes, but Mary said no. The
witness then ‘made John Philp to take her by the hand and I declared
them to be married persons’, before making John sign a certificate to that
effect. In her statement, Mary described this situation as being bedded by
witnesses.25
Bedding rituals followed a range of forms of ceremony, from regular
and clandestine services performed by clergy to those with no ecclesiastical
involvement at all. Yet many appear to have been viewed by this commu-
nity as central to the completion of the marriage. Jean Aiken and William
Cairnie informed their friends that they had been married privately, after
which they were publicly bedded and ‘both at the time of the bedding and
next morning when in bed, they both acknowledged each other as married
persons declaring they took each other for spouses’.26 James Steedman
and Margaret Miller were married regularly in church and were bedded
following the wedding supper. The couple was placed in bed and one of
the witnesses declared ‘you are fairly bedded before witnesses I declare
you Married persons’.
The significance of the bedding ritual was not necessarily because of an
expectation that sex was required to complete the marriage. Despite still
being fully clothed, the curtains were shut around Steedman and Miller
and they were left alone for several minutes. Yet, ‘they did not go to naked
bed that night … Mrs Crawford and the oyr [other] women having said
that upon account of private reasons It was not proper that she should go
to naked bed with the pursuer that night, by which the deponent under-
stood that she was under her Courses at that time’. Although the marriage
was not consummated, one witness, John Laurie, described this scene,
noting that ‘the said bedding did not appear to the deponent to be a frol-
ick but he considered it as Intended for a sort of form of Marriage’.27 This
witness had not attended the church marriage ceremony, but he was aware
that it had happened, joining them afterwards for supper and the bedding.
Despite knowing the couple had married regularly, Laurie still described
the bedding ritual as a form of marriage in itself, operating alongside the
events in the church. Moreover, it was the symbol of the bedding rit-
ual with its connotations of sexual intimacy and physical union, not the
actual sexual consummation, that he viewed as essential to the making of
marriage.
How people felt when participating in a bedding ritual is rarely described
in the accounts that came before the Commissary Court, other than in
instances where women argued they were compelled to participate against
their will. In these situations, unlike in many cases of forced marriage that
centred on a ceremony overseen by clergy where family were not pres-
ent, women do not describe feeling ‘fear’, but rather confusion. Margaret
Miller used this strategy when she denied participating in a bedding ritual,
but was unsure about the marriage ceremony before the minister, arguing
that she was ‘so struck with this unexpected event that she really lost the
power of reflection & whether she went thro’ the ceremony of marriage
or not she does not absolutely recollect’.28 Margaret Ferguson denied the
validity of her bedding ritual as a form of marriage, saying that she had
said ‘yes’ she was McKie’s wife whilst in bed ‘from the confusion arising
from her situation before strangers’.29 The witnesses to the bedding were
asked whether she showed ‘signs of reluctance’, but they thought that
‘she seemed to be very well pleased and Expressed herself as freely as the
Man’.30
50 K. BARCLAY
Within early modern Scottish culture, men did not have the excuse of
being forced into a marriage ceremony. The cultural importance placed on
their oath-taking, which assumed men would not make false oaths without
significant duress, and the absence of physical violence meant that they
could not claim force in these cases.31 Women also found force difficult to
claim as the presence of numerous witnesses from their own community
meant that it was assumed that there was ample opportunity for them to
safely express their opposition. In these instances, fear was not a legally via-
ble emotional response and such women looked to ‘confusion’ to explain
their participation in events they later regretted or the full significance
of which they did not understand. ‘Confusion’ in an eighteenth-century
context could imply ‘distraction of mind’ or ‘disorder’, as well as that
events were obfuscated, a ‘want of clearness’.32 Yet, tellingly in the context
of community marriages, one of the key meanings of confusion was ‘to
mix, not to separate’, ‘one mingled with another’.33 In this, the sense that
the individual became lost within the desires of the group during the ritual
is suggestive—an idea that will be returned to below.
Unsurprisingly, witnesses to such events never described seeing reluc-
tance on the part of the bride—an acknowledgement that would have
made them complicit in a forced marriage. If they provided details on the
emotion of the couple at all, and it was rare, they described ‘pleasure’ and
‘satisfaction’, the latter of which, at least, seemed to have explicitly bawdy
implications. That it should be an enjoyable experience is also suggested
by the traditional toasting and drinking of alcohol around the bed, as well
as the music, dancing and feasting that often surrounded the event. Many
accounts record the witnesses offering congratulations and wishing health
to the newly married couple.
Despite the absence of emotional language in such accounts, the
detailed descriptions of events given by witnesses are suggestive of the
importance of beddings to forming marriage in the cultural imagination
of the era, as are the references to beddings in even brief accounts of
the essential elements of marriage. William Beveredge, when denying the
validity of his marriage, noted: ‘if he was married he knew nothing of it
for he was mortally drunk, and that the man who married them was as
drunk as he was, and said that he never cohabited with her as his wife, and
that he did not bed with her that night’.34 An analysis of these ceremonies,
contextualised through references to love, intimacy and bedding rituals in
Scottish popular culture sources, provides access to the meanings of the
ritual and the emotional expectations they created for later married life.
In this, the bedding ritual can be viewed in the words of Susan Bordo,
Binnie Klein and Marilyn K. Silverman as a ‘spatial drama’, where the
familiar cultural associations created through ritual shaped the ‘emotional
climate’ of the event, heightening the personal and cultural significance of
these interactions.35 Moreover, like with the regular marriage ceremony,
the emotional context of these rituals helped to define the intimate rela-
tionship of the couple in later life (see also Chap. 2 and 9).
Ritualising Intimacy, Sex and Power

As has been recognised by historians elsewhere, perhaps one of the promi-
nent messages of the bedding ritual was the emphasis on sexual intimacy
as a central part of married life. Couples were usually undressed (although
in an eighteenth-century context, this would not have meant they were
naked) and placed within a bed that symbolically represented the ‘marriage
bed’. This was rarely the actual marriage bed, with most beddings taking
place before the establishment of the marital home, often in the house of a
parent, friend or public inn or lodgings. The couple were deliberately left
alone for a period, in some contexts with music and feasting to disguise
the noise of the presumed sexual activity. For the very poor, it may have
been a rare opportunity for privacy given the ubiquity of bed-sharing for
these communities.36 These actions emphasised the importance of sexual
intimacy to married life, but also highlighted the joining of the couple
as a discrete unit, separate from other family and community members,
through leaving them alone. Like the music performed to disguise the
imagined sexual activities, it not only suggested that sex should be per-
formed discreetly, but that married couples may have a need for privacy
from other members of the community in other contexts. This reinforced
the importance of the couple as a distinctive unit and new family, even
within communities where close kin networks were the norm.37
Beds and beddings had clear sexual connotations, but were particularly
associated with legitimate sexuality in popular culture. Samuel Johnson
provided ‘marriage’ as the third definition of ‘bed’, after ‘something
made to sleep on’ and ‘lodging’. He defined ‘to bed’ separately, includ-
ing amongst his definitions ‘to cohabit’ and ‘to lay in order’.38 Married
couples were expected in law to entertain each other at ‘bed and board’,
whilst a legal separation was described as separation from bed and board.39
Both semantically and in the cultural imagination, the bed symbolised the
legitimacy of the marriage relationship. As such, sexual intercourse that
52 K. BARCLAY
took place within beds held greater significance than that which occurred
elsewhere.
This idea was often used playfully in ballads, with A Bonny Lad of High
Renown suggesting surprise that sex that did not occur in bed could lead
to procreation:
O Jonny, Johny, thou art to blame

For once in the Meadow, and twice in the Lee
I am sure I am wi’ Bairn to thee.
Wi’ Bairn to me! how can this be,
for I was nere in a Bed with thee,
But once in the Meadow, and twice in the Lee
And I’m sure this Bairn is not to me.40
Having sex in the meadow or in the lee was not viewed as signifying a
legitimate relationship, unlike that within a bed. Moreover, Johnny goes
on to suggest that there were other men that she could father the child on,
tying the bed not just to legitimacy but also sexual exclusivity and fidelity.
The significance of beds to a legitimate relationship can also be seen
in the ways that their use was analysed as evidence of the nature of the
relationship within Scottish legal ‘declarator of marriage’ suits. A witness
to the relationship of Jean White and William Hepburn described how he
‘saw the pursuer sitting up in the bed, and the defender sitting upon the
foreside, and the pursuer was leaning her head upon the defenders breast
who was supporting her with both arms’.41 He continued that he:
did not hear by whom they were married, in what house they were Married,
or who was present at the Marriage But that the deponent thought it as
Clear as Sunshine that they were Married from the Care and concern the
defender showed when sitting on the bed with the pursuer.
In a more complicated case, one witness, Mrs Thompson, described how

she had reprimanded Jean Tweedie for standing before William Thompson
after he had gone to bed, telling her that ‘it was an Impudent thing in her
to be there’. Jean defended herself by claiming marriage with William. For
both Mrs Thompson and Jean, proximity to the bed was inappropriate for
couples who were not married due to its association with sex and a legiti-
mate relationship. As this might suggest, there was anxiety around the
illegitimate uses of bed space and, as such, the meanings associated with
bed usage might be ambiguous. Another witness for Jean and William
observed:
the defender take the pursuer in his arms and Carry her into a Closs bed in
the kitchen, that the defender then drew to the door of the bed so that the
Deponent could not see what passed within, That the deponent staid about
half an hour in the Kitchen, during all which time the pursuer and defender
remained in the bed.42
He continued that they had not taken their clothes off and he never saw
them behave indecently. The meanings of their antics in the boxbed were
left deliberately unclear by this witness, although the judges ultimately
found the couple to be married.
The association of the bed with a legitimate relationship also tied bed-
ding rituals into the patriarchal structures for marriage during the period.
Beddings could be used to mark male property in women after marriage.
The ballad The New Way of Pittcathly Well recorded the lament of a man
who was prohibited from marrying his love by his parents. He ended his
song:
O were I but so blest

as freely call the[e] mine,
I’de treat thee in my Fathers House
With Country Cheer that’s fine
And [But] if there be no Downy Beds,
I’le chose a place unseen,
Where young Swans do often Shape,
There Nymphs a gown of Green.43
‘Gown of Green’ is a metaphor for seduction, so here the suitor laments

that he cannot ‘make her mine’ through celebrating amongst his family
and lying in a ‘downy bed’; instead, he is left with illicit sex in a place
unseen. Bedding was associated with the ownership of women inherent
in marriage, in a way that illicit sex was not. This was underpinned by an
association between prostitutes and sex in public places, so that describing
having sex with a woman in a public place could be akin to calling her a
prostitute.44
That beds and bedding rituals conveyed the importance of sexual inti-
macy and fidelity to marriage, as well as conferring legitimacy on a patri-
archal model for married life, implicated it within a particular model for
54 K. BARCLAY
loving that existed during the period (see also Chap. 2). As I explore at
length elsewhere, sexual intimacy was closely related to love within this
culture, with love both inspiring sexual desire and the act of sexual inter-
course giving rise to the emotion of love.45 Moreover, and particularly
before the second half of the century, love was viewed as an emotion cre-
ated through the ritual act of marriage rather than a motivation for mar-
riage. Husbands promised to love their wives in their church wedding
vows, whilst women promised to convey their love through obedience.
The vows made within church placed an emphasis on love as an action
that followed an oath during the ceremony. In contrast, the bedding ritual
located love within the assumed act of sexual intercourse, but in both
cases, love arose through and during the ritual process, and was expected
to be continued into the everyday. In this, love was not a spontaneous
feeling, but something that couples performed and that had a corporeal
dimension. As such, going to bed each night, as well as the act of sex
within marriage, was not only a continued reminder of the importance of
love within marriage but an act of loving itself.
Moreover, like in wedding vows where men promised to love and
women to obey, a model of marriage located around sexual intimacy was
equally patriarchal. Not only were bedding rituals associated with the
legal ownership of wives conveyed through marriage, but they were also
informed by a cultural belief that located sex as a method of controlling
unruly women. Numerous ballads closely related male sexual impotency
with a lack of authority within marriage and, in turn, sexual satisfaction
acted to pacify women.46 Within this context, the focus on sexual intimacy
within the bedding ritual reinforced the gender hierarchy within marriage.
It was an idea that went out of fashion towards the end of the eighteenth
century as sex became more associated with reconciliation after marital
dispute and a marker of marital happiness rather than a display of marital
power.47 This is not to suggest that marriages were more equitable dur-
ing this period, but that the gender hierarchy was not implicated in sex so
explicitly. The meanings attached to the bedding ritual changed to reflect
different understandings of gendered power and sexual intimacy, promis-
ing pleasure and marital happiness. As a result, the bedding ritual not only
implicated couples within a particular model of loving, but of content-
ment and happiness, tying marriage more closely to personal wellbeing
and fulfilment than it had been in the past. This perhaps reflected a greater
expectation and demand for personal happiness during this later period,
which can also be seen in the framing of the American Constitution and
elsewhere.48
Community, Power and Emotion
The Bride lap in to the Bed,

Ann the Bridgroom ged till her
The Fidler crap [crept] in to the mids[t]
Ann they H—dled altogether.49
As the fiddler who crept into the middle implied, bedding rituals were
viewed as community affairs. Whilst the privacy accorded to the couple
during the act of consummation defined the couple as a discrete unit, bed-
ding rituals were notable for their involvement of friends, family and com-
munity within the act of marriage. Witnesses were not required for a legal
marriage. Only two were required by the Kirk’s regular ceremony and
there was no obligation for them to know the couple concerned. During
the eighteenth century, it was increasingly fashionable for church wed-
dings to take place privately, that is, without the presence of the congrega-
tion, and many only involved the marrying couple and a few close friends
or family. It was after the ceremony, or in its absence, that the community
came together to celebrate the occasion. In many respects, the bedding
ritual operated as a key sign to the local community of the legitimacy
and authenticity of the marriage of the couple. In turn, the community,
through acting as witnesses and through their celebrations, acknowledged
and gave permission for the union.
For marriages that did not incorporate a formal regular or clandestine
ceremony, the presence of multiple witnesses was a useful assurance, par-
ticularly to women, that their marriage could be proved in court if they
were later abandoned by their spouse. And they also ensured that the
wider community would acknowledge the relationship in everyday life.
Yet, symbolically, it went further by embedding the married couple within
the community and conversely, inserting the community into the marital
relationship, including the sexual relationship. In this context, sexual inti-
macy was not an exclusively private affair, but one in which the community
had a vested interest, something that can also be seen in the level of com-
munity regulation of sexual behaviour more broadly during the period,
demonstrated by the numerous nosy neighbours who act as witnesses
56 K. BARCLAY
of sexual behaviour for the Kirk and the law courts during this period.50
Rather than such surveillance being an invasion of privacy—an intrusion
on the intimacy of others—their presence was accepted as a dimension of
sexual intimacy in this community. Sexual intimacy became both a private
and public experience, something perhaps also mirrored in the practicali-
ties of life for the lower orders who lived in one or two room homes and
often shared beds.51
Taking this further, the community also became invested in marital
love. This was more than just an interest in its maintenance; rather, the
community actively authorised the feelings of the couple and so became
implicated in its creation. Romantic love, of course, could exist without
the community’s authority, but, in doing so, it existed outside of the
accepted social order, leaving the couple vulnerable to exclusion and pov-
erty. It was rare for transgressive love affairs to end in anything other than
tragedy in Scottish popular culture.52 For some people, the importance
of the community’s authorisation to the existence of love meant that love
could not exist without it.
Margaret Ferguson, whose story opened this chapter, denied her mar-
riage to David McKie after her relatives refused to acknowledge it, due to
their belief that he was not of a high enough social status (something McKie
disputed).53 Similarly, whilst her aunt arranged her marriage, Margaret
Miller’s other relatives were against it.54 In both cases, the women were
teenagers, fatherless (and thus vulnerable to exploitation) and claimed that
they were ‘confused’ when they went through with the ceremony. The
witnesses in these cases argued that the women were enthusiastic partici-
pants and they were both found to be legally married, despite their pro-
tests. Their confusion may be viewed as a convenient excuse for actions
they later regretted, but equally it may well be that these young women
found it difficult to imagine that a marriage that had not been sanctioned
by their community was valid. In this, the sense of ‘mixing’ or ‘mingling’
that confusion held is suggestive of a blurring of self within the commu-
nity for these women. Both at the time of the bedding ritual and then
later in discussion with their own families, their own emotional autonomy
was deeply interlinked with that of the surrounding community, making
it difficult for them to articulate their own desires—if indeed they could
conceptualise desire beyond the community (which may not be the case).
Without the sanction of their own communities, there could be no love,
with both women denying that their courtships, or the bedding rituals it
was alleged they participated in, created any meaningful attachment or
emotion. Instead, they articulated their feelings as ‘confusion’, reflecting

their inability to explain their actions in a context where love could not
exist without the endorsement of the community. Their confusion arose
from the disjuncture between their understanding of themselves as dutiful
daughters and their participation in marriage rituals without familial sanc-
tion. The resolution, for them, was to deny the validity of the marriage
and the emotions that should arise from that relationship. Love required
the community’s acknowledgement, which in turn explained the cultural
significance of the bedding ritual, alongside or in place of a formal church
ceremony. Moreover, it may be as the church ceremony became increas-
ingly privatised, the bedding ritual became more central for this group,
who needed the community to enable their marital love. The result of
this was that the bedding ritual tied the community to marital love and
marital love tied the couple to the community. In this, marriage ensured
social order by emotionally binding married couples to their communities
through their investment in their relationships.
Conclusion
Bedding rituals not only marked the sexual consummation of marriage
and the community’s endorsement of marriage, but also placed sexual
intimacy at its heart. In this, they became integral to both the emotional
and power relationships that operated within marriage, creating a par-
ticular model for loving that reinforced the cultural gender hierarchies
of the period. Sexual intimacy was not an equalising force in this culture.
Bedding rituals also drew friends and family into the marriage relationship,
asking them not only to authorise the relationship through bedding the
couple, yet also highlighting that this was not a ‘private’ relationship, but
a form of love and intimacy that also incorporated the community. That
the public were integral to this ‘private’ emotional experience complicates
understandings of romantic love and sexual intimacy as being intrinsi-
cally tied to the personal and interactions between individuals. Instead,
it reinforced marriage as an emotional relationship that was centred on
the couple, but included the group. Moreover, whilst the bedding ritual
was only performed once, going to bed as a married couple was usually a
daily occurrence, allowing couples to repeat this ritual in the everyday. In
doing so, couples were reminded of the importance of marital love, sexual
intimacy, family and community, and hierarchical power relationships to
marriage, embedding them in their communities and investing them in
social order. In this, marriage conferred adulthood at multiple levels.
58 K. BARCLAY
Notes
1. National Registers of Scotland (hereinafter NRS), CC8/6/38/159
David McKie agt Margaret Ferguson, 1780.
2. For some global examples, see: Daniel Seabra Lopes, ‘Retrospective
and Prospective Forms of Ritual: Suggestions of Social
Transformation in a Portuguese Gypsy Community’,
Anthropological Quarterly 83(4) (2010): 721–52; Karen Ericksen
Paige and Jeffery M. Paige, The Politics of Reproductive Ritual
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Hanne Blank,
Virgins: The Untouched History (London: Bloomsbury, 2007),
89–92 and 98.
3. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An
Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge,
1997), 30–2.
4. Sasha Roberts, ‘Let Me the Curtains Draw: The Dramatic and
Symbolic Properties of the Bed in Shakespearean Tragedy’, in
Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil
Harris and Natasha Kord (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 156.
5. Mia Korpiola, Between Betrothal and Bedding: Marriage Formation
in Sweden 1200–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 61–3.
6. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 31; Roberts, ‘Let Me the
Curtains Draw’, 157; Korpiola, Between Betrothal and Bedding,
61–3.
7. Joseph M. Ortiz, Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of
Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 151; Peter
Cooke, The Fiddle Tradition of the Shetland Isles (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 85–8.
8. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 31.
9. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern
Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 272–3.
10. For a theoretical discussion of emotion in ritual and how it unfolds
in everyday life, see Christian von Scheve, ‘Collective Emotions in
Rituals: Elicitations, Transmission, and a “Mathew-Effect”’, in
Emotions in Rituals and Performances: South Asian and European
Perspectives on Ritual and Performativity, ed. A. Michaels and
C. Wulf (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–77.
11. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (Dublin:
W.G. Jones, 1768), unpaginated – see ‘intimacy’.
12. Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy
in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2011); T. Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London:
Vintage, 1998), 324–5; A. Giddens, The Transformation of
Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted
by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Tony Ballantyne
and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility,
and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 2008).
13. Neringa Klumbyte, ‘Political Intimacy: Power, Laughter and Co-
existence in Late Society Lithuania’, East European Politics and
Societies 25 (2011): 658–77.
14. Katie Barclay, ‘Composing the Self: Gender and Subjectivity within
Scottish Balladry’, Cultural and Social History 7(3) (2010):
337–53.
15. Michael Herzfold, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-
State (New York: Routledge, 1997).
16. Andrew MacDowall Bankton, An Institute of the Laws of Scotland
in Civil Rights, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, A. Kincaid and
A. Donaldson, 1753), 60.
17. Cooke, The Fiddle Tradition, 86.
18. Alexander Carse, The Penny Wedding (1819).
19. The Husband’s Secret let out!! (c. 1830).
20. The Grievious Complaint of the Beaux and the Bads, And a the young
Widows, and Lasses and Lads, For Death’s taking Mas: James
Crouckshanks awa, Who buckl’d the Beggers at Mountounha (1724).
‘Coup’d’ can roughly translate as ‘to be put to bed’, but has disor-
derly connotations.
21. The Blaeberries, or Highland Laird’s Courtship (Durham: George
Walker, c. 1797–1834).
22. Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sexuality and Social

Control: Scotland 1660–1780 (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1989),
105. It is also telling that these areas are also geographically close
to the Commissary Court, so may reflect the fact that despite the
Court having national coverage, in practice, it was used more fre-
quently by those nearby.
23. NRS CC8/6/27/110 Helen Buchanan agt nephews of deceased
Archibald Buchanan of Balfunning, 1768.
60 K. BARCLAY
4. NRS CC8/6/30/137 James Smith agt Janet Syme, 1773.

2
25. NRS CC8/6/64/269 Mary Carmichael agt John Philp, 1796.
For more discussion on the relationship between rape and court-
ship, see Katie Barclay, ‘Love and Courtship in Eighteenth-Century
Scotland’, in Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Public,
Intellectual and Private Lives, ed. Katie Barclay and Deborah
Simonton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 37–54; Katie Barclay, ‘From
Rape to Marriage: Questions of Consent in the Eighteenth-
Century United Kingdom’, in Interpreting Sexual Violence:
1660–1800, ed. Anne Greenfield (London: Pickering & Chatto,
2013), 35–44.
26. NRS CC8/6/52/250 Jean Aiken agt William Cairnie, 1790.
27. NRS CC8/6/37/157 James Steedman agt Margaret Miller, 1778.
28. NRS CC8/6/37/157.
29. NRS, CC8/6/38/159.
30. Ibid.
31. Alec Ryrie, ‘Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant

Spirituality’, in Small Graves: Death, Emotion, and Childhood in
Premodern Europe, ed. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds with
Ciara Rawnsley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Conal
Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The
Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006). This is not to imply that female oath-tak-
ing was not taken seriously, but that women were viewed as more
vulnerable to coercion through fear.
32. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (Dublin:
W.G. Jones, 1768), unpaginated, ‘to confuse’, ‘confusedly’,
‘confusion’.
33. Ibid.
34. James Scott Marshall (ed.), Calendar of Irregular Marriages in the
South Leith Kirk Session Records, 1697–1818 (Edinburgh: Neil &
Co., 1968), 17, entry 205, 9 April 1719.
35. Susan Bordo, Binnie Klein and Marilyn K. Silverman, ‘Missing
Kitchens’, in Places Through the Body, ed. Heidi Nast and Steve Pile
(London: Routledge, 1998), 72–92.
36. Tom Crook, ‘Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in

Victorian Britain’, Body & Society 14(4) (2008): 14–35.
37. For a discussion of this, see Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power,
71–3.
38. Johnson, A Dictionary, unpaginated – see ‘bed’ and ‘to bed’.

39. For an example of this legal expression in action, see NRS CC8/5/1
Jean Cook agt William Johnstoun, 1698.
40. An Excellent New Song, Intituled A Bonny Lad of High Renown (c.
1701).
41. NRS, CC8/6/46/194 Jean White agt William Hepburn, 1783.
42. NRS, CC8/6/55/227 and 228 William Thomson agt Jean

Tweedie, 1790.
43. An Excellent New Song lately composed, intituled. The New way of
Pittcathly Well Or, The Gentlemans Love to his Mistress (c. 1700).
44. Laura Gowing, ‘“The Freedom of the Streets”: Women and Social
Place, 1560–1640’, in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and
Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark
Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 130–53.
45. Barclay, ‘Love and Courtship’; Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power.
46. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, 54–5. For an extended discus-
sion, see Katie Barclay, ‘I Rest Your Loving Obedient Wife: Marital
Relationships in Scotland, 1650–1850’ (PhD dissertation,
University of Glasgow, 2007).
47. Ibid.
48. Darrin McMahon, ‘From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of
Happiness: 400 B.C.–A.D.1780’, Daedalus 133 (2004): 5–17.
49. Dialogue Between Ald John M’clatchy, and Young Willie Ha, about
the Marriage of his Daughter Maggy M’clatchy (c. 1700–20).
50. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and
Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
51. Charles McKean, ‘Improvement and Modernisation in Everyday
Enlightenment Scotland’, in A History of Everyday Life in Scotland,
1600–1800, ed. Elizabeth Foyster and Christopher A. Whatley
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 70–4.
52. Katie Barclay, ‘“And Four Years Space They Loveingly Agreed”:
Balladry and Early Modern Understandings of Marriage’, in
Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed.
Elizabeth Ewan and Janey Nugent (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008),
23–34.
53. NRS, CC8/6/38/159.
54. NRS, CC8/6/37/157.
CHAPTER 4
Late-Adolescent English Gentry Siblings

and Leave-Taking in the Early Eighteenth
Century
Lisa Toland
Florence Smyth was a desolate young woman. The long-awaited trip to

visit her beloved elder brother John, or Jack, at his Oxford college was
over and now she and her many sisters were home again without friends
in the depths of the English West Country in the county of Somerset.
Scarcely arrived back, she penned Jack a short epistle in her characteristi-
cally large scrawling letters. ‘You were so kind’, she began, ‘to desire you
might hear how we got home, which I take the first opportunity to let
you know that we go very well to Ashton. The place I must needs tell you
seems very dismal after being in so much good company. The remain-
der of our journey after we left you we [sic] was very melancholy’.1 This
exchange of information was grounded within a pre-existing sibling bond.
Florence’s letter, most likely from 1719, was written in response to Jack’s
request for news of her safe arrival. His sister complied and then went on
to describe the interlocking relationship between her present low emo-
L. Toland (*)
Department of History, Montreat College, Montreat, NC, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_4
64 L. TOLAND
tions, her physical location and her memory of the moment in which her
depression began. She contrasts the gloomy setting of Ashton Court to
the excitement of Oxford and she names their departure from Jack as the
point in which her emotions shifted from happy sociability to grief at their
separation.
As with the Smyth siblings, the lives of the landed elite in eighteenth-
century England were made meaningful by the high frequency of comings
and goings between one another’s country homes, London residences and
university towns. Visiting, amongst other shared pastimes, ‘strengthened
ties of blood, affinity and upbringing and enabled members of the elite to
forge a shared identity that fostered cohesiveness among themselves while
distinguishing them from those below’.2 Visitation was framed on either
side by the performance of greeting and farewell between guests and hosts.
This chapter examines the act of taking leave as a specific, and often over-
looked, custom within the larger elite habit of visitation. In these frequent
farewells, we can observe a ‘ritual’ marking a perceived negative emotional
change for the individuals involved.3
For Florence Smyth, taking leave from her brother ‘strengthened ties
of blood’ because she used her recollection of her slide into sadness in the
letter to coax Jack to provide a sympathetic response, which he gave in his
next letter: ‘I am very glad to hear you had a safe Journey to Ashton. I
heartily wish it had been equally pleasant. Somebody’s name is up here as
well as in other places. His behavior has occasioned several merry remarks
to be made.’ The ‘somebody’ was their father Sir John, who was regularly
unsociable and even rude to company since his wife’s death. Following
the family’s visit to Oxford, memories of Sir John’s irascibility left plenty
of fodder for gossip amongst the young scholars who had met him. ‘As to
yourself and sisters’, Jack assured Florence, ‘you have done me immortal
honour insomuch, that I shall never hear the last of the fine ladies that I
showed the university to…’4 The communication between the adolescent
Smyth siblings dovetails with the widespread increase in letter-writing in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As a result, the nature
and formation of late-adolescent sibling relationships, outside of parental
voices, can be traced in surviving letters between brothers and sisters. By
focusing specifically on the custom of leave-taking as recalled in letters,
this chapter identifies a form of agency exercised by young elite women
within sibling relationships to reform the mode by which emotion, and
thereby attachment, was expressed to their loved ones. Early modern
English families were patriarchal in structure. Epistles, though guided by
LATE-ADOLESCENT ENGLISH GENTRY SIBLINGS AND LEAVE-TAKING... 65
prescription, were a liminal space in which late-adolescent siblings were

less bound to the family hierarchy. Young women could recall their past
performance of leave-taking, a hierarchal ritual, but because they were the
authors of the letters, they retained the power to either reaffirm or reinter-
pret their emotional displays or lack thereof.
The Smyths of Ashton Court

The family estate of the Smyths at Long Ashton in Somerset was nestled
into the gently sloping hills outside of Bristol. The house, Ashton Court,
boasted an expansive two-storey front façade—the second half was com-
pleted during the years of Charles I’s ‘Personal Rule’ in the early seven-
teenth century. The family fortune was originally from trade and shipping
in the sixteenth century, but by the early seventeenth century, the Smyth
men were significant landowners, men of parliament, and filled many local
magisterial posts.
The Smyths’ story represents the quintessential rise of the gentry, a
class of gentlemen and their families who made up the majority of landed
wealth in England from the later sixteenth to the mid eighteenth cen-
turies. Family power and reputation was held ideally by maintaining the
family patrimony and an unbroken male line, the marriage of eldest sons
to heiresses, and the marriage of daughters into families of equal or greater
prestige. In these tasks, the Smyths fared well until the early eighteenth
century. At least four generations of Smyth sons had married women who
were heiresses at marriage or became so later due to fraternal deaths. The
family held several other manor houses in West Somerset besides Ashton
Court.
In the early eighteenth century, however, the family’s wealth began to
decline, primarily due to poor management. Between 1693 and 1709, five
daughters and three sons were born to Sir John and Elizabeth. Two of the
sons died unmarried during Sir John’s lifetime. His eldest son, also John
but called Jack by the family, did not produce any heirs. All of his daugh-
ters outlived him. When their mother died in 1715, home life became
isolated and dreary. Jack was at St John’s, Oxford.5 Hugh, the second
son, was at grammar school in Taunton, but would soon join his elder
brother. In the few dozen surviving letters from the 1720s and beyond,
the sisters described Ashton Court as ‘dismal’ and, even more tellingly, as
‘the nunnery’.6 Early education in the finer arts in London and frequent
visits to cousins in the neighborhood had nearly ceased altogether. The
66 L. TOLAND
sisters should have been meeting prospective suitors and their families—
introductions that should have been carefully arranged by their father,
uncles, aunts and cousins. The sisters blamed their misery on their father,
who severely restricted their travels due to a combination of extreme grief
and fear of illness.
By curtailing their movement, Sir John was materially damaging his
daughters’ future marital success, as well as harming important family rela-
tionships. ‘My father’, complained the eldest child Anne to Jack, ‘will not
give us leave to go to Henbury which Lady Walden is very angry with us for
but it is not my fault you may depend on it.’7 Lady Walden was a maternal
aunt who had married into the aristocracy. While their mother lived, Anne
had been allowed to visit Lady Walden in London, perambulating the parks
and meeting friends. Now their father even actively discouraged visitors
from their remote stately home and had developed a reputation for public
irascibility. The limited scope of their daily lives and their relative geographic
isolation made farewells to family, when they did happen, a dreaded custom.
Leaving-Taking Defined and Described
While at first glance their letters seem primarily full of gossip, the Smyth
siblings’ letters to each other above bemoan their separations from one
another, infrequent though they were for the girls. The boys were away
from home approximately from the age of nine, when they left for board-
ing school in Taunton, Somerset. Later they attended university at Oxford.
The moments of departure at which those absences began were recounted
consistently enough in letters to point the historian towards the signifi-
cance of these mundane customs.
The frequency of leave-takings in early modern England must have been
influenced by an increase in travel—a trend that became marked in the early
seventeenth century.8 By the eighteenth century, metropolitan centres,
and London especially, had become the seasonal destination for gentry.9 The
rise of consumer culture, the popularity of city life, and the improved roads
and carriage transport meant that the upper classes lived in a dizzying
world of travel between country and town. Besides departures to London,
Royalist gentry and aristocrats in the mid seventeenth century experienced
continental exiles that not infrequently separated parents from children,
husbands from wives, and brothers from sisters. Families bid farewell to
their gentleman officers on both side of the conflict. The spread of the
empire meant that leave-takings took on a new anxiety with geographically
vast separations, many of which were permanent. The circumstances neces-

sitating a departure were innumerable and while the entire early modern
period was one of notable mobility, the increased movement of men and
women at home and abroad in the later period does suggest that depar-
tures were even more numerous than the previous century.10
Leave-taking broadly defined is a ‘greeting or parting sign [as] often
represented as conveying information and/or expressing emotion—an
announcement of presence or intended departure, a statement of plea-
sure at someone’s arrival, or of sadness at his going away’.11 Raymond
Firth’s definition focuses our attention on the physical markers of a leave-
taking in words, gestures and emotional expression. Leave-takings were
described in varying detail in correspondence, memoirs, travel diaries and
autobiographies. They were portrayed in magazines and described in pre-
scriptive literature for young men and women.12 They were so frequent as
to be easily missed. Leave-takings was expected to take place when one or
more individuals were departing an immediate neighborhood and were
intentional, face-to-face meetings. They were enacted by monarchs and
subjects, friends, husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings.
Exact phrases used to describe leave-takings from period correspondence
and memoirs included ‘taking a farewell’, ‘honor[ing] me with a farewell’,
‘taking my leave’, ‘parting with you’ or ‘obliged to pay my duty to you
before I leave’.13 Descriptions of leave-takings were often accompanied
by expressions of sadness at the separation. In many cases, the individual
inferior in social rank approached the other for the leave-taking, regardless
of who was actually departing.
Leave-takings had so many variables at play, such as their location,
duration or the particular tenor of the relationship involved, that the cus-
tom is not easily categorised. Nevertheless, I have extracted four common
elements that I see present within leave-takings in letters and memoirs
in England from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the giving of
gifts, physical posturing, verbal articulations and emotional expressions.
Leave-takings from or between royalty and aristocrats particularly, whether
public or private, were marked by gift-giving. These farewells were formal,
communal and ritualistic in their design. Lady Fanshawe’s recollection of
leave-takings from royal and aristocratic households across Spain described
decorated barges and barrages of cannon fire that had been preceded by
the giving of gifts from the Spanish court to the exiled English aristocrat
and her daughters.14 Repeated gift-giving affirmed mutual loyalty: ‘I never
parted from her upon a journey but she gave me some present’, recorded
68 L. TOLAND
Lady Fanshawe regarding Lady Ormonde’s generosity.15 The less formal

and everyday leave-takings between close family members did not always
include gift-giving, though the Smyth siblings passed gifts to one another
on a regular basis, but not necessarily at departures.
Leave-taking almost always involved an acknowledgement of respect
and intimacy through touch or gesturing towards the other person, such
as bowing. They often included embraces and kisses on the hand and
cheek between ‘friends’—a term in the early modern period that mostly
referred to kinfolk, but also to those who aided in times of crisis.16 When
the Fanshawes departed from Charles I for the last time, the king took Sir
Richard ‘in his arms’, making him promise to care for the king’s son.17
Kisses to the hand were given by departing men to both male and female
friends. This practice was common enough that closings in letters mim-
icked leave-takings: ‘I am called upon all sides with business’, concluded
Edward Phelipps to his cousin Thomas Smyth, ‘wherefore kissing your
lady’s hands, I bid you adieu.’18
At a leave-taking, both parties expressed their mutual obligation to
each other verbally. Promises of loyalty were exchanged. Henry Verney
departed with the Prince of Orange’s promises of an army post.19 Charles
II vowed ‘with all the oaths that he could express to cause belief’ that
he would reward Sir Richard Fanshawe for his friendship. In exchange,
Sir Richard promised ‘to serve [Charles II] in what he was capable of’.20
Promises of a reunion were also common.21 Mary Smith wrote to her
brother Thomas Smyth in the early seventeenth century: ‘and then I hope
to see you in Cheshire … Rogers will be as good as he promised both at
Ashton, and at Gloster at our parting’.22 These kinds of assurances pro-
jected the relationship forward, confirming that further meetings would
happen and that extant ties would deepen.
Leave-takings also ‘express[ed] emotion’, ‘a statement of pleasure at
someone’s arrival, or of sadness at his going away’.23 Descriptions con-
sistently label farewells in unhappy words such as ‘melancholy’ and a ‘sad
departure’, or ‘not without trouble’.24 Leave-takings were often remem-
bered as experiences signifying loss and marking a transition into emo-
tional despondency. Rather than trying to survey the range of emotions
expressed at a farewell, this chapter uses a ‘situated analysis’ of the Smyth
siblings in the early eighteenth century to provide a perspective on how
young women used emotion to reshape power relationships with their
closest childhood friends by sidestepping the custom of leave-taking, a
ritual that reinforced their subordinate role in the family structure.
The History of Emotions, Social Change and Power
At the outset of this chapter, I emphasised how the practice of visita-

tion was one way in which the shared ‘assumptions, values, goals’ of the
English gentry were cemented. Within the history of emotions, there is a
similar claim that emotional responses and expressions are formed within a
common cultural context. David Lemmings and Ann Brooks describe how
‘emotional styles are always developed interactively in societies; as embod-
ied expressions they are also often presumed to provide signals to oth-
ers about interior attitudes and character; and among witnesses they may
inspire corresponding feelings of compassion or disgust, love or anger’.25
In the opening letter to this chapter, Florence Smyth recalls to her brother
Jack that she ‘was very melancholy’ after she left Oxford. She describes
her past emotion of grief at that moment of physical leave-taking that he
had then witnessed. Through reminding him of their sorrowful farewell
in the letter, she calls to both their minds those past embodied emotions,
thereby appealing to her brother’s sympathy. Her current ‘dismal’ situa-
tion is made clearer to him by contrasting it with their past happy times.
This interaction between remembering emotions and writing about them
to another shows how a custom like leave-taking was a site that could
‘inspire corresponding feelings’. Linda Pollock identifies that letters ‘allow
an individual the opportunity to phrase their emotions carefully at a dis-
tance, or even empowered an individual to express an emotion he or she
might have been disinclined to do in face-to-face encounters’.26 Florence’s
recollection was also a directing of her brother’s emotions—a grasping of
an opportunity to reshape family power dynamics by a younger sister over
an elder brother through determining the emotional course of their rela-
tionship. Farewells demanded a reciprocity of feelings that further solidi-
fied interpersonal bonds (see also Chap. 2).
This reciprocity, or give and take, between individuals results in a par-
ticular ‘emotional style’ occurring within a specific context, as Lemming
and Brooks have argued. Pollock has similarly advocated for analysing
‘the situated use and lived experience of emotions’.27 This case study of
the Smyth siblings and leave-taking attempts to view emotional expres-
sion in situ, taking seriously the specific personal relationships involved.
Furthermore, I would argue that the Smyth siblings, as seen in their letters
to one another, can be considered what the historian Barbara Rosenwein
has termed an ‘emotional community’. Sibling bonds were one of the
most formative and longest-running relationships of an individual’s life.
70 L. TOLAND
Younger brothers and sisters were raised and educated to serve the fam-
ily’s dynastic goals alongside their eldest brother. However, historians,
when they have focused on sibling relationships, have tended to focus
too heavily on fractious relationships or the stereotypical ‘sibling rivalry’.
Siblings could be allies and a quick study of most major life events, such
as marriages and deaths, shows them negotiating nuptials and serving as
executors for wills of deceased brothers and sisters.28 Siblings, much like
the custom of leave-taking, are so prevalent in family stories that they are
easily missed, as the same individuals are usually defined by their other
roles as children, husbands or wives. Rosenwein’s model of an ‘emotional
community’ provides a means by which we can isolate siblings as a sub-
family group, while still maintaining their inextricable integration into
larger family networks.
Rosenwein defined an ‘emotional community’ as a ‘group in which
people have a common stake, interests, values, and goals’.29 Visually they
are usefully thought of as circles:
A large circle within which are smaller circles, none entirely concentric but
rather distributed unevenly within the given space. The large circle is the
overarching emotional community, tied together by fundamental assump-
tions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression. The
smaller circles represent subordinate emotional communities, partaking in
the larger one and revealing its possibilities and its limitations. They too may
be subdivided.30
Siblings represent what Rosenwein calls smaller ‘subordinate emotional

communities’. Brothers and sisters were raised and educated to serve
familial goals, and yet parental expectations did not always align with the
perspectives of children. For instance, Sir John Smyth’s irascibility dis-
tanced him from his offspring, while simultaneously the children’s shared
experience of their father’s unpleasantness, which they discussed often in
their letters, became an emotional rallying point forming greater sibling
solidarity and highlighting their father’s failings. If the larger emotional
community represented in this chapter is the class of the English gen-
try, then their common ‘modes of expression’ or customs and rituals,
such as leave-taking and letter-writing, were used by this small circle of
late-adolescent siblings as they navigated both family and larger societal
expectations.
A ‘Situated Analysis’ of an ‘Emotional Community’:

The Smyth Siblings
Among the dozens of sibling letters surviving between the Smyth broth-
ers and sisters of the early eighteenth century are two epistles from the
1710s penned by the two middle daughters, Florence and Astrea. In one,
Florence apologises for leaving her older and sickly sister Elizabeth at
Ashton Court without a proper farewell—perhaps without a farewell at all.
On the other occasion, Astrea admits she remained upstairs in the house,
failing to say goodbye to Jack after one of his visits home from Oxford.
In both epistles, the young women each speak of leave-taking as a per-
ceived moment of emotional change for them—a change so destabilising
that a proper performance was impossible. In these written explanations,
Florence and Astrea navigate the complex and contested relationship
between the expectation of their customary performance, their articulated
fear of excessive weeping and the reassertion of their sororal loyalties by
writing for forgiveness.
Before analysing these women’s words, however, the question needs
to be raised as to what extent historians can trust that historical subjects
expressed their ‘real’ feelings when they composed letters (for further dis-
cussion, see Chap. 5). Like so many other early modern documents that fol-
lowed accepted conventions, an epistle was a ‘highly mediated and specific
cultural act’.31 Can historians make completely accurate assertions as to the
subjects’ true interior emotional states? No. But here again, Rosenwein’s
perspective is helpful in reminding us that sources are never direct reports
of feeling. She argues that textual recordings of passions can be useful
in talking about the history of emotions: ‘Emotions are always delivered
“secondhand” … via gestures, bodily changes, words, exclamations, tears.
None of these things are emotion; they are symptoms that must be inter-
preted—both by the person feeling them and by observers’.32 All emotions
are mediated by some cultural framework. Arguably, the strictness, and even
predictability, of eighteenth-century stylistic conventions in letters allows
for the possibility of naming, at the very least, the expected emotional
expressions within the context of a particular ‘emotional community’, in
this case within youthful sibling relationships. Furthermore, the description
of their emotional despondency was employed by these young women as
an act of persuasion to balance a sibling relationship that they perceived as
temporarily imbalanced because of their failure to say goodbye in person.
72 L. TOLAND
The first letter-writer, Florence (1701–69), had a sense of humour.

Many of her surviving letters are to Jack at Oxford. She teased him about
young women, sent him alcohol and complained to him about their father’s
continued distasteful habits. She delighted in writing to him and, like so
many young gentle women of the eighteenth century, chided him when
his replies were too long in coming. Cooped up at home with four other
sisters was not her idea of sociability. Luckily for her, Florence was allowed
to travel on one occasion as far as Henbury House, less than 20 miles
away, to stay with her two unmarried aunts and other visiting friends. The
contrast in lifestyle between Henbury House and Ashton Court was clearly
exhilarating for Florence, who, ‘not being used of late to such recreation’,
wrote to her sister that a long walk the previous day had ‘sufficiently tired
me so am all alone to day not being able to walk with them who are gone
to my cousin Hookes’.33 In her solitude, she wrote to Elizabeth (1696–?),
who was the eldest child but one. Elizabeth was her father’s favourite, her
mother’s namesake and chronically ill. She was, apart from their brother
Jack, the most frequent recipient of letters from her siblings, most likely
because she was rarely able to leave Ashton Court.34
Florence began her letter with some rhetorical grovelling: ‘This comes
to beg my dear sister’s pardon for not taking my leave as I ought to have
done when I left Ashton…’ 35 The letter was an assurance of Florence’s
safe arrival and an apology to correct the slight of improper leave-taking.
Whether the younger sister failed to say goodbye at all or whether she gave
a brief and indirect farewell is not clear. Florence went on with her expla-
nation, assuaging her conscience: ‘but knowing I would have occasioned
a million tears I refrained’. The unspoken fear in this justification was that
she would have been overpowered with weeping if she had said goodbye
in person. Or perhaps she feared that both of them would have been given
over to excessive tears—Florence did not clarify exactly whose ‘million
tears’ would be shed. She concludes her apology: ‘but believe me if I tell
you that if I arrived at Henbury without tears it was not without a broken
heart with the thought of leaving she that I have the greatest respect and
value for of any one in the world, meaning yourself’. She assures Elizabeth
that weeping at a leave-taking, or even perhaps performing a proper fare-
well, is not the true barometer for depth of feeling. She uses the letter to
describe her decline into sadness that should have been articulated at a
proper leave-taking and to elicit her sister’s sympathy. She asserts complete
sororal loyalty claiming that for Elizabeth, she has the ‘greatest respect
and value … of any one in the world’.36
This kind of excessive language of affection is a feature of period

letter-writing. However, Elizabeth does seem to have held a particular
emotional place within the Smyth family that may lend more veracity to
Florence’s seeming hyperbole. Her father, so paranoid about her health in
particular of all his children, may have restricted her most stringently. ‘Do
our austere governor continue his old method of treating you, or are you
less confined’, inquired a male friend to Elizabeth, ‘I have been under a
good deal of apprehension lest this letter should fall under his inspection
and raise in him a jealously of your holding a correspondence with one
of the other sex and that has been one reason of my not writing till I had
an opportunity of sending it by a safe hand’.37 On the other hand, letters
from Sir John to Elizabeth include his strongly worded encouragements
for her to go ‘abroad in the coach to take the air, for once at least’ and
describe her ‘languishing, and as it were, desponding upon the bed of sick-
ness, without reaching forth one finger to your own assistance’.38 Even if
longer trips away from Ashton were curbed, the cumulative effect of let-
ters to Elizabeth is that family and friends were concerned for her health
and isolated life. Leaving her weaker sister behind at Ashton Court, a place
from which Elizabeth rarely ventured, was conceivably an emotional chal-
lenge for Florence. Her written explanation to Elizabeth gave a favourable
interpretation to her seeming oversight, providing the younger sister with
control over a memory that might have been misunderstood—a kind of
‘emotional management’ as identified by Pollock.39
Astrea (1698–1738) was also a frequent correspondent to Jack
(1699–1741), though she tended to take a more maternal tone towards
him than Florence, urging him not to drink too much and telling him
when he owed particular relatives letters.40 Similarly, Jack sometimes
chided her indirectly for her slow letter-writing: ‘I wrote to my sister
Astrea about a fortnight ago’, he informed another unnamed sister, ‘and
am very much disappointed that I had not an answer to night, I desire you
would advise her to defer it no longer upon pain of a second’.41 Letter-
writing between the Smyth siblings was a competition—a race to inform
each other of gossip and local news. After one of Jack’s visits home from
Oxford, Astrea wrote: ‘Dear brother, I think myself obliged to write to
ask pardon for not seeing you the morning you left Ashton but I was so
much troubled at parting with you that I could not bear taking of leave’.42
Here again the letter offers an apology, a vulnerable act, by admitting the
deliberate avoidance of a custom. But immediately, Astrea interprets and
repossesses her moment of absence by verbally reinforcing her depth of
74 L. TOLAND
sentiment: ‘I could not bear taking leave’. In fact, she intimates to Jack
that her absence speaks more loudly than her presence would have: a less
loving sister would find stoicism at leave-taking possible.
Astrea, much like her sister Florence, conceived of leave-taking as mark-
ing an interior emotional shift. Her brother and the excitement and activity
that he brought to her life was contrasted with how emotionally ‘troubled’
she was ‘at parting’. Leave-taking was perceived, or at least expressed, by
these young women as a moment in which the raw depth of their affec-
tion for their sibling was exposed, a moment which not only symbolised
but also began a real decline from happiness to disappointment and often
social isolation. Whether or not leave-takings in person were increasingly
avoided in the eighteenth century as letter-writing increased is beyond
the scope of this chapter, but these two micro-analyses suggest that with
this new mode of communication, new spaces emerged for emotional
expression.
Leave-taking as I have defined it above was a fully embodied custom. So
what did this sidestepping of the custom and the following explanation in
an epistolary space mean for small ‘emotional communities’, particularly
that of these young, late-adolescent siblings? Withdrawing from a fully
embodied farewell would, at least initially, seem to rob an intimate rela-
tionship of a critical moment in the further formation of sibling bonding.
All is loss. No tears are shed, or at least seen to be shed, and no embraces,
kisses or gifts are exchanged. All the physicality of sight, touch and smell
are absent. One sibling is left without a sense that her or his affection for
the other is reciprocated. The common ritual is pushed aside for its revi-
sion and transformation in a disembodied context.
The only element that did remain was a rhetorical articulation of feeling
and the reassertion of the strength of the sibling bond in a letter. The deci-
sion to either perform the ritual improperly or be entirely absent and then
to explain this absence in writing inverts the power structure of the tradi-
tional embodied leave-taking. In both cases, the sister writing to apologise
is socially inferior in rank to the other and is therefore the one who must
attend her sibling. In the first instance, Florence writes to her older sister.
In the second, Astrea writes to her eldest brother. The sister was unable to
cope with the sorrowful moment of departure, but by composing an epis-
tle to explain her failure not as an absence of her affection, but rather as
an excess of love, she wrested interior control. Once again we see a young
woman managing emotions while she manipulated the memory of the
ritual unperformed to reach a sense of equilibrium with her elder sibling.
I have already suggested some specific reasons related to their indi-

vidual personalities and relationships that explain why Florence and Astrea
felt it necessary to justify their poor performance to Elizabeth and Jack
respectively. What other influences within their family or elite English soci-
ety more broadly enabled them to sidestep the custom? The specific famil-
ial context as well as the collective pressures of polite society held sway.
Young women like Florence and Astrea knew that leave-takings were
an accepted and expected custom because they observed how their par-
ents talked and wrote about long separations. Betty Smyth, Florence and
Astrea’s mother, who often included words of greeting from her daugh-
ters to their father, wrote to Sir John about how much the memories of
leave-taking unsettled her. Writing much earlier in the late 1690s (during
one of his frequent trips to London), Betty wrote of her seeming emo-
tional trauma: ‘My Dear tis two young days for me as yet to venture men-
tioning what affliction twas to me parting with you, or to think of writing
or settling my mind to anything only to wish for Monday that I may then
have the good news of your having a safe journey and being well after it.’43
Betty identifies the moment of separation as disturbing. Much like her
daughter Florence would later, she also marks leave-taking as the begin-
ning of a period of unrest in which she is unable to function normally until
she is assured of her husband’s safe arrival to his destination. In this way
the ritualised custom is expressed as a highly anxious moment emotionally,
physically and psychologically, as well as the beginning of a lengthy period
of uncertainty.
In addition, Betty’s perception of how Sir John’s letters improved her
mood in the aftermath of his departure illustrates that the physicality of
an epistle served as a kind of stand-in for the absence of a loved one.
Upon receiving another letter, Betty wrote to Sir John, much relieved
that: ‘The welcome news of your good journey and health and your two
most endearing letters (which I have often kissed) have proved so great
a cordial as in some measure to remove the great sorrow and trouble I
have labored under since parting with that much the dearest of all earthly
felicitas and enjoyments I mean your beloved company’.44 Betty consis-
tently fixates upon her grief at Sir John’s departure. His letters proved
healing to Betty’s ‘sorrow and trouble’ in a method analogous to the
physical relief her herbal remedies bring her. Her moods seem, as self-
described in her letters, dependent upon her present proximity to her hus-
band’s departures and arrivals. Regardless of the heightened emotional
tenor at work in Betty’s writing, letters were acceptable modes of commu-
76 L. TOLAND
nication in which to rehearse the emotional pain of parting and the joy of
reunion. These epistolary exchanges between husband and wife helped to
define the nature of their marital relationship and must have impacted the
‘emotional community’ of the Smyth family. The difficulty of Sir John’s
habits and personality after Betty’s death also suggests that the seemingly
hyperbolic affection she expressed in the letters above was a reflection of
the couple’s emotional interdependence. As Florence, Astrea and their
siblings grew up in this emotional environment, their mother’s consistent
expression of being overthrown by their father’s departures was probably
observed, as was the fact that she claimed that his letters buoyed her emo-
tions—regardless of whether or not they truly did. At the very least, Betty
modelled for her daughters the use of letters to express appropriate emo-
tional attachments and to assert agency in a relationship usually bound up
within a conventional patriarchal hierarchy. The young girls’ emotional
epistolary habits can be seen as filial imitation.
Florence and Astrea’s excuses for poor performances were also strongly
related to their perceptions of the inappropriateness of weeping at leave-
taking. Here too their mother provided some pattern to follow. Writing
again to Sir John in London, Betty apologised to him: ‘I heartily beg
pardon for being so troublesome to you at parting twas what I would fain
have hid but could not’.45 A reasonable supposition is that she was weep-
ing. However, her apology may not have been so much an expression of
true contriteness and shame at her discomposure. Betty was drawing her
husband’s mind again to a memory that proved the depth of emotional
dependence she claimed to have upon him.
The inability to control tears as proof of attachment was echoed in the
larger society. The Smyth women articulated in their letters what would be
found in advice manuals 50 years later on female friendship. Prescriptive
literature written to educate young women in the development of female
virtues correlated tearful goodbyes positively to true friendship against
its foil of a mere acquaintanceship. The author of the mid eighteenth-
century text Whole Duty of Woman asks: ‘Who is she that biddeth thee
good-morrow, that kisseth thy cheek at parting, and giveth thee an invita-
tion to her house? She is an acquaintance, believe her not; go thou to her
home, tarry a while and thou wilt find her out’.46 A true friend does more
than simply perform the leave-taking in person and exercise hospitality.
Sincerity is obvious in her expression: ‘Doth she rejoice to see thee, yet
her eye sparkleth not; is she sorry for thy departure, yet her countenance
altereth not’.47 The face betrays the true affections of the heart. Mere
acquaintanceship is a vice linked with vacillation of purpose and charac-

ter, and is revealed when ‘her cheek is dry, and she forgetteth thee the
moment she turneth from thee’.48 No hint is made of ‘crocodile tears’ in
this manual—weeping is tied to genuine feeling—a value recognised by
Florence Smyth when she told her sister Betty: ‘if I arrived at Henbury
without tears it was not without a broken heart’.49
Betty and her daughters’ expressed insecurities about crying were prob-
ably not solely a rhetorical tool to assert their sincerity of feeling. Since
the Renaissance, excessive female tears were viewed suspiciously: some
authors even suggested demonic causation.50 By the early eighteenth cen-
tury, the causal question was more restrained and physical composure was
put in service to the ideal of politeness. In an intimate sibling relation-
ship, emotional attachment affected the ritual’s performance. Florence
and Astrea explained their customary failures by arguing that the integrity
of their friendship was exhibited in the potential excess of their sincere
tears. That they both associated tearful goodbyes with genuine feelings of
attachment while simultaneously fearing loss of decorum suggests that this
larger societal tug-of-war between maintaining polite composure and lay-
ing bare their sororal fidelity found its way into the remote sitting rooms
of the West Country.51 Moreover, this cultural cleavage provided these
two young women with the opportunity to shape the power dynamics of
the relationships with their siblings by reinventing the leave-taking ritual
at their writing desks (see also Chap. 5). Their sidestepping of embodied
ritual points both to the surety of their sibling bonds (or their growing
‘emotional community’) and their awareness that their loyalty could be
expressed in an alternative space by writing a letter.
Conclusion
Saying farewell to a friend or loved one both symbolised and initiated
an emotional shift that was manifested through the leave-taking ritual.
The Smyth women in this chapter expressed this change from happiness
to sorrow by recollecting the specific moment of leave-taking in writing.
Understanding what a leave-taking meant specifically to the individuals
who took part is contingent on situated analyses of the immediate family
contexts. Growing up at the turn of the eighteenth century, Florence and
Astrea Smyth were expected to exhibit polite manners, whilst also display-
ing the sincere emotion required of the leave-taking ritual. The sisters’
internalised struggle was between the knowledge of their expected per-
78 L. TOLAND
formance of leave-taking, their desire to express love and duty, their fear
of losing control of their weeping and their anxiety that their poor perfor-
mance would be interpreted by their sister and brother as lack of affection.
Although they sidestepped a common ritual, they believed they were still
able to affirm their sororal loyalty through leave-taking by an assertion of
emotion in a disembodied epistolary context. For these sisters, letter-writ-
ing provided a moment to renegotiate a social ritual that reinforced power
hierarchies within the family without damaging their familial relationships.
Performing a proper leave-taking could be emotionally taxing, but the
articulation of this strain and its ‘management’ in letters could continue
to develop siblings’ ‘emotional community’ in ways that impacted their
future adult interactions and the long-term stability of their family.
Notes
1. Bristol Records Office (hereinafter BRO), Smyths of Ashton Court
Collection, AC/C/100/14 Florence Smyth to John Smyth, n.d.
This visit probably took place around 1719, though the letter is
undated.
2. Maura A. Henry, ‘The Making of Elite Culture’, in A Companion to
Eighteenth Century Britain, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Malden: Blackwell
and Wiley, 2006), 320.
3. I refer here to leave-taking as a ritualised custom, but not strictly as
a ritual as it was not a formal prescribed activity.
4. BRO AC/C/99/1 John Smyth to Florence Smyth, n.d.
5. BRO AC/C/98/1-6 John Smyth to Sir John Smyth, 1720–22.
6. BRO AC/C/100/14 Florence Smyth to John Smyth, n.d.; BRO

AC/C/100/11 Astrea Smyth to John Smyth, n.d. The sibling corre-
spondence for the Smyths: BRO AC/C/92/1-25 Smyth
Correspondence, 1714–19; BRO AC/C/99/1-6 Smyth
Correspondence, c. 1726; BRO AC/C/100/1-15 Smyth
Correspondence [1710s–1720s]; BRO AC/C/102/1-5 Smyth
Correspondence, c. 1722; BRO AC/C/105/1-9 Smyth
Correspondence, 1726–41; Anton Bantock, The Earlier Smyths of Ashton
Court from their Letters, 1545–1741 (Bristol: The Malago Society, 1982).
7. BRO AC/C/100/3 Anne Smyth to John Smyth, 25 January n.y.
8. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 312.
9. Henry, ‘The Making of Elite Culture’, 325.
0. Ibid., 311–27.
1
11. Raymond Firth, ‘Verbal and Bodily Rituals of Greeting and Parting’,
in The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richard, ed.
Jean S. La Fontaine (London: Harper & Row, 1972), 1 and 8.
12. Sarah Pearsall highlights the centrality of leave-taking to family life
in her chapter ‘The Politics of Family Feeling’, in Atlantic Families:
Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
13. John Gough Nichols (ed.), The Autobiography of Anne Lady Halkett
(London: Camden Society, 1875), 13 and 60; BRO AC/92/25
Florence to [Betty] Smyth, n.d.; BRO AC/C/85/2 Betty Smyth to
Sir John Smyth, October 1696; BRO AC/C/103 John Smith to Sir
John Smyth, 24 October 1723.
14. Ann Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe (London: John
Lane, 1907), 132–3.
15. Ibid., 98.
16. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 190.
17. Fanshawe, Memoirs, 46–7.
18. BRO AC/C/58/9 Edward Phelipps to Thomas Smyth, 29 January
n.y.
19. Frances Parthenhope Verney, The Verney Family during the Civil
War, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green & Co, 1892), 189.
20. Fanshawe, Memoirs, 75.
21. Verney, The Verney Family during the Civil War, 233.
22. BRO AC/C/53/8 Mary Smith to Thomas Smith, 14 June n.y.
23. Firth, ‘Verbal and Bodily Rituals’, 1 and 8.
24. Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 81; Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel
Pepys (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1905), 17; Verney, Memoirs
… of the Civil War, 168; Nichols, Autobiography, 31.
25. Ann Brooks and David Lemmings (eds), Emotions and Social

Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (London: Routledge,
2014), 5.
26. Linda Pollock, ‘Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships’,

Historical Journal 47(3) (2004): 567–90.
27. Ibid., 590. This chapter is influenced by Pollock’s description of ‘situ-
ated use’. Others historians who have reconstructed an immediate con-
text to discuss emotions include Michael MacDonald, ‘The Fearefull
Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early
Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 1 (1992): 32–61.
80 L. TOLAND
28. Amy Harris, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England:

Share and Share Alike (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2012), 118.
29. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 24.
30. Ibid., 24.
31. Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 82.
32. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 27.
33. BRO AC/C/92/25 Florence to [Elizabeth Smyth], n.d.
34. BRO AC/C/92/1-25 Anon. to Elizabeth Smyth, 1714–19.
36. Ibid.
37. BRO AC/C/92/8 M. Codrington to Elizabeth Smyth, 25 January
n.y.
38. BRO AC/C/92/14 Sir John Smyth to Elizabeth Smyth, 2 June
1720.
39. Pollock, ‘Anger’, 585.
40. BRO AC/C/100/6-12 Astrea Smyth to John Smyth, various dates.
41. BRO AC/C/99/4 John Smyth to Astrea Smyth, n.d.
42. BRO AC/C/100/10 Astrea Smyth to John Smyth (d. 1741), 29
April n.y.
43. BRO AC/C/85/2 Elizabeth Smyth to Sir John Smyth, [27]

October [1696].
44. BRO AC/C/85/3 Elizabeth Smyth to Sir John Smyth, 2 November
1696.
45. BRO AC/C/85/11 Elizabeth Smyth to Sir John Smyth, 30

November 1697.
46. William Kenrick, The Whole Duty of Woman (Philadelphia, 1815), 42.
47. Ibid., 43.
48. Ibid., 42–3.
50. Gary L. Ebersole, ‘The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited:

Affective Expression and Moral Discourse’, History of Religions
39(3) (2000): 211–46.
51. Gary Ebersole critiques the established view that ritual weeping was
‘less than “real” precisely because they are not a spontaneous emo-
tional response’. Rather, he undermines this normative claim by
examining several previous case study interpretations related to
tears, emotion and power supporting his claim that tears must be
understood within local ‘discourses of social hierarchy, power, gen-
der, class, race, and morality’. Ibid., 213.
PART II
Civic and Nation-Building: Power

Created, Power Reinforced
CHAPTER 5
Shipwrecks, Sorrow, Shame and the Great

Southland: The Use of Emotions
in Seventeenth-Century Dutch East India
Company Communicative Ritual
Susan Broomhall
This chapter explores the use of emotions within Dutch East India
Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) documentation,
from instructions and ship’s logs, to letters and petitions, daily registers
and summative reports among personnel in VOC outposts, as well as to
the central board of directors in Amsterdam, as a ritual practice that func-
tioned to reinforce power dynamics, resolve conflict and suggest inclu-
sion and integration. It analyses this practice in relation to documentation
Research for this chapter was funded by the Australian Research Council
Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800 (project number
CE110001011). I am grateful to Jacqueline Van Gent, Lesley Silvester, the
editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this
work.
S. Broomhall (*)
School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_5
84 S. BROOMHALL
regarding interactions with the largely unknown lands south of the VOC’s
Batavia settlement (modern-day Jakarta), primarily produced in its first 50
years of operation.
At least two VOC ships are known to have been wrecked on the treach-
erous western coast of Australia during the seventeenth century, in addi-
tion to several documented near-misses: the Batavia struck Morning Reef
near Beacon Island in 1629 and the Vergulde Draeck was wrecked about
100 km to the north of present-day Perth in 1656. In the following cen-
tury, such disasters continued, with the Zuytdorp destroyed on the remote
coast between Kalbarri and Shark Bay in 1712, and the Zeewijk wrecked
upon Half Moon Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos islands in 1727. Here I
explore the uses of particular affective language and descriptions of emo-
tional states as they were employed by varied VOC officials in situations of
distressing challenge. How did the VOC’s communicative rituals operate
in these contexts of unexpected crises?
The VOC began in 1602 and grew quickly into a powerful entity.1
Its archive is extensive and includes all manner of documentation. These
communicative forms had many purposes, not least the passing of
Company information back and forth between the Dutch Republic and
the VOC’s global outposts. As such, the remaining records have primar-
ily been studied for what they suggest of VOC actions, an approach that
has foregrounded economic and political activities. However, they are
now increasingly being examined for what they embedded and conveyed
socially and culturally.2 As Eric Ketelaar has argued, the:
VOC is a perfect example of what [Bruno] Latour has described as ‘centres

of calculation’. Such a centre conditions and controls events, places and
people from a distance …This is done by what Latour reverentially calls
gratte papiers (paper shufflers), who create and manage records in a way that
allows mobility, stability and versatility of events, places and people, linking
various centres of calculation.3
Moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, VOC texts often expressed emotions,

presented varied moods and tone, and acted holistically as an affective object.
As such, I argue that VOC documentation served practical goals, communi-
cating news and information across its global network, but also provided an
outlet for articulating Company ideals, hierarchies and experiences through
a communicative ritual that utilised emotional expression to create cohesion,
reinforce hierarchies, control the unfamiliar and manage challenges.
SHIPWRECKS, SORROW, SHAME AND THE GREAT SOUTHLAND: THE USE... 85
The Use of Emotions in the VOC’s Textual

Practice
The VOC performed rituals that worked to project a sense of inclusion
and provided a framework for appropriate interpersonal behaviours in a
wide range of situations. At least some of the VOC’s rituals of integration
occurred through its ritualised textual practice. These were communicative
rituals that connoted hierarchy and power, and functioned to orient its men
towards positive achievement for the Company. This chapter focuses on
documentation that was designed for internal consumption rather than the
VOC’s external stakeholders, although the latter readership could not be
ignored in fashioning the narrative of the Company in its written records
at all levels. The VOC textual practice reflects the conventional criteria
for rituals in that it contained elements of repetition in the documenta-
tion’s form, content and performance; it was not spontaneous, but rather
an expected duty; it was a communicative act conducted by members of
the Company in specific positions of the hierarchy; it was highly organised
and performed even in situations of stress and disruption; it was aimed at
collective consumption by those in the Company; and finally—the matter
that is the focus of this chapter— it employed an ‘evocative presentation to
draw and hold attention’, in this case a particular form of affective rhetoric.4
I argue that this communicative ritual within VOC documentation used
emotions as a key tool (see also Chap. 4). While recent studies such as that
of Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf provide important new attention to
the power of ritual as emotional experiences, here my focus is on affective
expression as a tool of a particular communicative ritual.5 At one level, the
use of emotional language was a staged performance, creating the sense of
a human touch and bond between its men, which functioned as part of a
ritual of inclusion by reaffirming corporate principles. It combined a rite
of renewal in which ‘symbolic actions … are periodically staged to reassert
the dominance of certain organizational values’ with a rite of integration
that ‘works to establish an emotional unity or community bond’.6 As Islam
and Zyphur have suggested in relation to modern organisational culture,
public ‘ceremonial displays of shared affects, values, or attitudes will rein-
force and increase the strength of these affects, values, or attitudes and will
also increase the collective perception that these attributes are shared’.7
In VOC documentation, emotional expression presented the Company’s
commercial, religious and cultural ideologies, and framed appropri-
ate and expected behaviours of its members. Its authors were generally
86 S. BROOMHALL
European men, distributed globally on VOC business, linked via its admin-
istration and participating in an emotional community that was reflected
and practised through their particular regimes of affective expression.8
These expressive techniques linked a diverse cohort of individuals to a set
of shared goals from which they could all benefit (namely, to achieve profit
and to advance the Dutch nation and Protestant Christianity). The com-
municative rituals involved everyone from the Directors in Amsterdam,
regional Governors-General and their Councils to ship captains. The VOC
was comprised of many individuals, German, French and English as well as
Dutch, who were mainly but not always united by their Protestant confes-
sion. Other members were those born in VOC settlements.9 The creolisa-
tion of VOC men, in sexual and marital practices as well as their personal
affiliations and mentalities through their interactions with local communi-
ties, was a constant threat to the focus on Company objectives, one that
documentation as well as practices such as postings between VOC settle-
ments may have helped to limit.10 The VOC’s communicative ritual there-
fore operated to unify a disparate group of men and provide organisational
stability across a wide geographical sphere of operation.
Scholars of the period have tended to argue that Calvinists were gener-
ally reserved in their expression of sentiment.11 What has been observed
in the VOC archive is the strong sense of ‘Dutch righteousness’ about the
Company’s trade endeavours and sense of mission, particularly as reformed
doctrine informed the governance of settlements that the Company estab-
lished.12 Ships’ logs regularly commenced with ‘Praise God’ or ‘In the
name of God’. In addition, quasi-familial expressions of health and pros-
perity for more senior figures in the VOC were common. These articula-
tions of aspiration and concern were important to the Company’s identity
and culture. Jan Carstenzoon, who had navigated the region on the
northern Australian coast in 1623 in the Pera, concluded his journal to be
presented to his superiors thus:
... hereby bringing the voyage to a safe conclusion (by the mercy and safe-
keeping of the Lord) may He vouchsafe to grant prosperity and success in all
their good undertakings to the High Mightinesses the States-General, to his
Excellency the Prince of Orange etc., to the Lords Managers of the United
East India Company and to the Worshipful Lord General and his Governors.13
These globally circulating documents aimed to establish and reinforce

individuals’ affective connection to patria (the word used by the Company
to refer to the Dutch ‘fatherland’) and the VOC. Documentation was

frequently framed by salutations and valedictions containing both reli-
gious and familial statements, reiterating Company ideals in each missive.
When, in 1636, Governor-General Antonie van Diemen and Councillors
Philip Lucasz, Artus Gysels and Jan van der Burch issued instructions
from Batavia for Commander Gerrit Thomasz Pool and the skippers of
the yachts Cleen Amsterdam and Wesel who were to undertake further
discovery of the South Lands, their instructions ended with an expression
of paternal care as well as a reinforcement of the Company’s commercial,
patriotic and religious interests:
In conclusion, we wish you all the blessing of the Lord, a prosperous voy-
age and safe return, hoping at the same time that this voyage may redound
to the advantage of the Company, to the glory of our country, and to your
especial honour. Amen.14
These communicative rituals, employing quasi-domestic affective rheto-

ric, offered a sense of a shared almost-familial culture for this mercantile
network.15
In addition, and importantly, the employment of affective rhetoric in
particular ways within the VOC’s communicative ritual managed conflicts
and tensions inside the Company. It provided an outlet for alternative
views to be voiced and unexpected or difficult experiences to be narrated,
without generally destabilising the VOC’s corporate culture. Indeed, it
was not only what emotions were expressed but also who articulated them
that reinforced the Company’s mode of operation. The VOC had a distinct
internal structure, which reflected the distribution of power within it. This
flowed from the oversight of the Prince of Orange and the States General,
to the practical powerbase of the Directors, through the regionally-based
Governors-General and their Councillors to individual vessels’ captains
and crew. These positions were marked not only by clear demarcations of
activities and authority but also by distinctions in emotional expression
and affective labour for the Company.
Individuals could adopt multiple roles in this communicative ritual.
While Governors-General and Councillors, for example, might adopt the
paternal affective language in their instructions to skippers, it was with the
respectful rhetoric of the inferior that they justified local decision-making
to the Directors in Amsterdam. In January 1649, for example, Governor-
General Cornelis van der Lijn and the Councillors of the Indies François
88 S. BROOMHALL
Caron, Carel Reniers, Jochum van Dutecum and Gerard Demmer, wrote
to the Directors to announce that their 1648 resolution to send the yacht
den Leeuwerik to attempt to navigate the Sunda Strait had been successful
and would be of great advantage to the Company. In the polite but never-
theless positioning conventions of the respectful inferior, ‘Your Worships’
faithful servants’ encouraged the Directors to see the merits of the
endeavour by sending on the skipper’s records of discovery and evidence
of praiseworthy accomplishment: ‘How this voyage was undertaken and
successfully accomplished as far as Banda in the space of two months and
20 days, your Worships may be pleased to gather from the annexed daily
journal and chart of Skipper Jan Jansz Zeeuw’.16 These might have seemed
formulaic statements, but their expected inclusion evoked commitment
to each other as a group with a shared purpose, and their absence would
have been highly disrespectful and shocking to recipients. Moreover, this
example highlights the wide potential circulation of textual content as it
was reproduced in the annual reports of Governors-General or simply
included for perusal by others in the Company, including the Directors
in Amsterdam. VOC documents were carefully composed as they could
have unanticipated readers and could even be used in unexpected ways by
Company officials to achieve emotional effect, as will be explored below.
Affective expression reflected and reinforced the hierarchy, signalled
power, attempted to control disruptive behaviours and reorient these pro-
tagonists towards Company goals. My focus here is not upon instances
of disruptive or subversive emotions bursting though the conventions to
unsettle, achieve power or change hierarchy (for an example, see Chap.
4). This was rather emotional language used as part of the convention
and tool of this textual practice, as demonstrated through a case study of
a period in which the VOC was challenged by its experiences in the South
Lands and employed communicative rituals to manage distressing inci-
dents of shipwreck upon the Australian coast.
Batavia: Explaining the Unexpected
When the Batavia struck Morning Reef near Beacon Island in June 1629,
some 40 aboard drowned. Commander François Pelsaert, in his ‘Sad daily
notes on the loss of our ship’ composed with an eye to the justification of
his actions to the Governor-General and Councillors at Batavia, recorded
the immediate evacuation of the vessel to the land amid ‘great wailing that
there was from the ship, by women, children, sick and anxious people’.17
Pelsaert drew his readers into what he claimed to be a shared affective

experience, as he realised the complete destruction of the ship was inevi-
table: ‘How great a grief it was to me all reasonable people can imagine’.18
In his own dramatic turn of phrase, he demonstrated his deep unwilling-
ness to leave more than 200 survivors of the vessel upon the islands off
the inhospitable west coast, for ‘to leave such a large group of fine people
and the goods of the Company, I would be responsible before God and
my High Authorities at Batavia’.19 Yet, although he felt ‘it was better and
more honest to die with them than to stay alive with deep grief of heart
if we did not find [water]’,20 on 5 June, it was determined that a small
party, including Pelsaert, should search out the nearby islands or mainland
for fresh water and, if none were found, they should sail on to Batavia to
announce ‘our sad unheard of, disastrous happening’.21
Pelsaert, ever mindful of how this decision would be interpreted by
his superiors, had a resolution drawn up noting the group’s determina-
tion; indeed, he insisted that he was only ‘resolved after long debating’.22
This was then read to the survivors, copied and signed into his journal ‘as
appears out of the resolution’.23 The resolution itself was no less emotion-
ally charged: explaining once again the desperate need that forced the
small group to proceed to Batavia to announce their ‘sad disaster’ and
‘do our very best and our duty to help our poor fellow brothers in their
most urgent need’.24 The document added that ‘if we did otherwise we
could not answer before God and our high authorities’.25 When he located
Dutch ships as they neared the VOC settlement in Batavia, Pelsaert made
straight for Crijn van Raemborch, Councillor of the Indies, ‘where I had
to tell his Hon. with heart’s grief of our sad disaster. He showed me much
friendship’.26 Pelsaert’s history was filled with explicit affective language,
of his sorrow and grief, at events that he implied were unexpected and
harrowing for him. He also importantly signalled to his prospective read-
ing audience the sympathetic reception he had received from his superior
Raemborch and that he also hoped to receive from them.
Pelsaert’s finessing of events was no doubt in anticipation of a frosty
reception at Batavia. Emotions ran high at the news of the loss. Governor-
General Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s shock and anger at Pelsaert’s aban-
donment of his crew was palpably expressed in the orders he delivered:
Pelsaert was ordered to proceed ‘most hastily to the place where you
lost the ship and left the people’.27 Pelsaert was sent back immediately
in the Sardam to recover the ‘250 souls, men, women, and children, on
islands or cliffs located about 8 to 10 leagues from the mainland, left in
90 S. BROOMHALL
utmost misery to perish of thirst and hunger’.28 He was not to stop look-
ing until he had exhausted all possibilities:
in case you do not discover any of our people near the wrecked ship or on
the little islands nearby, which we hope will not be so, you should find out
whether some have gone to the mainland and try to discover the place,
searching for the people as much as possible and as you are able.29
Pelsaert had dishonoured the reputation of the VOC by his actions, with
Senior Councillor Antonie van Diemen describing the ship and its people as
‘shamefully left’ by Pelsaert in his regional report to the Directors in 1631.30
The Batavia incident exposed divergent emotional expressions within
the correspondence of the VOC regional hierarchy. Pelsaert expressed
his sorrow, grief and sense of loss, and his sense of powerlessness amid
the hostile environment he encountered off the coast. Leaving the
stranded survivors was an action he had been persuaded to take only with
extreme reluctance, he argued, and with the apparent support of his crew.
However, senior officials at Batavia openly articulated to Pelsaert a sense
of disbelief, and perhaps anger, at his actions. They made plain to him
the horrifying prospects to which he had left the survivors who remained
ashore (an imagined fate, however, that was exceeded by the grim real-
ity of widespread rape and massacre that left at least 110 survivors dead,
which Pelsaert was to discover and document in the continuation of his
journal as he investigated and punished the ringleaders of the violence).
Meanwhile, to their own superiors, the same men emphasised the shame
that Pelsaert had brought on the Company. Not only did these rituals
of voicing distinct emotional expression reflect these men’s positions in
the VOC hierarchy, but unexpected actions could be explained through
them as well. These journals, letters and orders between the men sought
to manage this surprising abandonment of a ship by its captain and the
subsequent criminal violence that ensued, applying communicative rituals
in which unexpected actions that were inconsistent with the practice of a
good captain could be articulated through particular emotional language.
The rituals of the production of Company paperwork functioned to sig-
nal disapproval of disruptive and unbecoming behaviour and to assert the
power of superior officials over an underperforming inferior, but also to
re-establish Company order by providing a means to control, both emo-
tionally and practically, the unexpected events that had arisen (see also the
discussion in Chap. 6).
Vergulde Draeck: Spurring to Action

Further shipwreck incidents exacerbated the VOC’s concerns about the
inhospitality of the western Australian coast. When the Vergulde Draeck
was likewise wrecked there in 1656, a group of its crew sailed north to
Batavia in search of assistance for the 68 remaining survivors whom they
had left behind ashore. As they explained to the Directors in Amsterdam,
the Governor-General Joan Maetsuyker and Councillors Carel Hartzinck,
Joan Cunaeus, Nicholaes Verburch, and Dirck Hansz Steur at Batavia met
on 7 June 1656, just one day after the schuyt of the Draeck had arrived,
bringing the news of the shipwreck ‘to our great sorrow’.31 Over the next
year, they sent three further ships, with a loss of further men, to seek out
the ‘poor affected people’ who ‘hopefully are alive and can sustain them-
selves for several more months yet’.32
In their instructions to the searching crews, the Governor-General
and Councillors at Batavia expressed dark fears ‘that they have perished
through hunger and misery or have been beaten to death by savage inhab-
itants and murdered’. They also emphasised their feelings of responsibil-
ity to send yet more searches ‘so as not to fail in any duty that could be
demanded of us in searching for these poor souls in case they should be
alive, or some of them’.33 At the same time, the Council wrote to the
governor of the VOC colony at the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, asking him
to direct ships heading to Batavia to scan the coast for signs of the Draeck.
The daily register there recorded their request that galiots and light ships
be sent, in simple terms ‘in order to see whether there are either people
or Compagnie goods to be salvaged’,34 but van Riebeeck made note in his
daily register of a letter from Batavia that articulated in far more emotive
terms the Council’s request that ships seek out the ‘79 surviving people
left behind, desolate and in need of all comfort and help’.35 As a result, the
Vincq, for example, was ordered by van Riebeeck to look out for Draeck
people ‘still miserably left behind who have not been found’.36 To the
captain of the Vincq, van Riebeeck used a similar pathos to that which had
infused the instructions to captains from the Council in Batavia: ‘you will
keep a watch for any signs of fires or such from those poor, miserable peo-
ple … in order to release them from their misery, and to bring them back
to Batavia’.37 Van Riebeeck’s daily register recorded these same instruc-
tions to take the people and Company goods that they located to Batavia
in far less emotional terms.38 In looking across a range of records, it is
possible to see how the VOC communicative rituals employed affective
92 S. BROOMHALL
language precisely in specific documentary forms for heightened effect in

order to instil and incite positive behaviours for the Company.
Moreover, in case the skipper remained unmoved by his elaboration of
the distressing situation, van Riebeeck included both the resolutions of
the Governor-General and the Council in Batavia, showing their deter-
mination to save the survivors, and the letters written from the stranded
survivors upon the coast that had been carried on by those who sailed for
help back to Batavia, and then sent on to him from Batavia:
And so that you will realize the intentions and seriousness of the Honourable
Gentleman, Governor-General and Councillors of the Indies in the search
and release of these miserable people, we provide you with an extract from
the missive they sent us with the copies of their resolution to this intent of
June 7 last. Also, the letters sent by the lost people to the aforementioned
Honourables with the little schuyt and forwarded to us with that missive
(you can read that on your way to realize the better their Honourables’
order and seriousness).39
These letters from the stranded passengers of the Vergulde Draeck became
powerful emotional objects, representing the very people whose lives hung
in the balance on the ability of the Vincq to locate them. Van Riebeeck’s
inclusion of these letters was calculated for maximum affective impact.
The death of 11 crew from the Goede Hoop, which faced heavy win-
ter storms as it sought evidence of survivors on the coast, was a further
disaster. The Council justified why its vessels had ‘returned empty-
handed’ to the Directors by sketching a picture of the ‘violent storms’,
‘bad weather and hollow sea’ that the rescuers had faced on the inhos-
pitable coastline.40 It submitted the journals made of these voyages as
a measure of their due diligence (and which also included charts of the
hitherto-uncharted coastline). The failure of the Vincq in 1657 also to
locate survivors was similarly recorded by the Council at Batavia in its
daily register as a result of treacherous weather that ‘became so much
worse and the breakers off the coast so violent that it was a fearful sight
to behold’.41 Two further ships sent from Batavia in 1658—the Emeloord
and the Waekende Boei—also returned ‘without, however, discover-
ing any Netherlanders or any traces of the wreck’, except a number of
planks and other artefacts.42 The Waekende Boei crew had located all man-
ner of beams, buckets, boxes and flotsam from what they thought was
likely the vessel, including—unusually—a series of planks placed upright
in a circle.43 Neither ship, though, located survivors. On the Emeloord’s

return, the Governor-General and the Council made particular note to
the Directors that the crew had indeed seen ‘5 black people of an unusu-
ally great stature’, a more restrained hint of their suppositions about the
fate of the Draeck’s survivors.44
While much of the terminology in the documentation for and about
the recovery missions was similar throughout the VOC network, suggest-
ing a common routine of transcription and modelling from texts received,
there were however subtle differences in the affective rhetoric employed
across the Company hierarchy. To the captains of the rerouted vessels,
senior officials emphasised the helplessness of poor, stranded survivors,
at risk from an unknown and fearful environment, and dependent on
the Company’s assistance. These emotive descriptions were designed to
inspire careful searching by the crews that they sent to the area. To their
superiors, the Directors in Amsterdam, these same men demonstrated
their earnest attempts to locate the crew and goods of the Draeck and
placed blame for repeated failures on the extreme and unusual weather
conditions of the coast, making it an exceptional force to be reckoned
with, described in awesome and fearful terms. It was a reality the Directors
were in the end forced to accept, responding in August 1660: ‘Now that
all missions have been fruitless, we will have to give up, to our distress,
the people of the Draeck, who had found refuge on the Southland.’45
The Company ultimately resigned itself to God’s will. The communicative
rituals surrounding this event employed varied affective language both to
emphasise and to inspire the expected duties and attendant actions of men
in different positions in the Company hierarchy.
Waekende Boei: Reiterating the Corporate Mission

As the Waekende Boei surveyed the coast off present-day Perth in early
1658, its skipper Samuel Volckertszoon sent ashore a crew of some 14 led
by upper steersman Abraham Leeman to look more closely for survivors.
When Volckertszoon left the crew in bad weather and did not return,
Leeman was forced to sail the crew’s small open boat to Batavia, a jour-
ney which saw the crew reduced to just four survivors. Within Leeman’s
account of his experiences unfolded a remarkable tale of survival against
the odds, in which his religious beliefs became key to how he and his crew
dealt with their fate.46 It was moreover a deeply affective account, charting
the highs and lows as they battled their emotions as much as the elements.
94 S. BROOMHALL
Leeman’s account is particularly important here because of its explicit

recognition of the importance of adopting specific emotional expression
as the superior among the men ashore. Leeman’s journal articulated his
sense of responsibility to lead his crew and to show them, by his own care-
ful control of the feelings that he displayed to them, how they should act
as a group:
I was very sad, not knowing where to turn, for from the crew I could get
neither action nor help, but they looked to me. If I told them anything,
they were content with it; if I asked them anything they said they would do
whatever I told them, so that the cares were all mine. I prayed to God in my
heart for help and guidance.47
Leeman’s text provides us with an opportunity to see how one man’s

experience of sudden ascension to leadership brought with it difficult
expectations to subordinate his personal feelings. Significantly, Leeman
allowed himself to express these same emotions in the paperwork designed
to be read by his superiors in Batavia. In practice, he attempted to hide
the emotions that so permeated his journal, and his written record became
an opportunity to position his behaviour and articulate feelings that he
claimed he had worked so hard to repress in front of the men he led. By
displaying his concerns, fears and heartache in his textual practice, Leeman
performed as a subordinate who had not yet formally earned the status
of a Company captain, making clear that he was not claiming authority
to which he was not entitled. He thus allayed any potential concerns of
his superiors about his potentially problematic, albeit short-lived, assump-
tion of a superior role. Here, the emotions expressed via the rituals of
VOC administration carefully articulated Leeman’s subordinate status and
power to more senior men in the Company.
Leeman’s evidence revealed the use of prayer as a ritualised activity in
times of stress. He recorded the deep sense of despair that pervaded the
group, but also recognised the importance of divine assistance in bearing
their trials. Significantly, the account he made for his superiors of his emo-
tional state informed an understanding of his power within the Company.
At times, he wrote, ‘I was very downcast and tortured myself as if I were
out of my senses, often wishing for death out of despair, but consoled our-
selves sometimes … and prayed to God for better sense, if He pleased, for
this cannot be done without His will’.48 Thus, he attributed his strength
to lead his men as not from himself, but from his faith, one that was
ostensibly shared by all in the Company and regularly reiterated across its
documentation:
I was very sad for I could not consult with anybody save God alone; I went
up the mountain, fell on my knees and prayed to God for succour. Having
come down again I made them pray together and admonished them to keep
God before their eyes, for we were in great peril and God was the right
helmsman who could lead us back, so that some were moved and wept.49
Leeman legitimated his leadership under divine guidance by contrasting

the succour he drew from God with the grief and weakness he felt person-
ally in their situation.
Leeman subtly utilised the Company’s practice of emotions in its texts
to reassure his superiors of his acknowledged subordinated status, despite
his unexpected exercise of authority in a moment of need. He employed
the Company’s communicative ritual to reflect cycles of despair, faith in
the Lord and, ultimately, to demonstrate God’s grace through his sur-
vival. This allowed for a traumatic event to be articulated, remembered
and then reintegrated as a positive achievement for the VOC, and became
an important reiteration—given repeated disastrous experiences off the
Australian continental coast at that time—of the Company’s belief in its
God-given mission.
Conclusion
The VOC’s experiences with the South Lands were communicated, under-
stood and experienced through specific communicative rituals in its tex-
tual practice. A wide range of different types of documents were produced
by men in different positions of authority. These textual forms had distinct
purposes that were reflected in, and created through, their varied affec-
tive language. Emotions—anger, grief, fear, sorrow—were an important
aspect of the performative practice of VOC communicative rituals. Their
expression reflected and reinforced the Company’s internal hierarchy of
power, influencing who could feel what and when within its documen-
tation. Officials at senior levels portrayed paternal emotions, reflecting
their superior status, to show their care and concern, as well as anger and
dismay, about those they supervised within the wider VOC community.
These were affective positions adopted by the central Directors as well
as Governors and Councillors in Batavia and the Cape settlements. Fear,
96 S. BROOMHALL
terror, sadness and grief were generally articulations of subordinate men

in the hierarchy, usually expressed by skippers and their crews, although
they might also be employed by senior officials as acceptance of God’s will
when no other option for action appeared possible. For all, these expres-
sions were negotiated emotional states that were designed to make sense
of actions and justify them to those above and below them.
As the example of early Australian experiences suggests, VOC textual
practices also provided a space in which one could work through diffi-
cult experiences in rituals that foregrounded emotional expression as a
tool for collective reflection of their purposes and reintegration of men
after distressing events. These communicative performances attempted to
promote a positive, inclusive and righteous Company identity with which
members could associate. In doing so, the VOC archive created a shared
language, expectations, interpretation and, ultimately, even a collective
emotional engagement with the Company and the region itself.
Notes
1. Femme S. Gaastra provides a comprehensive but accessible analysis
in The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline
(Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003).
2. On the foundations and structure of the VOC archives, see
J.C.M. Pennings, ‘Origin and Administration of the VOC
Archives’, http://www.gahetna.nl/sites/default/files/afbeeldin-
gen/toegangen/NL-HaNA_1.04.02_introduction-VOC.pdf
(accessed 13 October 2016). See also Adrien Delmas, ‘The Role of
Writing in the First Steps of the Colony: A Short Enquiry in the
Journal of Jan van Riebeeck, 1652–1662’, in Contingent Lives:
Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. Nigel
Worden (Cape Town: Royal Netherlands Embassy, 2007), 500–11;
Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archives as Spaces of Memory’, Journal of the Society
of Archivists 29 (2008): 9–27; Eric Ketelaar, ‘Exploration of the
Archived World: From De Vlamingh’s Plate to Digital Realities’,
Archives and Manuscripts 36(2) (2008): 13–33; Adrien Delmas,
‘From Travelling to History: An Outline of the VOC Writing
System during the 17th Century’, trans. Christine Bull, in Written
Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas 1500–1900,
ed. Delmas and Nigel Penn (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2011),
95–122; Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. De Jong and Elmer Kolfin (eds),
The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Leiden:
Brill, 2010); Hedley Twidle, ‘Writing the Company: From VOC

Daghregister to Sleigh’s Eilande’, South African Historical Journal
65(1) (2013): 125–52. The approach of Ann Laura Stoler in exam-
ining colonial records principally of the nineteenth century pro-
vides a powerful example of the emotional interpretive possibilities
of such official administrative documentation. See Ann L. Stoler,
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
3. Ketelaar, ‘Exploration of the Archived World’, 23–4.
4. Gazi Islam and Michael J. Zyphur, ‘Rituals in Organizations: A
Review and Expansion of Current Theory’, Group Organization
Management 34(1) (2009): 121, drawing particularly upon the tax-
onomy devised by Harrison M. Trice and Janice Beyer, The Cultures
of Work Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).
5. Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (eds), Emotions in Rituals and
Performances (London: Routledge, 2012).
6. Islam and Zyphur, ‘Rituals in Organizations’, 125 and 132.
7. Ibid., 132.
8. On theories about styles of affective practices within particular
group cohorts, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities
in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006);
Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges’,
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16(2)
(2012): 161–75.
9. On religious aspects of VOC identity and practices, see Gerrit
J. Schutte (ed.), Het Indisch Sion: De gereformeerde kerk onder de
Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002).
10. Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and
Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1983); Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies:
A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, trans. Wendie
Shaffer (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008).
11. Costas Gaganakis, ‘Stairway to Heaven: Calvinist Grief and

Redemption in the French Wars of Religion’, Historein 8 (2008):
102–7.
12. Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘The Use of Dutch Material for South-
East Asian Historical Writing’, Journal of Southeast Asian History
3(1) (1962): 103–4. See Gerrit J. Schutte, Het Indisch Sion: de
Gereformeerde kerk onder de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2002)
98 S. BROOMHALL
13. ‘wesende daermode de vojiage (door de genadige bewaernisse

Godts) volbrocht, Die de Ho. Mo. Heeren Staten Generael, Sijn
Extie Prince van Orange etc. ende de Heeren Generael ende Sijne
Gouverneurs, in alle haer goet voornemen, geluck ende heijl
believe te verleenen’, in Het Aandeel der Nederlanders in de
Ontdeeking van Australië, 1606–1765, ed. Jan E. Heeres (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1899), 44. ‘Journael van Jan Carstensz. Op de ghedaene
reyse van Nova Guinea’, in Twee togten naar de Golf van
Carpentaria, ed. L.C.D. van Dijk (Amsterdam: J.H. Scheltema,
1859), 56. Translation by C. Stoffel in Jan E. Heeres (ed.), The
Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765
(London: Luzac, 1899), with additional translations by Elise
Reynolds and Marianne Roobol online at the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek website: http://www.kb.nl/bladerboek/barrenre-
gions/carstens/browse/page_56.html (accessed 13 October
2016).
14. ‘Ende hiermede wenschen Ul. altsamen toe, den segen des Heeren
ende een behouden reyse. Mitsgaders dat dese voyagie mach
strecken tot dienst der Compie, reputatie van ’t Vaderlandt ende
Uwe besundere Eere, Amen’, in Het Aandeel, 67, trans. Stoffel,
The Part borne, 67.
15. Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis and Ioanna Pepelasis
Minoglou (eds), Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four
Centuries of History (New York: Berg, 2010) includes several essays
focusing on early modern examples of trade diasporas.
16. ‘UEd. Trouweschuldige dienaren’, in Het Aandeel, 74. ‘Hoe die
voyagie ondernomen, ende in 2 maanden en 20 dagen tot Banda
geluckigh volbracht sij, gelieven U Ed. uyt het nevensgaende
gehouden daghregister en de caerte van den schipper Jan Jansz.
Zeeuw te beoogen’, 18 January 1649, in Generale Missiven van
Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde
Oostindische Compagnie, vol. 2, 1639–55, ed. Willem P. Coolhaas
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 334.
17. ‘Droeviege daghaenteyckeningh’, ‘het groot jammergeschrij datter
jnt schip was, door vrouwen, kinderen, ziecken, ende armhertige
menschen’, in Het Aandeel, 55. Marit van Huystee (ed. and trans.),
The Batavia Journal of Francisco Pelsaert: Algemeen Rijksarchief
[ARA], The Hague, Netherlands: Document 1630: 1098 QQII,
fols. 232–316. Western Australian Maritime Museum Report 136
(Fremantle, Western Australian Maritime Museum, 1988), 2. The
original text has not been entirely transcribed (apart from selec-
tions in Het Aandeel), but Pelsaert’s published account Ongeluckige
Voyagie van ’t Schip Batavia, nae Oost-Indien (Amsterdam: Joost
Hartgers, 1648) is a slightly altered, third-person account described
as a ‘Journael ende Historiche verhael’. On the published life of
ship’s journals, see Marijke Barend-van Haeften, ‘Van scheepsjour-
naal tot reisverhaal: een kennismaking met zeventiende- eeuwse
reisteksten’, Literatuur 7 (1990): 222–8.
18. Van Huystee, Batavia Journal, 3.
19. Ibid., 4. The same statement appears in the published version:
‘want men ’t voor Godt de Bewinthebberen en de Overigheydt op
Batavia niet souden konnen verantwoorden sa een schoon volck
ende des Compagnies rijche middelen lichtvaerdelijck’, Ongeluckige
Voyagie, 4.
20. Van Huystee, Batavia Journal, 4. A modified version of this is in
the published text: ‘met haer aldaer by des Compagnies Schip ende
goederen/in er eeren te sterven’, Ongeluckige Voyagie, 5.
21. ‘ons droevigh noijt gehoorde ongelckigh wedervaren’, in Het

Aandeel, 55. Van Huystee, Batavia Journal, 4.
22. ‘naar lange biddens dat sy mij beweechden’, in Het Aandeel, 55.
Van Huystee, Batavia Journal, 4. ‘Soo heeft den Commandeur
sijn byhebbent volch dese naervolgende te booren veraemde reso-
lutie voorgelesen daer sy in alle geconsenteert ende die met eeden
beverstigt hebben’, Ongeluckige Voyagie, 6.
23. ‘als bij de resolutie blyckt’, in Het Aandeel, 55. Van Huystee,
Batavia Journal, 4.
24. ‘droevig ongeluck’; ‘ons uyterste beste ende devoir te doen, om
onse arme mede-broeders in haer hoog-dringende noot te helpen’,
Ongeluckige Voyagie, 6.
25. ‘dat wy het anders voor Godt, en onse Hooge Overheden niet
souden konnen verantwoorden: des wy eendrachtigh goet gevon-
den ende geresolveert hebben’, Ongeluckige Voyagie, 6.
26. Van Huystee, Batavia Journal, 8. ‘hem met droefheyt des herten
haer droevigh ongeval verhaelde; die hem veel vriencschap bewees’,
Ongeluckige Voyagie, 10.
27. ‘spoedichste moocht arriveeren ter plaetse daer ghyliende ’t schip
ende ’t volck verlaten hebt’, 15 July 1629, in H.T. Colenbrander,
Jan Pieterszoon Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn Bedrijf in Indie, vol.
5 (’s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1933), 576.
100 S. BROOMHALL
28. ‘omtrent de 250 sielen, soo mans, vrouwen als kinderen, op seker
eylanden ofte klippen, omtrent 8 a 10 mylen van ’t vaste lant gele-
gen, gelaten in d’uytterste miserie, omme van dorst ende hongers-
noot te vergaen’, ibid., 576.
29. ‘Byaldien geen van ons volck omtrent het verongeluckte schip off
op de byleggende eylandekens verneempt, dat niet verhoopen, sult
onderstaen oft sich oock ymandt na ’t vaste lant begeven heeft,
trachtende de plaetse daeromtrent soo na ’t ontdecken ende ’t
volck op te soecken, als immer mogelijcke ende doenelijck sal sijn’,
ibid.
30. ‘schip en volck zoo schandelijck heeft verlaten’, in Willem Ph.
Coolhas, ‘Een Indisch Verslag uit 1631, van der hand van Antonio
van Diemen’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch
Genootschap te Utrecht lxv (1947): 202.
31. ‘tot onze grote droefheijt’, 4 December 1656, in Het Aandeel, 75.
32. ‘na de geroerde arme menschen te soecken, met hoope, ingevalle
alsnoch in’t leven sijn, dat se haer voort noch wel ettelijcke
maenden sullen sustenteren’, 4 December 1656, in Generale
Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der
Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, vol. 3: 1655–74, ed. Willem
P. Coolhaas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 85.
33. Translated by Louis Zuiderbaan, in James A. Henderson, Marooned:
The Wreck of the Vergulde Draeck and the Abandonment and Escape
from the Southland of Abraham Leeman in 1658 (Perth: St George
Books, 1982), 62–3.
34. ‘om te sien of er noch eenige menschen often Compe waeren sullen
te salveren sijn’, 28 November 1656, in Dagh-register gehouden int
Casteel Batavia, Anno 1656–1657, ed. J. de Hullu (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1904), 19.
35. ‘als oock noch 79 daer in gansch desolaten staet achtergelaten sijn,
makende t’samen 197 sielen, welcke d’ Almogende wil troosten,
alsoo der, om van menschen geholpen te worden, reede veele
moeyten gedaen ende derhalven weynich raedt meer toe wesen
sal’, 22 February 1657, in Jan van Riebeeck, Daghregister, vol, 2:
1656–8, ed. D.B. Bosman and H.B. Thom (Cape Town:
A.A. Balkema, 1955), 104; see also 124–6, 333.
36. Jeremy Green, with contributions by Lous Zeiderbaan, Robert
Stenuit, S.J. Wilson and Mike Owens, The Loss of the Verenigde
Oostindische Compagnie Jacht ‘Vergulde Draeck’, Western Australia
1656, Part I, British Archaeological Reports Supplementary Series

36(i) (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1977), 51.
37. Ibid., 52.
38. ‘aff te sacken ende alsoo ’t opgemelte vrack ende volcq, mogelijck
sijnde, op te soecken ende empassant weder mede op Batavia te
brengen, neffens sooveel van de contanten ende andre coopman-
schappen als met het minste pryckel mogelijck wesen sal uyt dito
vracq noch te becomen’, 22 April 1657, in Riebeeck, Daghregister,
124–5.
39. Green, The Loss of the Verenigde Oostindische, 52.
40. ‘onverrichter sacken te retourneren’, ‘vehemente storm’, ‘onwder
ende holle zee’, 4 December 1656, in Het Aandeel, 75.
41. ‘maer ’tweeder begon so hart aen te halen ende de cust langs ber-
rendet soo geweldich, dat vervaerlijck om sien was’, 8 July 1657,
in Dagh-register gehouden int Casteel Batavia, 206.
42. ‘doch geen Nederlanders nochte oock het wrack van het schip ver-
nomen, dan wel eenige planken, blocken, oock een joffer ende
hackebert van een schip’, 14 December 1658, in Generale Missiven,
211.
43. ‘een dicke dwarsbalck, stuck van de eecke huyt, stuck van de ver-
dubbelingh, vaetie, putsen, doften van de boot, stucken van kisten,
duygen en andere rommelingh, en notabels was, dat party stucken
van plancken, die met de eyden omhooch en in ’t ronde opgeset
waeren’, 26 February 1658, in Samuel Volckertszoon’s journal,
ARAKA 1115, Overgekomen brieven en papieren 1659, fols.
222v–223, http://museum.wa.gov.au/sites/default/files/No-
274-Volkersen-Wackende-Boey-Journal.pdf (accessed 13 October
2016).
44. ‘Die van Emeeloort hebben op seeker plaets oock 5 swarte men-
schen gesien van een ongemeene groote stature’, 14 December
1658, in Generale Missiven, 211.
45. Green, The Loss of the Verenigde Oostindische, 60.
46. KA1115, Overgekomen brieven en papieren uit Indie gericht aan
Heeren XVII en Kamer Amsterdam 1659, fols. 229–52, http://
museum.wa.gov.au/sites/default/files/No-273-Leemans-
Journal.pdf (accessed 13 October 2016). A transcription is avail-
able in Samuel Pierre LHonoré Naber (ed.), ‘In een open sloep
van Australië naar Java’, Marineblad (1910–11): 18–36 and trans-
lated by C. de Heer, ‘My Shield and My Faith’, Westerly 1 (1963):
33–46.
102 S. BROOMHALL
47. ‘Ick seer bedroeft sijnde niet wetende waar ick mij keeren oft wen-
den soude, want van ’t volck geen raat off daet crijgen conde, sij
sagen al op mij, seyde ick haer wat, sij waeren daar mede te vreeden,
vraechde ick haer iets, seijden ’t geen u goed dunckt, sullen wij
doen, soo dat de sorgh alleen op mij aan quam. Ick badt Godt in
mijn harte, om hulp en raat’, 27 March 1658, in KA1115, fol. 236.
De Heer, 40.
48. ‘ick was somtyds soo bevreest ende quelde mij selven off ick halff
sinneloos was, wenschten dikwijls om de doot, van mismoedicheyt,
dan troosten ons somwijlen weder, ende baden Godt om beter sin-
nen, dewijle het hem soo belieffde want sonder sijn wille ins niet
geschieden can’, 1 May 1658, in KA1115, fols. 247v–248. De
Heer, 44.
49. ‘Ick was seer bedroeft want met niemant conde te raade gaan, dan
met Godt alleen, gingh boven op den bergh, viel op mijn knien, en
badt Godt om bijstant, om laegh gecomen zijnde, liet haar gesa-
mentlijck ’t gebet doen, ende vermaende haer, dat zij Godt voor
oogen wilden houden, ende haer wachten van sonden, want wij in
groote noot waeren, ende dat Godt den rechten stuurman was, die
ons weder te recht con brengen, soo datter sommige beweeght
wierden, tot schreijen’, 24 March 1658, in KA1115, fol. 234v. De
Heer, 39.
CHAPTER 6
Ritualised Public Performance, Emotional

Narratives and the Enactment of Power:
The Public Baptism of a Muslim
in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona
François Soyer
Highly ritualised public ceremonies were an integral part of the rhythm of

everyday life for the inhabitants of early modern Spain and Portugal. They
ranged from annual religious processions such as those of penitents dur-
ing the Semana Santa (Holy Week) before Easter and the Corpus Christi
processions to more sporadic (though no less spectacular or carefully cho-
reographed) events such as the public sentencing of convicted heretics
by the Inquisition (the notorious autos-de-fé) or the triumphal entries
of monarchs and bishops into the towns that they were visiting during
their peregrinations. Accounts of most of these festivities and events were
recorded in printed pamphlets. These include accounts of the public cel-
ebrations and ritual pomp surrounding the baptisms of the royal children
F. Soyer (*)
Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton,
Southampton, UK

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_6
104 F. SOYER
of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs. In his wide-ranging analysis of

fasto público (‘public pomp’) in early modern Spain, historian José Jaime
García Bernal has noted how the process by which the ritual of baptism
was transformed into a public spectacle (el processo de especularización en el
ritual del bautismo) reached its zenith in the seventeenth century and was
part of a conscious propagandistic effort to achieve dynastic legitimacy.1
Such royal baptisms were not, however, the only baptisms to be turned
into public spectacles. A number of pamphlets and newssheets printed
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries record elaborate processions
and ceremonies taking place to celebrate the baptism of Muslim converts.2
The existence of other public baptisms of Muslims is only recorded in
manuscript documents (private letters, baptismal registers) or anecdotally
in a handful of printed historical accounts. The pamphlets include surviv-
ing accounts of public baptisms of Muslims staged in Lisbon (1588 and
1589), Seville (1625 and 1672), Fitero (1659) and Barcelona (1723).
In spite of their variety, the sources paint a fairly standardised picture of
the rituals involved in the ceremonial public baptism of neophytes. These
ceremonies always involved (1) a solemn procession and (2) the actual
baptism. Our sources leave no doubt that both these aspects of the cer-
emony were highly choreographed, staged with great consideration, and
celebrated with equal pomp and solemnity.3
This work analyses the surviving account of one public baptism: that of
a single Muslim captive in 1723, who was baptised in Barcelona amidst a
sumptuous and elaborate public ceremony that included a procession, mili-
tary parade, public baptism in the cathedral and was concluded with a truly
spectacular celebratory bonfire. It highlights the crucial importance of ana-
lysing ritualised early modern ceremonies not in isolation, but rather within
their broader political, social or religious contexts. Furthermore, through
the unparalleled wealth of details about this public baptism, this work also
explores the manner in which a ruler could usurp a highly ritualised religious
ceremony to enact his power and convey an emotional message to his sub-
jects via its semiotic density (for the converse phenomenon, see Chap. 8).
The same rituals and symbols were used in Barcelona to express two
different emotional and political narratives: on the one hand, the offi-
cial expression of joy at the spiritual victory of Christianity over Islam
exemplified in the public conversion of a Muslim and, on the other hand,
the displeasure of a monarch towards his rebellious subjects. Indeed, by
examining the political and social context of events in Catalonia dur-
ing the first two decades of the eighteenth century, this chapter argues
RITUALISED PUBLIC PERFORMANCE, EMOTIONAL NARRATIVES... 105
that the exact same rituals and symbols were also used by King Philip V
(1700–46), the first monarch of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain and a man
who spent his formative years at the court of Louis XIV of France, as
part of a symbolic struggle with his Catalan subjects. As this work reveals,
Philip V keenly perceived the Catalans to be treacherous and unreliable
subjects. Responding to a command issued personally by the king, the
Bourbon authorities in Barcelona exploited a public religious ceremony
with no explicit political function to enact royal power: articulating the
king and the royal government’s anger against his rebellious Catalan sub-
jects, legitimising his claim to act as their ruler and emphasising both his
majesty and the submission of his Catalan subjects. To achieve this aim,
the Bourbon viceroy in Catalonia organised a remarkable display of the
Spanish Crown’s military power and religious authority.
As Gerd Althoff has pointed out, the concept of royal anger (ira regis
in Latin) was part of ‘rulership practice’ and was the antithesis of royal
clemency and grace. Demonstrations and evocations of royal anger were
often calculated displays of power.4 In medieval Spain, ira regis was a legal
instrument that enabled kings to arbitrarily exile magnates who displeased
them.5 Whilst the legal significance of this concept in Spain waned after
the central medieval period, its political meaning endured into the early
modern period. The ira regis came to express the anger of the king as an
individual, the antithesis of his paternal love for all his subjects, but also
of an institution, the Crown, against those subjects who had reneged on
their oaths of loyalty and defied royal authority. In 1640, for instance, the
rebellious Catalans claimed in a propaganda pamphlet that the chief min-
ister of King Philip IV had ‘awoken the royal wrath against this province’.
That same year, the Spanish diplomat Diego de Saavedra Fajardo worried
in his popular treatise on the education of princes about the intemper-
ate use of ‘anger’ by princes, which, he cautioned, was ‘more dangerous
than the lit fuse of an explosive mine under a city’. During Philip V’s own
reign, in 1708, the author of a panegyric poem extolling the virtues of
the Bourbon monarch repeatedly emphasises his ‘just anger’ against his
foreign enemies and rebellious subjects.6
The Public Baptism of Mustafa Azen

The public baptism of Mustafa Azen in 1723 is recorded in a single source:
an anonymous account of the ceremonies and festivities with the some-
what prolix title: Relación verdadera de la solemnidad con que se celebró
106 F. SOYER
el Bautismo de Mustafa Azen, Comandante de Cavalleria Dragona de los

Turcos de Levante (‘A true account of the solemnity with which was cel-
ebrated the baptism of Mustafa Azen, commander of the dragoon cavalry
of the Turcs of the Levant’).7 Although the pamphlet is short, comprising
only eight pages, its diminutive and densely packed print means that it
includes a wealth of information about the highly ritualised ceremony. The
identity of the author of the Relación is not known, but it was produced
by the printer Joseph Teixidó in the same year as the events it relates.
The Teixidós were a respected family of printers in eighteenth-century
Catalonia and Joseph Teixidó printed a variety of items, including books,
royal proclamations, short accounts (relaciones) of newsworthy public
events, as well as, from 1716 onwards, an official newssheet in Barcelona
(entitled the Noticias de Diferentes Partes Venidas a Barcelona). Given the
close ties between Teixidó and the Crown, it appears most likely that the
Relación was commissioned by the royal authorities. The Relación is cer-
tainly a work of political propaganda seeking to publicise news of an event
that was itself an act of political propaganda. It is noteworthy that, as far
away as Portugal, the issue of the Gazeta de Lisboa Occidental (a newssheet
circulating in Lisbon and the rest of Portugal) printed on 4 March 1723
reported the baptism and cited the Relación as its source.8
According to the Relación, Mustafa Azen was a native of the
Peloponnesian town of Nafplion, which is located in modern-day Greece,
but was situated within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire in the
eighteenth century. He had risen to prominence as a trusted advisor of the
Muslim ruler of Tunis and served as his emissary to the courts in Paris,
Constantinople and Algiers. Unfortunately for him, he was captured dur-
ing a journey he undertook at the behest of his master in order to convey
a gift to the holy city of Mecca when the ship upon which he was travelling
was shipwrecked on the coast of Sicily in 1716. The exact motives that
impelled him to apostatise from Islam are not known. Did he undergo
a genuine religion conversion? Did he fear returning to Tunis after the
failure of his mission and, one presumes, the loss of the gift entrusted to
him? Did he despair of being ransomed by his master? The Relación insists
that he dedicated himself to ‘reading and listening to pious books’ once
he arrived in the citadel of Barcelona and that he spontaneously told his
captors that St Francis and St Jerome had appeared to him in visions and
had urged him to convert to Christianity.9
After his miraculous visions, Mustafa informed his captor in
Barcelona, the brigadier in charge of the citadel, of his intention to convert
and the news was relayed (by means not specified) to the Crown. It is at
this point that the narrative of the Relación first refers to King Philip V
of Spain, who, on 19 December 1722, ordered his Captain-General in
Catalonia, José Carrillo de Albornoz y Montiel (1671–1747), the Count
of Montemar, to arrange for the baptism of Mustafa ‘in his royal name and
with all the corresponding solemnity’. The king specified that he himself
would act as the catechumen’s godfather. The author does not seek to
hide the Relación’s propagandistic aim and panegyrically commented on
the monarch’s motivations: ‘Although the innate Catholic piety of the
King has always manifested admirable virtue and ardent devotion on such
occasions as have presented themselves, they were never more evident
than in the present one’.
The captain-general informed the Real Audiencia (royal appellate
court), the cathedral chapter and the municipal authorities. The Bishop
of Barcelona, Andrés de Orbe y Larreátegui (1672–1740), personally
interviewed the catechumen, asking Mustafa questions about the basics
of Catholic dogma and his reasons for abjuring his Islamic faith. The
bishop was content with his replies and declared that he was ready to be
baptised.
The ceremony itself was the subject of meticulous planning. The medi-
eval cathedral of Barcelona was selected to be the venue of the baptism
since it was ‘the grandest and most famous’ religious edifice in the city
and, crucially, forestalled any strife caused by rivalry between the munici-
pal and ecclesiastical authorities, thus guaranteeing the ‘happiness and joy’
of the event. The cathedral was sumptuously decorated for the occasion:
‘the most expensive tapestries that could be found’ were hung upon its
walls, while its various altars were illuminated with candles and very large
chandeliers ‘surrounded’ the main altar and the presbytery. The overall
effect was that ‘the artificial light outshone the daylight’. The author of
the Relación particularly mentions the fact that a ‘great and sumptuous’
portrait of Philip V was hung in the dossal of the baptismal chapel, which
was itself covered with ‘precious velvet’ (ricos terciopelos). The procession
was carefully choreographed so that it would depart from the palace of
the captain-general with the catechumen holding the hand of the Duke
of Atri, an Italian aristocrat in the service of the Bourbon monarchy, until
they reached the doors of the cathedral. Walking along with them, and in a
precise order, came many members of the nobility and ‘persons of distinc-
tion in the city’, as well as the officials and officers of the military garrison,
and the Real Audiencia.
108 F. SOYER
On the day of the baptism, Thursday 4 February 1723, proceedings

began at the palace of the captain-general, whose main façade was deco-
rated with tapestries and a canopy covering a portrait of Philip V. A recep-
tion was held there at 9 am for members of the Real Audiencia and their
staff, to whom ‘many sweets and chocolate’ were offered. After this, the
Duke of Atri and officers of the garrison arrived along with the convert,
who had been moved to a cell in the convent of San Francisco, right next
to the house of the Duke. At 10 am, the procession, led by the Duke
holding Mustafa with his right hand, began. The participants walked on
foot since ‘it would have been impossible to procure enough carriages for
such a multitude’, although the captain-general and the members of the
Real Audiencia followed the procession (presumably at a walking pace)
in sumptuous carriages escorted by their pages and various squadrons of
cavalry.
The procession, which wound its way through the main squares of
Barcelona, was heavily guarded by lines of soldiers from the different regi-
ments stationed in the city (from the Castile, Guadalajara, Comerie and
Swiss regiments as well as the Artillery Corps). The distinguished con-
vert was escorted to the Cathedral of Barcelona amid what can only be
described as an extravagant military parade and a cacophony produced by
a multitude of military bands. The printed account relates the distribution
of the military bands along the route of the procession as follows:
In the plaça de Sant Francesc, situated right next to the residence [of the
captain-general], could be found a squadron of the regiment of Barcelona,
with their standard, kettledrums and all of their trumpets; in that of the
Encantes one hundred horsemen of the regiment of Extremadura; on
the corner of the Calle de la Merced fifty horsemen of the regiment of
Calatrava; in the plaza of the Palace two squadrons of the same regiment [of
Calatrava]; in the plaza del Borne fifty horsemen of the regiment of Malta;
in the plaza del Angel fifty horsemen of the regiment of Seville; and in the
plaza del Rey fifty horsemen of the regiment of Bourbon; and in the plaza
of the Cathedral a squadron from the regiment of Farnese with their kettle-
drums and trumpets. All these units were using their martial instruments to
produce the most pleasant harmony.10
The choice of the square in front of the captain-general’s official residence

in Barcelona was not accidental. The captain-general was the king’s rep-
resentative, indeed quite literally his alter ego, and Philip V was to play a
particularly important part in this ceremony.
Once the procession arrived at the main doors of the cathedral, it was
met by the municipal authorities and the bishop. The captain-general took
Mustafa’s right hand and loudly informed him that ‘the King has ordered
me to act in his royal name as your Godfather’. The baptism took place in
the small baptismal chapel of the cathedral, under the portrait of the king
and only in the presence of the captain-general, the bishop and their assis-
tants. Dressed in his ‘moorish robes’, Mustafa was anointed with holy oil
and renamed Philip Joseph Francisco, in homage to his royal patron/god-
father and the saint who had miraculously appeared in his visions. Whilst
the ceremony was taking place, an orchestra ‘played exquisitely’ (primoro-
samente). The transformation or rebirth of Mustafa/Philip as a Christian
also entailed a transformation of his physical appearance. After his baptism,
the ‘moorish robes’ of the new convert were removed in the chapel where
the baptistery was located and he was dressed in a ‘beautiful white mantle,
with silver embroidery’ offered to him by the captain-general, along with
other necessary clothing (a shirt of the finest Dutch linen, cravat, belt,
short sword, hat and even diamond buttons), ‘all of which was in the best
taste possible and worth over two-hundred dubloons’.
The crowning glory of the whole ceremony was a ‘splendid banquet’
held by the captain-general for the principal dignitaries, followed by a
memorable fireworks display from the citadel and the erection, close to the
city walls by the sea, of a monument or structure intended to resemble a
castle, which the printed account describes as ‘a castle of fire’ (un castillo
de fuego). This was presumably a reference to the fact that the structure
was to be used as platform to launch celebratory fireworks, during which
it would be deliberately burnt down. The relación denotes that the castle,
which took over two months to construct, was square-shaped, 100 palmos
high and 40 palmos wide (approximately equivalent to 20 metres high and
eight metres wide). It had been built with three doors on each side, so that
it had 12 in total. Our source relates that one door stood out as the princi-
pal entrance of this fake castle and four cartouches were located above this
entrance with the coats of arms of the Turks, Tripoli, Algiers and Tunis.
The castle was adorned with no less than 16 statues with four statues
positioned on each side of it. Each statue represented a detestable vice:
Pride (soberbia), Avarice (avaricia), Lust (lujuria), Anger (ira), Gluttony
(gula), Envy (envidia), Sin (pecado), Deceit (engaño), Error (error),
Hypocrisy (hipocresía), Idolatry (idolatría), Ambition (ambición), Scandal
(escándalo), Fraud (fraude), Superstition (superstición) and Falsehood
(falsedad). Finally, the castle was surmounted by a representation of a
110 F. SOYER
phoenix, just beneath which were placed a cockleshell and six jugs.11 The
banquet, fireworks and festivities were over by 10 pm.
The spectacular public baptism of a Muslim was intended to be an emo-
tionally charged religious lesson for onlookers, offering an exemplary rep-
resentation of the spiritual rebirth that resulted not only from conversion
to Christianity but also from the genuine religious conversion of any sin-
ner (including a Christian who was already baptised). The rituals and sym-
bols staged in the spectacular public baptism were deliberately chosen to
reinforce this message and provoke a pious display of emotions among the
crowd of spectators: these included the careful ordering of the procession,
the music and spectacular magnificence of the setting of the baptismal
font in the cathedral and, ultimately, the Muslim’s dramatic removal of his
‘Moorish robes’ and his post-baptismal re-attiring as a Christian in spotless
and mostly white clothes made of valuable fabrics. Whilst the baptism took
place in a relatively small chapel, the neophyte would have re-emerged
into the crowded central nave of the cathedral, and re-appeared as a com-
pletely transformed man to the onlookers. The author of the Relación of
1723 does not describe the emotional response of the crowd, possibly
because a lack of space (the Relación was produced in a single, eight-page,
quarto format) and a need to focus on the aspects of the ceremony that
emphasised the king’s power and majesty. Other accounts (most notably
the short description of the public baptism of a Muslim slave sentenced
to death that took place in Seville in 1625, where the onlookers wept)
offer fascinating evidence of the intense emotional response of onlook-
ers to public baptisms.12 Devotional weeping, as William Christian Jr. has
emphasised, was understood to represent a sign of genuine religious belief
and love of God in early modern Iberian Catholic society.13
The King’s Anger: Philip V and His Catalan

Subjects
An uncritical reading of the public baptism as it is recorded in the
Relación would interpret it as a celebration of the spiritual triumph of
Christianity over Islam personified in the quasi-miraculous conversion of
a single individual. This would place the public baptism of Mustafa Azen
in a line of such ritual performances dating back to the sixteenth century.
However, such an interpretation would fail to note the stark differences
that exist between the public baptism of 1723 and earlier ceremonies such
as those of Lisbon in 1588 or Seville in 1672. The ceremony of 1723
had a particular historical and local context and its symbolism possessed a
clear local political dimension that went far beyond the struggle between
Christianity and Islam.
To fully appreciate the political use that Philip V made of the public con-
version of Mustafa Azen, it is crucial to understand the troubled historical
context in which the ceremony took place. Officially, Philip V did not rule
Catalonia as a monarch, but as the holder of the title of Count of Barcelona,
one of the many constituent polities forming the Spanish monarchy. From
the medieval period onwards, the inhabitants of Catalonia jealously safe-
guarded their local privileges and autonomy against any royal encroach-
ment and the county always represented a politically sensitive component
of the Spanish monarchy. In the seventeenth century, Catalonia had already
waged a major and bloody, albeit unsuccessful, rebellion with French assis-
tance against its Spanish ruler, Philip IV, between 1640 and 1652 (the
Guerra dels Segadors) and witnessed a popular uprising against the govern-
ment of Carlos II between 1687 and 1689 (the Revolta dels Barretines).
During the revolt against Philip IV, Catalonia’s representatives had gone
so far as to depose King Philip and recognise first Louis XIII of France and
then his son Louis XIV as their rightful rulers. Finally, the county had been
invaded twice more by the French in 1694 and 1697, who successfully
besieged Barcelona during the second invasion, and for a very short time
in 1697, Louis XIV was re-invested with the title of Count of Barcelona.
The relationship between the Crown and the Catalans was a particu-
larly difficult one under Philip V, who succeeded the childless Carlos II in
1700 and became the first monarch of Spain from the French/Bourbon
dynasty. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), Catalonia
first supported Philip V’s claim, but subsequently, in 1705, sided with
the Austrian/Habsburg candidate to the Spanish throne. From then
onwards, the Catalans had fiercely resisted the claim of the Bourbon
Philip V. Barcelona itself was besieged by the troops of Philip V on no
less than three occasions. The first siege of Barcelona took place between
14 September and 19 October 1705, the second siege between 3 and 27
April 1706 and the third siege from 25 July 1713 until 11 September
1714. The final siege, which followed the Catalan refusal to accept a royal
pardon and general amnesty in March 1713, lasted for well over a year
before the town was compelled to surrender to the Bourbon monarch.
This was a protracted and costly operation that cost the Bourbon forces
over 10,000 men. The siege artillery of the royal forces fired a total of
30,068 cannon balls into the city and left large parts of it in ruins.14
112 F. SOYER
The victorious Philip V and the Bourbon authorities never forgot the
disloyalty of their Catalan subjects and were constantly aware of the danger
that this region, situated on the border with France, represented to the sta-
bility of Philip’s reign in Spain. To counter this threat, the Bourbon mon-
archy embarked upon a programme of centralisation and Castilianisation,
seeking to curb the erstwhile autonomy of the Catalans through the Nueva
Planta decrees. Even before the end of the war, in 1707, Philip issued an
edict abolishing all local laws and privileges (fueros) in the eastern parts of
Spain that did not recognise his authority, including Catalonia. In an angry
tone, the edict berated the Catalans as ungrateful and rebellious subjects
who had betrayed their oath of fealty to their monarch, contrasting them
with ‘my most faithful vassals, the Castilians’. The king’s rancour was also
plain in 1713, when he furiously told the British ambassador that he would
never grant any privileges to the seditious Catalans, those ‘outlaws and
scoundrels’ (forajidos y pillastres).15 Officially promulgated in Catalonia in
January 1716, the Nueva Planta abrogated the legal autonomy enjoyed
by the Catalans through their local laws (the fueros). The newly created
position of ‘Captain-General’ replaced the previous one of ‘viceroy’ in
Catalonia and a new royal appellate court—the Real Audiencia—under
royal control was also established. Trustworthy Castilian officials were
appointed to positions of power and the monarch imposed Castilian as the
official language of Catalonia, banning the use of Catalan for official pur-
poses. Finally, the six traditional universities of Catalonia were closed and a
single new university was established in the town of Cervera.16
Long after the surrender of Barcelona and the suppression of the
revolt in 1714, Catalonia remained under a form of military occupation
as a large portion of the Spanish royal army continued to be stationed in
the county. As late as 1725, the cost of garrisoning Catalonia still repre-
sented 30 per cent of the Spanish Crown’s military expenditure. Over
50 castles throughout Catalonia were demolished, although the Spanish
Crown oversaw the construction between 1715 and 1725 of a prominent
citadel in Barcelona—the Ciutadella de Barcelona—whose massive earth-
works and defences were designed just as much to dissuade any future
uprising as to protect the city from foreign attack. The threat of distur-
bances or even of a new rising against the king was certainly a reality that
could not be neglected by the Spanish Crown. Although he had igno-
miniously abandoned the Catalans to their fate in 1713, the Habsburg/
Austrian claimant to the Spanish throne (the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles VI) had not officially renounced his claim (and would only do so
with the Spanish–Austrian treaty of Vienna in 1725). The new laws and
heavy burdens of contributing to defray the cost of provisioning the royal
army caused considerable resentment in Catalonia. In 1718, the Bourbon
statesman and diplomat Baltasar Patiño commented that the Catalans
were ‘very restless’.17 Catalan exiles and guerrillas favouring the return
of Habsburg rule still threatened the stability of royal authority in the
countryside and the proximity of the border with France was the cause
of continuous concern. Indeed, a French army had invaded Catalonia in
1719 during the War of the Quadruple Alliance and did so with the assis-
tance of numerous Catalan auxiliaries led by the legendary guerrilla Pere
Joan Barceló (known as ‘Carrasquet’). The end of the war in 1720, which
saw Spain humiliated by the combined forces of France, Britain, Austria
and Holland, cannot have failed to bring home to the Spanish Crown the
vulnerability of Bourbon rule in Catalonia.18
Bearing in mind this highly charged political context, it is no surprise
that the baptism of Mustafa Azen should have warranted both the direct
participation by Philip V, at least in image-form, as well as a display of mili-
tary strength. Such a public baptism presented the Bourbon monarch with
a golden opportunity to demonstrate his majesty as a Catholic Monarch,
not only by acting as the godfather of Mustafa Azen, but also by mount-
ing a show of force that would offer a salutary reminder to the Catalan
populace gathered to observe the baptism that the Crown held a firm grip
on the county. By hijacking a public ceremony for political purposes and
seeking to make a point, Philip was in fact employing the same methods
that the Catalans had utilised before their rebellion against him.
Most crucially of all, the public baptism of 1723 was the first major
public spectacle organised by the Crown in Barcelona for over 20 years
and the first since the end of the civil war. In 1701, the Catalan authori-
ties had welcomed a teenage Philip with a ceremonial entry into the city
of Barcelona, during which the monarch had been made to ride through
a series of special constructed triumphal arches. As Frederico Revilla has
revealed, these arches may have had a festive aim, but were also designed
to educate Philip about Catalonia’s history and to warn him not to trifle
with its traditional liberties. One arch in particular, that erected by the
council of the representatives and judges of Catalonia, featured a por-
trait of the young Philip and allegorical representations of eight virtues,
including ‘justice’ (Iustitia), ‘public hope’ (Spes Publica), ‘public hap-
piness’ (Hilaritas publica) and ‘liberality’ (Liberalitas). The virtue of
Princeps Iuventutis (‘the first amongst the young’ or ‘leader of youth’) was
114 F. SOYER
an unofficial honorary title bestowed upon the successors to the Roman

emperors, but was also a somewhat double-edged allusion to his youthful
inexperience.19
Finally, it is possible to add another factor that may have played a role
in Philip V’s decision to stage the public baptism of Mustafa Azen beyond
the troubled relationship between the Crown and the Catalans. Since
1720, a weary Philip had secretly resolved to abdicate the Spanish throne
in favour of his son Luis, an act he would carry through in January 1724.
The year of 1723 was a crucial one in which the king’s resolve to abdi-
cate—a move that took the whole of Europe by surprise—finally became
firm. With the painful memory of his own contested accession in Catalonia
still fresh in his mind, Philip may well have encouraged by these plans to
stage a display of power in Barcelona in advance of his son’s accession to
the title of Count of Barcelona. A timely ritualised display of royal power
in Barcelona could only help affirm the legitimacy of his son’s rule over
the turbulent Catalans as well as over the other Spanish subjects of the
Bourbon monarchy.20
Emotional Politics on the Public Stage

Public rituals have always played a crucial role, both past and present,
in the legitimisation of authority and the projection of power either by
individual rulers or the religious and secular institutions of government.
In his seminal research on the use of rituals and symbols by rulers on the
island of Bali (Indonesia), Clifford Geertz persuasively argued that the
rulers of the ‘theatre-state’ used ritual celebrations to ‘enact’ their power
through models of an imagined reality.21 More recently in early modern
Iberian scholarship, José Jaime García Bernal has aptly described the same
process as ‘power turned into a spectacle, or even better the spectacle of
power’.22 The power of ritualised public performances to enable and facili-
tate rule over a community of individuals depends upon their ability to
communicate through symbols and arouse emotional responses amongst
the spectators through their religious, cultural or historical specific con-
notations. Planned with the utmost attention to even the most minute of
details, such ritual performances broadcast powerful messages or narra-
tives to onlookers through their semiotic density.
On an emotional level, ritualised public performances such as the pub-
lic baptism of 1723 offered their organisers the opportunity to articulate
powerful messages to onlookers, who were expected to respond with the
appropriate collective emotional display. By seeking to elicit a certain type

of emotional response from the spectators, such as sadness during the
processions of penitents on Easter Friday or joy at the conversion of a
Muslim to Christianity or baptism of a royal infant, such ritualised per-
formances also served a purpose in the creation of ‘emotional regimes’
(as defined by William Reddy) by endeavouring to inculcate emotional
norms.23 Accounts of other public baptisms frequently described the emo-
tional reaction of the spectator/participants. In the small village of Fitero
(1659), the population of the village, and especially its aldermen, joined
the procession with all proper ‘solemnity and expressions of joy’. Another
public baptism, recorded in the baptismal register of the village of Arganda
(south-east of Madrid) in 1637, took place ‘amidst a great crowd and
much rejoicing’. Finally, the surviving account of the baptism of a Muslim
slave in Seville in 1625 records the emotional reactions of the crowd in
considerable detail.24 In stark contrast, the Relación of 1723 does not
provide much information about the spectators’ emotional response. It
only indicates that a large crowd of onlookers was present in the cathe-
dral and was separated from the dignitaries by two rows of troops, and
that the fireworks were the cause of ‘much amusement amongst all the
people’. The reason why the author of the 1723 Relación does not elabo-
rate on the public reaction, especially given its propagandistic objectives,
is debatable (did the Catalan crowd not react with sufficient enthusiasm?).
Nonetheless, its account of the ceremony and its rituals fortunately per-
mits a detailed analysis of how the ritualised public performance of bap-
tism was used to weave two interconnected emotional narratives in the
conscious (perhaps even heavy-handed) use of symbolism.
There are two emotional narratives in the public baptism of 1723: (1)
official joy and rejoicing at the conversion of Mustafa Azen; and (2) the
Crown’s expression of royal anger at its rebellious subjects in Barcelona
and a desire to project the power of the Bourbon monarchy. Whilst these
two narratives obviously intersected—the king was after all protector of
the Catholic Church in Spain—it is this second narrative that this chapter
explores. To express the second narrative, the royal authorities exploited
the opportunity offered by the public performance of the baptism not
only to stage a military parade but also to seize upon the religious symbol-
ism of the event and use it for political ends. This was a particularly shrewd
political move by Philip V and the Bourbon authorities. One may specu-
late that the official religious purpose of the ceremony and the emotionally
charged rituals accompanying the baptism of Mustafa Azen allowed the
116 F. SOYER
Bourbon Crown to avoid staging a spectacle that was too overtly political
and which thus risked either the humiliation of a poor public turnout or
provoking open demonstrations of hostility.
The virtual presence of Philip V in the form of his two large portraits—
one on the walls of the palace of the captain-general and the other in the
baptistery of the cathedral—clearly acted as a reminder to the Catalans
of the two sources of their ruler’s authority and legitimacy: his secular
authority as Count of Barcelona and his religious authority as defender of
the Catholic Church in accordance with his official title as ‘Catholic King’
(rey católico) of Spain. By publicly acting as the godfather of the catechu-
men, Philip was enacting his father-like spiritual authority not just over the
catechumen but also over all his subjects, Catalans included.
The construction of the ‘castle of fire’ was not in itself remarkable, as the
erection of structures described as ‘ephemeral art and architecture’ (arte
efímero y arqutitectura efímera), such as triumphal arches that Philip V had
to cross during his ceremonial entry into Barcelona in 1701 or ‘heavenly
castles’, were a standard feature of public celebrations in Habsburg and
Bourbon Spain.25 The ‘castle of fire’ built in Barcelona certainly presents an
unusual variation on the ‘heavenly castles’ or ‘city-fortresses of Jerusalem’
that were frequently built to feature in public religious celebrations in
Spain. The role of such constructions was to edify the masses by present-
ing them with a physical representation of the City of God, the heavenly
New Jerusalem. According to some published accounts, for instance, those
describing the festivities held by the Jesuits in Salamanca in honour of their
patron St Ignatius in 1610 or by the Franciscans in Granada in 1650, such
‘heavenly castles’ were garishly decorated with allegorical images of the
Virtues as well as paintings and statues of saints, Doctors of the Church,
Christian martyrs, biblical passages and eschatological subjects.26 On one
level, religious symbolism of the ‘castle of fire’ was fairly obvious and, it
could be argued, fairly crude. The castle was evidently meant to symbolise
Islam, patently presenting it as the formidable fortress of all inequity, evil
and vice. The phoenix could be interpreted as a symbol of the resurrection
and representation of the rebirth of Mustafa Azen, following his baptism
and abjuration of his Islamic beliefs, whilst the seashells and jars were mani-
festly allusions to the seven sacraments. The cockleshell was a traditional
symbol of baptism and the jars referred to the other six sacraments that
would purify Mustafa in his new life as a Christian.
However, on an entirely different level, the symbolism of the ‘castle
of fire’ also pointed to the troubled relationship between Philip V and
the Catalans. The inclusion of deceit, error, hypocrisy, ambition, scandal,

fraud and falsehood amongst the vices listed on the castle may well have
been aimed at the Catalans observers, reproaching them for their fickle-
ness, rather than Islam. The use of one symbol in particular stands out
and its inclusion certainly does not appear to have been devoid of politi-
cal connotations: the figure of the phoenix placed on the very top of the
castle. The mythical phoenix (fènix in Catalan) rising from the ashes was
a symbol of religious regeneration, but also one with resounding con-
notations in Catalonia. In the nineteenth century, it became the symbol
of supporters of Catalan independence and cultural revival, but its special
significance for Catalans pre-dated this by many centuries. In the midst of
the Catalan revolt against Habsburg rule in the seventeenth century, the
Carmelite monk Josep Elies Estrugós wrote a work (printed in Perpignan
in 1645) entitled Fènix Català, o Llibre del singular priuilegi, fauors, gra-
cias, y miracles de Nostra Senyora del mont del Carme (‘The Catalan phoe-
nix, a book of the singular privileges, favours, graces and miracles of Our
Lady of Mount Carmel’) that sought to encourage Catalans to learn their
language. Even more importantly, the Catalan lawyer Narcís Feliu de la
Penya, who later opposed Philip V’s claim to the Spanish throne and was
imprisoned, referred to the mythical beast when he published his famous
patriotic work Fènix de Cataluña: compendio de sus antiguas grandezas y
medio para renovarlas (‘The phoenix of Catalonia: a compendium of its
ancient splendours and the ways by which they can be revived’, printed in
Barcelona in 1683). In it, he extolled the virtues of the county and offered
suggestions as to how to restore its fortunes. The author of the prologue
of Feliu’s book, a merchant named Martí Piles, accounted for the choice
of title by the fact that ‘the phoenix of Catalonia searches for a new life’.
The symbolic presence of the phoenix and its fiery destruction thus surely
transcended its role as a religious metaphor and also symbolised the king’s
anger and his wish to establish a new relationship between the Crown and
the Catalans through the Nueva Planta decrees and the newly established
Real Audiencia.
Conclusion
The public baptism of Mustafa Azen is a textbook example of the use of
ritual and public performance to enact and represent kingship, as well as to
achieve what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described as symbolic (‘or
soft’) power. Just as the Catalans had used the ritualised celebrations of
118 F. SOYER
Philip V’s ceremonial entry into Barcelona in 1701 to communicate their

strong feelings about their political rights, the Bourbon monarch acted
in a similar manner in 1723. Appropriating a highly ritualised religious
ceremony and making use of the monarch’s symbolic capital (not only
his authority as temporal ruler but also, thanks to his proxy appearance
as godfather of the convert, his spiritual authority as the ‘Most Catholic
Monarch’ (Rex Christianissimus)), the Bourbon royal authorities organ-
ised a dramatic display of absolutist pageantry heavily laden with semiotics
that was designed both to articulate the Crown’s anger at the Catalans and
overwhelmingly demonstrate its secular and spiritual majesty, as well as its
crushing military power.
Since we only possess an official royal account of the ceremony with
clear propagandistic objectives but no Catalan account (at least none has
yet been uncovered in the archives), it is difficult to assess its impact and
efficacy. The Relación only states that the size of the crowd of onlookers
in both the streets and the cathedral was significant and that they were
suitably entertained by the fireworks display. Yet the Relación’s descrip-
tion of the events of 4 February 1723 could not be clearer proof that the
Bourbon authorities obviously understood that the symbolism of ritualised
public performances allowed such public events to act, and to be used, as
instruments of social, political or religious communication.27 Central to
this faculty is the ability of performers/organisers to broadcast and articu-
late emotional messages to the observers with the aim of manipulating the
latter’s emotional response(s).
In addition to this, the 1723 baptism demonstrates that it would be
impossible to fully understand the enactment of power through public
performances without considering their emotional dimension and ana-
lysing the link that exists between rituals, symbols and emotions. The
purpose of the rituals and symbols used in the ceremony of 1723 were
certainly not limited to the staging of a straightforward ritualised display
of public rejoicing at the conversion of a Muslim, presenting the conver-
sion as symbolic of the triumph of Christianity over Islam and thus serving
to create an ‘emotional regime’ or to strengthen a ‘discourse commu-
nity’ based on a Christian identity. They were also consciously deployed
to serve an entirely different set of political aims. The ritualised public
baptism of 1723 was more an absolutist triumph and spectacle than a reli-
gious ceremony. A distinctly royal initiative, it was funded by the Crown,
organised by the captain-general, featured a massive display of royal mili-
tary power and showcased Philip V’s spiritual authority as the godfather of
the convert. Its military character and exaltation of the ruler make it closer
in character to dynastic events such as the Prussian coronation of 1701.28
Moreover, the baptism of Mustafa Azen occurred just when such public
baptisms, never very frequent in the first place, were witnessing a gradual
decline. A few decades later, the author of a very short account of the cer-
emonial public baptism of three Muslims in Ferrol (north-western Spain)
on 21 June 1755 noted that whilst some members of the large crowd of
onlookers were motivated by feelings of zealous piety, many others had
come out of curiosity ‘since they have never witnessed the ceremonies in
which the catechumens are baptised’.29
Notes
1. José J. García Bernal, l fasto público en la España de los Austrias
(Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2006), 251–6.
2. See, for instance, Anon, Conversion, baptismo y muerte por iusticia
executada en la plaza de San Francisco de Sevilla, en Francisco
Ignacio, antes Moro esclavo en tres de Otubre deste ano de 1625
(Seville: Simón Faxardo, 1625); Relación de los maravillosos efectos
que en la ciudad de Sevilla ha obrado una mision de los padres de la
Compania de Jesus (Seville: Por la viuda de Nicolàs Rodriguez,
1672); Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Gazeta de Lisboa Occidental,
n°22, Quinta feira, 15 de Outubro de 1739, 264.
3. François Soyer, ‘The Public Baptism of Muslims in Early Modern
Spain and Portugal: Forging Communal Identity through
Collective Emotional Display’, Journal of Religious History 39
(2015): 506–23.
4. Gerd Althoff, ‘Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal
Anger’, in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle
Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1998), 59–74.
5. Hilda Grassotti, ‘La ira regia en León y Castilla’, Cuadernos de
Historia de España 41–2 (1965): 5–135.
6. Gaspar Sala, Proclamacion catolica a la magestad piadosa de Filipe
el Grande (Barcelona: Anon, 1640), 75 and 136; Diego de Saavedra
Fajardo, Idea De Un Principe Politico Christiano (Monaco: Nicolao
Enrico, 1640), 47–53; and Luis Enriquez de Navarra, Laurel his-
torico y panegyrico de las gloriosas empresas del Rey nuestro señor
Philipo Quinto (Madrid: Francisco Laso, 1708), 120 and 31.
120 F. SOYER
7. Relación verdadera de la solemnidad con que se celebró el Bautismo

de Mustafa Azen, Comandante de Cavalleria Dragona de los Turcos
de Levante (Barcelona: Joseph Teixidó, n.d.).
8. Federico Revilla, ‘Un monumento celebrativo del bautismo de un
magnate musulmán: simbología dieciochesca’, Boletín del
Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología 52 (1986): 487–93.
9. Ibid., 489.
10. Relación verdadera de la solemnidad con que se celebró el Bautismo
de Mustafa Azen, 4.
11. Revilla, ‘Un monumento celebrativo’, 490–1.
12. See Soyer, ‘Public Baptism of Muslims’.
13. William Christian Jr., ‘Provoked Religious Weeping in Early

Modern Spain’, in Religion and Emotion: Approaches and
Interpretation, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 33–50. For further discussion of ritualised weeping,
see Chap. 4 and 8.
14. Santiago Albertí, L’onze de setembre (Barcelona: Albertí Editor,
1964), 374.
15. Pedro Voltes Bou, La Guerra de Sucesión (Planeta: Barcelona,

1990), 276.
16. Henry Kamen, Philip V of Spain (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), 112–17.
17. Ibid., 112–19.
18. Enrique Giménez López, ‘Conflicto armado con Francia y guer-
rilla austracista en Cataluña (1719–20)’, Hispania: Revista espa-
ñola de historia 65(220) (2005): 543–600.
19. Federico Revilla, ‘Las advertencias políticas de Barcelona a Felipe
V en las decoraciones efímeras de su entrada triunfal’, Boletín del
Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología 49 (1983): 397–408.
20. Kamen, Philip V of Spain, 139–52.
21. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century
Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), especially
127–9.
22. Bernal, El fasto público, 145: ‘del poder hecho espectáculo, o mejor
del espectáculo del poder’.
23. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the
History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 129.
24. See Soyer, ‘Public Baptism of Muslims’.
25. There is now a growing literature on arte efímero in early modern

Spain; see most notably Lorenzo Pérez del Campo, Fiestas barrocas
en Málaga: arte efímero e ideología en el siglo XVII (Malaga:
Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1985); Victor Mínguez, Art i
arquitectura efímera a la València del segle XVIII (Valencia:
Edicions Alfons el Magnánim, 1990); Maria T. Zapata Fernández
de la Hoz, Arquitecturas efímeras y festivas en la corte de Carlos II:
las entradas reales (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,
1993); Maria J. Cuesta García de Leonardo, Fiesta y arquitectura
efímera en la Granada del siglo XVIII (Granada: Universidad y
Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1995); Francisco Javier Pizarro
Gómez, Arte y espectáculo en los viajes de Felipe II: 1542–1592
(Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 1999); Beatriz Lores Mestre,
Fiesta y arte efímero en el Castellón del setecientos (Castellón:
Universitat Jaume I. Servei de Comunicació i Publicacions, 1999);
Jesús F. Criado Mainar, ‘Arte efímero, historia local y política: la
entrada triunfal de Felipe II en Tarazona (Zaragoza) de 1592’,
Artigrama: Revista del Departamento de Historia del Arte de la
Universidad de Zaragoza 19 (2004): 15–38.
26. See Bernal, El fasto público, 513–15.
27. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
28. Christopher Clark, ‘When Culture Meets Power: The Prussian
Coronation of 1701’, in Cultures of Power in Europe during the
Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14–35.
29. Maximiliano Barrio Gozalo, ‘Trasvase de religiones y culturas en el
mundo mediterráneo del siglo XVIII: renegados y conversos’,
Cuadernos Dieciochistas 5 (2004): 13–49.
CHAPTER 7
Ritual Encounters of the ‘Savage’

and the Citizen: French Revolutionary
Ethnographers in Oceania, 1768–1803
Nicole Starbuck
In the long term, encounters between Enlightenment explorers and

Oceanian peoples impacted significantly on European government
and colonialism. Accounts of the contact, and observations and evalu-
ations made during these meetings, were read widely among the pub-
lic and were used by philosophers, naturalists and eventually scientists
to advance theories about the nature of humanity, society and ‘civili-
sation’. Yet in the moment, these encounters were unpredictable, pre-
carious events fraught with fear and confusion, approached with high
anticipation and coloured by a heady mix of sights, sounds and smells.
Newcomers and locals each tried to bring some order to these epi-
sodes and to navigate them according to their respective needs. While
circumstances varied from beach to beach and from one experience to
another, participants routinely performed a combination of customary,
ritualistic, practices: signs of peace and friendship, exchanges of gifts,
products and knowledge, sharing of food and drinks, demonstrations
N. Starbuck (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_7
124 N. STARBUCK
of weaponry, planting of gardens and sometimes acts of possession.1 In

different ways, they sought either to enter into a new relationship or to
reaffirm and advance an existing but tenuous one. Indigenous commu-
nities often dealt with Europeans as with more familiar visitors, accord-
ing to their usual protocols and sometimes by incorporating them into
their existing relationships of exchange, while the voyagers sought to fulfil
immediate needs—resources, respite and fieldwork—and to familiarise the
‘savages’ with European ‘civilisation’.2 Given the mixed objectives, the
process was never entirely smooth, nor was the experience entirely shared;
often, it proceeded no further than a burst of shouts and spears from a
distant shore. However, the protocols of contact generally rendered meet-
ings something which explorers could interpret and describe in a coherent
report.3 The cross-cultural encounter might indeed be treated as a ritual.
This chapter tests a ritual frame on the voyager–Indigenous encounter,
using as case studies the encounters of French voyagers Louis-Antoine
de Bougainville during the mid eighteenth century and Jean-François de
Galoup de la Pérouse on the eve of 1789, as well as the expeditions that
occurred at either end of the French Revolution: the first led by Bruni
d’Entrecasteaux and the second by Nicolas Baudin. Its scope does not
extend to all the ritualistic aspects of the voyage encounter or the affective
and cultural elements which influenced its course and French representa-
tion. There already exists a strong body of scholarship on gift exchange
and gender in this context, while the sharing of meals and the significance
of touch, performance and music each merits further analysis in its own
right. Focusing on three broad themes—the initiation of contact, the use
and significance of space and, lastly, power and civilisation—it is an over-
view of the voyage encounter as ritual that is provided here.
The study also queries how far and in what ways the ritual contact prac-
tices of eighteenth-century French voyagers changed in line with the trans-
formation of France during the Revolution of 1789–99. Developing via
a myriad of celebratory, militant and transformative episodes, the French
Revolution was highly ritualistic in itself. Its leaders sought to ‘regenerate’
France by applying the democratic to everyday life and bringing its entire
people into une famille indivisible. It altered relations of power, inspired
a more urgent analysis of the nature of Man and advanced the concept
of the nation, which, all together, accelerated a shift from sentimental-
ism to science and renewed the significance of French ‘civilisation’.4 This
episode, so heavy in ritualistic elements, provides a rich context for the
overview of the voyage encounter as a ritual.
RITUAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE ‘SAVAGE’ AND THE CITIZEN:... 125
The ritual, in general, is classified in diverse ways. According to Edward

Muir, it is ‘basically a social activity that is repetitive, standardized, a model
or a mirror, and its meaning is inherently ambiguous’.5 To others it further
involves spiritual and/or transformative elements,6 while many scholars
agree that rituals do not need to be planned, yet often function as social
scaffolds. Mona Ozouf asserts that ritualisation—‘even if anonymous,
even if destitute of an explicit system of regulation or of a conscious cohe-
siveness’—provides an ‘armature’ to human experience.7 What many ritu-
als have in common is that they are given unpredictability and are partly
driven by rising emotion: emotion roused by the senses, anticipation, the
sharing of interests and actions, and the tension between parties. Not all
participants experience the same feelings, but they are typically affected by
an emotional ‘effervescence’.8 While the circumstances of a ritual excite
the passions, its processes serve simultaneously to harness them. The
resulting tension gives the episode its shape and overall effect.
Cross-cultural encounters are problematic as rituals. Each party was
motivated differently and gave different meanings to the event. While
Europeans saw ‘natives’ as the subjects of their mission, those natives, as
hosts, carried out ‘staged events’ of their own.9 These Oceanian rituals
varied from place to place, culture to culture, while aboard each ship and
ashore each island existed a further range of interests and concerns. The
participants’ interrelations were also complicated by the problem of univer-
sality of sentiment and, correspondingly, misinterpretations of emotion.10
Indeed, more than any sharing of emotions, it was such misunderstanding
that critically affected power relations and thus directed the course of the
ritual. As William Reddy, Joanna Bourke and Sara Ahmed argue, emotions
do not merely describe inner states, but actually ‘do things’: they medi-
ate between the individual and social, the self and the Other, and lead to
negotiations of boundaries.11
As noted above, both visitors and locals aimed to establish a relationship
and to affect a degree of change in the other. Their encounters featured
repeated actions, the effervescent and regulating effects of senses, bodies and
emotions, and performances that served at certain times to model a social
organisation that could be, and at other times to mirror a social organisa-
tion that was believed already to exist. Europeans and Islanders did perform
within a Pacific ‘theatre’ in the late eighteenth century, yet their assertions
of power and identity and their manipulations of feelings such as fear were
not entirely consistent. Practices altered over time as familiarity between
Europeans and Islanders increased and, as Patricia Seed reveals in relation
126 N. STARBUCK
to ceremonies of possession in the New World, encounter rituals varied

between French, British and Spanish explorers. They mirrored the cer-
emonial practices that were typical at home and shaped by local culture,
politics and social organisation.12
‘Demonstrations of Peace’: Initiating

the Encounter
Bougainville and La Pérouse were typically met at sea by Islanders seek-

ing to engage in trade and so they rarely initiated encounters. Their
accounts indicate that they, especially Bougainville, were reluctant to go
out of their way for the sake of cross-cultural contact. The first Islanders
Bougainville saw in Oceania, at Hao (west of Tahiti), kept their distance
and he recorded no effort to make direct contact. When the inhabitants
lit fires along the length of the coastline, he responded by having a series
of rockets fired from his two ships, and sailed on: ‘this spectacle will have
greatly astonished the islanders’, he remarked. This expedition left a pow-
erful legacy in its romantic account of ‘New Cythera’, now known as
Tahiti, but it had initially been intended as a political mission rather than
a scientific voyage. The subsequent expedition was a different matter. La
Pérouse aimed to rival the accomplishments of James Cook and he carried
detailed instructions from the Société de Medecine concerning the obser-
vation of Indigenous peoples. Still, while this captain did record more
thorough observations than his predecessor, ethnographic curiosity alone
rarely directed his course.13 Both he and Bougainville watched for stereo-
typical signs of welcome—Bougainville described Tahitians approaching
with ‘demonstrations of friendship, all carrying tree branches, symbols of
peace’—and, on the water, allowed the local people to lead the proceed-
ings. For them, as for voyagers before and after, the ritual of contact com-
menced officially with an exchange: usually local produce for ‘trinkets’ or
‘trifles’ (see also Chap. 2). They used this time to judge how ‘friendly’,
welcoming and trusting their potential hosts were, the levels of honesty
and gratitude evident in their trading practices, and how wealthy they
appeared to be, before deciding to weigh anchor.14
They then, typically with a show of force, headed ashore to mark out
a space for themselves and their officers on land. At Tahiti, local chiefs
ordered Bougainville and his officers to sleep aboard the ship rather than
on shore. However, soon ‘everything was settled’: he dined with a local
authority and his family, ‘had 12 rockets fired on land in front of the
guests’—‘their fear was indescribable’—and slept ashore with ‘the soldiers

and an armed boat in front of the camp’.15 La Pérouse, for his part, regu-
larly set up his camp in military style. At Easter Island in 1786, though
he ‘flattered’ himself that he would have ‘friends ashore, having show-
ered gifts on all those who came aboard the previous day’,16 his ‘first care
after landing was to make an enclosure with armed soldiers in a circle’;
in this guarded space, the expedition’s tent was erected.17 Later, at Maui
(Hawaii), 20 armed soldiers with an officer performed a similar ceremony
and ‘with their bayonets fixed [they] carried out their manoeuvres with
the same precision as if they been in the presence of the enemy’.18 La
Pérouse remarked: ‘these rather frightening activities made no impres-
sion on the inhabitants’ of Maui;19 undoubtedly, like Bougainville with his
rockets, his intention had been to inspire fear in his hosts.
For the voyagers, the successful accomplishment of the encounter ritual
relied on a perceived balance of power in their favour, and that, in turn,
depended on a balancing of friendliness and fear. They sought what they
described as friendly conduct from their hosts—‘friendly’ in the sense of a
willingness to provide all they needed and desired. Once they had gained
access to the locals’ territory, the voyagers sought to encourage this so-called
friendliness by encouraging their new hosts to regard them with a degree
of fear. As Jonathan Lamb’s research would suggest, they were no doubt
driven largely by their own preoccupation with self-preservation. However,
the voyagers must also have been influenced by contemporary French cul-
ture and ideology; specifically, the cultural significance of fear and the theory
of supposedly civilised societies’ superiority over so-called savage societies.
In eighteenth-century France, fear was associated with respect and sub-
ordination, on the part of children regarding their parents and the peo-
ple before their ruler, and it played an important part in the maintenance
of social order.20 In encounters with non-European contacts and colonial
subjects, as Lisbeth Haas demonstrates, attributions of fearfulness served
to diminish Indigenous agency.21 They reduced Indigenous people from
rational, active agents, with possession of local knowledge and authority
and in pursuit of local agendas, to emotionally ruled, submissive subjects.
Still, when during any encounter ritual a voyager chose to incite fear
amongst his interlocutors, and whether they made this decision as a mat-
ter of routine or in response to a particular circumstance, was variable.
Bougainville’s and even La Pérouse’s provocation of fear during only ini-
tial stages of contact corresponds with the hierarchical and fear-based social
order of ancien-régime France (see also discussion in Chaps. 5 and 6).
128 N. STARBUCK
It also corresponds to an era of exploration when the study of humanity was

a lower priority and a vaguer objective than it was soon to become.
The expeditions led by d’Entrecasteaux in 1793–4 and Baudin in
1801–3 sought out contact with the peoples of Oceania more actively
than their predecessors had done. Although an emotional balancing of
power continued to play a key part in the contact ritual, that balance was
managed more cautiously. From the Revolutionary years into the nine-
teenth century, voyagers tended to draw less readily, dramatically and
routinely on the provocation of fear. This development was influenced
in part by different and changing contact experiences. D’Entrecasteaux
and especially Baudin happened to spend more time than their forebears
with people who followed contact protocols involving displays of strength
and ‘cold shoulder’ treatment.22 Such protocols were more difficult for
European voyagers to navigate than those found generally in Polynesia
and, if met with a forceful approach, would obstruct the voyagers’ own
contact procedures and objectives. Furthermore, familiarity between
Oceanian Islanders and scientific voyagers had increased considerably by
the early nineteenth century; therefore, the latter less frequently felt the
need to boldly assert power. Yet the voyagers’ comparatively cautious ini-
tiations of contact were not driven merely by circumstance, but also by
significant ideological developments at home.
D’Entrecasteaux had been sent primarily to search for La Pérouse,
but he was also to investigate the natural world. Unlike his predecessors,
but in common with Baudin, who was to follow him, d’Entrecasteaux
had no territorial objectives. Furthermore, he carried a memorandum
which instructed him to observe ‘the character of each nation, what they
have in common with other savages and with civilized nations’; as Carol
E. Harrison points out, revolutionary naturalists looked more for similar-
ity than difference.23 D’Entrecasteaux recounted in detail attempts to draw
hesitant Islanders into contact with him and his men. His favourite tactic
was to place ‘some trifles’ on a plank of wood, which sometimes ‘fluttered a
small red flag’, push the plank through the window of the great cabin, and
float it towards the distant canoes. Usually, this s uccessfully initiated trade:
men near the Admiralty and Bougainville Islands, for example, replaced
the trifles with bows, arrows, ornaments and shells, and pushed the plank
back towards the French ship. However, near one of the Admiralty Islands,
d’Entrecasteaux tried a different approach: ‘I wanted to display a rocket’,
he wrote in his journal, ‘keeping in mind … that this spectacle would start
to surprise them’, he explained, ‘but that their admiration and perhaps
their curiosity would follow.’ However, when, as it burst and came down
in a ‘shower of fire’, the people took fright and retreated, d’Entrecasteaux
regretted his action. In contrast to Bougainville, who had intended his
fireworks to intimidate, he reflected: ‘if I had anticipated the effect this
produced I would have spared them this fright, as this can only increase a
very natural suspicion that we must try to erase—avoiding with the most
scrupulous attention everything that can encourage it’.24 The firing of a
rocket was traditionally an expression of power, used ceremonially before
other Europeans who were familiar with its meaning and as a tool for
frightening, impressing and subordinating Indigenous contacts who were
not. D’Entrecasteaux drew on the custom instinctively, naively seeking
simultaneously to impress and to gain trust.
Baudin’s approach to commencing encounters was similarly cautious
and reflective. His expedition, organised by a committee of the Institut
National and sponsored by the Consulate, was aimed at completing and
perfecting the chart of Australia and studying the natural history of the
Australian environment and its inhabitants. He had set sail from France in
1800 with a team of 24 naturalists specialising in various disciplines and
including a self-styled ‘observer of Man’. The study of ‘anthropology’ in
Australia was in fact one of the expedition’s most innovative and impor-
tant tasks and, to assist the voyager-naturalists in this work, the Société
d’Observateurs de l’Homme had provided guiding material: instructions
compiled by comparative-anatomist Georges Cuvier and a treatise on the
observations des peuples sauvages by Joseph Degérando.25 During the course
of his exploration of Australia, Baudin was determined to maintain a record
of no bloodshed on Australian soil and accordingly his men were well-
instructed on how to approach Australia’s Aborigines.26 Even by the final
stage of the exploration, this resolution had not weakened. For example,
in early 1803, Baudin wrote to his second-in-command, Louis Freycinet:
you are ordered to attempt by all possible means—gentleness, friendship,

demonstrations of peace—to withdraw from their territory rather than seek
to enter by force using your weapons—which should only be used in a case
of imminent danger to yourself or those accompanying you.27
On this voyage, it was the officers who initiated encounters during ini-
tial onshore surveys. They too presented ‘signs of peace’, such as green
branches, and offered ‘trifles’. They paid particular attention to practices
of exchange and demonstrated an expectation that by ‘showering’ their
130 N. STARBUCK
new acquaintances with gifts, they would secure a harmonious relation-

ship. This led them occasionally to perceive the Aborigines as ‘ungrate-
ful’, which, disappointedly, they associated with the peoples’ ‘savage’ state.
Still, they were eager to minimise tensions and generally tried hard to
interpret the Aborigines’ signals and to respond appropriately.28
Like that taken by d’Entrecasteaux and his companions, the Baudin expe-
dition’s approach was directed less by a desire to gain access to resources or
curiosities than a keen desire to observe humanity, yet it involved a more
‘scientific’ ethnographic lens. During the late 1790s, the transformation of
natural history had been markedly accelerated. The Revolution had inspired
a pressing demand for more in-depth and precise knowledge about human
nature and led to the establishment of the Muséum national d’histoire
naturelle. By the turn of the century, naturalists were advancing from
Enlightenment pursuits of encyclopaedic knowledge to specialised analyses,
particularly in biological disciplines. The Baudin expedition’s first attempt
to initiate an encounter with Australian Aboriginal people, at Geographe
Bay in 1801, was an exceptional case as the men thereafter showed more
sensitivity and restraint, but serves to demonstrate how powerfully the
imperatives of research had come to influence the nature of expedition con-
tact. A group of Aborigines had been watching the Frenchmen from afar
and upon being noticed ran hastily away; one, however, a heavily pregnant
young woman, threw herself to the ground, stricken with fear. According
to François Peron and botanist Théodore Leschanault, the Frenchmen felt
her terror, but proceeded to examine her thoroughly before helping her to
her feet.29 This conduct was influenced by a deeply ingrained assumption of
cultural superiority, but was not intended as an assertion of such. Whereas
the early stage of previous encounters had often been characterised by voy-
agers’ interest in establishing a balance of power in their own favour, by the
nineteenth century, it was usually approached with scientific imperatives
foremost in mind. And, generally, as the ethnographic lens steadily focused,
the voyagers took up the green branch themselves and cautiously sacrificed
a degree of power for the sake of a productive encounter.
‘Seated on the Grass Together’: Spaces

of Encounter
Beginning with this initial stage of contact, one of the most crucial aspects
of the encounter ritual was the use and effect of space. The Frenchmen
experienced and sought to control contact rituals differently as the dynam-
ics of power and emotion shifted from place to place: aboard the ship,
on the water’s edge, by a local campfire or in their own tents. In turn,
the sense of threat or relative comfort led contact participants to regulate
these spaces through the delineation or relaxation of boundaries. The voy-
agers’ approach also reflected contemporary associations between space
and power in France. The festivals of the French Revolution, as revealed
by Ozouf, closely reflected the principles of equality and national regen-
eration in their use of space. They took place in areas that were free from
buildings that represented history and continuity, and lacking in depth,
darkness and variations in height which might suggest the politics of social
hierarchy: they were ‘open, horizontal and luminous’.30 Even given the
different contexts, this spatial arrangement is strikingly different from that
of Bougainville’s and La Pérouse’s earlier Oceanian encounters.
With French spaces marked out and guarded by armed soldiers, those
pre-Revolutionary episodes featured a distinct and enforced cultural
divide. In the case of Bougainville’s encounters, this divide was clearly also
about subordination. Like an old-regime provincial lord extracting sei-
gniorial dues from the local peasants, the captain repeatedly provoked the
Tahitians’ fear—which, reflecting the biblical proverb ‘fear of the Lord is
the beginning of knowledge’, he claimed was ‘the beginning of wisdom’.31
In turn, the Tahitians placated him and his men by offering supplies of
fruit, livestock and girls, and the encounter proceeded.32
During the Revolutionary period, however, d’Entrecasteaux and
Baudin were determined to observe Indigenous people closely and in their
‘natural state’ and accordingly tried to minimise the disruption of that
state by their presence.33 This involved efforts to create a contact space
shaped by a relatively delicate and even balancing of power. Although
these voyagers often erected tents on shore, neither captain presented this
event as one aimed at intimidating the local people or excluding them
from a French space, but usually as places for enabling astronomical obser-
vations and tasks such as salting meat. At the island of Tongabatu in 1793,
d’Entrecasteaux was unnerved by the large population and its contingent
of ‘agitated men’ and tried to maintain a reassuring sense of order by
declaring one tent to be the ‘trading post’. However, in other ways, he
still tried to respect the rights of his hosts. Upon finding some water-holes,
for example, he exchanged ‘some trifles’ with the owner for permission to
collect water there.34 These men also tried to follow their hosts’ directions
more often than they took the lead and gave their hosts a degree of access
to their own bodies by permitting them to remove their uniforms and
132 N. STARBUCK
paint their skin.35 Ideally, the success of the encounter ritual now required
immersion.
This goal is particularly evident in Baudin’s descriptions of the encoun-
ters at the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Maria Island. The Frenchmen
and the Tasmanians sat ‘together on the grass and anyone who saw
[them]’, remarked the commander, ‘would have taken them for the best
friends in the world’; however, ‘their anxious looks and private conver-
sations’ made Baudin suspect ‘hostile plans on their part’. His response
was to retreat, promising that he and his men would return the next day,
and there followed a series of tense and, eventually, tender movements
in advance, withdrawal and detachment. As the Frenchmen retreated,
they were ‘assailed by a hail of stones’. Baudin threatened to return fire,
the locals retreated into the forest, and though he advanced further with
his men, upon finding no one, neither he nor any of his men fired their
guns, but returned to their ship. The next day they tried again to find the
Tasmanians and ‘re-establish the relationship on good terms’. Unsuccessful
once more, some turned to the task of fishing, whereupon some local
men emerged and watched from a distance. The Frenchmen appeared to
ignore them; the Tasmanians gradually approached and, wrote Baudin,
were finally ‘reassured of our intentions by the caresses we gave or, even
more so, by the presents they received’.36 During the subsequent encoun-
ter at Maria Island, one of the expedition’s carpenters found himself, as
Baudin described, surrounded by armed men. ‘Rendered masters’, by the
carpenter’s submissiveness, the group drove him to the beach and, ‘having
stripped him naked from head to foot, conducted a scrupulous inspection
of his entire body’.37
Local participants had always influenced encounter rituals; the change
taking place was in how their counterparts responded to it in order to
fulfil their objectives. Bougainville, for example, heightened his displays
of military strength, increased his use of violence and sought explicitly to
provoke fear in response to certain behaviours. However, the process that
Baudin describes here, of advance and retreat, intimacy and reserve, and
particularly the final act of inquiry and power on the part of the Aboriginal
men and of submission on the part of the French carpenter, emphasises
the extent to which, increasingly, the encounter ritual was being directed
by Indigenous agency and shaped by emotional responses to the perceived
feelings and intentions of Indigenous interlocutors.38
The most obvious way in which the significance of space in the French–
Islander encounter ritual changed during this era is, as Harrison argues, in
relation to territorial claims.39 Before he set sail from Tahiti, Bougainville

inserted an Act of Possession in a bottle and buried it without ceremony.40
This straightforward approach, seemingly carried out without consulta-
tion with or the involvement of the local people, contrasts with the elabo-
rate ceremonies of possession enacted by Bougainville’s forbearers in the
‘New World’. In the sixteenth century, Patricia Seed explains, Frenchmen
felt it was crucial to give a sense that Indigenous people consented to
their territorial claims.41 Bougainville’s approach was in line with his
attitude concerning the encounter overall. By contrast, La Pérouse and
Baudin explicitly took issue with the concept of claiming possession of
territory already inhabited.42 In a letter to the governor of New South
Wales, Baudin asserted that the Australian Aborigines were ‘no more sav-
age’ than the Highlanders of Scotland or the peasants of Lower Brittany
and, furthermore, that European governments would be wiser to con-
centrate on the civilisation of their own peoples than on societies in dis-
tant lands.43 This last comment was a particular concern, of course, of
the French Revolutionary administrators. Alessandro Malaspina, leading
a Spanish expedition in Oceania at the same time as d’Entrecasteaux, did
not share the Frenchmen’s point of view. Even though earlier treaties had
already laid claim to the entire Pacific on the part of Spain, he left acts of
possession at Alaska and Tonga. His ceremonial approach and emphasis on
eliciting Indigenous consent suggests that his motive was largely symbolic:
this was a reassertion and celebration of Spanish imperial authority, and
one that was more traditional than the new sense of republican authority
that emanated from contemporary French voyagers.44
‘Take Their Hand and Raise Them to a Happier

State’: Emotion, Power and ‘Civilisation’
The different ways in which these voyagers managed their spaces of
encounter, and the finer elements of the contact ritual itself, were associ-
ated with the geopolitical objectives of their expeditions and their atti-
tudes concerning human nature and social progress. Similar to the way in
which disputes were publicly resolved in Parisian communities during the
eighteenth century, they were often assertions of French moral norms—
largely futile, given that the audience was not familiar with their meta-
phors and meanings, but encouraging for the Frenchmen themselves.45
They were also designed to contain and control the emotional escalation
and contagion these encounters could cause, in order to prevent open
134 N. STARBUCK
conflict. Through their demonstrations of force and authority, the voyag-

ers represented themselves in particular ways.
At a time when France had recently lost a string of colonies in the Seven
Years’ War and had taken up arms with the American colonists against
Britain, Bougainville’s dramatic ‘spectacles’ and shows of martial power
asserted a fierce imperial ambition. Twenty years later, La Pérouse’s mili-
tary parades and defences reflected a preoccupation with self-preservation.
Following repeated ‘thefts’ at Easter Island and then again after a bloody
conflict at Samoa, he wrote with anguish about his wish to make the
Islanders know the effects of French weapons. Although his men had
killed many locals while under attack at Samoa, La Pérouse curbed his
instinct either to seek vengeance on the Samoans or similarly to punish the
‘thieves’ of Easter Island, out of his sense of duty to protect the reputa-
tion of European society and to impress the locals with his ‘patience’ and
‘generosity’.46 Over the course of the Revolutionary period, the French
voyagers acted out a renewed patriotism, born from the regeneration of
France.47 Although, when feeling threatened, d’Entrecasteaux and Baudin
fired their guns to inspire fear and thus to discourage acts of hostility
from their hosts—at Tongabatou, d’Entrecasteaux even had local thieves
flogged on his ship before a local audience—they gave such performances
less frequently and arbitrarily.48 The more improvisational and relatively
sensitive approach affected a subtle evolution in the voyagers’ ritual of
encounter.
Increasingly, the voyagers’ desire to inspire fear in their hosts stemmed
less from any intention to establish dominance than from a sense of vul-
nerability. This apprehension may often have arisen early in the encounter
when, as they rowed from their ship towards the shore, the captain and his
men were sometimes met by crowds of over 100, even several hundred,
animated Islanders. Yet, assuming that emotions and their expressions
were universal, voyagers reported signs of ‘cheerfulness’, ‘joy’, ‘sincerity
and confidence’ expressed by the ‘shouts and features’ in these crowds.49
If such scenes were overwhelming, they also, as Gillian Beer and Vanessa
Smith argue, flattered the visitors’ egos.50 Indeed, according to their
accounts, it was typically once the encounter was well under way that voy-
agers’ anxieties developed. They noted a change of mood in the crowd,
remarked upon the size and muscularity of the men’s bodies, and worried
about the expressions on those men’s faces and their laughter. Above all,
they suspected a withdrawal of that wonder they had felt subject to ear-
lier.51 As Beer opines, they felt insulted at moments such as these, but it
was insult mixed with consequent fear.52 The fear in these encounters was
circular, contagious; the voyagers attempted to take it in hand, regulate it
and wield it in an effort to gain power over the process of encounter (see
the parallel discussion in Chap. 6).
La Pérouse’s own sense of unease at Easter Island had grown steadily,
as he failed to stop the rampant ‘thieving’ and perceived that the Islanders
were less innocent and more intelligent than he had assumed.53 While
their initial welcome had given him ‘the most favourable opinion of their
character’, he later declared: ‘all their displays of friendship were a pre-
tence and their features did not display a single feature that was genuine’.54
In response, the Frenchmen had at times ‘taken aim with a musket’, which
made the Islanders retreat, and once had been ‘forced’ to fire into a crowd
with birdshot. Yet, on the whole, La Pérouse believed he had behaved
‘with softness’, and only because his stay was short. Had his expedition
been staying longer, he noted, his men would have meted out a punish-
ment ‘in proportion to the crime’: ‘a few blows with a rope would have
made these islanders more amenable’.55 The captain’s frustration was far
more profound when 12 of his men were killed by Islanders on Samoa. In
his journal, he did not imagine what offence he and his men had caused,
but declared the Samoans more emotional than rational and asserted that
they had felt that the power balance was in their favour. Indeed, he had
warned his first-lieutenant:
that these islanders were too turbulent to send ashore boats and longboats
which could not be assisted by our ships’ guns, that our moderation had
inspired little respect for us on the part of these Indians who were colossi
and looked only at our physical strength which was inferior to theirs.56
At times, voyagers believed that all that prevented the implosion of an

encounter ritual was their weapons. If these did not impress the locals,
then the power balance seemed to hinge on relative physical strength
and, in that scenario, the voyagers often felt distinctly disadvantaged.
At Tongabatu in 1793, apparent hostility on the part of local ‘warriors’
and acknowledged fear on the part of himself and his men intensified so
sharply that d’Entrecasteaux decided that it was ‘necessary’ to inspire fear
amongst the armed men by arranging a demonstration of the expedition’s
firearms. To his horror, however, his riflemen twice missed the target—
two birds, fastened to a tree—then a second rifleman’s gun failed to fire.
‘Laughter could be detected on all sides’, he recorded, followed by ‘no
136 N. STARBUCK
end of applause’ after one of the local men ‘stretched his bow and struck
one of the birds’ himself. This seemed a ‘pitiful contrast’, and the voyagers
noticed that the locals’ fear of French weapons had ‘decreased consider-
ably’; they ‘perceived’ the men’s ‘insulting looks’ and, worried that their
defences were inadequate, moved their ships closer in order to ‘intimidate
[the local people] with the display of [their] artillery’.57 In this way, the
rising emotions and conflict of power were contained until the encounter
could be brought properly to its conclusion.
This pattern, whereby their own anxiety incited voyagers to provoke
fear in their hosts, was repeated throughout the history of maritime explo-
ration; yet, during this period, there was a development in the way in which
voyagers perceived or at least represented signs of danger among their
interlocutors. According to records from the expeditions of Bougainville
to Baudin, French voyagers paid closer attention to facial features and
expression, and read more into them, as they approached and passed into
the nineteenth century. Bougainville referred vaguely to Islanders’ joy,
beauty and ‘demonstrations of happiness’, leaving the reader to imagine
precisely how these looked. Moreover, based on his writing, the captain’s
responses to these people were based more on their actions—their giving
of gifts, for example—than their expressions.58
The more reflective La Pérouse later frequently commented on his
hosts’ expressions in an impressionistic way and usually in hindsight after
an unsettling, disempowering, turn of events. Reflecting on the con-
flict at Samoa, he noted that the Samoans’ ‘expression often seemed …
to indicate a feeling of scorn towards us’. These impressions developed
in the context of La Pérouse’s preoccupation with how locals ‘looked’
at his expedition: the Samoans, he perceived, had ‘looked only at [the
Frenchmen’s] physical strength which was inferior to theirs’ and when
shown the effects of French weapons, ‘they looked upon the noise as a
diversion and a joke’.59 The same anxiety was occasionally revealed in the
observations of the d’Entrecasteaux and Baudin expeditions, though, if
only a few years later, these were usually more considered and precise.
As d’Entrecasteaux’s remark after a peaceful meeting off the Santa Cruz
Islands indicates, they did not necessarily follow actual conflict: the
Islanders, d’Entrecasteaux noted, had ‘an extreme ugliness and a som-
bre look which inspires disgust and mistrust’. He continued: ‘I have no
doubt that we would have resorted to force had we spent a longer time
among them.’60 From this defensive, if relatively thoughtful, attitude to
that reflected in the records of the Baudin expedition, we find a marked
transition. The contact behaviours described above indicate that Baudin

and his men were particularly sensitive to local feeling. No doubt facial
expression was one sign they observed, yet they rarely drew conclusions
on that basis about temperament. Back in France, writing the official
ethnography of the voyage, young anthropologist François Péron finally
did so, with confidence and in hindsight regarding moments of conflict
in Tasmania, yet he gave it legitimacy for his contemporary audience by
presenting it in ‘scientific’ style. ‘In all individuals’, he declared, ‘their
look always has something sinister and savage in it, and I strongly believe
that basically their character corresponds with the expression on their fea-
tures’.61 While emotional management had been crucial in the moment
for keeping the contact ritual in process, at a distance from the encounter
itself, Péron extracted the influence of human interaction and reduced the
matter to the Tasmanians’ ‘look’ alone. In this way he assumed a sense of
authority based on his ‘knowledge’. Such confidence in the possibility of
accurately assessing others’ characters encouraged the civilizing imperative
in France. In the eighteenth century, French expeditionary interests had
developed from predominantly territorial to civilising, which nuanced the
rituals of encounter. Although the planting of gardens and the gifting of
‘useful’ items and products continued, acts of possession did not, while
voyagers increasingly tried to represent a society that was not merely pow-
erful but also humane and sophisticated.62 La Pérouse wrote repeatedly of
his expedition’s desire only to ‘do [Oceanian peoples] some good’63: ‘we
showered gifts on them’, he explained, ‘we patted those who were weak,
especially children still at their mother’s breast; we sowed all kinds of use-
ful seeds in their field; we left pigs, goats and ewes in their settlements …
we asked for nothing in return’.64 D’Entrecasteaux, with more faith in the
concept of the ‘noble savage’, wrote less about ‘improvement’, but con-
tinued the practice of introducing European items and, as he highlighted,
‘none of them was given without its use being explained’.65
In his treatise provided to the Baudin expedition in 1800, Degérando
opined that French voyager-naturalists ought to offer Indigenous people
‘the pact of a fraternal alliance!’, to ‘take their hand and raise them to a
happier state’ and, more precisely, to ‘bring them our arts, and not our
corruption, the code of our morality, and not the example of our vices, our
sciences, and not our scepticism, the advantages of civilization, and not its
abuses’.66 Their cautious contact behaviour suggests that the philosophy of
Baudin and his men was generally in line with that of Degérando, as does
the little they wrote and the disappointed tone of what they wrote during
138 N. STARBUCK
their sojourn at Port Jackson. The Aborigines of Port Jackson had already
been introduced to the ‘abuses’ of ‘civilisation’ and the corruption and
vices of ‘civilised’ people. They already spoke English and were habituated
to European society. The Frenchmen were deprived of the opportunity to
contribute to a civilising effort and the ritual of encounter, in its structural
elements and objectives, was rendered redundant. They consequently lost
their bearings as well as the sense of purpose and control that usually gave
them some power in cross-cultural encounters.67
Conclusion
The importance of the encounter ritual as armature, to use Ozouf’s term,
had remained fairly consistent over these years and most of the basic steps
of the ritual’s civilising aspect had stayed in use. The ritual of cross-cultural
encounter provided a script to follow in daunting situations and to guide
expeditions in pursuit of their objectives. It also provided a framework
for the voyagers’ evaluation of and performance before the peoples they
met. Participants in the encounter were expected to experience a sense of
a shared purpose and enjoyment, and when local gratitude and curiosity
seemed lacking, voyagers’ feelings about the relationship and the people’s
character quickly soured. The ritual, as a civilising process, was a failure.
Gradually, emotions played a more complex role in the encounter ritual,
in combination with changing ideologies and objectives around the study
of humanity. They affected finer balances of power. French–Oceanian
encounters of the late eighteenth century evolved from bold ceremonies
of territorial discovery and possession to cautious rituals of ‘civilisation’
and knowledge accumulation. D’Entrecasteaux and Baudin were much
like the administrators of the Republic who ventured into the far corners
of regional France: they sought, if not to ‘teach the revolution’ itself,68 at
least to teach the ‘civilisation’ of regenerated France more broadly, as well
as to advance it with their ethnographic knowledge. The power relations
and affective currents in the Oceanian encounters were treated accord-
ingly, as participants met in a space that still reflected a mode of imperialist
thinking, but was relatively ‘horizontal’. They sought to enter the local
world rather than to carve out their own space within it, aimed more
often at allaying fears than provoking them, and facilitated more balanced
power relations, which allowed locals greater agency and themselves better
opportunities for ethnographic observation. Ultimately, as the manage-
ment of emotion and power grew more refined, the ritual of encounter
became more potent. During the Revolutionary era, it opened up a space

for not only closer cross-cultural relations but also the development of
theories that would feed the ‘science of race’ and French colonial projects.
Notes
1. Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (Crows Nest,
NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 10–16 and Captain Cook was Here
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Tiffany Shellam,
Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at
King George’s Sound (Perth: University of Western Australia Press,
2009), 3–19; Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship,
Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 21–175; Shino Konishi, ‘Discovering the
Savage Senses: French and British Explorers’ Encounters with
Aboriginal People’, in Discovery and Empire: The French in the
South Seas, ed. John West-Sooby (Adelaide: University of Adelaide
Press, 2013), 99–140.
2. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture,
and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991).
3. Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages and Encounters in Oceania,
1511–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 233–7.
4. Stuart Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic
Empire’, Past and Present 124 (1989): 96–120; Mona Ozouf,
Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1976] 1991);
Dorinda Outram, ‘New Spaces in Natural History’, in Cultures of
Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord and Emma
C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
249–65; Claude Blanckaert, ‘1800—Le moment “naturaliste” des
sciences de l’homme’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 3
(2000): 117–60; and William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A
Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge
5. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge:
6. Axel Michaels, ‘Performative Tears: Emotions in Rituals and Ritualized
Emotions’, in Emotions in Rituals and Performances, ed. Axel
Michaels and Christoph Wulf (London: Routledge, 2012), 29–32.
140 N. STARBUCK
7. Mona Ozouf, ‘Space and Time in the Festivals of the French

Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(3)
(1975): 372.
8. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, extract
reproduced in Emile Durkheim: Sociologist of Modernity, ed.
Mustafa Emirhayer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 109–13.
9. Nugent, Botany Bay, 13.
10. Vanessa Smith, ‘Performance Anxieties: Grief and Theatre in

European Writing on Tahiti’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 31(2)
(2008): 150–1; and Serge Tcherkézoff, ‘First Contacts’ in Polynesia
(Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), 159.
11. Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in

Modern History’, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 124.
12. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the
New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995).
13. Jean-François de Galoup de La Pérouse, The Journal of Jean-

François de la Pérouse, ed. and trans. John Dunmore, 2 vols
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1995).
14. See La Pérouse, Journal, vols I and II, 55–6, 82, 387–91 and
Shino Konishi, ‘François Péron’s Meditation on Death, Humanity
and Savage Society’, in Representing Humanity in the Age of
Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Cook, Ned Curthoys and Shino
Konishi (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 116–17.
15. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, The Pacific Journal of Louis de

Bougainville, 1767–1768, ed. John Dunmore (London: Hakluyt
Society, 2002), 62.
16. La Pérouse, Journal, vol. I, 57–8.
17. Ibid., 59–60.
18. Ibid., 86.
19. Ibid.
20. Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, new edn., vol. (Paris:
Gaude, 1777), 286, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k6271591g/f301.image.r=.langEN (accessed 10 October
2016); and Ronald Schechter, ‘Terror in the European
Enlightenment’, in Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in
Global Perspective, ed. Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 39 and 53.
21. Lisbeth Haas, ‘Fear in Colonial California and Within the

Borderlands’, in Facing Fear, ed. Laffan and Weiss, 74–90.
22. Nugent, Botany Bay, 13.
23. Carol E. Harrison, ‘Replotting the Ethnographic Romance:

Revolutionary Frenchmen in the Pacific, 1768–1804’, Journal of
the History of Sexuality 21(1) (2012): 40.
24. Antoine R.J. Bruny d’Entrecasteaux, Voyage to Australia and the
Pacific, 1791–1793, ed. and trans. Edward Duyker and Maryse
Duyker (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 84–5.
25.
Joseph-Marie Degérando, ‘Considérations sur les diverses
méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages, 1800’
and Georges Cuvier, ‘Note instructive sur les recherches à faire
relativement aux différences anatomiques des diverses races
d’hommes, 1800’, in Aux Origines de l’Anthropologie Française:
Les Mémoires de la Société des Observateurs de l’Homme en l’an VIII,
ed. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (Paris: Le Sycamore, 1987),
127–69 and 171–85.
26. Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath and John West-Sooby, Encounter
Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and
Matthew Flinders (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2004), 361.
27. Nicolas Baudin to Louis Freycinet, Kupang Bay, Timor, repro-
duced in L. Freycinet, Journal, Archives Nationale de France
[ANF], série marine [SM] 5JJ49, entry dated 13 prairial an XI [2
June 1803].
28. See Freycinet, Journal, ANF, SM 5JJ49, entry dated 16 prairial an
IX [5 June 1801].
29. François Péron, Voyage de découvertes aux terres Australes, vol. 1,
Historique (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1807), 81; Rhys Jones,
‘Images of Natural Man’, in Baudin in Australian Waters: The
Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands,
1800–1804, ed. Jacqueline Bonnemains, Elliott Forsyth and
Bernard Smith (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 42;
Shino Konishi, ‘Depicting Sexuality: A Case Study of the Baudin
Expedition’s Aboriginal Ethnography’, Australian Journal of
French Studies XLI(2) (2004): 105.
30. Ozouf, ‘Space and Time’, 376–9.
31. Proverbs 1:7, The Official King James Bible Online, http://www.
kingjamesbibleonline.org/Proverbs-1-7 (accessed 10 October
2016).
142 N. STARBUCK
32. See, for example, Bougainville, Journal, 62, 66 and 69, and ‘Pastel
drawing by an unknown artist, representing Bougainville and his
officers with islanders in Tahiti’, 65.
33. Nicole Starbuck, Baudin, Napoleon and the Exploration of Australia
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 81–100 and ‘Neither
Civilized nor Savage: The Aborigines of Colonial Port Jackson,
through French Eyes, 1802’, in Representing Humanity in the Age
of Enlightenment, ed. Shino Konishi, Alexander Cook and Ned
Curthoys (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 123–33.
34. D’Entrecasteaux, Journal, 168–9.
35. For example, see François Péron, Voyage de découvertes aux Terres
australes, Historique, vol. II, 2nd edn (Paris: Imprimérie Impériale,
1824), 80.
36. Nicolas Baudin, ‘Des naturels que nous trouvions et de leur con-
duite envers nous’, in Aux Origines de l’Anthropologie Française,
ed. Copans and Jamin, 209–12.
37. Baudin, ‘Des naturels’, 217.
38. On Aborigines investigating European bodies, see Konishi,

‘Discovering the Savage Senses’, 129–30.
39. Carol E. Harrison, ‘Planting Gardens, Planting Flags: Revolutionary
France in the South Pacific’, French Historical Studies 24(2)
(2011): 243–77.
40. Bougainville, Journal, 70.
41. Seed, Ceremonies, 56–65.
42. La Pérouse, Journal, 88.
43. Nicolas Baudin to Philip Gidley King, Elephant Bay, King Island,
3 nivôse an XI [24 December 1802], in Historical Records of New
South Wales, ed. Frank M. Bladen, vol. V (Sydney: Government
Printer, 1897), 826.
44. Alejandro Malaspina, The Malaspina Expedition, 1789–1794:
Journal of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina, vol. III: Manila to
Cadiz, ed. Andrew David, Felipe Fernando-Armesto, Carlos Novi
and Glyndwr Williams, and trans. Sylvia Jamieson (London:
Hakluyt Society, 2005) 143; and Harrison, ‘Planting Gardens’,
265.
45. David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris,
1740–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
115–41 and 260–5; and Peter McPhee, A Social History of France,
1780–1880 (London: Routledge, 1992), 13.
46. La Pérouse, Journal, vol. I, 59–60, 66–7, 68–9 and vol. II, 393,
402 and 404.
47. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire
in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 1–2 and 16–19.
48. D’Entrecasteaux, Journal, 174.
49. La Pérouse, Journal, vol. I, 56 and 58; D’Entrecasteaux, Journal,
80.
50. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in the Cultural Encounter
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 62; and Smith, Intimate
Strangers, 40–1.
51. Smith, Intimate Strangers, 41.
52. Beer, Open Fields, 62.
53. La Pérouse, Journal, vol. I, 68–9.
54. Ibid., 66–7.
55. Ibid., 66
56. Ibid., 397.
58. Bougainville, Journal, 59–61.
59. La Pérouse, Journal, vol. II, 397, 418.
60. D’Entrecasteaux, Journal, 226–7.
61. Miranda Hughes, ‘Philosophical Travellers at the Ends of the

Earth: Baudin, Péron and the Tasmanians’, in Australian Science
in the Making, ed. Roderick W. Home (Cambridge: Cambridge
62. Harrison, ‘Planting Gardens’, 266.
63. La Pérouse, Journal, vol. I, 59. See also 68–9 and 88.
64. Ibid., 68–9.
66. Degérando, ‘Considérations’, 132 (author’s translation).
67. See Starbuck, Baudin, 88.
68. Ozouf, ‘Space and Time’, 381.
CHAPTER 8
Channelling Grief, Building the French

Republic: The Death and Ritual Afterlife
of Léon Gambetta, 1883–1920
Charles Sowerwine
Late on New Year’s Eve 1882, the charismatic statesman Léon Gambetta
died unexpectedly at the young age of 44.1 All France had followed his
illness since he had accidentally discharged his revolver and injured his
hand a month earlier, but his doctors—seven of France’s leading profes-
sors of medicine—had announced that morning that his ‘general condi-
tion [was] satisfactory’.2 The next morning, on the news of his death, the
Prefect of Police in Paris reported that ‘People are weeping for the patriot,
the orator’; everywhere, there was ‘very great, very profound and general
emotion [émotion]’. ‘We were dumbfounded at first’, reported a patriotic
journalist, ‘and then there was an explosion of immense grief.’ His death
‘has left us forever inconsolable’.3
Gambetta had captured the public imagination in 1868 as a republi-
can orator opposing the Second Empire. He had entered into legend in
C. Sowerwine (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_8
146 C. SOWERWINE
1870 as a patriot leading the resistance to Prussia when all other lead-
ers despaired, escaping by balloon from besieged Paris, arriving at Tours,
assuming control of the government and raising a new army of 100,000
men. When nevertheless the peace treaty ceding Alsace and parts of
Lorraine to Germany was signed in February 1871, Gambetta resigned
from the National Assembly in protest. For Alsatians and Lorrainers, he
became the symbol of resistance to German occupation.4 The war over,
he led the campaign to make France definitively a Republic. He negoti-
ated the Constitution of 1875, ending the instability that had plagued
France since the Revolution of 1789. Criss-crossing the country to rally
people to the Republic—he became known as ‘the traveling salesman
of the Republic’—and led the republicans to victory in the 1877 elec-
tions.5 This victory, as it turned out, confirmed the Republic as France’s
default regime. At the time of Ganbetta’s death, however, the Republic
still appeared to be hanging by a slender thread, born as it was in defeat
and tarred with the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.6 Bereft of his charisma and
leadership, republicans faced the task of translating their political victory
into cultural hegemony. For this, his death proved extraordinarily helpful,
enabling republicans to channel the emotion of grief into affirmation of
his Republic through commemorative rituals focused on his body.
Emotion and Ritual
Drawing on Bourdieu, Monique Scheer has argued that emotion is not
simply a ‘mental event’; it ‘is always embodied’ and ‘cannot exist ‘without
a medium for experience’.7 While in English emotion is defined as ‘a strong
feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with
others’,8 in French it is defined in bodily terms as ‘conduct that is reactive,
reflexive, involuntary, experienced simultaneously at the level of the body
in a more or less violent nature and affectively on the mode of pleasure
or grief’ or as a ‘state of consciousness that is complex, generally abrupt
[brusque] and of short duration, accompanied by physiological turmoil
[troubles]’.9
Individual emotion is shared and channelled through ritual, bodily out-
pourings of emotion in public performance. In a classic study published
a century ago, Émile Durkheim argued that ritual was essential in devel-
oping and consolidating the bonds between the individual and society.
‘There can be no society’, he concluded, ‘that does not feel the need to
uphold and reaffirm at regular intervals the collective sentiments and col-
CHANNELLING GRIEF, BUILDING THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: THE DEATH... 147
lective ideas which make its unity and its personality’.10 As Scheer notes,
such events are a ‘means of achieving, training, articulating, and modulat-
ing emotions for personal as well as social purposes’. They have ‘performa-
tive effects on the constitution of feelings and the (gendered) self’.11 The
rituals that followed Gambetta’s death, both in the immediate mourning
and in commemorations during the next four decades, reconstituted and
enlarged what I will call (borrowing Barbara Rosenwein’s term) the ‘emo-
tional community’ of republicans.12
For Rosenwein, ‘emotional communities … are precisely the same as
social communities’, whose pre-existing ‘systems of feeling’ the histo-
rian seeks ‘to uncover’.13 But although republicanism and the Republic
had social bases,14 they were not social communities, but—in Benedict
Anderson’s term—imagined communities.15 The construction of such
imagined communities depends, I suggest, on emotion shared through
a common discursive economy, both of body (largely through ritual)
and of language (largely through speech and, in our period, the press).16
After the short-lived First Republic (1792–1804), the Republic became
an imagined community, a mythic alternative to the problematic monar-
chic and imperial regimes that followed.17 Gambetta’s death introduced
a new and powerful emotion into this imagined community, an emotion
that the republicans used to foster and develop this imagined commu-
nity into an emotional community. This enabled them to reinforce and
extend the existing republican community by drawing in those less enthu-
siastic for, or indifferent to, the Republic, but touched by the emotion
Gambetta aroused, to bring in dissidents, particularly workers attracted
to the nascent socialist movement, and especially to ward off a new threat
from the right.
Gambetta incarnated both the Republic and the Nation. While these
emotional communities overlapped significantly, they were nevertheless
distinct: republicans were virtually all patriots, but some patriots were not
republicans, or at least not committed republicans. From these, a new
right-wing authoritarian nationalism emerged in the mid-1880s to contest
republican nationalism. Continuing rituals around Gambetta’s memory
enabled republicans to reinforce and enlarge the republican national-
ist emotional community and thus marginalise this new authoritarian
nationalism. The Republic’s victory over Germany in 1918 completed the
emotional work which rituals built upon Gambetta’s body had begun.
With the ‘lost provinces’ (Alsace and Lorraine) returned to the Republic
and the Republic secure, all that Gambetta stood for was accomplished.
148 C. SOWERWINE
Elaborate, highly ritualised ceremonies celebrated Gambetta one last time

and brought an end to these rituals, the need for which had now passed.
Initiated in 1883, they ceased in 1920, a life cycle of only 37 years.
Mourning and Ritual
Upon Gambetta’s death, journalists and police reported widespread grief.
This was the golden age of mass-circulation newspapers. Despite vicious
partisan rivalries, all reported Gambetta’s death with sadness, even the hos-
tile conservative press. Le Temps’ front-page obituary began: ‘Democracy
has lost a good servant, the tribune an incomparable orator, and France
a great citizen’. Across the world, newspapers reported in similar terms.18
Within France, a highly developed, pioneering system of police surveil-
lance kept the government informed of the public’s ‘state of mind’.19 The
police distinguished emotional communities in both social and geographical
terms, noting that Gambetta’s death united vastly different neighbourhoods
of Paris in a transcendent emotional community. ‘From impressions gath-
ered across different neighborhoods’, even in working-class Belleville, where
most thought Gambetta should have held out for a more radical or socialist
republic, the police noted, locals were ‘frightened at his death, which they
consider disastrous [funeste] for the Republic’. In shopping areas, ‘grief is
profound’. In the wealthy seventh arrondissement, ‘the emotion seems even
keener than anywhere else’; ‘it was an irreparable loss for the party of order’,
which had depended on Gambetta to moderate social demands.20
Grief was all the greater because of the intensely personal nature of
Gambetta’s bond with the people of France, a bond forged through his
countless speeches across the country. He had an extraordinary ability to
communicate with, and to rouse emotion, in the huge crowds to which he
spoke so often. ‘Gambetta had such a power of enthralling mobs, he was
so thoroughly a man after the people’s own heart’, wrote The Times’ cor-
respondent.21 The conservative historian Pierre de la Gorce, a contempo-
rary of Gambetta, decried a lack of polish and finish in Gambetta’s oratory,
but admitted that he won crowds over with:
sudden surges [élans] of passion, something familiar and vehement, a

remarkable force and sometimes a remarkable finesse as well; and, with
that, a voice both profound and sonorous, large, inclusive gestures, and an
engaging, spontaneous manner in which all the minor failings disappeared,
as dross is carried away in the frothing of a torrent.22
The modern historian Pierre Barral concludes that ‘everyone who heard
[his speeches] witnessed to the extraordinary impression they felt’.23
The bond Gambetta thus created was deeply emotional. The hard-
headed Georges Clemenceau—later the architect of victory in the Great
War, then a young politician—kept Gambetta’s death mask in his study24
and recalled the ‘irresistible power of attraction’ Gambetta exercised over
his audience.25 Reporting an 1876 speech by Gambetta, a journalist wrote:
‘The fragrance of his burning eloquence penetrated every heart, every-
one was moved, tears even came to the eyes’.26 Stenographers constantly
reported cries of ‘Hear! Hear!’, usually followed by ‘Salvo of applause. —
Lengthy interruption’, and at least once in most speeches: ‘The excitement
of the audience prevents the orator from speaking for several minutes!’27
The grief that followed Gambetta’s death was based not only on republi-
can and patriotic sentiment but also on profound personal emotion.
To express their grief, people sought refuge in ritual, much of it focused
on les Jardies, the weekend cottage where Gambetta had died.28 On New
Year’s Day 1883, his body lay on his bed. All day long, a crowd filed into
the modest house and up the narrow staircase to pay their respects; many
more were turned away.29 From these beginnings, ritual came increasingly
into use to express and share grief. The only available source of ritual lay
in Catholic culture and practice, so long traditional in France.
The republicans were, to be sure, fervent anti-clericals. Gambetta him-
self was famous for his rallying call: ‘Clericalism! There is the enemy’.30
The medical practitioners who had cared for Gambetta shared these
strong anti-clerical beliefs, but they were not immune from quasi-religious
practice.31 Indeed, their preserving of Gambetta’s body parts betrays a
profound need to embody the emotion they felt, a need reflected in the
Catholic practice of keeping and venerating the body parts of saints. The
day after the body was displayed, the doctors performed an autopsy on the
body while it lay on the deathbed. They removed the brain, the heart, the
bowel and the appendix. (During a 1909 re-inhumation, others removed
the skull and the right arm.) After analysis, instead of discarding these
body parts or returning them to the coffin, they treasured them, like pious
Catholics (see the parallel discussion in Chap. 11).32 Paul Bert, one of
Gambetta’s doctors and devoted friends, kept Gambetta’s heart in a crys-
tal jar, apparently on the mantel in his home. This was religious venera-
tion, not science.33
After the autopsy, what remained of Gambetta’s body was placed in
a closed coffin, still in his bedroom at les Jardies. The next day, another
150 C. SOWERWINE
4,000 mourners came to pay their respects. That evening, the coffin was
manoeuvered down the cramped spiral staircase and taken to the Palais
Bourbon, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house elected by
universal male suffrage, of which Gambetta had been President.34
Funeral Rites
Spontaneous ritual now gave way to planned ceremony. A committee of
republican politicians worked with Jules Bastien-Lepage, the noted art-
ist, and Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, to prepare the
funeral and to decorate the Palais Bourbon and its surrounds. Opposite
the Palais across the Seine, black crepe veiled the statue of Strasbourg (the
capital of Alsace) on the Place de la Concorde, recalling Gambetta’s com-
mitment to the ‘lost provinces’.35 This was not the first time that the statue
had been so draped, but it was the first and only time it was draped as an
act of quasi-personal mourning.
To symbolise Gambetta the republican orator, nothing could serve bet-
ter than the Palais Bourbon. It was Gambetta who had, only three and a
half years earlier, engineered the return of the Chamber of Deputies and
the Senate from Versailles, where they had met since 1871. As President
of the Chamber and its leading orator, Gambetta was intimately linked
with the Chamber in the popular imagination. Indeed, a Paris clockmaker
sold clocks representing the Chamber Tribune surmounted with a bust of
Gambetta, his arm wielding the speaker’s gavel, which struck the hours.36
Following Gambetta’s death, the Palais Bourbon was draped in an enor-
mous crepe veil, echoing the crepe over the statue of Strasbourg, as if the
building of which Gambetta had been the heart and soul was itself mourn-
ing his loss. (Fig. 8.1 shows the cortege about to depart from the veiled
building). Inside, customary mourning ritual was further adopted by the
transformation of the ceremonial hall into a chapelle ardente, a candlelit
shrine, though of course without religious symbols. Anne Martin-Fugier
describes this practice as a traditional bourgeois ritual: ‘a mortuary chapel
lit with tapers would be set up in [the deceased’s] home. Visitors came to
pay their respects’. On 4 January, an estimated 150,000 mourners filed
past the coffin; still more came the following day.37
The state funeral followed traditional mourning ritual too. The plan-
ners assumed that the body was required for a secular republican funeral,
just as for a Catholic funeral, but Gambetta’s father insisted that the body
be returned to Nice for burial in the family vault. A veritable Who’s Who
Fig. 8.1 The Late Léon Gambetta—the funeral procession leaving the Palais
Bourbon, which housed the Chamber of Deputies. Contemporary engraving.
Courtesy look and learn. Reproduced by permission
of the republican elite tried to persuade him to relent, using language

usually associated with Catholicism. ‘In the name of our great dead one,
I beseech you, to leave his body to our worship’, wrote one. ‘Leave your
son to Paris’, wrote Victor Hugo. After Gambetta’s lover, Léonie Léon,
intervened, Gambetta’s father accepted that the body be interred ‘provi-
sionally’ in Paris, making the funeral possible.38
‘The funeral will be the greatest since the body of the First Napoleon
was taken to the Invalides’ in 1840, predicted the Paris correspondent of
the New York Times. In fact, it was far greater, equalled only by Victor
Hugo’s funeral in 1885. Gambetta’s casket was surrounded by more than
5,000 bouquets and wreaths and was followed by an immense procession.
Some 1,500 delegations, many of them including hundreds of individuals,
formally took part. They represented not only Paris and national organ-
isations, but also groups from every town where Gambetta had spoken.
152 C. SOWERWINE
Delegates from Alsace and Lorraine led the cortege. It left the Palais
Bourbon at 10 am (see Fig. 8.1) to the sound of cannon fired from the
nearby Invalides, a monument to the army to which Gambetta had been
deeply attached.39
The cortege crossed the Seine to the Place de la Concorde, where some
150,000 people were waiting for a glimpse, and then proceeded to the
Place de la République, where it was halted by the thick crush of onlook-
ers. Using the telegraph to keep track of the procession, the police esti-
mated that 800,000 people followed the formal procession; the number
of spectators was ‘incalculable’. The cortege finally reached Père Lachaise
Cemetery at 4 pm. Speakers were so numerous that, in order to finish, the
eulogies had long since begun. Everyone had to have a say: parliamentar-
ians, ministers, generals, representatives of Gambetta’s local political com-
mittee, of the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace and Lorraine, and of the Paris bar.
The official delegations then filed past and placed flowers on the tomb,
followed by regiments of infantry, artillery and cavalry. Cannon fired inter-
minably. It was dark by this time. The coffin was dropped into the vault
by torchlight, along with soil from Lorraine in a black bag inscribed (in
Latin): ‘Lotharingia [the old name for the Duchy of Lorraine] remembers,
violated not dominated’.
James Lehning suggests that the leaders of the government focused on
Gambetta the patriot to avoid focus on Gambetta the republican because
they had cut short his term as Prime Minister only ten months before. But
the presence of hundreds of republican political groups and the texts of
the many speeches attest to the funeral’s emphasis on Gambetta as leader
of the republican movement. Gambetta’s newspaper responded to general
sentiment in declaring that it was impossible to separate the republican
from the patriot. Gambetta’s death, like his life, conflated the Republic
and the Nation.40
The body remained six nights in the ‘provisional’ tomb. On 11 January,
a delegation made a last unavailing attempt to persuade Joseph Gambetta
to leave it in Paris. The next day, the coffin was taken to a special train.
Loaded with friends and dignitaries, it stopped at many towns and cities.
At each stop, a civic ceremony with speeches, wreaths and bands was held.
The train finally arrived in Nice 24 hours later. There, another ceremony
was held. Late on Saturday 13 January, Gambetta was placed alongside his
mother in the modest family tomb.41
Meanwhile, initial spontaneous visits to les Jardies were creating new
ritual. Only days after Gambetta’s death, a leading republican suggested
publicly that ‘the place where the great patriot died must become a sacred
place where those who remember will henceforth go in pilgrimage’.42
In 1884, on the first anniversary of Gambetta’s death, more than 1,000
people made what Gambetta’s newspaper termed ‘a pious pilgrimage’ to
les Jardies.43 The term ‘pious pilgrimage’ was soon adopted universally to
describe what became annual events.44 The irony of anti-clerical republi-
cans making ‘pilgrimages’ to ‘a sacred place’ went unremarked. In 1900,
the police still counted more than 800 participants.45 As a result of the pil-
grimages—not only the annual group walks but also individual and family
excursions—les Jardies became famous. An enterprising printer even pro-
duced a popular cut-and-construct cardboard model of the house. This
was new ritual, born spontaneously, built on familiar rituals and discourses
of sharing emotion.46
Emotional Communities and Monuments
The emotional community around Gambetta’s death was soon challenged

by the emergence of an authoritarian right, which also laid claim to patrio-
tism. This was a new right. Monarchists had never accepted patriotism: for
them, the French people were not citizens, but subjects of the king. By
the mid-1880s, however, monarchists despaired of imposing a king and
sought instead to salvage their core values—a hierarchical society based on
tradition and ties to the land—and to preserve hierarchical institutions—
nobility, Army and Church. For this project, patriotism offered a welcome
if unexpected opportunity.
The conservatives and populists who combined to form this new
authoritarian and patriotic right argued that regaining the lost provinces
required not democracy, but authority and obedience. In the late 1880s,
the charismatic General Boulanger emerged as a potential authoritarian
leader to achieve revanche (revenge).47 While Boulanger’s movement
failed, it provided a catalyst for a new anti-parliamentary nationalism. The
Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s reinforced this authoritarian nationalism with
populist anti-Semitism. Thus, patriotism as a uniquely republican virtue
gave way to two contested forms of nationalism, one republican and the
other anti-parliamentary or authoritarian, before becoming, in the twenti-
eth century, a virtue associated more with the right than the left.48
Gambetta, in death, became a major factor in the power struggle
between these two patriotisms, played out in another ritual in which the
French nation was well schooled: the construction of monuments to
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harness the power of image to incarnate and legitimate authority. Since the
Renaissance, the monarchy had put up statues of the king. The Republic
put up statues of its ‘great men’, none more than Gambetta. In both
cases, the erection of statues, often at central locations as part of grandiose
monuments, was a major tool to demonstrate power and legitimacy by
arousing emotion. Each monument was inaugurated with a major cer-
emony following a civic liturgy involving not only speeches, but also the
ritual participation of various groups which paraded, presented wreaths
and played music. Onlookers often commented on the intense emotion
aroused. Each statue, once inaugurated, incarnated not only Gambetta in
a dramatic pose, reflecting the drama and emotion he had aroused, but
also the emotion which surrounded the inauguration. And that emotion
was perpetuated as the monument became the focus of more civic rituals:
annual commemorations of the inauguration, of Gambetta’s death and of
other great occasions.49
For the republicans, Gambetta’s memory, incarnated in such statues,
became a tool of legitimization (see discussion of similar iconography of
monarchy in Chap. 6). The monarchy had often portrayed the king as a
mighty warrior through equestrian statues. The republicans had a choice.
On the one hand, they could portray Gambetta as the fearless patriot,
the leader of national defence in the Franco-Prussian War. On the other
hand, they could portray him as the inspirational republican orator, the
architect of the Constitution of 1875 and the founder of the Republic.
In the struggle between the two forms of patriotism, each monument
to Gambetta became a contested site: which Gambetta to celebrate, or
rather how much of each—the patriot or the republican? Ultimately, the
republicans sought to combine the two, emphasising their commonality;
their opponents sought to portray the leader of the armed resistance to the
invader, excluding any reference to the founder of the Republic.
The monument in Paris, the spearhead of republicanism since the
great Revolution, combined ‘national defense and the foundation of the
Republic’, as the appeal for funds put it. Some 250,000 subscribers raised
360,000 francs, making it the most expensive monument ever built in
Paris.50 The monument took the form of a truncated pyramid 23 metres
(75 feet) high, incorporating an array of symbolic tributes to the Republic
and to Gambetta’s role in creating and defending it. Atop the pedestal was
not Gambetta, but a female figure riding a lion and holding the ‘Rights
of Man’, an allegory of democracy as realised in the Republic Gambetta
had founded. An immense stone statue on the front face of the pyramid
presented Gambetta, simultaneously, if improbably, leaning on a cannon,

holding a sword, supporting a ‘citizen’ about to fire a rifle and protecting
a group of children.
The choice of a ‘citizen’, that is, a civilian in the voluntary militia, empha-
sised the democratic nationalism originating in the great Revolution. Half
a dozen secondary sculptures jostled on the sides of the pyramid, includ-
ing youths representing fraternity, an infantryman and a naval commando,
all decorated by an array of symbols: the cock (symbol of France); crowns
of laurel and oak (trees associated with Alsace and Lorraine); the hand of
justice; and shields inscribed with republican ideals that Gambetta had
championed—‘compulsory military service’ and ‘instruction for all’.51 All
remaining space was filled with lengthy quotes from Gambetta’s speeches
(see Fig. 8.2).52 The result was less an artistic creation than an ‘altar of the
religion of the fatherland’, as the deputy Eugène Spuller, Gambetta’s com-
rade in struggle since 1868, called it in his speech inaugurating the monu-
ment on 13 July 1888. It was, Spuller added in religious discourse typical
of these speeches, ‘a monument of grateful piety and immortal glory’.53
The placement of monuments in Paris was always symbolic. As Benno
Gammerl notes, ‘certain spatial styles or landscapes induce specific emo-
tions’.54 The Louvre, begun in 1190 as a royal palace, had a long associa-
tion with the monarchy. Gambetta’s monument was set in the Carrousel
courtyard of the Louvre, near where I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid now stands,
directly opposite Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, on an axis
running directly through this small arch up the Champs-Élysées to the
large Arc de Triomphe nearly seven kilometres (more than four miles)
away. Gambetta’s monument was thus at the base of Paris’ most famous
vista. Its placement carried a clear political message. Erecting the statue of
Gambetta in this space claimed it for the Republic, as Spuller declared at
the inauguration: ‘In the midst of the architectural splendors of the mon-
archy, the stone erected to the glory of this plebeian is in its rightful place,
at the center of our history and our city’.55 The monument implanted
republicanism at the symbolic heart of power over France.
In the provinces, the monuments sometimes gave greater emphasis to
Gambetta the patriot, particularly that in Cahors, Gambetta’s birthplace.
Its monument, inaugurated on 14 April 1884, depicted him as a defiant
military leader, his right hand on a cannon, looming over an infantry-
man and a naval commando. The pedestal was inscribed with his 1870
proclamation calling on the nation to rise up against the invader.56 In most
cases, however, the republicans won out. A more typical mix characterised
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Fig. 8.2 Monument to Gambetta—Place du Carroussel. Contemporary photo-

graph. Courtesy look and learn. Reproduced by permission
the choices of an Alsatian group which planned a monument to Gambetta.

They sought to celebrate him as defender of the lost provinces, but by
invoking him as inspirational republican leader. The renowned sculptor
Auguste Bartholdi, whose Liberty Enlightening the World had just been
inaugurated in New York harbour, represented Gambetta ‘holding to his
chest a torn tricolor flag on a broken staff’. The tricolor was a clear allusion
to the Republic; it had been the flag of the Revolution and the monarchy
had always rejected it. Gambetta’s right arm was outstretched, ‘seeking’,
as explained at the inauguration, ‘to reverse destiny’. Beneath the pedestal
were sculpted an Alsatian woman and a Lorraine woman, each protect-
ing a child. The sentimentality of this sculptural group is reminiscent of
the statues of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus so common in Catholic
churches and suggests an intentional link to the profound emotion sur-
rounding the ‘lost provinces’. That powerful emotion was ultimately
judged too intense for a highly visible Parisian location, which might, it
was feared, lead Germany to take umbrage. As a result, the monument was
finally erected not in Paris, but at les Jardies. However, this had the result
of linking the monument to what was already a popular pilgrimage site,
thus enabling les Jardies to fulfil its role as a complete shrine.57
The shrine even included a relic. Paul Bert, who had kept Gambetta’s
heart after the autopsy, died in 1886. His widow, perhaps less fond of it
than her late husband, gave it to the state for others to venerate.58 Encased
in metal, then in a box of Alsatian wood, it was sealed inside the statue
on 6 November 1891, two days before the monument was inaugurated.
With a relic of the saint, les Jardies indeed became a ‘sacred place’, a wor-
thy shrine for the annual pilgrimage. Republican veneration of body parts
matched that of Catholics.59
Apotheosis
To contest the emerging authoritarian right, republicans increasingly
evoked Gambetta as a ‘saint for the Republic’. From the inauguration of
the monument at les Jardies to the height of the Dreyfus Affair a decade
later, the number of pilgrims to les Jardies grew steadily.60 And, more
significantly, after a 15-year pause, a second wave of monument building
summoned Gambetta’s legacy to reassert the republican message and to
ward off the resurgent ultra-nationalist threat. The two most significant
of these new monuments were great successes for the republican cause.
Bordeaux led the way in 1905 with a huge monument by Dalou, most
famous for the sculptures on the Place de la République in Paris. He set
Gambetta alone, atop a three-metre pedestal, not in military or oratorical
mode, but thoughtful and pensive, an implicit rebuke to hotheads who
sought to provoke a disastrous war in the name of revanche.
At the inauguration, the President of the Chamber of Deputies out-
lined the lessons that the monument would present to citizens, lessons
combining republicanism and patriotism: ‘The statue … will tell them
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that they must cultivate the virtues that create the useful man, the enlight-
ened citizen, the watchful soldier; that they must be attached to liberty,
to the republican regime that assures it for everyone; that they must love
the fatherland before all and above all’.61 The proceedings constituted a
now-familiar civic ritual, with speeches from all the dignitaries interspersed
with music and rituals such as parades and wreath laying. In the presence
of the President of the Republic and nine ministers, the famous composer
Camille Saint-Saëns conducted the premiere of a patriotic cantata he had
composed during the Franco-Prussian War, thus further linking the emo-
tions of the ceremony and of the monument itself to Gambetta’s glorious
role as leader of the Republic during that traumatic past.62
The republicans were also successful in Nice. In April 1906, the city
raised a monument to the ‘Great Patriot’ buried there, at the same time
replacing his tomb with one ‘more worthy of the eminent statesman’. A
huge pedestal four metres high was surmounted by a much taller but nar-
rower pedestal, around which were grouped weeping women and soldiers
grasping a huge flag, symbolism linking emotion and patriotism. On the
upper pedestal, an enormous statue depicted Gambetta not in military
mode, but as republican orator in full rhetorical flight.
At the inauguration, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau emphasised
the need to mobilise Gambetta’s memory against the anti-parliamentary
right, calling for vigilance against ‘the enemies’ of the Republic, against
‘the reactionary, who wants to return to superseded [déchues] forms of
government, and the demagogue … who will make use of hard-won
liberties to dragoon sections of the population who are not sufficiently
enlightened and launch them on violent enterprises’.63 The emotional
community of patriots was fractured, but Gambetta’s memory was still
a potent symbol to mobilise them against the authoritarian right. As in
other inaugural ceremonies, such speeches were interspersed with leaders
paying respects, delegations laying wreaths and bands playing music while
parading around the monument. The net effect of this ritual, as of the
others we have discussed, was to arouse emotion that could be harnessed
to the power of the Republic against its internal enemies as well as against
potential external enemies (see also Chap. 6).
Victory in the Great War of 1914–18 brought the ‘lost provinces’ back
to France, completing Gambetta’s historic mission. When French troops
entered Strasbourg in triumph on 9 December 1918, one house displayed
a banner reading: ‘Sleep content, Gambetta! Finally the proud dawn of the
day you dreamed of has risen for us’.64 Victory gave full cultural hegemony
to the Republic. Not only had the Republic successfully prosecuted the
war, but also the whole spectrum of political opinion had joined in the
government of union sacrée, fully and finally legitimising the Republic.
Though challenged subsequently, the Republic now became France’s
default regime. The political and cultural struggle which Gambetta had
led was now at an end.
Gambetta’s memory was, however, powerfully invoked to celebrate vic-
tory in two significant rituals in 1920. On 28 March, a large delegation
proceeded to les Jardies, led by the past and present Presidents of the
Republic, the Presidents of the Senate and Chamber, the Prime Minister,
ten ministers, Marshal Joffre, several generals and those of Gambetta’s
companions who were still alive. A large crowd heard a succession of
speeches celebrating him as the one who had ‘never given up on France,
even in the darkest days of defeat’. The President of the Republic then
took a French flag captured by the Germans in 1870 and recaptured in
1918. He climbed the stairs to Gambetta’s room, knelt and deposited the
flag on Gambetta’s deathbed.65
Later that year, Gambetta reached his apotheosis, achieving something
like sainthood. The government decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Republic not on 4 September, the date in 1870 when it had
been proclaimed, but on 11 November, the date of the armistice conclud-
ing the war that had restored the lost provinces to the Republic, thus
‘symbolically linking’, as government’s spokesman put it, ‘the Republic
and France’ and corresponding to their ‘indissoluble unity’.66 How better
to celebrate such an anniversary than to invoke Gambetta? The Chamber
of Deputies voted overwhelmingly to transfer Gambetta’s heart to the
Pantheon.
The deputy reporting on this bill made clear the quasi-religious signifi-
cance of the move: ‘the faithful’, he argued, already ‘celebrate his memory
in pious pilgrimages. It is not without a wrench that they will see the relic
removed from the reliquary’. This was intensely religious language used
by a leading anti-clerical. It was one thing to speak of ‘pious pilgrimages’;
it was quite another to speak of ‘the faithful’, ‘relics’ and ‘reliquaries’.
Several times since its construction in the eighteenth century, the
Pantheon had passed between religious and republican hands, from
church to monument. The republicans took it over in 1885 for the burial
of Victor Hugo, and kept it as a tomb and shrine for ‘the great men of
the Republic’. Gambetta’s heart was now to be placed alongside Hugo’s
remains. And at the same time as Gambetta’s heart was to be translated
160 C. SOWERWINE
to the Pantheon, an Unknown Soldier would be buried beneath the Arc

de Triomphe, to which the Gambetta monument in the Louvre courtyard
was visually linked.67
The double ceremony took the veneration of the Republic’s relics to
new heights and constituted one of France’s grandest civic rituals since
the 1789 Revolution. Late in the evening of 10 November 1920, ‘the
heart of a patriot, this heart which beat so strongly for the fatherland’,
as the speaker put it, was removed from the monument at les Jardies and
taken in procession to Paris, to the Place Denfert-Rochereau. This site was
highly symbolic. It was named after the Governor of Belfort, the only city
that had withstood the siege and remained undefeated during the Franco-
Prussian War. There, the heart was placed in a glass-sided reliquary and set
on a table in a chapelle ardente. The table, draped with linen, looked like
an altar in the candlelight.68
The next morning, the reliquary containing Gambetta’s heart and the
coffin containing the body of the Unknown Soldier were each placed on
a catafalque and taken in procession to the Pantheon, where the President
of the Republic, accompanied by Raymond Poincaré (who was President
in 1914), Marshals Joffre, Foch and Pétain, plus numerous generals, all
knelt before the relics, while a band played Saint-Saëns’ ‘Marche héroїque’
(originally part of his patriotic cantata) and the ‘Marseillaise’. The kneel-
ing posture, the emotional music and the very symbolism of the heart
made this, so onlookers reported, a particularly moving moment.69
The dignitaries then led a long cortege to the Arc de Triomphe, follow-
ing in reverse the exact route of Victor Hugo’s funeral procession in 1885.
A huge crowd looked on. At the Arc de Triomphe, the relics of the two
heroes were placed on display. The crowd filed past to pay their respects.70
That evening, the body of the Unknown Soldier was transferred to the hall
in the top of the Arch to await its final burial in January. Gambetta’s heart
was taken to the Pantheon, where it remained on display in its reliquary
for three days. A year later, it was finally laid to rest in a porphyry urn,
giving symbolic closure and bringing veneration of Gambetta in line with
that of the other ‘great men of the fatherland’, as the pediment of the
Pantheon still proclaims.71
With Alsace and Lorraine restored to France and with the Republic
firmly established as the natural expression of the nation, Gambetta’s mis-
sion was accomplished. The emotional community built upon his death
made a final evolution, growing to include virtually the whole of the nation,
but by the same token losing its specificity as it merged into the broad,
normative expression of the nation, from which only a small segment of

the extreme right remained aloof. The rituals born with Gambetta’s death
came to an end after this apotheosis. The pilgrimages to les Jardies never
resumed. During the Second World War, most of the statues were demol-
ished by the occupying forces and many of the monuments were disman-
tled after the war. Gambetta ceased to figure in republican rhetoric. The
emotional work done in his name accomplished, he slipped from active
memory into passive history.
Conclusion
The picture we have traced is of nationwide harnessing of emotion through
ritual. The rituals surrounding Gambetta’s death—the funeral, the pil-
grimages—were perpetuated by an unbroken series of rituals around the
anniversaries of his death and around the inauguration of the many monu-
ments erected to his memory. I have discussed only a few of these major
monuments. There were many in small towns, and every town and most
villages in France still have a street named after Gambetta. Each of these
was inaugurated or opened with a powerful ritual.
A major factor in the power of these rituals was their use of the body.
As Scheer reminds us, emotion ‘is always embodied’.72 Gambetta’s body
provided the requisite ‘medium for experience’. The doctors’ appropria-
tion of body parts and the use of Gambetta’s heart are evidence of the
continuing emotional need for tangible remains. The many statues erected
to Gambetta’s memory stood in for his body, providing a tangible focus
for emotion around which successive rituals coalesced like so many mini-
funerals. Even Gambetta’s house, les Jardies, provided a focus like a shrine
for the body which had been there and whose heart had been enshrined
there.
During nearly four decades, these rituals were a significant force
in arousing emotion and linking it to the Republic, reconstituting and
enlarging the ‘emotional community’ of republicans. They were signifi-
cant factors in the legitimisation of the Republic. Struggling to obtain
the emotional engagement of its citizens after its birth in defeat and the
loss of Alsace-Lorraine, tossed by the renewed authoritarianism of the
1880s, challenged by a series of scandals culminating in the Dreyfus Affair,
besieged anew by the authoritarian forces incorporating anti-Semitism,
the Republic struggled for legitimacy from its proclamation in 1870 to its
victory in the First World War.
162 C. SOWERWINE
A republic, a democracy, does not have (or did not have at the time) the
emotion of fear as an authoritarian state does. A republic requires some
form of positive emotional commitment from its citizens. The powerful
emotions aroused by Gambetta’s memory and channelled through ritual,
through the bodily outpouring of emotion, provided that emotional com-
mitment and played a major role in mobilising popular support for the
Republic that he founded. Modern polities are not immune to the needs
for ritual to uphold and reaffirm their sentiments as a collectivity, to para-
phrase Durkheim, or, we might say, to foster and develop emotional com-
munities to uphold their collective identity.
Notes
1. See Susan K. Foley and Charles Sowerwine, A Political Romance:
Léon Gambetta, Léonie Léon and the Making of the French Republic,
1872–1882 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 200–46.
2. La République française, 31 December 1882. The doctors hid the
truth because Gambetta was still reading newspapers.
3. ‘Préfecture de Police. Intérieur’, 1 January 1883, Archives
Nationales (hereinafter AN) F7 15.9582. ‘Chroniques’, Revue
alsacienne, January 1883, 140. Other reports: ‘very moved [très
ému]’ (M. Mouquier, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris
[APP] B/a 924); ‘moved and saddened [émus et attristés]’
(M. Féger. ibid.); ‘a cruel loss [perte cruelle]’ (M. Evrard, ibid.).
4. For the war of 1870–1, see Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870:
Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic, 2nd edn
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 12–15. J.P.T. Bury’s
remains the best account of Gambetta’s role: Gambetta and the
National Defence: A Republican Dictatorship in France (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1971 [1936]), esp. 116–39.
5. For Gambetta’s career, see Foley and Sowerwine, A Political
Romance; Bury, Gambetta and the National Defence; John
P.T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic (London:
Longman, 1973) and Gambetta’s Final Years: ‘The Era Of
Difficulties’, 1877–1882 (London: Longman, 1982); Jean-Marie
Mayeur, Léon Gambetta: la patrie et la République (Paris: Fayard,
2008); Jérôme Grévy, La république des opportunistes, 1870–1885
(Paris: Perrin, 1998).
6. Sowerwine, France since 1870, 29–38.
7. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that

What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to
Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220
(at 195, 209).
8. Oxford Dictionary of English. Cf. William Reddy’s definition of
emotion: ‘goal-relevant activation of thought material that exceeds
the translating capacity of attention within a short time horizon’,
that is, feeling too powerful for words. The Navigation of Feeling:
A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge
9. ‘Émotion’, B, Trésor de la langue française informatisé, http://atilf.
atilf.fr (accessed 14 October 2016); ‘Émotion’, 2, Grand Robert de
la langue française: dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la
langue française (2nd edn, 9 vols, Paris: le Robert, 1985): III, 903.
10. Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le sys-
tème totémique en Australie (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1912),
427; cf. E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).
11. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 210, citing Victor Turner.
12. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’,
American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–45 (at 842).
13. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions’.
14. See Sowerwine, France since 1870, 39–52 and 472–3; and Charles
Sowerwine, ‘Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship
and Republicanism in France, 1789–1944’, in Confronting
Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds and Gender, ed.
Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 19–42.
15. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso,
1999), 13.
16. See further the discussions in Chaps. 3, 5 and 11.
17. See Sowerwine, France since 1870, 39–52 and 473–4; Maurice
Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism
in France, 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981); The Republic in the Village: The People of the
Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also,
more broadly, Francois Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880,
164 C. SOWERWINE
trans. Antonia Nevi II (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); and Peter McPhee,

A Social History of France 1780–1880 (London: Routledge, 1992).
18. See, e.g., New York Times, 3 January 1883, 1; The Times (London),
2 January 1883, 1.
19. A.R. Gillis, ‘Crime and State Surveillance in Nineteenth-Century
France’, American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989): 307–41; Fredric
Zuckerman, ‘Policing the Russian Emigration in Paris, 1880–1914:
The Twentieth Century as the Century of Political Police’, French
History & Civilization 2 (2009): 218–27.
20. ‘La Mort de M. Gambetta’, 1 January 1883, AN F7 15. 9582;
‘Gambetta’, M. Féger, 1 January 1883, APP B/a 924. Reports on
the mourning occupy three cartons: AN F7 15. 9581–2 and APP
B/a 924.
21. ‘Gambetta Reminiscences’, New York Times, 15 January 1883.
22. Pierre de la Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, (Paris: Plon, 1900),
V: 413.
23. Pierre Barral, Léon Gambetta: tribun et stratège de la République,
1838–1882 (Toulouse: Privat, 2008), 127.
24. It can still be seen there, in his residence, now the Musée

Clemenceau (Paris).
25. Quoted in Paula Cossart, ‘L’émotion: un dommage pour l’idée
républicaine. Autour de l’éloquence de Léon Gambetta’,
Romantisme 33 (119): 47–60, at 50.
26. Petit Lyonnais, 1 March 1876, quoted in Cossart, ‘L’émotion’, 51.
Cf. Jacques Chastenet, Gambetta (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 69.
27. Gambetta, ‘Discours prononcé le 26 septembre 1872 à Grenoble’,
in Discours et plaidoyers politiques de M. Gambetta (hereinafter
Discours), 11 vols (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880–85), III: 100–1.
28. On the spatiality of emotion, see Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional
Styles—Concepts and Challenges’, History 16 (2012): 161–75 (at
164).
29. ‘Aux Jardies’, 1 January 1883, AN F7 15. 9582.
30. ‘Discours sur les menées ultramontaines’, Discours VI: 284–362
(at 354). Cf. Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 143–7;
Jérôme Grévy, Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi: une guerre de religion
en France (Paris: Colin, 2005).
31. Professors Charcot, Verneuil, Trélat, Brouardel and Cornil;

Doctors Siredey and Lannelongue (‘Blessure et mort de
M. Gambetta’, Gazette hebdomadaire de médecine et de chirurgie
no. 3, 19 January 1883: 33–46). Other doctors, such as Paul Bert,

came as friends, but offered medical opinions. See Foley and
Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 200–22.
32. Avner Ben-Amos, ‘Monuments and Memory in French Nationalism’,
History and Memory 5 (1993): 50–81 (at 60–1); Mona Ozouf, ‘The
Panthéon: The École Normale of the Dead’, in Realms of Memory:
Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora and trans. Arthur
Goldhammer, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
III: 325–40; Lorraine Ward, ‘The Cult of Relics: Pasteur Material at
the Science Museum’, Medical History 38 (1994): 52–72; Véronique
Magnol-Malhache, Patrick Chamouard and Denis Lavalle, Léon
Gambetta: un saint pour la république? (Paris: Caisse nationale des
monuments historiques et des sites, 1996), 46.
33. Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 218–22; ‘Blessure et
mort’; P.B. Gheusi, La vie et la mort singulières de Gambetta (Paris:
A. Michel, 1932), 300, 305; Odilon Lannelongue, Leçons de cli-
nique chirurgicale (Paris: Masson, 1905), 318, 323; Magnol-
Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 43–6, 70–6; Letter, Léonie Léon
to Mme Marcellin Pellet, 17 November 1886, in Émile Pillias,
Léonie Léon, amie de Gambetta, 3rd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1935),
215. Cf. P.B. Gheusi, ‘Le nouveau tombeau de Gambetta’,
L’Illustration, 10 April 1909, 239–42.
34. La République française, 3 January 1883.
35. La République française, 3, 4 January 1883.
36. For an example, see http://www.musees-midi-pyrenees.fr/

musees/musee-de-cahors-henri-martin/collections/collection-
gambetta/anonyme/pendule-representant-gambetta (accessed 15
October 2016).
37. La République française, 3, 4 January 1883; Anne Martin-Fugier,
‘Bourgeois Rituals’, in From the Fires of Revolution to the Great
War, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 of A History of Private Life, ed.
Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 261–337, at 333.
38. Discours XI: 236–9; Pillias, Léonie Léon, 187; Archives d’histoire
contemporaine, Sciences Po Centre d’Histoire, Paris, 2EP 6, Dr 2,
sdr a: ‘Lettres à sa famille’, Joseph Gambetta to Victor Hugo, 12
January 1883; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 54–7.
39. ‘The Death of Gambetta: France Preparing to Bury Her Greatest
Statesman’, New York Times, 6 January 1883; ‘Ordre du Cortège et
166 C. SOWERWINE
Liste des Couronnes’, ‘Compte-Rendu des Obsèques’, La

République française, 7, 8 January 1883; Discours XI: 282–92;
APP B/a 924, ‘Mort et Funérailles de Gambetta’, January 1883.
For the complete funeral, see Le Figaro, 6–7 January 1883; and La
République française, 1–7 January 1883. For the role of Léonie
Léon, see Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 226.
40. ‘Ordre du Cortège et Liste des Couronnes’, ‘Compte-Rendu des
Obsèques’, La République française, 7, 8 January 1883; Cf. James
R. Lehning, ‘Gossiping about Gambetta: Contested Memories in
the Early Third Republic’, French Historical Studies 18 (1981):
237–54 (esp. 240–1).
41. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 63–5; ‘Obsèques à Nice’,
La République française, 12–14 January 1883.
42. L. Delpech to E. Spuller, La Presse, 7 January 1883, 2; cf. Magnol-
Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 105.
43. La République française, 2 January 1884.
44. Odile Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta: Destin et mémoire (1838–1938)’, 2
vols (thèse de doctorat d’histoire, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne,
1998), 373–92, 385 (Spuller); APP, B/a 924: dossier Gambetta: 6
January 1884; ‘Discours de Eugène Étienne’, in Émile Labarthe,
Gambetta et ses amis (Paris: Les Éditions des Presses modernes,
1938), 324.
45. APP B/a 924, ‘C[ommisionnai]re Sèvres à Préfet de Police’, 7
January 1900.
46. ‘Image d’Épinal N° 1316’, fig. 7, in Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon
Gambetta, xiv.
47. See Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 55–9; and Charles
Sowerwine, ‘Boulangism’, in Europe 1789 to 1914—Encyclopedia of
the Age of Industry and Empire, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter,
5 vols (Philadelphia: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006): I, 281–3.
48. See Sowerwine, France since 1870, 64–69, and Sowerwine, ‘The
Dreyfus Affair’, in Europe 1789 to 1914, ed. Merriman and Winter:
II, 683–6.
49.
See Neil McWilliam, ‘Conflicting Manifestations: Parisian
Commemoration of Joan of Arc and Etienne Dolet in the Early
Third Republic’, French Historical Studies 29 (2004): 381–418 (at
381–2 and notes).
50. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 111; June Hargrove, The
Statues of Paris: An Open-Air Pantheon (New York and Paris:
Vendome Press, 1989), 162.
1. For images, see Hargrove, The Statues of Paris, 108–9, 256, 316.
5
52. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 112; Sassi, ‘Léon
Gambetta’, 441–59; Georges Poisson, ‘La première pyramide éri-
gée dans la cour du Louvre: La pyramide de Gambetta’, Historia
520 (1990): 70–6; ‘The Gambetta Monument’, New York Times,
3 July 1887; Hargrove, The Statues of Paris, 162.
53. ‘Discours de M. E. Spuller’, in Labarthe, Léon Gambetta, 243, 249.
54. Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles’, 164.
55. ‘Discours de M. E. Spuller’, in Labarthe, Léon Gambetta, 252–4.
56. ‘The Statue of Gambetta’, New York Times, 11 April 1884; Sassi,
‘Léon Gambetta’, 422–38.
57. Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 464; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon

Gambetta, 111–12.
58. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 46, 111–12.
59. Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 464; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon

Gambetta, 111–12; Ward, ‘The Cult of Relics’, 52–72.
60. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 107–8; Sassi, ‘Léon
Gambetta’, 397–403, 409–11; Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis,
307–9; ‘Discours de Joseph Reinach’, Labarthe, Gambetta et ses
amis, 331.
61. ‘Discours de Paul Doumer’, in Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 262.
62. ‘M. Saint-Saëns à Bordeaux’, La Revue musicale 5(9) (1 May

1905): 266–7. Cf. Sabina Ratner, Camille Saint-Saëns 1835–1921:
A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works, I: The Instrumental
Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278–82; Sassi,
‘Léon Gambetta’, 471–81; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon
Gambetta, 112–15; Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 311.
63. Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 484–5; Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 311.
64. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 81–2.
65. Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 412–16; Le Temps, 29 March 1920, 1–3.
66. Paul Strauss, speaking in the Senate (Annales du Sénat et de la
Chambre des députés, Documents parlementaires, Sénat, Débats, 8
November 1920 Session, 13–15); cf. Magnol-Malhache et al.,
Léon Gambetta, 79–86.
67. Annales, Chambre des députés, Débats, 31 July 1920 Session, 2943;
Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 81–2; Sassi, ‘Léon
Gambetta’, 505.
Gambetta’, 507–8.
168 C. SOWERWINE
69. Rémi Dalisson, 11 novembre: du souvenir à la mémoire (Paris:

Colin, 2013), 31–55.
Gambetta’, 508–9.
71. The delay resulted from difficulties in finding the desired stone for
the urn. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 94.
PART III
Religious Rituals: Relationships with

the Divine and the Political
CHAPTER 9
Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun’s

Coronation in Late Medieval Germany
Julie Hotchin
Ecce quod cupivi iam video quod speravi iam teneo

illi sum iuncta in celis quam in terris posita tota devotione dilexi.
Lo, what I desired, I now see; what I hoped for I now hold;
in heaven I am joined to him whom I loved with complete devotion when
I was on earth.1
Sung in joyous celebration by newly crowned nuns to conclude the ritual

of their coronation, the antiphon expresses the passionate desire for and
love of Christ that defined a nun’s spiritual role. These words, attributed
to the fourth-century virgin martyr Agnes, voice the multiple transitions
enacted by the liturgy of a nun’s coronation: from woman into virgin-mar-
tyr and heavenly bride, from longing desire to anticipated fulfilment and
from earthly love into heavenly union. According to the account of her
life by Ambrose of Milan (339–91), Agnes rejected a worldly suitor and
riches out of her desire for her heavenly lover.2 She thus offered a potent
spiritual and emotional model for religious women dedicated to Christ. As
reward for her sacrifice Agnes received the crown of martyrdom; nuns too
J. Hotchin (*)
School of History, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_9
172 J. HOTCHIN
offered a bloodless sacrifice of their virginity through their ascetic life in

the cloister, similarly anticipating the reward of a heavenly crown in their
afterlife. In northern Germany, this spiritual reward was given material
form; nuns received a linen band crown, worn over their veil, during their
coronation, as a symbol of their virginity and status as a sponsa betrothed
to Christ. The ritual of a nun’s consecration—or coronation (coronatio) as
it was known in northern German convents—was an evocative drama of
spiritual betrothal through which religious women acquired a privileged
status, spiritually and socially, as a bride of Christ. Participation in the
ritual, for individual coronands and the community, was an intensely emo-
tional experience that shaped how nuns, both individually and collectively,
created, affirmed and negotiated their identities.
As Robert Orsi has observed, ‘religious rituals, with their movements,
smells, sounds, and things, are privileged sites for rendering religious
worlds present’.3 Ritual practice is one means to make the ‘invisible vis-
ible’, such as through the relationships between people and things that
materialise the sacred.4 Attention to the emotional dimension within reli-
gious ritual is central to explaining how the experience of the sacred is
‘conjured’ by arousing certain feelings through ritual performance, and
to our understanding of how ritual can have lasting effects upon partici-
pants.5 Emotions are social and relational; the feelings aroused in religious
ritual express and produce relationships between individuals, communities
and the sacred. As Joanna Bourke has argued, emotions also serve to align
people with others within social groups, thus subjecting people to power
relations.6 Emotional arousal in liturgical performance is therefore not a
free expression of emotion, but a disciplined rehearsal of ‘right attitudes’.
Through the corporate experience of the liturgy individual feelings are
shaped and aligned to collective norms, generating an attitude or orienta-
tion to the sacred that permeates other aspects of religious life (see also the
discussion in Chap. 11).7
As a dramatic enactment of the betrothal of the loving soul with Christ,
the liturgy of a nun’s coronation provided a narrative model that shaped her
spiritual role and expressed her place within the social and power relations
of the convent, the church and with the divine. The significance of the rit-
ual of coronation for constituting religious women’s identities, the theo-
logical meanings of the nun’s crown and the deep emotional investment
of nuns in the symbol of their crown have been perceptively examined
by scholars such as Eva Schlotheuber, Evelin Wetter and Caroline Walker
Bynum.8 My interest here is to look more closely at how the narrative and
EMOTIONS AND THE RITUAL OF A NUN’S CORONATION IN LATE MEDIEVAL... 173
emotional arc of the ritual of a nun’s coronation provided a pattern for

the cultivation of feeling appropriate for a bride of Christ. Analysis of the
rich textual and visual evidence from convents in northern Germany offers
insight into how women interpreted and understood the coronation ritual
and its influence on their emotional and spiritual lives, and how emotional
stimulation in ritual performance articulated, affirmed and reproduced
religious women’s individual and collective identities.
Coronation and Convent Entrance Practices

Entrance rites transition new members into the group, mobilising material
forms including dress, imagery and shared practices, such as processions
and liturgical chants, to generate the feeling of participation in a shared
religious world.9 Convent entrance ceremonies with their rich symbolic
and dramatic enactment of spiritual marriage socialised girls into their
community, providing them with social, spiritual and emotional maps for
their future life as a nun (for a parallel discussion in a Protestant context,
see Chap. 12). A girl was placed with a convent when she was very young,
usually around five years of age, in the practice of oblation.10 She then
spent around five to eight years in the convent school, where she received
instruction in Latin, scriptural and theological knowledge to comprehend
the liturgy, and training in practices of self-discipline through which she
learnt to ‘adhere to the norms of emotional expression’ of the convent.11
The girl received her monastic habit and veil in the rite of investiture,
marking her formal departure from her family and entrance into religious
life, when she was around 12–14 years old. By wearing monastic dress,
the girl was understood to be offering tacit consent to the decision of her
parents to offer her to religious life. Customarily, the girl then made her
profession once she reached the age of majority of 14 years, although it
was not uncommon for girls to profess their vows earlier.12 The future
nun’s social and spiritual preparation to take their place in the convent
represents a form of emotional management through which the senior
nuns ensured the continuity of their community and reproduced their
religious world.
A nun’s coronation was the culmination of a sequence of entrance
rites that could extend up to a decade or more. Whereas profession was a
monastic ritual, subject to the requirements of the respective order, coro-
nation was not a requirement for monastic life and in theory could be
celebrated at any time. According to canon law, nuns were to be crowned
174 J. HOTCHIN
only after they had made their profession; in practice, however, nuns in
northern German convents in the later fifteenth century frequently were
crowned before they professed their vows.13 The ceremonial performance
of a nun’s coronation marked her transition into a full member of the
religious community and dramatised the self-understanding of the nun
as a virgin bride of Christ. However, the spiritual marriage enacted by
the coronation ritual was conditional, as union with a heavenly spouse
could only be achieved after death. Nuns referred to their coronation as
a spiritual betrothal (desponsacio), an expression of their legal union with
Christ in this world that would be fulfilled as marital union with Him in
the afterlife.
The excitement and anticipation with which girls awaited their corona-
tion were amplified through these years of preparation. An account writ-
ten by a young future nun at the Benedictine monastery of Ebstorf in the
1480s conveys the urgent anticipation she and another four young sisters
felt about their impending coronation. She recounts how they yearned
to be crowned and had asked their provost to bring forward the date of
their profession. Their longing is expressed in the rapturous language of
spiritual union: ‘sighing daily we desire with the innermost desires of our
heart that longed for day on which we can be united and betrothed to
our most adored spouse … and have the red sign of His most holy cross
placed on our heads so that we can be called and become brides and wives
of Christ’.14 The impatient young nuns at Ebstorf were all below the stipu-
lated age of profession of 14 years, indicating that their coronation was
the result of a compromise whereby the provost and nuns adhered to the
monastic requirement that nuns be professed before they were crowned,
although at a younger age. The protracted period of a girl’s spiritual edu-
cation, punctuated by the sequence of entrance rituals, shaped her emo-
tional and religious identity as a loving bride of Christ, and taught her to
cultivate and express her love in communally authorised ways (for similar
phenomenon in marriage see Chap. 3).
The Nun’s Crown

The iconography and spiritual meaning of the nun’s crown provided a
focal point for a nun’s emotional cultivation as a loving bride of Christ.15
The crown had a long tradition in Christian iconography as a symbol of
the rewards of the faithful. The nun’s crown symbolised her dual espous-
als: the first her betrothal in this world as a virgin bride of Christ and the
second the anticipated fulfilment of her union with her heavenly spouse
in the afterlife.16 Nuns also likened their crowns to the ‘aureola which
[Christ] is accustomed to grant to martyrs and virgins’.17 By the later
Middle Ages, the aureola was understood as a reward reserved to special
categories of the blessed.18 Nuns at Ebstorf envisaged themselves as mer-
iting not one but two such rewards—for their virginity as well as that due
as martyrs for their penitential sufferings within the cloister in a ‘blood-
less martyrdom’.
The symbolism of the nun’s crown also echoed the Virgin’s heavenly
coronation, placing the nun in a special relationship to Christ’s mother.
These Marian associations are depicted in the striking iconography of an
extant nun’s crown (Fig. 9.1). This crown comprises overlapping bands
of twelfth-century gold silk brocade, joined to a circlet at the lower edge.
The silk bands are affixed to a more recent blue damask cap, which pro-
vides support for the crown.19 Embroidered medallions are appliquéd
where the bands overlap, with images that elaborate on the crown’s litur-
gical and scriptural meanings of spiritual betrothal and heavenly reward.
They depict the Lamb of God as a reference to both Christ and the virgin
martyr Agnes; King Solomon with his associations to the nuptial ode of
the Song of Songs; and an angel holding a lily sceptre and a seraph as a
material reminder to the wearer about her future place among the angelic
choirs.
Fig. 9.1 Nun’s crown

made from woven silk
bands with embroidered
medallions, France (?),
twelfth century. Repro
duced with permission ©
Abegg-Stiftung, CH-
3132 Riggisberg, 2009
(photo: Christoph von
Viràg)
176 J. HOTCHIN
As Evelin Wetter’s sympathetic analysis of the relation between mate-

rial form, symbol and liturgical performance has shown, the imagery of
this early crown assimilates the young nun who is crowned to the Virgin
Mary.20 The wearer’s coronation on earth parallels Mary’s coronation by
her son in heaven. In addition to generating a deep emotional identifica-
tion between the nun and the Virgin, the crown also conveyed moral-
ethical meanings. The reward of heaven would only be granted to those
who merited it, to those who ‘remained with Him’ as the liturgy states.
The crown is thus a reminder to the wearer about her conduct of life, as
likeness to the Virgin enjoined the nun to adapt her comportment and
inner disposition to the Virgin’s exemplar of compassionate love for her
Son.
Sources from northern German convents in the late fifteenth cen-
tury attest to how the symbolism of the crown was employed to shape a
future nun’s emotional disposition. Whereas the precious extant crown
from Riggisberg was most likely worn for ceremonial purposes, nuns in
northern German convents customarily wore the much simpler linen
band crown embroidered with five red crosses, symbolising the wounds
of Christ. The symbolic identification of the wearer with Christ’s suffering
and his mother’s compassion was strengthened by associating the nun’s
crown with the crown of thorns (Fig. 9.2).
A description of the spiritual meaning of the crown by a young nun
from Ebstorf writing in the 1480s demonstrates how future nuns were
instructed to meditate on the symbolism of their crown to arouse and
deepen their love for Christ. Likening the embroidered crosses to the
‘wounds of our spouse at the crucifixion’, she urges her audience to
contemplate these symbols as a prompt to love, comparing them to
the lover in the Song of Songs, who declares: ‘you have wounded my
heart, my sister, my spouse, namely through love’ (Cant. 4:9). The nun
interprets this invitation to cultivate love for Christ as a means through
which ‘our heart is transfigured by love to his side, seeing that all of our
actions and affections with our thoughts are directed towards how we
serve virginal purity inviolably in our hearts and bodies through humility
and chastity’. She exhorts her audience not to feel pride, for a ‘proud
virgin is not a virgin, and no chastity pleases God without humility nor
humility without chastity’, thus equating genuine love for Christ with
this central monastic virtue. ‘Inviolate virginity’, she concludes, ‘is the
sister of the angels’ and only those who ‘live this way are considered a
spouse of Christ’.21
Fig. 9.2 Nun instruct-

ing a girl (detail). Kloster
Ebstorf, Hs V3, fol.
200v, c. 1480. Image
courtesy of Kloster
Ebstorf
Identifying the girls as angelic citizens underscores their exalted sta-

tus and the positive, confident self-image that coronation conferred upon
nuns. This praise alludes to the prayer of consecration recited over the
girl in her coronation, in which she is reminded that ‘blessed virginity …
emulates angelic integrity’.22 At the Cistercian convent of Wienhausen,
religious women’s confident aspiration to become a sister of the angels
is given visual form in a depiction of the monastery’s first abbess Eveza,
painted on the upper vault in the nun’s choir (Fig. 9.3). She is shown
wearing her crown, seated next to the monastery’s founders and patrons,
partaking of the bridal banquet of the Lamb in the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Wienhausen’s nuns, who were crowned in the choir beneath this image,
were invited to identify with their predecessor as a conciva angelorum (fellow
citizen of the angels).23 This depiction within the communal space of the
nuns’ choir draws attention to the elite status of the entire community who
acquire a privileged social position as Christ’s brides. The image of Eveza
in the choir also shifts attention from the abbess as foundress to the com-
munity of nuns as her spiritual descendants, reinforcing the heavenly reward
that accrues to the individual nun who conforms to communal norms.
178 J. HOTCHIN
Fig. 9.3 Wienhausen, painting in nuns’ choir of the heavenly Jerusalem, detail
with abbess Eveza and the convent founders, c. 1330. Image courtesy of Kloster
Wienhausen
These examples bring into focus the crown’s ability to communicate

and modulate desired emotional dispositions. As an item of religious
dress, the crown brought into being what it signified; it promised heavenly
reward to those who loved appropriately. It was also invested with a mix
of emotions, including hope for salvation, anticipation, pride in the nun’s
self-consciously privileged status and perhaps also anxiety about being
worthy to merit divine love and its reward.
Ispi sum desponsata: The Liturgy of a Nun’s

Coronation
The coronation ritual followed the liturgy for the consecration of a vir-
gin, the Consecratio sacrae virginis, which originally developed in the
early medieval period. The earliest surviving text of the liturgy is in the
tenth-
century Roman-German Pontifical, compiled in Mainz.24 The
rite was later expanded and given greater musical elaboration under
the direction of William Durand, Bishop of Mende (1285–96), who

added texts and musical elements from the passio of Agnes, and scripture
(chiefly the Song of Songs and parable of the Wise Virgins in Matthew
25) to augment its nuptial imagery and expressive elements.25 The musical
elements of the ceremony, many drawn from the chants for the feasts of
Agnes and other virgin martyrs, associate this ritual with liturgical worship
throughout the year, presenting the participants with an ‘audible roll call’
of emotional models of the heroines of monastic life.26
The version of the liturgy preserved at the Benedictine monastery of
Lüne provides our most detailed record of its performance. This text forms
part of the so-called Ceremoniale, copied by a member of the convent after
the introduction of reform of the community in 1481 as a record of how
a nun’s entrance into the convent was to be celebrated here.27 The dating
and context of the manuscript’s production suggest that these texts for rit-
ual performance represent the outcomes of negotiation between nuns and
monastic authorities. It is worth noting that the text for the coronation
liturgy follows that for profession, indicating that the two rites were cel-
ebrated in the sequence required by canon law at Lüne. A textual record
of a rite cannot convey all of the dimensions of an actual performance;
nevertheless, it conveys a sense of the ceremony’s length and character,
rhythm and motifs, and the sound and solemnity of how a nun’s corona-
tion was enacted. Analysis of the ritual dynamics and especially the sung
components indicates how the ritual drama presented a nun with an inti-
mate script for how she was to feel as she assumed full membership of the
convent.28 The rite embodied elements of performance, the nun’s proces-
sion and gesture, alone and with the convent, and articulated her role and
place in relation to her community, church and divine spouse.
In contrast to the festivities that accompanied a girl’s investiture, her
coronation was celebrated as a private, communal event within the choir.
The ceremony commenced when the coronands, with hair uncovered and
holding candles as an embodiment of the Wise Virgins, processed towards
the altar while the bishop chanted the hymn Veni Sancte Spiritus to invoke
the Holy Spirit. In answer, the nuns collectively sang Regnum mundi (‘I
despised the kingdom of the world’), to express their renunciation of the
world out of love for Christ,29 followed by the coronands, who sang of
the joy in their hearts at the prospect of their heavenly union (‘My heart is
overflowing’; Eructavit cor meum; Psalm 44:2).30 Both of these sung texts
are drawn from the feast for the Common of Virgins, locating the drama
of this opening antiphonal exchange between the convent and its new
180 J. HOTCHIN
members within a broader frame of liturgical performance that cultivates

desire and rejoicing through identification with the Wise Virgins and their
joyous longing.
At the altar, a further sung exchange between the bishop and the coro-
nands evokes the similitude between the nuns and the Virgin’s nuptial
reception into heaven. The bishop sings ‘Quae est ista quae progreditur
sicut aurora consurgens’ (‘Who is she, who advances like the dawn, beau-
tiful as the moon?’), an antiphon sung in the office for the Assumption
of the Virgin.31 The antiphon queries the identity of the newly arrived
woman and praises her beauty in the image of the dawn, moon and sun.
The text conveys a sense of erotic beauty from the Song of Songs, from
which it is drawn, while also alluding to the image of the Virgin as the
woman clothed in the sun from the Apocalypse of John. The liturgical
association with the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin also brings to
mind the assumption of the body, making an explicit metaphor: just as
Mary’s body was assumed into heaven so the nun’s body will be assumed
into another state of being.32 The script from Lüne records that the eldest
nun to be crowned led the procession to the altar carrying an image of the
Virgin, symbolising Mary as the leader of the wise virgins, further rein-
forcing the Marian parallels for the participants.33 The coronands respond
by singing together ‘Ista est speciosa’ (‘She is most beautiful among the
daughters of Jerusalem and Syon’), another antiphon from the liturgy for
the Assumption of the Virgin that conveys the admiration of the angels
and daughters of Jerusalem at the arrival of the virgin bride. These chants
envelop the young nuns within a soundscape of praise and joy.
The bishop summons the girls to approach the altar to make their vow
by intoning the invocation Venite (‘Come’) three times, symbolising Christ
calling the virgins to His side. The convent sings a verse to instil confidence
in the young brides as they are about to approach the altar ‘Come to him
and be enlightened, and your faces shall not be confounded’,34 to which
the bishop responds with a verse of reassurance in the voice of the heav-
enly groom: ‘Who follows me will not walk in the shadows’ (John 8:12).35
As they advance, the coronands chant a verse expressing how they over-
come their trepidation by arousing the strength of love within their hearts
and placing their trust in their heavenly groom: ‘And now we follow with
our whole heart and fear you and we seek your face Lord, so that we are
not confounded.’36 A final verse sung by the convent seeks to allay the fear
of the new members with a song of confidence, affirming that trust in the
Lord will not fail those who may be confused.
These antiphonal exchanges illustrate how liturgical singing accompa-

nied a transition; the timorous coronand receives reassurance from her
community and gains confidence to advance towards the presence of
the divine at the altar. Alternatively, this sung exchange may also have
moderated the excitement of young nuns eager to be crowned, the wel-
come reassurance sung by the senior nuns of the convent modelling the
restraint expected of its members. The convent’s sung texts enact a col-
lective self-understanding as welcoming, trusting and reassuring to ease
the new member’s transition. The sung exchange between the convent
and the coronands also evokes memories of shared liturgical performance,
reminding the coronands of their role and spiritual purpose as a member
of the community, and their conformance to communal norms that this
membership entailed.
The provost in his capacity as male guardian of the young nuns pre-
sented them to the bishop as the embodiment of their bridegroom, Christ,
and attested to their worthiness to be His brides. The exchange of the nun
from provost to bishop as her spouse mirrors the transfer of authority of
a woman from her father or male guardian to her husband in secular mar-
riage. This gesture underlines the parallels between a woman’s entrance
into religious life and property exchange, reinforced for nuns by the finan-
cial arrangements concerning their dowry upon entering the monastery.37
The bishop then asks each nun whether they wish to persevere in their vows
of perpetual virginity and to wed Christ. Each responds with volo/promitto
(‘I do, I promise’). The nuns are then questioned about their willingness
to preserve their virginity and to embody the attributes that the ring, veil
and crown represent. Once more the nuns affirm their intention to do so,
after which the bishop takes their right hand in the dextrarum iunctio, the
legally performative gesture of marriage, and pronounces the marriage
vow.38 Exulting in their new status, the coronands chant in unison an
antiphon of joyous praise from the liturgy of St Agnes: ‘I am betrothed to
the one whom the angels serve, whose beauty is admired by the sun and
moon’ (‘Ipsi sum desponsata cui angeli serviunt, cuius pulchritudinem sol
et luna mirantur’). This is both a poetic expression of the nun’s change in
status and a statement of fact; she is now betrothed.
The bishop then recites the prayer of consecration over the nuns pros-
trate before him. Finally, he invokes divine aid to protect her from evil
and to preserve her physical integrity for her spouse.39 After a prayer of
blessing, the rite moves to its highpoint—when the young nun receives
the consecrated veil, crown and ring from the bishop. After receiving each
182 J. HOTCHIN
object, the coronands sing further antiphons in which they vocalise the
words of the virgin martyr Agnes, amplifying and deepening their emo-
tional identification with the girl who preferred death rather than accept a
worldly suitor.40 Each antiphon strengthens the associations between lov-
ing devotion and the material items of her spiritual betrothal. After the veil
is placed on her head, the nun chants: ‘Clothe me, Lord, in a robe woven
in gold and adorn me with innumerable jewels’ (‘Induit me dominus
cyclade auro et textus immensis monilibus ornavit me’). Once the crown
is placed atop her veil, she exclaims: ‘He placed a sign on my face so that I
may receive no other lover than Him’ (‘Posuit signum in faciem meam ut
nullam praeter eum amatorem admittam’). And after receiving her ring,
the nun proclaims: ‘With His ring my Lord, Jesus Christ, has betrothed
me, and like a spouse he has adorned me with a crown’ (‘Annulo suo sub-
arravit me dominus meus Ihesus Christi et tamquam sponsam decoravit
me corona’). The bishop then entrusts the nuns back to the provost and
the rite concludes with the celebration of communion.
Through antiphonal singing, the nuns pledge themselves individually
and collectively to their heavenly spouse. The sung exchanges also affirmed
and reaffirmed the nuns’ love for Christ that lent shape to their life within
the cloister.41 The singing of individual coronands expressed the vows and
declaration of love of individual nuns, while at the same time also repre-
senting the shared experience of her community. The feelings of individual
nuns were amplified through emotional exchange and were reflected in
the feelings of others, instilling a deeper sense of belonging and cohesion.
Collective singing also focused devotion on the veil, crown and ring worn
by all members of the convent, enhancing the sense of solidarity. The con-
vent’s sung expression of welcome and trust to facilitate the integration of
the newly crowned nun may also have enhanced feelings of inspiration and
approval, thereby ordering and reinforcing how a newly crowned nun now
identified herself as one among the concives angelorum. This also served
as a subtle reminder of the self-discipline and comportment required of
the convent’s members: the loving bride was also a humble bride who
submitted to higher authority. The emotional performance through song
thus affirmed the coronand’s status as a sponsa and her commitment to
religious life, while she also served as an affective exemplar for the convent
and their values. Through singing of her commitment to religious life, the
young nun also embodied her incorporation into the convent for which
she had been nurtured since a child.
Devotional Singing
The joyous singing of the coronands breaks across the solemn intonation
of the bishop, contrasting ‘rhapsodic’ melodies to lend melodic expression
to the sung quality of the bride’s joy at her betrothal.42 The antiphons
from the liturgy and Passio of Agnes were well suited to the ritual’s design,
purpose and symbolism. Each expresses nuptial themes: betrothal, gift-
exchange and the love of Christ as spouse. These sung texts performed
an important function in the sequence and staging of the ritual to arouse
affective response. The use of the first person encouraged closer identifica-
tion with Agnes, and in singing them each woman embodied the virgin
martyr, proclaiming her love—in the face of death—for Christ and her joy
at its impending fulfilment. These song texts function as emotives in that
they at once express and produce emotion, singing into presence the nuns’
intense feeling of love that they declare.43 In singing the words of Agnes,
each nun was for a moment at one with her, the embodied performance
of song encouraging her to feel the emotion conveyed in the words she
uttered, to give voice to the impassioned declaration of the virgin martyr.44
As Ulrike Hascher-Burger has observed, devotional singing was
thought to awaken the proper affectio or emotion in the soul.45 The affec-
tio was cultivated over time through reading and meditation intended to
kindle emotion that could then be directed into prayer towards God.46
The importance of singing with fully aroused affectio so as to engender a
truly loving soul before God can be seen clearly in the instructions for a
young nun at Wienhausen on how to sing the antiphons to imitate Agnes.
This manuscript, now badly damaged, presents the young reader with a
gloss on the spiritual meaning of the coronation liturgy.47 Of interest for
our purposes here is how she is instructed to sing her responses after she
has received the symbols of newly betrothed state. After receiving the ring,
she is urged to sing Annulo suo ‘with all your heart in all love and desire
with the lover St Agnes’.48 Similarly, after the veil, the symbol of ‘pure vir-
ginal chastity’, is placed on her head, she is instructed to chant Induit me
dominus ‘with full love and desire’.49 The instructions encourage a deeper
affective response after she becomes Christ’s bride and wife (‘brud unde
syn husfrowe’). When she receives the crown, she is instructed to always
think about it with ‘full devotion’ (gantzem andacht) and to remember
that this earthly crown signifies the golden aureola granted to virgins in
heaven. Moreover, the red crosses embroidered on the crown are inter-
preted as the signs of the ‘suffering of Jesus Christ’, which all people
184 J. HOTCHIN
‘should contemplate within their heart’. So the reader is guided to prog-

ress from loving desire to meditate on the redemptive suffering and pain
of Christ, symbolised by their newly granted crown. The emotional shift
is reinforced when she is urged to sing ‘Posuit signum in faciem meam’
with ‘all the groans of your soul’.50 This guidance for nuns about how to
arouse the desired and proper emotion at central moments of their spiri-
tual betrothal illustrate how individual emotional response was shaped by,
and encouraged to conform to, collective norms.
A nun’s identification with Agnes’ loving desire was scripted at the
moments in liturgy when she actively sings her commitment. It is instruc-
tive to consider the purpose of the emotional expressiveness of these
antiphonal chants at spiritually significant moments. The dramatic arc
of the rite and in particular the exchange of marriage vows granted the
religious woman fictive agency.51 In pronouncing her vows and singing
the loving desire of Agnes, the nun expressed her will and desire in an
agentic sense, whereas in reality her choice had been determined for her.
Presented as an oblate by her parents, her tacit profession at investiture
was confirmed by her vows of profession. By the time of her coronation,
she had been nurtured within the convent for many years with her spiritual
and emotional formation directed towards her membership of the convent
after her coronation. The nun’s participation in her coronation performed
an intimate script for feeling to kindle and nurture her love for her spouse,
and through it her passion for the life of the monastery that she has fic-
tively chosen. Musical performance, conditioned and informed by appro-
priate reading (lectio) and meditation, was thought to arouse the affectus
or emotion of the soul towards God. The nun’s impassioned singing as
Agnes aroused love, shaped her identity and engendered her commit-
ment to the life for which she was given. The emotional dimension of the
nun’s antiphonal chant transformed her diminished agency about choice
to enter religious life into an active expression of her commitment to it.
The incorporation of the antiphons from the liturgy of St Agnes and the
Common of Virgins into the coronation rite connected these celebrations
of a nun’s desire for her spouse at regular intervals throughout the year.
Nuns were likely to have called to mind Agnes’ legend when they sung
texts attributed to her at their coronation; similarly, when she sang these
same antiphons for the feasts of virgin martyrs during the year, she would
have recalled their loving communion with Christ at their coronation.
The four antiphons have a similar musical profile, enhancing their close
association and creating ‘aural memories’ that linked liturgical occasions
on which a virgin martyr’s passionate commitment to her heavenly groom

was celebrated.52 These liturgical events thus became a regular, repeated
emotional practice through which nuns were encouraged to cultivate an
emotional arc of anticipation, compassion, sorrow, love and joy on occa-
sions of greatest spiritual import to their role as a bride (see also the discus-
sion in Chap. 3). The nun’s participation in the liturgy, both individually
and collectively, in repeated performances over time created a ‘cumulative
emotional legacy’ which formed her inner disposition and through which
she learned how to arouse her affections rightly.53 Liturgical celebration
propelled the nun both back in time, to the events of a virgin martyr’s
passio, while at the same time projecting her forward in anticipation of her
own reception before the throne of heaven. The models of the Virgin and
female martyrs offered emotional and spiritual templates against which
young nuns patterned their own responses and practices so as to be wor-
thy loving brides.
Conclusion
A nun’s coronation was the culmination of an extended period of education
and formation that prepared new nuns spiritually, socially and emotionally
to perform their role in the convent. The future nun’s formation not only
moulded her spiritual disposition, but that of older nuns too, as adults also
experience their religious beliefs through children. Convent entrance rituals
of investiture, profession and in particular coronation provided occasions
on which the whole community enacted their conception of their religious
world and their spiritual and hierarchical place within it. The performance
of a nun’s spiritual betrothal in the coronation ritual served to make the
world of the convent and the role of the nun as sponsa emotionally salient
for the young nuns as coronands, as well as the senior nuns who laboured
to represent and embody this world and its values for their junior sisters.54
Entrance rites are one way through which nuns rendered the interiority of
and understanding of their role as brides of Christ and their place in the
world visible and materially substantive—for new members, themselves as
a community, and for families, clerics and patrons. What was being formed
was not only the young nun’s religious disposition, but also the distinctive
quality of the convent’s spiritual and emotional understanding, and the
social relations through which it was expressed.
The arousal and circulation of emotion within the performance of a
nun’s spiritual betrothal implied a high degree of alignment of individual
186 J. HOTCHIN
emotional dispositions with the affective norms of the monastic commu-

nity. The long years of preparation for and performance of the ritual script
structured individual experiences into communally acceptable emotional
attitudes, through which nuns were encouraged to internalise feeling rules
and shared practices of emotional expression and performance. As the
instructions for the young nun at Wienhausen on how to modulate her
antiphonal singing in the coronation ritual shows, a nun’s interior prepa-
ration for and participation in her coronation was intended to structure
her emotions into the ‘right’ attitudes for ritual participation through spe-
cific textual and emotional practices. Prayerful devotional reading directed
nuns to meditate on the meaning of the ritual for her life, to arouse an
experience of liturgical participation that amplified the emotional meaning
and interpretation of the event in personal spiritual terms. A nun’s interior
preparation to participate in her coronation, or to celebrate its anniversary
then, was intentionally structured to cultivate the feelings that would be
caused and reinforced through ritual performance. In doing so, they dem-
onstrate how the ‘personal and communal were not separate realms but
dialogic: each had the power to and potential to inflect emotional experi-
ences in the other’.55
The ritual of a nun’s coronation illustrates how communities are ‘devel-
oped in and through rituals and the emotions created in them’.56 The enact-
ment of a nun’s spiritual betrothal was a ceremony of intense emotional
significance through which the community regenerated itself socially and
emotionally. Young nuns were integrated as full members of the convent as
brides of Christ, while the collective performance of the ritual, in particular
its sung components, educated all participants in the particular emotional
norms and patterns of expression through which the community created
their religious world. The specific emotions aroused through performance
and their intensity of arousal were key to achieving the social functions of
the ritual. The opening exchanges sung between the coronand and convent
as the young nun approached the altar communicated the convent’s atti-
tude of welcome and trust, intended to ease her transition and overcome
any trepidation. This articulation of collective unity and self-expression also
subtly reinforced social power relations and expectations; to be welcomed
into the convent required the coronand to be like them, modelling her
disposition and behaviour in alignment with communal models.
At the highpoint of the ritual, the coronand’s impassioned declaration
of love strengthened her identification with the virgin martyr Agnes as an
exemplar of emotional comportment to mould her future life within the
cloister as a loving bride. The intentional scripting of emotional arousal in

texts to prepare the nun for this performance underscores its significance
at this moment in the ceremony. By singing her love for Christ, the coro-
nand also actively committed herself to the religious life for which she was
chosen, in an act of fictive agency through which she assumed her place
within the convent for which her long years of education and spiritual
formation prepared her. The coronand’s voice expresses her emotional
commitment and was also emblematic for the convent. The young nun’s
exultant expression of joyous love sung at the highpoint of the ceremony
facilitated the effects of emotional exchange and circulation among all
participants, enhancing feelings of belonging and group cohesion. For
older nuns, their participation evoked emotional memories of their own
coronation and other liturgical performance, bringing past emotions into
the present and affirming their relevance for the future. The ritual of a
nun’s spiritual betrothal articulated and reaffirmed the emotional patterns
and values of the convent, educating and reminding all members of the
community’s affective norms and their expression so as to enhance order,
control and integration.
Notes
1. Antiphon for the Feast of St Agnes (21 January); René-Jean Hesbert,
Corpus antiphonalium Officii, 6 vols (Rome: Herder, 1963–79), vol.
3 (1968), no. 2539. Research for this chapter was funded by the
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions, 1100–1800 (project number CE110001011).
2. Agnes’ legend and passio forms the introductory section of Ambrose’s
De virginitate; see ‘Agnes’ in David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford
Dictionary of Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7–8.
3. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds
People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton
4. Ibid., 5–6, 73–4. For orientation to and discussion of the emerging
field of material religion, see David Morgan (ed.), Religion and
Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London: Routledge, 2010);
and John Kieshnick, ‘Material Culture’, in The Oxford Handbook of
Religion and Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 223–37.
188 J. HOTCHIN
5. Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead, A Sociology of Religious Emotion

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 92.
6. Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern
History’, History Workshop Journal 55(1) (2003): 111–133 (125).
7. Judith Marie Kubicki, Liturgical Music as Ritual Symbol: A Case
Study of Jacques Berthier’s Taizé Music (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 124.
8. Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der
Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des ‘Konventstagebuchs’
einer Zistzersienserin von Heilig-Kreuz bei Baunschweig (1484–1507)
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); Evelin Wetter, ‘Von Bräuten und
Vikaren Christi. Zur Konstruktion von Ähnlichkeit im sakralen
Initiationsakt’, in Similitudo: Konzepte der Ähnlichkeit in Mittelalter
und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Martin Gaier, Jeanette Kohl and Alberto
Saviello (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012), 129–46; and Caroline
Walker Bynum, ‘“Crowned with Many Crowns”. Nuns and their
Statues in Late Medieval Wienhausen’, Catholic Historical Review
101(1) (2015): 18–40.
9. David Morgan, ‘The Material Culture of Lived Religion: Visuality and
Embodiment’, in Mind and Matter Selected Papers of NORDIK 2009,
Conference for Art Historians, Jyväskylä, September 17.–19.2009, ed.
J. Vakkari (Helsinki: Society of Art History, 2010), 14–31.
10. Schlotheuber examines oblation as practised by northern German
convents in detail: Klostereintritt und Bildung, 175–263.
11. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2.
12. For a detailed overview and discussion of investiture and profession
as practised in northern German convents, see Schlotheuber,
Klostereintritt und Bildung, 134–55.
13. Schlotheuber discusses the coronation rite in ibid., 156–74.
14. Conrad Borchling, ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben in Kloster
Ebstorf am Ausgang des Mittelalters’, Zeitschrift der Historisches
Verein Niedersachsens (1905), 361–407 (at 395–6): ‘Set et cotidie
suspirando desideramus cum intimis desiderijs codis nostri illum
desideratum diem, quo possimus uniri ac desponsari amabili sponso
nostro … eiusque sanctissime crucis rubeum signum capitibus nos-
tris imponi, ut sponse Christi ac uxores dici possimus et esse.’
15. For the nun’s crown, see Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung,
156–74; Julie Hotchin, ‘The Nun’s Crown’, Journal of Early
Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2009): 187–94;
Wetter, ‘Von Bräuten und Vikaren Christi’; and Bynum, ‘“Crowned

with Many Crowns”’.
16. For the symbolic associations of virginity and the nun’s crown, see
Eva Schlotheuber, ‘Klostereintritt und Übergangsriten. Die
Bedeutung der Jungfräulichkeit für das Selbstverständnis der
Nonnen der alten Orden’, in Kloster—Frauen—Kunst. Neue
Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, Beiträge zum
Internationalen Kolloquium vom 13. bis 16. Mai 2005 anlässlich der
Ausstellung ‘Krone und Schleier’, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Carola
Jäggi, Susan Marti and Hedwig Röckelein in cooperation with the
Ruhrlandmuseum Essen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 43–55.
17. Borchling, ‘Litterarisches Leben’, 400: ‘coronemur cum aureola

que solet martiris dari ac virginibus’.
18. Edwin Hall and Horst Uhr, ‘“Aureola super Auream”: Crowns and
Related Symbols of Special Distinction for Saints in Late Gothic and
Renaissance Iconography’, Art Bulletin 67(4) (1985): 567–603,
esp. 568.
19. For a detailed description of the crown, including dating and analy-
sis of textiles and stitching, see the catalogue entry by Evelin Wetter,
Mittelalterliche Textilien III: Stickerei bis um 1500 und figurlich
gewebte Borten (Riggisberg: Abegg Stftung, 2012), Cat. no. 1, 41–7.
20. Wetter, Mittelalterliche Textilien, 43–7, and in more detail in
‘Bräuten und Vikaren Christi’.
21. Borchling, ‘Litterarisches Leben’, 400.
22. Lüne, Klosterarchive, HS 14, fol. 42v. The idea that professed reli-
gious lived a life akin to the angels derives from early Christian tradi-
tions; John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval
Ideal (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 30–5.
23. June Mecham. ‘A Northern Jerusalem: The Transformation of

Space at the Convent of Wienhausen’, in Defining the Holy: Sacred
Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sarah Hamilton
and Andrew Spicer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 139–60.
24. Nikolaus Gussone, ‘Die Jungfrauenweihe in ottonischer Zeit nach
dem Ritus im Pontificale Romano-Germanicum’, in Kloster—
Frauen—Kunst, ed. Hamburger et al., 25–40.
25. Anne Bagnall Yardley has examined how the rite acquired greater
musical elaboration in the later period in Performing Piety. Musical
Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006).
190 J. HOTCHIN
26. Ibid., 159.

27. Lüne Klosterarchiv, Hs 14. Schlotheuber introduces the manuscript
content and context in Klostereintritt und Bildung, 121–7.
28. I draw here on Sarah McName’s concept of devotional meditation
practices as ‘intimate scripts’ to produce desired feelings; Sarah
McName, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval
Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010),
11–14.
29. Regnum mundi, et omnem ornatum saeculi contempsi propter

amorem Domini mei Jesu Christi: quem vidi, quem amavi, in quem
credidi, quem dilexi (‘I despised the kingdom of the world, and all
the beauty of the world, for love of the Lord Jesus Christ: whom I
saw, whom I loved, in whom I have believed, in whom I have
delighted’). See CANTUS Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant,
no. 007524, http://cantusdatabase.org/id/007524 (accessed 14
October 2016).
30. Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum dico ego opera mea regi (‘My
heart is flowing over with good things; my words are of that which
I have made for a king; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer’);
CANTUS Database, no. 007524a, http://cantusdatabase.org/
id/007524a (accessed 14 October 2016).
31. The text in the Lüne Ceremoniale uses the word progreditur

(advances) instead of the original ascendit (rises) to emphasise the
exemplary character of the Virgin for the nuns. Lüne Klosterarchiv,
Hs 14, fols 34v–35r. CANTUS database no. 004425, http://can-
tusdatabase.org/node/377878 (accessed 14 October 2016).
32. I draw here on Alison Altstatt’s interpretation of this antiphon in
‘The Music and Liturgy of Kloster Preetz. Anna von Buchwald’s
Buch im Chor in its Fifteenth-Century Context’ (PhD thesis,
University of Oregon, 2011), 155–6.
33. Lüne Klosterarchiv, Hs 14, fol. 35r: ‘Tunc senior de coronandis por-
tans ymaginem beate virginis incipiatur hanc antiphonam.’
34. Psalm 33:6: ‘Accedit ad eum et illuminamini et facies vestre non
confundentur’ (‘Come to him and be enlightened; and your faces
shall not be confounded’).
35. Qui sequitur me non ambulat in tenebris sed habebit lumen vitae
(‘He who follows me walks not in darkness but in the light said the
Lord’); CANTUS database, http://cantusdatabase.org/
node/377953 (accessed 14 October 2016); also sung in the fourth

week of Lent.
36. Et nunc sequimur in toto corde et timemus te et quaerimus faciem
tuam domine ne confundas: Dan. 3:41.
37. On the gender dynamics of a nun’s transfer into the monastery, see
Katharine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of
Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2009), 185–209.
38. Lüne, Klosterarchiv, Hs 14: fols 38v–39r: ‘Desponso te Ihesu

Christo filio sumi patris, qui te illesam custodiat et ab omni malo
defendat’ (‘I betroth you to Jesus Christ, the son of the highest
Father, who will guard you from danger and defend you from all
evil’).
39. The ‘great prayer of consecration’ (Deus castorum corporum); Lüne,
Klosterarchive, Hs. 14, fols 41v–43v. For this prayer, see O’Keeffe,
Stealing Obedience, 199–201.
40. James Borders discusses the sources for the antiphons from the lit-
urgy of Agnes and their rhetorical force in liturgical action in ‘Music,
Performativity, and Allusion in Medieval Services for the Consecration
of Virgins’, in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of
Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
17–38.
41. Yardley, Performing Piety, 177.
42. Ibid., 161–77, which includes a musical description of the several of
the antiphons in the consecration rite.
43. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the
History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 96–107.
44. Borders, ‘Music, Performativity, and Allusion’, 25.
45. Ulrike Hascher-Burger, ‘Religious Song and Devotional Culture in
Northern Germany’, in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in
Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth
A. Anderson, Heinrike Lähnemann and Anne Simon (Leiden: Brill,
2013), 261–83.
46. Niklaus Largier, ‘The Art of Prayer. Conversions of Interiority and
Exteriority in Medieval Contemplative Practice’, in Rethinking
Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and
Contemporary Thought, ed. Julia Weber and Rüdiger Campe (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2014), 58–71.
192 J. HOTCHIN
47. Hannover Landesbibliothek, MS I 79, f. 32r–93r, described by

Helmar Härtel and Felix Ekowski, Handschriften der Niedersä
chsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover. Erster Teil (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1989), 84–5.
48. Hannover, Landesbibliothek, MS I 79, f. 58r: ‘Und schult denne
mit den liefhebberinne sunte Agneten in gantzen[?] leue und beger-
inge singen mit alle iuwen herten Annulo suo subarravit me domi-
nus meus Ihesus Christus et tamque sponsam decoravit me corona.’
49. Hannover, Landesbibliothek, MS I 79, f. 59v: ‘unde schult syngen
mit gantzen leue unde begeringe Induit me dominus’.
50. Hannover, Landesbibliothek, MS I 79, 63r.
51. O’Keefe discusses the religious woman as both a passive object of
transfer between men and an ‘agent of her own dedication’; Stealing
Obedience, 197–203.
52. Yardley, Performing Piety, 166.
53. Fred P. Edie, ‘Liturgy, Emotion, and the Poetics of Being Human’,
Religious Education 96(4) (2001): 474–88 (at 485).
54. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 73–109, esp. 73–9, 107–9.
55. Susan Broomhall, ‘Introduction: Destroying Order, Structuring

Disorder: Gender and Emotions’, in Gender and Emotions in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order; Structuring
Disorder, ed. Susan Broomhall (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 8.
56. Christolph Wulf, ‘Memory, Mimesis and the Circulation of Emotions
in Rituals’, in Emotions in Rituals and Performances, ed. Axel
Michaels and Christolph Wulf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 79.
CHAPTER 10
Miraculous Affects and Analogical

Materialities. Rethinking the Relation
between Architecture and Affect in
Baroque Italy
Helen Hills
This chapter addresses the relation between affect, architecture and place,
materiality, miraculous event and ritual in baroque Italy through examin-
ing two miraculous liquefactions of saintly blood in baroque Naples, one of
St John the Baptist and the other of San Gennaro (St Januarius), the city’s
principal patron saint. I argue that if these interrelationships are treated
in non-representational terms, then materiality emerges as central to these
I gratefully acknowledge a Small Research Grant from the British Academy that
facilitated research for this chapter. I wrote it in the congenial atmosphere of
Smith College where I was Kennedy Professor of Renaissance Studies in 2014
and it owes much to colleagues there. I thank Mary Pardo and Michael Gnehm
for invaluable assistance with interpreting Basile’s testing text, and Andrew
Benjamin who gave encouraging and perceptive advice at critical junctures.
H. Hills (*)
Department of History of Art, University of York, York, UK

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_10
194 H. HILLS
relationships and crucial for an understanding of affect. Meanwhile, I sug-

gest below that the role of ritual has been overstated.
My approach fundamentally reconfigures the thinking of affect by see-
ing it as materially implicated. This is in contradistinction to a prevailing
tendency within history and history of art to approach affect in terms of
representation. The focus in history of art has fallen on the ‘representation
of the passions’: depictions of facial expression of emotions (Fig. 10.1).
The model of art as representation of emotions is well traversed. Emotion
is treated as that which is represented or embedded within an artwork,
which artwork preserves and conveys, rather than as an effect of the work
of art, that is, something it produces. Art as materially affective is thus
overlooked. While the notion that art is generative of emotion is hardly
new, this is usually engaged with ideally or in terms of iconography (which
is to return to the model of representation). By contrast, here I explore
affect in relation to the materiality of art and architecture. How do art
and architecture work materially in non-representational terms to produce
affect, or to effect affect, particularly in relation to miraculous events?
And, since ritual is not equivalent to a miracle, what role does ritual play?1
Thus, this chapter treats affect not in terms of representation (that which
is to be represented), but as an effect of material possibilities. The question
thus becomes how are those material possibilities activated?
‘Materiality’ is not to be confused with ‘material culture’. Currently a
mainstay in studies of ritual and of affect, ‘material culture’ unhelpfully
Fig. 10.1 James

Parson, ‘Human physi-
ognomy explain’d: in the
Crounian lectures on
musical motion for the
year MDCCXLVI’,
Royal society (London)
philosophical transactions
for the year 1746, XLIV,
pt. 1, p. 53. Photo:
Helen Hills
MIRACULOUS AFFECTS AND ANALOGICAL MATERIALITIES. RETHINKING... 195
implies that there is an ‘immaterial culture’ from which it is distinct. It

arises from a hasty assumption that the ‘material’ is identifiable with the
literal object (conceived as fixed and stable).2 Instead, I work here with the
notion that all culture is material, but that the nature of that ‘material’ is
not given. Indeed, ‘affect’ is seen here as an effect of the working of mate-
riality in imbricated economies. Thus, materiality is not equivalent to the
literal object any more than it is the mere matter of the object.3 This raises
the following question: ‘how is materiality implicated in the affective?’ Not
in the sense of technique, virtuosity or fixed ‘function’ of a stable object,
but in productive terms in which materiality exceeds the literal object. Thus,
matter may work analogously, extensively and intensively to permit art-
works to bear a potentiality that is material. This requires the consider-
ation of the intersection of affect, matter, materiality, artistic invention and
material transformation without presupposing that any of these terms is
either stable or occupies a relation of representation to any of the others.
Likewise, I approach architecture not as representing something already
in existence (‘ritual’, ‘miracle’ or ‘power’), but as materially productive of
effects—including ritual, material transformation and power relations—
which it seems merely to house.4 Architecture extends beyond the literal
building to encompass all its implications, including the work of architec-
tural discourse which precedes, accompanies and traverses architectures.
Affectively it works as assemblage, traversing organic and non-organic,
streets and statues, stasis and movement, worshippers and quarrymen.5
Thus, I do not start with a building, since architecture’s affective effects
cannot be equated with a literal building. Architecture is always multiple
and cannot be reduced to the notion of a static building that can be simply
‘described’. Instead, my focus falls on miraculous liquefactions—transfor-
mations of material—that implicate ritual, affect and power relations. My
aim is to think these miracles in relation to matter and architecture. I
suggest that affect works as ‘escalator’ between fields (architecture, feast,
congregation, ritual of the Mass), which do not enter into direct represen-
tational relation, and thus permits them to interfuse.
The Celestine monk Teofilo Basile gives an extraordinary account of
the bloody liquefaction of the blood of St John the Baptist in Naples in
August 1649:
On the 27th of the most fervent month of the year, seeing an uproarious
gathering, I asked a man what caused such a crowd and he replied that it
was the miracle of St John the Baptist, that is wont from the vigil of his
196 H. HILLS
Decollation to liquefy, resuming (once the feast was over) its erstwhile hard-
ness. I, who profess a devotion beyond the ordinary for the saint, in hearing
something I’d never heard before, nor seen, was filled with tender and rever-
ent joyfulness (riverente allegrezza), which pressing on my heart, expressed
a few little tears from my eyes.6
Basile does not witness the ritual—presumably mass and antiphon—that

precedes (but does not guarantee) the miracle. Called away on business,
he returns to the church of San Gregorio Armeno, part of the complex of
the homonymous female convent where the relic is conserved, to find that
the miraculous liquefaction has already taken place (Fig. 10.2):
the Blood that for a thousand and many hundreds of years had been sepa-
rated from his veins, and detached from his limbs, and that left to the laws of
nature should not have demonstrated any properties beyond those of earth
or stone, I found [it], I tell you, softened, liquefied, and dilated throughout
its container.7
Fig. 10.2 Giovan

Battista D’Aula, reli-
quary of the blood of St
John the Baptist (1727),
Naples, silver. Photo:
Giovanni Tiralongo
Rather than treat the miracle as a mechanistic response to ecclesiastical

ritual, we can interpret the miraculous event in terms of material assem-
blage. Thus, sweat and blood, silver, rock crystal, gems, anxious wor-
shippers, mid-summer heat, the dark clamminess of the church interior
adorned with magnificent apparati, music, candlelight, the smell of wax
and sweat, sharp inhalations of awe and fear are all part of the miracu-
lous event. Part of that assemblage was the ritual of mass and antiphon,
part of it was the dark interior of the church, but they were only a part
of it, not equivalent to it, and they did not produce the miracle. Indeed,
miraculous liquefactions frequently occurred without any formal ritual
at all.8
The miracle is a material event—one, indeed, that turns Basile’s world
upside down: ‘I was left deprived of my senses, stupefied, and almost
immobilized. My heart, clamorous, spoke: “O my God, you are marvel-
lous in all your works; but in your saints you bring the finest wonders
to light, What do I see now, or rather what do I not see?”’9 A hasty
response to such an account is to describe it as an affective response to
a miraculous transformation of matter. It is in such representational
terms that emotion is generally treated in scholarship considering the
relation between art and religion. However, such an interpretation of
affect as representation—a model whereby an emotion is experienced and
is then represented, textually or visually—is inadequate to address the
complex implication of affect and materiality, especially in relation to a
miracle. Significant divides in recent scholarship hold apart a consider-
ation of materiality, religion and affect.10 I here investigate their inter-
relation, while resisting a relation of representation. I also resist the too
hasty notion that emotion is ‘embedded’ in the object, that is, as an idea
imposed on or equivalent to matter.
In Basile’s account, the attractive and transformative qualities of the
miracle run parallel to its effects. Subject and object divisions are d
issolved.
Yearning is at once met and confounded. The working of the miracle
on the blood has a corresponding working on its witness. To witness is
to enter into an unending process that requires constant repetition and
renewal (distinct from the repetitions of ritual, though ritual may afford
an aide). Seeing the miracle deprived Basile of his senses. He wonder-
fully evokes the displacement at the heart of the miracle and its witness-
ing. His senses make no sense. Almost immobilised, he is virtually shut
down, while his heart, opened up, is animated, endowed with visionary
and enunciatory capacity. Yet what his heart feels and what it is capable of
198 H. HILLS
speaking remains confused, veiled, intensely paradoxical: ‘What do I see

now, or rather what do I not see?’ In a transfusion between theological
and corporeal language, Basile indicates that seeing the miracle is at once
to see everything and to see nothing. There is an abyssal paradox at its
heart. To ‘see’ the miracle is not equivalent to its work.
The miracle affords the witness access to a vaster stage: ‘[A] little
ampoule shows me in a concentrated form the universe of wonders’,
writes Basile. The blood is at once a synecdoche for the body and life of
the Baptist and a microcosm of the world. That encounter is made pos-
sible through the saint’s charity, through his willingness to suffer again.
Affective engagement works on both sides of the glass. The miracle bears
witness to the saint’s suffering and that testimony to sacrifice demands
its new witnesses to bear witness in the profoundest sense, to make their
amends:
It seems, that with a nice prosopopeia [the most intense Charity that still
lives in that most spirited Blood] says: I as already once drained from the
veins and shed (sparso) in witness to that first Truth, that I adore: but I do
not feel satisfied on that account. I would like to join again with my veins,
and my body and be reimprisoned anew, thus to requalify for martyrdom’s
suffering. I would wish to see in myself the torments multiplied, and the
shedding equal to the atoms of my blood: but since this is not permitted me,
I will enjoy remaining imprisoned in this receptacle until the end of time.11
Notable here is that the blood simultaneously both is and is not the saint.
The relationship between matter and agency is at once unusually close,
literal, yet also distant. The blood that yearns to be ‘reimprisoned’ and to
reinhabit its body must remain instead imprisoned in the crystalline col-
umn. Life, palpable in the palpitating blood, has here loss inscribed into
it. Yet it is present, literal, palpable:
A star so inflamed, fixed in its crystalline sphere, that it delights the eye,
awakens stupor in the breast, evokes devotion in the heart, renders illustri-
ous the beautiful temple, glorifies the noble convent, and renders the city
of Naples more famous, whence I am led to believe from the beauties, and
from the marvels of that blood, that perhaps the most glorious soul of John
the Baptist in that day [his feast] takes pleasure in visiting and reuniting itself
with his dear blood, with that Blood, that served it [the soul] as minister in
the service of God, [his token of] faithfulness, and [his] pulpit for proclaim-
ing the coming of the Word.12
The delight is of the Baptist. The blood miracle and its effects are less
described than produced. Like the miracle, its effects take place and place
is not secondary to them: ‘The blood appeared to me to be oil, and the
bloody colours its fervours, and I said to myself: O most fortunate virgins,
who with your pious devotions, and lofty honours (eccellsi honori) you
render yourselves worthy of the possession of so precious a lamp’.13
The blood’s affective power affirms church, convent and city in a special
relation: ‘A star so inflamed, fixed in its crystalline sphere, that it delights
the eye, awakens stupor in the breast, evokes devotion in the heart, ren-
ders illustrious the beautiful temple, glorifies the noble convent, and ren-
ders the city of Naples more famous.’14 The convent, church and city are
places that are reformed by the miracle.
Shed blood redeems.15 ‘Thus lives on that day’, writes Basile, ‘the most
holy Blood of John the Baptist, and it speaks, and it laments. All those
movements are words, [and] those boilings and rarefactions are lamenta-
tions. And how could it not lament? (E come non deve lamentarsi?)’.16 The
blood freed from the body allows essence not to be obliterated by identity.
Blood might be seen as a performative marking, a refusal to satisfy the
question of who or why or what—indeed, a means to trouble the assump-
tions that prompt those very questions. The bloody miracle presents the
saintly body, but takes it back, removes it, withholding offers it. Lost blood
indicates the way of the martyr, not back to its own body, but marks it out
in others to come. Thus, its movement marks the connection of what has
been and what is to come. The event’s incoherence and unintelligibility in
terms of everyday experience raises the possibility of being differently in
a different place, even as it does not guarantee it. Yet the facility to make
sense of what disrupts sense also characterises this account. Matter commu-
nicates and is intelligible. Colour works as fervour, sight as sensation, blood
caught long ago, entrapped in a crystal case, signals the angelic presence
of the Baptist. The ‘where’ (usually contingent) and ‘what’ (here distinctly
contingent) become one, elided in a vermilion transformative truth. The
truth, however, cleaves not to the blood, but to the worshiper and witness,
as he or she is moved and changed. Thus, ‘ritual’ is largely beside the point.
Miracle of San Gennaro and Architecture

I now turn to the relation of affect, ritual, and the miracle of liquefy-
ing blood in their relation to architecture through an examination of the
miraculous transformations of the blood of San Gennaro (St Januarius) and
200 H. HILLS
the material transformations of the magnificent Treasury Chapel building

from 1608 which contains (and fails to contain) his relics and those of the
other rapidly proliferating protector saints of Naples (Fig. 10.3).
In seeking to understand affect in early modern Europe, historians of
emotions have paid particular attention to written texts and affective ter-
minology used in textual sources, such as that by Teofilo Basile. By con-
trast, there is potential in thinking of affect as effect—which of necessity
means where it is not articulated directly. An examination of materiality
in non-representational terms permits access to affect conceived in this
manner. Thus, we can think of Gennaro’s miracle and its architecture in
terms of affect, without positing that relationship in terms of representa-
tion or seeking its textual articulation. Rather than considering architec-
ture directly in terms of affect (and thus in terms of representation), I look
beyond architecture as narrowly conceived to the affective implication of
materiality in the chapel. This entails Gennaro’s role as ‘protector’ of the
city of Naples, including protector from volcanic eruption. I investigate
Fig. 10.3 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Interior looking towards
liturgical east. Photo: Joseph Connors. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima
Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro
the material analogy between the volcano’s threatening liquefaction and

eruption and the salvific liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood. I suggest that
miracle and architecture, saint and volcano work in contrapuntal analo-
gous material relation, which are also relations of power. Thus, while I
conceive those relations materially, it is affect that is the mechanism that
draws miracle, architecture and threat of annihilation into relation.
Volcano and architecture work in analogous relation to miraculously
liquefying blood. This relation may be read in straightforward analogous
material terms, but it is their affective implications in which their analogous
materiality takes place and through which new possibilities are opened
up—and thus come to matter. Architecture may seem to be irrelevant to
the miracle. At best it seems only to ‘contain’ it. But it should be seen in
terms of material analogy with the transformations of both the bloody
liquefaction and volcano and in terms of their interrelationship, and also as
an effect of that relation. Thus, I pursue the miraculous in relation to the
architectural in terms of its affective materiality, which works analogously
via blood, bronze and worshipper. The orchestration of these is architec-
ture’s affective effect. And those effects produce the power relationships
which are at stake in the chapel, including the tensions between the aristo-
cratic committee that directed the chapel and ecclesiastical hierarchy that
sought to control it (see also the discussion on memorials in Chap. 8).17
Two distinct forms of emotional operation are at work in and through
the chapel. The first, dealt with briefly here, relates to the spiritual invest-
ment in the chapel by diverse religious institutions across Naples—an
investment understood here in affective terms. The second is the affective
discourse of the miraculous liquefaction of the blood relic, its material
implications and its affective effects. The Treasury Chapel has to date
been interpreted by scholars as a fulfilment of a vow made by the Eletti of
Naples during the plague of 1527.18 Its concentrated artistic splendour is
viewed either in terms of struggles and triumphs of individual artists, or as
exemplifying Neapolitan ‘Counter-Reformation’ devotion, and more spe-
cifically as the centre for the cult of San Gennaro and as a grand receptacle
for the precious silver reliquaries of all Naples’ patronal saints.19 Thus, the
chapel is treated as a mere representation of or a passive receptacle for
affects, objects and events produced elsewhere. How instead might the
architecture and the material work of the chapel be thought in affective
terms? I seek here to address relationships between affect and materiality
in a specific architectural conjuncture (Fig. 10.4).
202 H. HILLS
Fig. 10.4 The miraculous blood of San Gennaro, during the procession for the
feast of San Gennaro, September 2013. Photo: Helen Hills
The Treasury Chapel required and maintained an unprecedented degree

of spiritual, economic and affective investment from diverse religious insti-
tutions across the city. Convents, monasteries and parish churches were
required to translate to the Treasury Chapel their relics of Naples’ protec-
tor saints in silver reliquary busts made specifically for the chapel. There
they were allocated specific loculi, or niches, punched into the very walls
of the chapel, along the lines of burial loculi in the ancient Neapolitan
catacombs (Figs. 10.5 and 10.6). Directly beneath the bronze statues of
Naples’ protectors, a loculus holds a silver reliquary bust of the same saint.
Those busts were exported on their feast days in solemn processions across
the city back to their alternative institutional homes.
The Treasury Chapel treats the saints as living presences, not a peep-
show of bones behind glass as was usual in seventeenth-century reliquary
chapels, but worldly, mobile and fluid, animating not just the chapel, but
out into the street in processions. While the bronze statues remained
Fig. 10.5 Silver reli-

quary busts in their
niches with bronze stat-
ues above in the liturgical
south side of presbytery,
Treasury Chapel of San
Gennaro, Naples. Photo:
Massimo Velo. By kind
permission of the
Eccellentissima
Deputazione della Reale
Cappella del Tesoro di
San Gennaro
inside the chapel, the silver reliquary busts were exported objects,
belonging simultaneously to their originating institutions (Neapolitan
convents, monasteries and churches) and also to the Treasury Chapel
itself. Peripatetic, brilliantly mobile objects, they were never fully at
home or at rest. The chapel is therefore partly product and machine
of affective-material investment by diverse institutions competing for
spaces within it, guided partly by ambitions for hierarchical spiritual
authority (power relations). This sort of affective investment is relatively
straightforward.
More complex is a consideration of the miracle in affective terms. In
Sacred Naples (1623) Cesare d’Engenio Caracciolo describes the miracu-
lous liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood in terms of ritual:
each time this miraculous blood is brought together with the head of the
holy Martyr, or when a priest says the antiphon or when the Mass in honour
of the saint is celebrated on the altar where the blood stands, the sediment
204 H. HILLS
Fig. 10.6 Catacombs of San Gennaro, Naples. Photo: Helen Hills
of dry earth that lies congealed and immobile at the bottom of the little
ampoules is again returned to living, vermilion blood; and … it fills up the
ampoules entirely … expands, and it boils, just as if it were at that moment
in the blow of the executioner’s sword. And heaping marvel upon marvel,
what overcomes astonishment with another [even] greater, is that after the
ceremony, mass, praying, and saint’s antiphon, and the encounter with the
head, that living blood returns once more to its congealed state.20
But while ritual may induce the miracle, it is not equivalent to it.21 Instead,
it is the miracle that is materially affective. Scholarly preoccupation with
ritual diverts attention away from material affectivity.
The miracle is affective in several interrelated ways. The first is in terms
of its bloodiness (Fig. 10.4). Blood lies at the wellsprings of existence and
at the heart of affect. Physicians, moralists and theologians regarded the
heart as the heart of emotions. Crucial to the humoural system on which
depended temperament and thus emotion, it was the most vital and highly
esteemed of the humours, the ‘father of all humours’.22 Indeed, other
humours were merely intermediate stages in the generation of blood.

Blood’s association with the heart, the noblest of the organs in Aristotelian
physiology, enhanced its affective significance. Blood transports the spiri-
tus, or vital spirit, from the heart. Galenic physiology distinguished arterial
from venous blood. Part of the respiratory system, connecting heart, lungs
and arteries, arterial blood was regarded as superior to venous blood.23
When the discovery of the circulation of the blood displaced this duality,
far from diminishing the status of blood, it assigned it a central role in
supporting life and the spirit, and a source of vital heat.24 Either way, since
Gennaro shed arterial blood at his death, these theories of blood rendered
his relics still more precious. And in its transports it shared in the four
elemental qualities (hot, cold, wet and dry) and the innate heat which liv-
ing beings receive at birth.25 Since it encompassed life and salvation, blood
was best able to register mood.26 Marker of the sanguine and the choleric,
blood was as affective as it was nutritive. Thus, blood was inherently privi-
leged conveyer of mood, disposition and affect. More than that, blood
embodied mood, and in Gennaro’s miracle blood materialised affect.
Second, Gennaro’s blood is affective in its transformative capacity. Hot
to touch and brilliant red in colour, it flourishes again into a boiling rag-
ing tumult of life.27 Thus, death becomes life through the transformation
of this blood, in accordance with Hippocratic wisdom by which blood
(which all humans share) is composed of the two bodies of fire and water;
the wellsprings of existence, for life is heat and moisture attuned.28 The
question of the nature of the relationship between unchanging divinity
and passible, sinful humanity is thus staged in material terms. In affective
terms, San Gennaro’s blood was moody and unpredictable. Sometimes
it skulked darkly at the bottom of the ampoules; sometimes it joyously
erupted, open in its movement and responsiveness. It performed, then, as
a sensitive barometer of heavenly mood, which demanded an equivalent
sensitivity from its interpreters, and its material change—itself sign and
substance of both divine presence and human sacrifice—in turn required
devotional and spiritual change in its witnesses.
Third, blood connects humans and the divine. Thus, it can commu-
nicate between the two registers and is implicated in salvation and the
forging of place (including ‘architecture’). More than merely sustaining
life, blood was the possibility of relation with the divine. In his rapturous
address to San Gennaro’s blood, Lubrani quotes Ezekiel 16:6: ‘Live: yea, I
said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live’.29 According to Levinus
Lemnius’ Della complessione del corpo umano (Venice, 1564), blood, ‘life’s
206 H. HILLS
treasure’ (questo tesoro della vita), was ‘the food of life’. For him the soul
‘is submerged in blood, and life is maintained by blood as the flame of the
wick [is maintained] by its pool of oil’.30 Nevertheless, as carrier of soul
or life, blood was equated with spirit, whether allegorically or symboli-
cally. Thus it was that in theological discussion and devotional writing, the
body/blood contrast was used explicitly to symbolise the opposition of
body/soul.31 Not humanitas but sanguis joins divinity in the incarnation.32
Blood was claimed as sedes animae, the seat of the soul. Medical theo-
ries variously located the soul in blood, heart and brain. Scholastic theolo-
gians also diverged about the relationship of blood to bodily life.33 Thomas
Aquinas and Bonaventure both cite Leviticus 17:11: Anima carnis in san-
guine est: ‘for the life of the flesh is in the blood’.34 Even to Thomists there
was no implication that soul was literally in the blood, but core aspects of
the body were informed immediately by soul, which made them that per-
son’s body. Without the veritas humanae naturae, including blood, the
person would not be that person. Non-material soul or spirit could not
have a physical location, but had to be present throughout the body—like
blood—whole in every part, by a kind of concomitance. Much devotional
writing and preaching implied that blood carried life and therefore was the
seat of life and of the soul.
Thus, blood was at the heart of the affective economy, tightly bound
to soul, and with a critical relationship to ‘place’. At one level, the miracle
is a making visible of the affective economy binding the devout, saint and
blood, and the securing of place through that relationship.
Miraculous Transformations, Material Analogies

and Affect
In the Treasury Archive, a ‘Register of Miracles 1659–1733’ describes the

liquefactions (or lack of them).35 It demonstrates that the ritual of bringing
head and blood together, along with mass and antiphon, did not guaran-
tee the occurrence of the miracle. Indeed, the miracle sometimes occurred
without the ritual. It also shows that the manner of the miracle, attention
to material detail, mattered in terms of deciphering divine mood. In turn,
those decipherings of the miracle assumed material analogies with volcanic
transformations of rock and earth into lava and smoke.
There were basically three sorts of occasions when Gennaro’s blood
liquefied or when it significantly failed to do so. First were the three prin-
cipal feast days of the saint: his dies natalis (19 September); the feast of
the translation of his body/blood (the Saturday before the first Sunday in
May); and, after 1631, the ‘Feast of Vesuvius’ (16 December). Second, it
liquefied in the presence of important dignitaries, including the Viceroy
and distinguished visitors from Protestant England. Third, it liquefied
prematurely or remained obdurately hard during times of peril or in the
presence of heretics or infidels, thereby warning of impending danger. On
each occasion, the speed of liquefaction, the viscosity of the liquid, and
its colour, were carefully noted and interpreted. The emotion of the saint
in heaven was seen as traceable in the manner of his shed blood on earth.
Thus, the blood’s transformations worked in analogous relation to the
saint’s intercession in heaven.
In turn, the blood’s responsiveness, or lack of it, was linked to worship-
pers’ engagement. If the blood refused to liquefy, then the devout took
to the streets in public penitence, flagellation and prayer to ‘encourage’
it to do so. There was in play an affective symbiosis between saint, matter
and worshipper. If everything is aright on earth, then everything can be
aright in heaven, San Gennaro will intercede and everything will be aright
on earth. The miracle is part of a cyclical thread of repetition that restores
order where there was order, and is withheld when the correct order is
absent.
The relation between architecture and affect worked in terms of mate-
rial analogy of the miracle (not the ritual). The blood’s liquefaction indi-
cates Gennaro’s intercession with God. Indeed, Carlo Celano referred
in 1692 to it in a ‘continuous miracle’.36 Non-liquefaction or premature
liquefaction warned good Catholics of disasters ahead. Plague, famine,
volcanic eruption, earthquake and even revolt: Naples was particularly
imperilled and the blood was able to provide warnings of these threats.
Failure to liquefy was usually interpreted as indicating that the city or the
kingdom was about to suffer war, plague or some other disaster.37
The manner of the miracle was as momentous as its occasion for those
with the ability to divine its ways. A simple change of state from solid
to liquid was not enough. A correct ritualised sequence of events was
crucial. Time, tempo, order of events and speed of liquefaction were care-
fully attended to and, attuned, the Deputies led the city in appropriate
response. The blood reassured by liquefying, and called for change of heart
and display of contrition in its non-liquefaction. Premature liquefaction
spelled heavenly displeasure: ‘if the Blood is found in a liquid state before
being placed before the Head, it is a sign that [Gennaro] is interceding
208 H. HILLS
with the Holy Divinity for some urgent reason’.38 Throughout the octave
of September 1665, the blood was found in liquid state before the ritual
encounter of blood and head, prompting the Treasurer to note: ‘the glori-
ous Saint thereby gave us to understand his readiness to spill anew his pre-
cious blood in defence of our Catholic faith and in service of God’.39 Here
not only is San Gennaro’s heartfelt intervention with God envisaged, but
something more resolute and altogether bloodier: San Gennaro was will-
ing to suffer and die again for the Catholic faith.
Blood and Volcano: Material Analogous Relation

Gennaro’s blood formed a particularly close relationship with Vesuvius.
It bonded with the perilous and subterranean movements of Vesuvius in
three principal ways: first, through the place of Gennaro’s martyrdom at
the Solfatara, a volcanic area near Naples; second, Gennaro offered par-
ticular protection from Vesuvius, especially after the potentially devastat-
ing eruption of 1631; and, third, in analogical material terms whereby the
manner of the blood’s liquefaction may be read as material analogy for the
eruption itself (Fig. 10.7).
The year 1631 consolidated the link between Gennaro and Vesuvius.
Terrible earthquakes were followed by a violent eruption of Vesuvius. The
air of Naples was thick with ash and smoke, and ‘everyone was terrified; it
seemed to all that death was before their eyes and that Heaven’s trumpet
intimated to them the day of universal judgement’.40 Prayer, penitence,
procession and flagellations failed. But when the Cardinal Archbishop of
Naples took the ampoules of Gennaro’s blood in his hands and made with
them the sign of the Cross to the ‘infuriated mountain’, straight away the
deadly clouds advancing towards Naples began to withdraw, and soon
the volcano subsided.41 Simultaneously, San Gennaro appeared above the
main door of the cathedral, in the act of blessing the people, an iconic
image later referenced in the bronze gate to the Treasury Chapel, as we
shall see below. Old connections between volcanic threat and Gennaros’
intervention were definitively sealed.
Blood and volcano could be either solid or fluid, or both simultane-
ously, and they were locked in a close relation of material affectivity. While
one liquefied, the other put on its most obdurate face. Both blood and
volcano were believed to contain the cosmic elements of earth, water, air
and fire: ‘Mount Vesuvius spewing forth a lot of fire and smoke, along
with a liquid bitumen, and has been enflamed for many days’, runs the
Fig. 10.7 Silver reli-

quary of St Clare (1689;
restored in 1759) in the
nave of Naples Cathedral
outside the Treasury
Chapel prepared for pro-
cession of San Gennaro
(4 May 2013). Photo:
Helen Hills. By kind per-
mission of the
Eccellentissima
San Gennaro
record in May 1698.42 Just as fire roared out of the earth in a volcanic
eruption, it was fire that burned through the chapel’s blood. Its liquefac-
tion ensured the non-liquefaction of the earth and its tumescence meant
that the volcano was less likely to blow its top.
Yet there was no easy equivalence between heavenly disposition, blood
and volcano. The descriptions of Vesuvius in the ‘Register of Miracles’ and
those of the liquefying blood share uncertainty, anxiety, a search for a clear
interpretation of opaque signs and their relation. Variations in the miracle
sometimes accord with specific historical events, but the blood, divine
sign, relation and material, could not be readily manipulated or predicted.
Like the volcano, Gennaro’s blood did not simply switch from being con-
gealed and dry as dust to seething liquid form. In the uncertain border
between abstract and concrete, allegorical and literal, it wavered and was
declared both liquid and solid: part one state, part the other. ‘A little ball’
might remain, like a hardened heart, remorseless and unyielding, amidst
a heart-warming liquefaction.43 Observing the blood and interpreting its
signs was to read its affective state: sometimes impenetrable, often ambig-
uous, frequently reassuring and occasionally alarming.
210 H. HILLS
Like the volcano, the blood transformed in viscosity, colour and vol-
ume. It might pass from dark and cloudy to light and clear, like the sky
during and after eruptions.44 It could even assume the colour and consis-
tency of ash and smoke. In May 1710 the blood emerged hard and, ‘to the
huge terror and fear of the city’, it remained so. Worse still, like a warning
of an eruption, it was ‘black and like ashes’.45 On 7 May, it performed like
a volcanic eruption, complete with swelling foam and rising volume: ‘the
blood was hard, and after half an hour it liquefied, beginning to grow in
such a way that sometimes it was visible, at other time invisible, because
it reached to the top of the ampoule, producing a foam that rose up right
to the very top of that carafe’.46 Like the heated entrails of the earth, it
expanded, filling the ampoule to the brim, a tumescence akin to that of the
volcano, like a boiling cauldron.47 Thus, the blood, free from the binds of
nature, was able to assume various volumes and different forms, like the
God head itself.
In the miracle and in the volcano, heat was at play. The process of
liquefaction was expressly likened to fire: ‘it immediately liquefies, just as
if it were wax placed in a fire’.48 But sometimes the blood did not sim-
ply liquefy; more than enlivened, it was furiously engaged. Boiling blood
changes in temperature and in appearance: it becomes agitated, mov-
ing, violent, inhabited by something formidable and invisible. Boiling, it
warned of danger.49
Gennaro’s blood was therefore affectively disturbing—threatening in
both its fieriness and in its immobility. Its heat was part of its fervour, its
feverish engagement with God, its urgent desire to commune with the
people of Naples. Its capacity to transform itself in relation to God’s will
was crucial to its analogous material relation with Vesuvius.
Architecture as Affective Material Analogy

Analogous material motifs and effects are at work in the architecture of
San Gennaro’s Chapel. Thus, its bronze gate (Fig. 10.8) can be read in
analogic relation to Vesuvius and to Gennaro’s blood, and thus to his
affective engagement with the city. First, there is the figurative register.
‘He died, beheaded, that he could come to the head of his victories’,
writes Lubrani of Gennaro. Here he leans both forward and upwards (Fig.
10.9). Operating in two opposing directions simultaneously, forward and
backward, such an extroverted figure animates the gateway itself and pro-
duces the sense of an all-encompassing tutelary figure.
Fig. 10.8 Entrance gate from the organ loft, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro,
Naples. By kind permission instead of ermission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione
della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo: Helen Hills
At once intimidating and imploring, St Januarius, like Januas, looks in

two opposing directions. He leans out, away from the grille, in an impre-
catory gesture, out to the cathedral, the city and beyond, to the world
of Vesuvius, plague and earthquakes, while his alter ego looks inwards
towards the chapel’s altar and the relics, to miraculous glimpses of heaven.
Thus, the figures of the saint in the door, like the relics themselves, like
Januas at the beginning and end of the year, mediates between threat and
place, earth and heaven, here and there. Most gateways simply enclose or
cut off. This gateway separates, but draws together; divides, but scans.
Janus, the ancient god of doors, from city gates to humble residences,
212 H. HILLS
Fig. 10.9 Bust of San Gennaro in the entrance gate of the treasury Chapel of San
Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della
Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo: Helen Hills
in Ovid’s Fasti presides over the gates of heaven; here Gennaro is janitor
to heaven, and the gate effectively represents the gateway to heaven, via
San Gennaro.50 Thus, the Ianua Coeli, the ‘door’ to heaven, produces
Ianuarius as gateway to heaven. And the conceit is thrown wide to all who
enter there.
The gate thus embodies the relationship between Gennaro and Vesuvius,
a relationship to which the miraculous liquefying blood was also materially
analogous. Fanzago’s gates figure the half-length figure and the ampoules
of blood to evoke Gennaro’s martyrdom, the repeated miracles and the
presence of the saint (Fig. 10.10). But they do more than this in terms of
Fig. 10.10 Head of San Gennaro and ampoules of his miraculous blood in the
main gate of Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail. ©
Helen Hills. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale
Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro
affective material analogy. This is where the qualities of bronze come into
play. Since Antiquity, bronze was regarded as apotropaic, an effective means
of warding off evil influence. Blood and bronze can be thought of as analo-
gous, if we think of the miracle in terms of the desires it generates in rela-
tion to its solid and fluid states. In the gate, the ampoules containing and
restraining the blood are counterpoint to the flow of bronze (Fig. 10.8).
The doors bind blood and bronze and prophylactic miracle together.
Just as in the miracle the blood heated up and boiled, just as the vol-
cano transformed rock to liquid, so the bronze of the gate was trans-
formed through heat. Heat and affect work analogously in devotional and
material terms. It is heat—and affect, its analogous counterpart—that set
things in motion. Devotional affect for Januarius stirred his divine inter-
cession, made visible in the liquefaction that succoured the devout. The
blood boiled, and heated bronze was cast to proclaim the triumph of
Januarius, to keep at bay the molten lava of Vesuvius’ spew. Bronze and
blood contained the cosmic elements of earth, water, air and fire. Fire
214 H. HILLS
Fig. 10.11 Letter of a

mysterious alphabet in
the main gate of treasury
Chapel of San Gennaro
by Cosimo Fanzago.
Detail. © Helen Hills. By
kind permission of the
Eccellentissima
San Gennaro
burned through the chapel’s blood. Divine heat liquefied blood, trans-
forming from solid to liquid; meanwhile Vesuvius transformed solid rock
to molten lava, which the blood prevented from afflicting Naples. Fire
forged urban devotion and bronze metal in analogous relation with an
affective economy involving the divine.
San Gennaro’s gateway has a thickness that acts as a brake, slowing the
transition, emphasising the materiality of boundary, producing itself not
as division but as connection—a connection that violates boundaries even
as it draws attention to them. Letters of an unknown alphabet, indecipher-
able from the start (Fig. 10.11), are found as you enter the compression
chamber. Van Gennep observed that blood rites are rites of passage and
of liminality, rites of advent, birth and initiation. The great bronze gates
enunciate the blood rites of the chapel, allowing San Gennaro and his rel-
ics to mark the edge and relation between cathedral and chapel, between
that which is kept out and that which is let in. This is a place where things
become something else, including the threshold itself, and in entering
which you too are changed.
The bronze of the gate resembles flame: fire of Vesuvius and God’s
heat. Cunningly cast with more or less sand and heat to produce chro-
matic variations ranging from oily green to gold (Figs. 10.8 and 10.9),
as sunlight falls across its surfaces, it glances off these fictive lights, like
the flickering of flame. Thus, the gate, made of metal that, like Gennaro’s
blood, liquefies in heat and solidifies again, catches fire in heavenly light.
Affective investment in the miraculous liquefaction of San Gennaro’s
blood should be seen as far more than simply an expression, or even a
formulation, of the power of the aristocrats who sponsored its cult and
its spectacular housing in the huge expensive and elaborated chapel. The
chapel may be read as material analogy for the miracle itself and, as such,
both a material means by which we might grasp the affective investment
of its various human participants and a machine productive of that affect.
The miracle and chapel thus form part of an analogous material affec-
tive economy involving volcano, blood and bronze. The materiality of
architecture is activated in and by analogous material relations. Affect and
materiality work indirectly. Bronze is implicated materially by analogy
in relation to blood and its changes, and to Vesuvius and its changes,
and thus to Gennaro’s miracle that, by changing, protects Naples from
threat (including volcanic annihilation). Thus, the affective economy is
implicated in the miraculous through material analogy and the affective
economy of architecture works by analogy of the materiality of the mirac-
ulous transformation. It is thus affect that opens the potentiality of change
within materiality to take place. Indeed, affect makes matter and miracle
matter together.
Conclusion
Ben Highmore speaks of a materialist turn towards the immaterial, towards
affect, towards thinglyness and the senses as ‘necessarily determined by the
social worlds that produced them’.51 This depends on a notion of objects
as representing and coming after ‘social worlds’, from which they are in
some way detached. I have argued that the relationship among miracle,
architecture and affect is more intimate than consigning the productive
forces to a distinct ‘social world’ allows, and that it is not one of repre-
sentation. I have sought to avoid the hasty collectivity of ‘thinglyness’
in thinking about materiality. Insofar as matter matters, it does so affec-
tively—but in precise and distinct terms. Heat and affect in an analogous
relation set saint and bronze to work to hold Vesuvius at bay and secure
divine redemption. Architecture in its broadest sense is the orchestration
of that relation. For architecture allows the interarticulated presence of
emotion, ritual and power to take place.
216 H. HILLS
Notes
1. It is important to note that a miracle is not a ritual. A miracle has
divine causes, while rituals are enacted by humans eager to propiti-
ate the divine. The miracle is thus a sign of divine grace; it is not an
inevitable or mechanical response to a ritual.
2. For example, Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and
Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
3. See Andrew Benjamin, ‘Plans to Matter: Towards a History of
Material Possibility’, in Material Matters: Architecture and
Material Practice, ed. K.L. Thomas (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007),
13–28.
4. The best introduction to architectural theory in this manner
remains Mark Wigley, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’, in
Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton
University School of Architecture, 1992), 327–89.
5. For ‘assemblage’, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004), 306, 504–5.
6. Teofilo Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso del Gloriosissimo S. Giovan
Battista Esistente nel Bello e Divoto Tempio di santo Ligorio di Napoli
(Napoli, 1649), 2r.
7. Ibid., 2r.
8. Miraculous liquefactions also took place without any ritual at all.
See Helen Hills, ‘Beyond Mere Containment: The Neapolitan
Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro and the Matter of Materials’,
California Italian Studies Journal 3(1) (2012): 1–21.
9. Basile, Sangue Miracoloso, 5r.
10. Studies of materiality have been overwhelmingly focused on non-
religious matters; studies of religious issues have rarely engaged
with materiality beyond naming materials and identifying technical
procedures, effectively treating ‘material culture’ in idealist terms.
11. Basile, Sangue Miracoloso, 5r.
12. Ibid., 5v.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and

Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 210–26.
16. Basile, Sangue Miracoloso, 5r–6v.

17. The details of this are irrelevant to the thrust of my argument here.
For them, see Antonio Bellucci, Memorie storiche ed artistiche del
Tesoro (Naples: Antonio Iacuelli, 1915), 1–34.
18. Franco Strazzullo, La Real Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro.
Documenti inediti, (Naples: Società editrice napoletana, 1978);
Franco Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro nel Duomo di
Napoli (Naples: Instituto grafico editorial Italiano, 1994); Gaetana
Cantone, Napoli barocca (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1992), 109, 144,
214; Elio Catello and Corrado Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro di
San Gennaro (Naples: Edizione del Banco di Napoli, 1977).
19. See Silvana Savarese, Francesco Grimaldi e l’architettura della

Controriforma a Napoli (Rome: Officina, 1986), 116–26.
20. Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra: Ove oltre le vere origini,
e fundationi di tutte le Chiese e Monasterij, Soedali, & altri luoghi
sacri della Citta’ di Napoli, e suoi Borghi. Si tratta di tutti li corpi, e
Reliquie di Santi, e Beati vi si ritrovano, con un breve compendio di lor
vite, e dell’opre pie vi si fanno (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1623), 7.
21. See note 8 above.
22. ‘Father of all humours’ claimed Tarduccio Salvi in Il Chirvrgo
Trattato Breve (Rome: Stefano Paolini, 1613), 27. See also Nancy
Siraisi, History, Medicine and the Tradition of Renaissance Learning
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Gianna Pomata,
‘Malpighi and the Holy Body: Medical Experts and Miraculous
Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance Studies 21(4)
(2007): 568–86.
23. See Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy:
Identities, Families, Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester
University Press: 2007), 46.
24. ‘Sanguis, non cor, est pars corporis princeps’ (‘Blood, not body, is
the principal part of the body’): Phlebotomia Damnata a Dominico
La scala Messanensi (Pavia, 1696), 8 (cited by Cavallo, Artisans of
the Body, 59 n.33).
25. Telesio identified ‘cosmic heat’ with the World-Soul or its physical
manifestation. See B. Telesio, De rerum natura iuxta propria prin-
cipia (Naples, 1586).
26. Tarduccio Salvi, Il chirugo: Trattato breve (Bologna: G. Longhi,
1688), 30.
27. Giacomo Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro della Divinità racceso negl’altari
del Clero mitrato e religioso (Naples: D.A. Parrino & M.L. Mutii,
218 H. HILLS
1694), 25. For boiling blood as a sign of youthfulness, see Levinus

Lemnius, Della complessione del corpo umano, libri due: Nuovamente
di latino in volgare tradotti e stampati (Venice, 1564), 77.
28. Piero Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance
of Blood, trans. R.R. Barr (New York: Continuum, 1995), 20–1.
29. ‘Vive, dixi tibi, in sanguine tuo vive’; see Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro,
116. ‘And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine
own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea,
I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live’ (Ezekiel 16:6).
30. Lemnius, Della complessione del corpo umano, 70.
31. Aquinas, Summa theologia 3 q.74 art 1 pp. 889–90 and q.76, art.2
ra 1 p. 895, col 1: ‘corpus exhibetur pro salute corporis, sanguis
pro salute animae’. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 162.
32. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 165.
33. See Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul’, in The Cambridge
History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C.B. Schmitt, Quentin
Skinner and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 485–534.
34. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 161.
35. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro (ATSG), CA/67 ‘Registro dei
Miracoli’, (Fasc.83 bis n1).
36. Carlo Celano, Notizie del bello dell’antico e del curioso della città di
Napoli, ed. Chiarini (Naples, 1856), II, 268.
37. Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7–8.
38. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc 83 bis n.1), f.2v.
39. Ibid., ff.22v-23r.
40. Bottoni, Pyrologia topographica idest de igne dissertatio … (Naples,
1692), 34; despite the author’s every effort to secure reproduction
permissions for Micco Spadaro (Domenico Gargiulo), Procession of
Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from
Vesuvius, oil on canvas, 126 × 177 cm, we were unable to include
the image in this chapter. The image can be viewed here: https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Domenico_Gargiulo_-_The_
eruption_of_the_Vesuvius_in_1631.JPG (accessed 14 October
2016).
41. Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita, Virtù e Miracoli
di S Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissima
Città, e Regno di Napoli (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1707), 129; Giulio
Cesare Braccini, Dell’Incendio fattosi nel Vesuvio a XVI Di Dicembre
M.DC.XXXI (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1632), 43; Antonio

Bulifon, Raguaglio Istorico dell’incendio del monte Vesuvio succce-
duto nel mese d’Aprile M.DC.LXXXXIV [e degli] incendj ante-
cedenti (Naples: Antonio Bulifon, 1696), 35.
42. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc 83 bis n.1), f.141r.
43. Ibid., ff. 11v; 46v–47r; 49v–50r; 157r.
44. For instance, 10 May 1714, ibid., f.201r.
45. Ibid., f.191v.
46. Ibid., f.190r.
47. Ibid., ff.84v–85r.
48. Ibid., ‘Registro dei Miracoli’, f.2r.
49. Marsilio Ficino warned against blood that was too fiery, Della reli-
gione christiana … insieme con due libri del medesimo del mantenere
la sanità e prolungare la vita per le persone letterate (Florence:
Giunti, 1568), 65–6.
50. Referring to Oliviero Carafa’s use of the Janus weight emblem on
his Succorpo door, Norman observes that in his commentary on
the opening passage of Ovid’s Fasti, where Janus presides over the
gates of Heaven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola reserves the sym-
bol of Janus for ‘celestial souls’, a text that Carafa could have
known. D. Norman, ‘The Succorpo in the Cathedral of Naples:
“Empress of all Chapels”’, Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte 49(3)
(1986): 351–2, n.68.
51. Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives. Studies in the Everyday (Routledge:
London, 2011), 166.
CHAPTER 11
Political Ritual and Religious Devotion

in Early Modern English Convents
Claire Walker
On 30 October 1695, in the English Augustinian cloister of Our Lady of

Sion in Paris, the following ceremony took place:
On ye Octave day of ye Exposition of St Justin’s Relikes a solemne high Masse

with Musick was sung. In ye afternoone solemne Vespers in Musick a sermon
preached by P. Le Villeur … salut, & Benediction of ye Bd Sacrament. After
wch ye Relikes were again brought into ye Quier. A Priest in a Tunike caryed ye
crosse; four in Tunikes who caryed ye Relikes, a Master of Ceremonies, two
Thurifers, four who caryed torches, severall others who carryed lighted wax
tapers in their hands all these in surplices, or Rd Father in a Cope assisted
by two in Tunikes; All ye Religious had likewise lighted wax tapers in their
hands: when ye shrine was brought into ye Quier, ye Religious began to sing
ye Litanies of ye Saints; &; soon after the Procession of all ye Religious, ye
sayd priests, and all others in ye Monastery began, & first they went into ye
Garden … & went all along by ye side of ye Refectory to ye Blew [or Brew?]
house; from hence they crossed ye garden to ye little chappel of or Bd Lady;
before wch little chappel a little Altar was prepared, & ye Relikes placed on it,
C. Walker (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_11
222 C. WALKER
whilst ye Antiphone Sancta Maria Sucurre Miseris &c was sung; wch being
ended ye officiant sung ye V[ersicle] ora pro nobis Sta Dei Genetrix, & ye
Quier having answered ye R[esponse] ut digni Efficiamur &c ye officiant
sung ye prayer Concede nos famulos tuos. wch being ended ye procession con-
tinued on, went round ye cloisters, thugrough [i.e. through] ye Chapter, &
… into ye Quier, where ye Relikes were placed on an altar prepared for yt pur-
pose; then the officiant Entoned the Te deum, wch was sung by ye Quier: at
ye end ye officiant sung ye Benedicamus Patrum et Filium cum Sancto Spirito
& ye Prayer of Thankesgiving … wch being ended, ye grates were shutt, &
ye Priests … unvested themselves, & soon after went out of ye Monastery.1
This ritualistic exposition of the martyr’s relics and their liturgical proces-
sion through the religious cloister first took place in 1694 and thereafter
occurred annually. Although the chronicler did not always describe the
event in such detail, she noted its observance each year, suggesting its
significance in the community’s formal devotional calendar. As is common
with religious ritual, the sources do not provide clear evidence of individ-
ual nuns’ emotional responses to, or even engagement with, the festivities
surrounding St Justin’s relics, nor have I located accounts by participating
clergy or lay Catholics to elucidate their feelings. However, by considering
the ritual within the wider history of the post-Reformation cloisters and
their support for the exiled Catholic king James II, his queen, Mary of
Modena, and their children, it is possible to understand the religious and
political significance of the feast and thereby its emotional significance for
participants. The connection between the Augustinian convent and the
Jacobites instituted the new ceremonial in the nuns’ liturgical schedule
and influenced its evolution over the first half of the eighteenth century.
The creation of this devotional practice raises important questions
about the relationship between religious ritual, political ideology and the
people who initiated, sustained and participated in its annual celebration.
While there is a considerable anthropological literature on the signifi-
cance of ritual in community formation, the role played by emotions in
this process is less developed, particularly when it comes to considering
the historical past. The dearth of analysis is in part the consequence of a
tendency to focus on individual emotional responses, which depend upon
personal accounts and recollections. In most instances such sources are not
available, particularly for nuns, who were not permitted to write diaries
and private letters or encouraged to express their sentiments in public (for
some rare examples, see Chap. 9). They could record spiritual progress,
POLITICAL RITUAL AND RELIGIOUS DEVOTION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH... 223
but these scripts were commonly centred upon individual endeavours

to combat the self and enter a state of mystical union with their divine
spouse.2 The political dimension added by the Catholic exiles’ adherence
to Jacobitism further diminishes the likelihood of locating these kinds of
ego documents which might explain personal motivation for attending
particular religious rituals and the affect that participation in them invoked.
However, Monique Scheer’s assertion that we can access emotions in the
past by considering them as a ‘kind of practice’ in a Bourdieuian sense
opens up several possibilities for accessing the emotional significance of
rites. Scheer notes that ‘attending to practices means attending to observ-
able behavior’; thus, third-person accounts, like those of the Augustinian
chronicler, might be considered valid sources for discerning emotional
management in the past.3
This chapter will analyse the emergence of the ritual centred upon the
relics of St Justin and their political import for expatriate British Catholics
in Paris in the early eighteenth century. It will explore the complex relation-
ship between ritual and power, and the importance of emotion in validating
and consolidating membership of a dissident political movement. The emo-
tion evoked in this process is itself complicated. It is a form of patriotism,
which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘love of or devotion
to one’s country’, originally suggesting loyalty to the king and parliament.4
However, Jacobite patriotism centred upon a vision of an alternative king
and parliament to those in existence since 1688. Catholic Jacobites sought
not only a Stuart state but a restitution of Catholicism as well. Jacobite
patriotism was accordingly rooted in a yearning for the political and reli-
gious realities of the past, and the Jacobites’ emotional investment in their
cause might best be described as ‘love of or devotion’ to the Stuart royal
family. This chapter will accordingly consider how religious ritual focused
upon the relics of a martyr sought to inspire and consolidate Jacobite patri-
otic fervour in the Paris convent and beyond its enclosure. After consider-
ing theoretical and methodological approaches in the first section, I will
discuss the emergence and performance of the ritual in the second section,
before assessing its success in fostering a Jacobite emotional community.
Ritual, Emotions and the Early Modern Convent

Anthropological studies suggest that rituals are central in the creation
of communities. As Christoph Wulf has argued, ‘communities develop
in and through rituals and by the emotions created in them’.5 Through
224 C. WALKER
collective experiences and memories, often kept alive by the repetition

of stories, performances, images and emotions, commonalities are estab-
lished and group solidarity and identification is cemented.6 This is assisted
by mimetic processes in routine rituals, in which emotional contagion or
collective effervescence spreads among those participating.7 Such con-
cepts have been considered with respect to early modern Christian ritual.
Susan Karant-Nunn noted that in early modern Catholic missionisation,
familiar rituals were employed by the clergy to instil fundamental beliefs
in those they catechised. The ceremonies of Easter week, Corpus Christi
processions and other ritualised observances inculcated in the newly con-
verted and long-term adherents alike a ‘firm identification of themselves as
Catholic Christians’.8 The Catholic missionaries’ use of ritual would seem
to equate predominantly with anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse’s doc-
trinal mode of religiosity, in which the transmission of religious teachings
occurs in routinised formats, such as repetitive oratory or performance.9
Whitehouse’s alternative imagistic mode in which infrequently enacted
but intensely stimulating practices, such as religious ecstasy or collective
possession, might similarly have bound early modern Catholics into cohe-
sive belief communities.10 Whitehouse’s modes of religiosity (which can
co-exist within a single religious tradition) are useful when considering the
ways in which ritual functioned to establish confessional communities.11
The marriage of routine devotional performance with imagistic episodes
nicely encompasses the repetitive prayer and rituals with the stimulation,
real or imagined, proffered by martyrdom, the miraculous and possession.
The processes of instilling communal cohesion described in the anthro-
pological literature dovetails with scholarship on how individuals learn a
culturally appropriate emotional repertoire. Far from accepting that human
emotions are hard-wired neural responses, recent research has posited the
importance of culture and society in their transmission and expression.
Monique Scheer emphasises ‘the mutual embeddedness of minds, bodies
and social relations’.12 In this approach, which considers the inculcation
of emotion as a practice, the acquisition of an emotional style is not just a
cognitive response based upon acculturation, but one also grounded in the
body.13 Scheer argues that in practice theory, an individual is the product
of his or her quotidian routines, and the body is profoundly shaped by
the ‘habitus’—“‘schemes of perception, thought and action” that produce
individual and collective practices’.14 She suggests therefore that emotions
are ‘acts executed by a mindful body, as cultural practices’.15 In other
words, they are learned by ‘emotional management’ in social settings.16
Rituals thus become significant ‘as a means of achieving, training, articu-

lating, and modulating emotions for personal as well as social purposes’.17
Yet it is not only the social environment which shapes emotional educa-
tion and expression. Other scholars have emphasised the significance of
the space in which this occurs, and the importance of objects and media
within it. Andreas Reckwitz has discussed the ‘affective habitus’ which is
continually replicated in specific spatial environments (see also Chaps. 7
and 10). He considers the ‘atmospheres’ conducive to the production of
emotions, which include not only the space, but also its aesthetic arrange-
ment in the reproduction of affective cultures.18 Both Scheer and Reckwitz
include churches and the religious practices and feelings which occur in
them as examples of this spatial and ritual interaction.19
When applied to the monastic environment, the significance of repetitive
ceremonies in the formation of communal identity is obvious. Fundamental
to becoming a nun or monk was the exact performance of the religious and
quotidian rituals which aimed to dissolve the individual into a spiritual vessel
for divine communion. I have discussed the broad parameters of this process
elsewhere.20 Here I want to explore how formal monastic devotions might
be adapted to inculcate religious and political identities which transcended
the confines of the enclosure. The post-Reformation English cloisters,
founded principally in the Low Countries and France in the seventeenth
century by the daughters of England’s Catholic minority, were no strangers
to religious and political dissidence. Throughout their period of exile, which
lasted until the French Revolution, the convents maintained a strong sense
of their English identity. They recruited almost exclusively English women
and were dependent economically upon their countrymen and women,
with some charitable assistance from local rulers, clergy and laity.
Established with the express intention of relocating to their home-
land, once Catholicism was either reinstated or at least tolerated, the con-
vents worked towards preserving female monasticism, but with the added
objective of providing education, refuge and spiritual sustenance for their
‘persecuted’ coreligionists. Although unable by virtue of their gender to
become missionaries (and martyrs) across the Channel, from within their
enclosures the nuns directed prayers towards the reconversion of England.
By the 1650s, various cloisters were involved directly in political activities
which might lead to this end.21 They increasingly forged links with the
Stuart royal family. The Stuarts had spent a period of temporary expatria-
tion in the 1650s between the execution of Charles I and the restoration
226 C. WALKER
of his son, Charles II. This was followed by the permanent exile of the
Catholic king, James II, and his heirs after 1688. Thus, from their incep-
tion, the convents’ collective devotions intersected with their religious,
and political, aim of returning to England. From the 1650s, masses, spe-
cial feasts and daily formal and informal religious observances were often
directed at the expressly political goal of the restoration of the Stuart mon-
archy (see the parallel discussion on political goals in Chap. 8).
The English Augustinian convent in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor
was founded in 1634 by Letitia (in religion, Mary) Tredway and Thomas
Carre, procurator of the English College at Douai, who became the com-
munity’s first confessor. It was successful in attracting novices, with over
40 women taking their vows by 1650, a further 90 by 1700, and 33
professed between then and 1750, during a period of slowing recruit-
ment across the exiled religious houses.22 From its inception, the clois-
ter accepted only English women, although in the aftermath of 1688,
some Scottish and Irish women entered the house. Despite the absence
of French nuns, the convent nonetheless developed a strong relationship
with Parisian Catholics who attended its religious services and provided
charitable assistance.23 The cloister’s location in Paris meant that it was well
placed to establish good connections with James II and Mary of Modena
in the aftermath of 1688, when their exiled court was at St Germain-en-
Laye, and the nuns lost no time securing royal patronage, with the annals
recording visits by James, Mary and their children on several occasions,
during which the royal guests enjoyed the nuns’ spiritual services and hos-
pitality.24 The bond between the Paris Augustinians and the Stuarts was
cemented not only via this sociability, but also by Mary of Modena’s 1694
gift of the relics of St Justin the Martyr.
The ‘Feast’ of St Justin the Martyr at Our Lady

of Sion in Paris25
The Paris convent’s acquisition of St Justin reflected the popularity of

relic-centred devotions in seventeenth-century Catholicism. Following
the rediscovery of the Roman catacombs in the late sixteenth century, the
1600s witnessed a thriving industry centred upon the relics of the early
Christian martyrs. Authentication of the bones observed strict protocols,
and the relics’ translation into churches, monasteries and palaces across
Europe was rigorously documented and carefully monitored. Despite this
contemporary regulation, scholarship has uncovered controversies sur-

rounding the trade, particularly difficulties authenticating the remains of
putative martyrs and confessors of the primitive church.26 The relics of St
Justin accordingly entered the Augustinian enclosure in Paris, with sev-
eral testimonials confirming their legitimacy. In 1675, the cardinal vicar
responsible for their authentication detailed their removal from the cata-
comb of St Calisto, identification as the remains of St Justin and subse-
quent interment in a decorated box or urn, secured with a red cord and
his seal.27 The relics were given to their purchaser, the Brussels papal inter-
nuncio, who in November 1685 presented them to Mary of Modena, and
they were placed in her chapel at St James.28 It is not clear what happened
to them during the Glorious Revolution and how they were transported
from England to France. However, on 7 August 1694, the relics were
reauthenticated in Paris by the papal nuncio and Mary of Modena’s almo-
ner, who testified that the damaged box and its contents were the items
from the chapel at St James. That evening, the almoner hurriedly delivered
the reliquary to the nuns as he departed for Rome.29
The documents verifying the relics’ authenticity were not given to the
convent until 21 September and, without this guarantee, the religious
women were uncomfortable about the saint’s legitimacy. Even with
the papers confirming the relics’ credentials and a letter from Mary of
Modena the following month gifting them to the nuns, along with addi-
tional proofs of their authenticity, some doubt evidently remained in the
convent regarding the bones’ true identity and thus spiritual legitimacy.30
The cloister dispatched material to Rome for further verification. In July
1695, the English agent in Rome, George Witham, sent word that the
authorities believed that the paperwork was in order and that the convent
could have ‘nothing more authentick’. He reassured the nuns that: ‘You
ought not to have ye least dout or feare but you have ye Relick of some
great saint and Martyr’.31 Witham apparently reassured the nuns of their
relics’ authenticity and resultant potency. The exposition and translation
of St Justin’s relics was accordingly performed in October and annually
thereafter.
In 1697, the observance was moved from October to the second or
third Sunday after Easter. The nuns had petitioned the Archbishop of Paris
to change the feast’s timing. He granted their request, permitting them
to replace the usual Easter rites on the day it commenced with ‘a Double
office of Reliques’. The event’s spiritual potency was further enhanced by
permission to expose the Eucharist with the relics on their first day in the
228 C. WALKER
convent church ‘to augment ye devotion of ye faithfull’. Any man or woman

who visited the church on this day and offered prayers for ‘ye extirpation of
heresie, ye exhaltation of ye Faith, for ye peace and union of Christian Kings
& Princes, for ye health & prosperity of ye sacred Parsone of His Majesty
and all ye Royall familie’ would receive 40 days of indulgence.32 Thereafter
the ceremonies occurred in April or May, depending upon the timing of
Easter. The chronicler recorded the annual removal of the relics from their
usual location above the door from the choir into the monastic enclosure
and their exposition in the nuns’ choir on the day before they were carried
into the convent church for the octave celebration.
On the first day, they were exhibited with the Eucharist for joint venera-
tion. A sung mass was celebrated with a sermon from a guest preacher. On
the eighth day, after another mass and sermon, and the services of com-
pline and benediction, the relics were carried into the cloister for a proces-
sion through the convent enclosure. The exact route is not detailed, but
the column of priests and nuns accompanying the relics with a crucifix, lit
tapers and incense stopped to sing or recite prayers and antiphons at certain
stations, like the statues of the Virgin Mary and of St Augustine in the gar-
den, before the procession concluded in the nuns’ choir with the prayers
of St Justin, a Te Deum and a final prayer of thanks-giving to the Blessed
Trinity. The following day, the relics were returned to their resting place.33
(see also a discussion of the procession of relics in Chaps. 8 and 10).
The importance of St Justin’s feast for the convent is evident in the
meticulous annual chronicling of the event. Early entries provide detailed
accounts like those already cited, but the descriptions became briefer as
the years passed. By 1704, a decade after the nuns had received the rel-
ics, although the chronicler rarely described the liturgical features of the
ritual, she always noted who had preached the sermons and which lay
women had collected donations during the two masses to cover the feast’s
expenses.34 The chronicle only goes into similar detail when reporting the
funerals of community members or significant lay patrons. It also regularly
notes the celebration of the feast of the nuns’ patron, St Augustine, but
never in as much depth as for the martyr’s feast. Thus, using the chroni-
cler’s attention to detail as a guide, it is possible to argue that the relics of
Justin formed a central element of annual communal devotion.
Another indication of the relics’ significance is the nuns’ recourse to
their saint at times of crisis. On at least two occasions, the relics were called
upon to heal dangerously ill friends of the community. This happened first
in September 1701, when James II was on his deathbed. Upon hearing
of his illness, after vespers ‘we uncovered ye holly Relikes of St Justin’ and
the choir sang the hymn for a martyr. When the nuns learned of James’
demise the following day, they covered the relics with ‘ye same Ceremonies
as when Uncovered’.35 The second instance occurred in May 1713, when
the community left the relics exposed in the middle of their choir for nine
days beyond the usual concluding ceremony for St Justin’s feast. During
this time, they petitioned the martyr to restore the health of their confes-
sor, Edward Lutton, who had been suffering fits. Despite the additional
rituals and petitions, Lutton, who had guided the convent’s spiritual and
business affairs for almost 40 years, died on 1 July.36 Both James II and
Lutton were significant benefactors to the convent. The nuns’ resort to
the relics accordingly demonstrates their desperation at the potential loss
of such friends and their belief that devotions focused upon St Justin were
the most potent spiritual means available to them of preventing the men’s
deaths.
The final illness of James II is a key to understanding the nuns’ emo-
tional investment in St Justin’s relics and provides an insight into the
martyr’s significance for the cloister. The relics were a gift from James
II’s queen and they had come from the royal chapel at St James. They
were therefore intimately connected with the Stuarts. This royal associa-
tion would account for the nuns’ recourse to them when James was ill
and would also explain why they were so greatly treasured by the cloister.
However, I think there was a deeper connection between the relics, the
nuns and James. St Justin’s reliquary contained the remains of a mar-
tyr. As a deposed and exiled monarch who had lost his crown in part for
his allegiance to the Catholic Church, there was already emerging before
James’ death the hint of a cult promoting him as a martyr for his faith.37
The extent to which the Paris Augustinians supported such a cult became
apparent after his death, when they were sent a piece of his arm, which the
prioress duly embalmed and placed in the nuns’ choir.38 Although the relic
of the dead king did not become a central feature of communal devotion
in the way that St Justin’s relics had become, it resided in the cloister and
provided a tangible link between the nuns, James and his heirs. It was also
ready for ritual use should James be officially recognised by the church as
a martyr or a saint.
It is possible that after James’ death, the relics of St Justin became a
spiritual proxy for the ‘martyred’ king. At the very least, they represented
a spiritually powerful physical connection between the Augustinian con-
vent and the Stuarts. In any case, the martyr’s remains provided a focal
230 C. WALKER
point around which the Parisian Jacobite community coalesced. Patrick

Geary has suggested that in the Middle Ages, the shrines of holy men
and women provided a hub around which communities formed. These
were often monastic or church establishments and the religious, com-
bined with the lay estate workers, formed a familial relationship with their
saint who as paterfamilias protected them and assured their prosper-
ity.39 The inclusion of St Justin in the Paris Augustinian monastic family
is perhaps most evident in the nuns’ efforts to link him with their other
saintly patrons. During the relics’ annual procession through the convent
grounds, central points for prayer were the shrines to St Augustine and
the Virgin Mary, namesakes for the order of Augustinian canonesses to
which the nuns belonged and their cloister, Our Lady of Sion.40 It is pos-
sible that the desire to connect the celebration of St Justin with the wider
Augustinian family also encouraged the nuns’ petition to change the tim-
ing of the celebration from October to the period after Easter. The feast of
St Augustine’s mother, St Monica, was celebrated on 4 May and the feast
of St Augustine’s conversion on 5 May. While the feasts fell only occasion-
ally within the octave, they occurred close to the annual celebration of St
Justin’s relics, uniting the martyr with the nuns’ principal saintly patrons.41
As Geary observes, when a medieval relic moved to a new community, it
had to ‘undergo a cultural transformation to acquire status and meaning in
its new context’ (see also the discussion of relics in Chaps. 8 and 10).42 In
this instance, St Justin was accommodated within the convent community
through these connections with existing devotional icons and practices.
The process of situating the saint within the Paris Augustinian family
had wider political implications. The relics close association with Mary of
Modena meant that through St Justin’s incorporation into the cloister’s
saintly pantheon, the exiled queen and her family joined the convent’s
kinship circles. In 1705, when the ritual surrounding the martyr coincided
with the feast of St Monica, the nuns ceremonially hung a picture of St
Augustine’s mother in their choir. Significantly it was placed ‘betwixt ye
monument of ye late King James of happy & holly memory, & ye picture
of St John drawn by our present young King James ye 3d’, drawing obvious
connections between the Stuarts and the cloister’s patron saints.43
The familial bond engendered by the spiritual connection between saint,
monarchy and nuns had further political connotations. Geary argues that
by co-opting the sacred power of saints’ relics and their links to Rome, the
Carolingians in the ninth century consolidated the spiritual foundations
of their empire, which in turn bolstered the rulers’ political legitimacy.44
Philip II of Spain similarly appropriated saintly strength when he came to

the throne in 1556, building the palace-monastery of the Escorial, where
his extensive relic collection, ancestral mausoleum and seat of govern-
ment converged to legitimate and reinforce his kingly authority.45 The
link between St Justin’s relics, which had been in the royal chapel before
the events of 1688, and the exiled Stuarts and their supporters in Paris
from 1694 can be considered in a similar light. The relics recent historical
association with the monarchy of James II enabled them to be co-opted
by the Augustinian nuns to direct Jacobite loyalties to the royal exiles and
their cause. The nuns were assisted in this process by the indulgence which
allied St Justin’s remains directly with their spiritual and political objec-
tives as exiled monastic women and Jacobite sympathisers. In this sense,
the identity of the relics did not particularly matter, and it could be argued
that for the nuns, it was their connection with the exiled Stuarts that was
more significant than St Justin. George Witham had, after all, in 1695
assured them that they had the ‘Relick of some great saint and Martyr’
and not stated categorically that they possessed the remains of St Justin.46
Yet, despite this, as the bones of a martyr, St Justin’s relics remained a
potent symbol of Catholic suffering. Trevor Johnson has argued that in
early modern Bavaria, relics served two functions: the refutation of her-
etics and the formation of local and national identity. The opening of
the catacombs had provided beleaguered Catholics with ample evidence
of their long history of suffering for the faith against the enemies of the
Church. As Johnson has observed, ‘what greater symbol could there be
of the continuity of Catholic tradition, from its past heroic ages to its
embattled present, than possession of the corporeal remains of the mar-
tyrs themselves?’47 Like the Augustinian observance of St Justin’s feast,
in 1693 the translation of St Primianus’ relics in the Bavarian town of
Kamnath drew crowds whose intense devotion in the week of festivities
was dedicated to the ‘extirpation of heresy’. This was especially pertinent
in the Upper Palatinate with its proximity to Lutheran territories.48 The
possession of St Justin’s relics and the permission to devote over a week
to liturgical festivities in his honour was similarly apposite for the English
nuns in Paris. As a martyr, beheaded for his Christian faith, Justin’s his-
tory resonated with women from families which had often lost property
and sometimes loved ones for their adherence to Catholicism. Suffering
for religion, and occasionally paying the highest price for commitment to
Rome, was integral to post-Reformation Catholic identity. The religious
cloisters collected the stories of their co-religionists who had suffered for
232 C. WALKER
the faith and remembered them in communal prayers. Therefore, in the

physical remains of St Justin, there coalesced the spiritual and political ide-
als of many exiled nuns and a determination to bring about Catholic tol-
eration in their homeland, ideally through the demise of the Protestants.
The relics and the rituals surrounding them, coupled with the associated
indulgence, affirmed the nuns’ belief that they were legitimate participants
in the fight against the Protestant heresy.
Religious Ritual and the Jacobite Community

in Paris
If we can identify St Justin’s relics as providing a key emotional link

between the Paris Augustinian nuns and Jacobitism, is it possible to iden-
tity a wider emotional community centred upon the martyr’s remains and
their political import for Britain’s Catholic minority?49 The ceremonies
were intended not only for the nuns but also for the participation of a
lay congregation. Anyone who prayed for the extirpation of heresy, for
Christian unity and for the king and royal family during the joint exposi-
tion of the relics and the Eucharist would earn an indulgence. Thus, the
Archbishop of Paris encouraged people outside the cloister to associate
the relics with the religious and political ambitions of English, Scottish
and Irish Catholics, and in so doing defined the Augustinian cloister as a
centre for Jacobite devotion.50 The convent’s annual rituals centred upon
the martyr’s relics evidently drew numerous ecclesiastical and lay devotees.
Exact numbers attending the religious services are not extant, but it is
possible to glean some sense of the feast’s popularity from the chronicler’s
comments about the number of clergy participating in the procession and
from the charitable donations collected each year to defray the cost of the
celebration.
On 17 April 1701, the chronicler recorded that ‘the Procession was
accompanyed with a very considerable number of Churchmen of ye clergy,
& some Religious’.51 A similar comment was appended to the accounts
for 1702, 1709 and 1710.52 While the feast’s apparent popularity among
the clergy was not noted in the intervening years, the number of priests
attending evidently increased to unmanageable proportions. In May 1713,
the timing of the procession was altered. After describing the celebration
of the octave mass, the chronicler explained that the ‘procession wch was
wont to be made at ye closeing of ys solemnity was differd till ye next day
to avoid too great a concours of people wch might cause disorder’. The
next day it was performed ‘wth ye decensey & number of clergimen as was
fitt’.53 In subsequent years the procession continued to occur on the day
after the octave mass.54 While the incident which necessitated the change
is not explained, the number of people participating in the procession had
apparently spiralled out of control. In 1715, the prioress set parameters for
procession participants after an intervention by the cloister’s ecclesiastical
superior.55 The brief chronicle references suggest that clerical participa-
tion in the procession had become considerable, but there is the hint that
lay people had begun to process too, causing logistical difficulties and
perhaps even posing a threat to monastic discipline and order. Whatever
brought about the modification, the changed timing of the procession
points to the increasing popularity of St Justin’s feast among the exiled
British clergy and laity and their Parisian counterparts.
Larger lay participation is also evident from money collected during
the two masses which framed the beginning and end of the relics’ public
exposition in the nuns’ church. At each mass, a lay woman would solicit
alms to cover the cloister’s costs for performing the ritual. Although not a
precise indication of the numbers present in the church, the sum collected
was considerably higher at certain junctures. In the early years of the eigh-
teenth century, between 1702 and 1708, congregants gave between 114
livres and 198 livres at the two masses. In 1709, the combined collections
totalled 378 livres, rising to 379 livres in 1710 and only dropping slightly
to 347 in 1711.56 Amounts diminished to the mid-200s for the next couple
of years, but rose to 300 livres in 1715 and to 365 livres in 1716. Totals
returned to sums in the 200s for the next couple of years, after which the
chronicler ceases recording the donations. There are clearly individual and
political variables determining donations which might be responsible for
increased alms from individuals, but the overall trend upwards to 1712
implies that the mass congregations were rising. Perhaps the key indicator
that the convent church was reaching capacity is the conjunction between
the increase in alms collected and the change in the timing of the proces-
sion in 1713.
Clerical and lay support for the feast reveals that British exiles in
Paris considered the religious observance a significant enough event to
attend. The question remains regarding the reasons for their participa-
tion. It is possible that the relics had established the cloister as a centre
for Jacobitism. The greater monies collected at moments of heightened
political tension in the aftermath of a Jacobite uprising or on the eve of
234 C. WALKER
military activity certainly reflect a high degree of support for the Stuarts
and for those who endeavoured to restore them. Participation in the ritual
and its attendant political objectives might be considered as both a badge
of Jacobite honour and an occasion for renewing fervour for the cause.
The festivities surrounding the relics also provided an annual public occa-
sion when Stuart supporters might gather to reflect on progress (or the
lack thereof) made towards their political goals and to foster connections
with more recent exiles and with French sympathisers. There may also
have been an element of sublimated rebellion enacted through engag-
ing in sacred rituals dedicated to achieving the seemingly stalled Jacobite
religious and political ambitions. Just as the nuns could only pray for a
Stuart restoration and the toleration of Catholicism in their homeland, so
the exiled Jacobites who were unable to take decisive military action on
their own might employ ritual directed towards overcoming Protestantism
and promoting the Stuart cause to compensate for their own limitations.
Religious ritual at the convent accordingly became an alternative form of
activism to invasion and rebellion.
Despite the political aspirations suggested by the popularity of the feast,
it is impossible to know how many of the pious adherents to the cult of
St Justin shared Jacobite goals. Some might simply have been devoted to
the martyr or to the cloister and its exiled religious women, or perhaps
even to earning the indulgence attached to the festivities. The degree of
emotional engagement with the feast is also difficult to gauge. We are left
with a situation in which religious ritual with explicit political objectives
was performed in a manner which might well have elicited the intended
emotional responses—the grief of exile and patriotic fervour for a Stuart
Britain—among its participants. There were opportunities for emotional
effervescence and, in an environment focused on shared suffering for the
faith through martyrdom or exile, there was an opportunity for the estab-
lishment of the high arousal and strong cohesion that is characteristic of
Whitehouse’s imagistic mode of religiosity.57 On the one hand, our sources
allow us to make valid assumptions regarding the potential of this ritual to
form strong emotional bonds between participants and thereby generate a
Jacobite community. On the other hand, these same sources do not reveal
whether this actually occurred, either collectively or on an individual basis.
Yet if we return to the theories about emotional management and
expression discussed in the first section, there is a high likelihood that
those participating in the ritual understood and shared the spiritual and
political ideologies which underpinned it. The chronicler’s third-person
evidence describing its early performances in great detail, the alms col-
lected and the increasing number of people processing in the first decade
of the eighteenth century points to active engagement by the nuns, the
clergy and the laity during the octave. The consecrated space of the con-
vent church with the exposition of the Eucharist, flickering candles, sacred
music, intoned prayers, festive masses and rousing sermons represented
the kind of affective habitus that Reckwitz suggests generates and repro-
duces emotion.58 Although it might be argued that this space, the arte-
facts, media and ceremonies also functioned on other occasions for very
different purposes, the participants in St Justin’s feast were appraised of
the political significance of this particular rendition by the indulgence
attached to the exposition of relics.
Writing about Christian penance, Scheer argues that penitential rites
aim to achieve ‘an embodied experience of regret’. The body is mobilised
physically through the pain of wearing a cilice or walking on knees, but also
through ‘focusing attention on painful memories, by listening to a rous-
ing fire-and-brimstone sermon together with others’.59 The ceremonies
surrounding St Justin’s relics functioned similarly to remind participants
of their own and their kin’s suffering for the faith, the exile of the Stuarts
and the Catholic martyrs stretching from St Justin in the second century
to their own time. The relics’ procession through the cloister in a form
of pilgrimage required physical exertion, while reminding the participants
of the arduous path to heaven via earthly trials. Those processing walked
with the martyr and remembered his suffering for the faith, which was
not at odds with their own experiences of religious persecution and exile.
Moreover, the indulgence and presumably the content of the sermons, in
combination with the ceremonies and rituals, including specific antiphons
and prayers for martyrs, sought to engage the emotions of participants.
Grief for religious persecution and anger at William III’s (and his succes-
sors’) ‘usurpation’ of the British Crown could thereby be channelled into
patriotic determination to assist the Jacobite cause (see also Chap. 8).
Conclusion
For the English, Scottish and Irish at the liturgical celebrations surround-
ing St Justin’s relics, the experience of exile presumably did intersect with
the spiritual and political intent of the feast, and encouraged reflection
upon its potential power to transform church and state in Britain. The
extent to which this reflection matched the official objective of performing
236 C. WALKER
the exposition and translation of the relics as an act of Jacobite devotion

is difficult to ascertain. However, as Trevor Johnson concluded regarding
the significance of the catacomb saints for local identity in Bavaria, the
authorities’ success in communicating the martyrs’ universalising message
to the people might be unclear, but the high attendance and participa-
tion in the translation processions and other rituals suggests that like their
religious and secular leaders, ‘the ordinary laity too were able to graft
their own sets of meanings and identifications on to the ever-receptive
relics’.60 The ritual exposition and procession of St Justin’s relics evidently
stuck an emotional chord with British exiles and Jacobite sympathisers
in Paris. It was still celebrated annually in 1749 and beyond, despite the
failed uprisings of 1715 and 1745 and the apparently fading possibility of
a Jacobite restoration. We might conclude therefore that the rituals which
comprised the feast of St Justin played a significant part in the formation
of Jacobite identity, both for the nuns who facilitated and participated in
them and also for the congregation of clergy and laity who came each year
to participate. Whether the infusion of spiritual meaning in a ceremony
focused on the relics of an early Christian martyr or the political meaning
so closely connected with the post-Reformation Catholic and contempo-
rary Jacobite martyrs, or both, the relics of St Justin created an emotional
community of ritual participants who bonded, if only temporarily, in the
cause of Catholicism, the extirpation of heresy and devotion to the Stuart
royal family.
Notes
1. Westminster Diocesan Archives (hereinafter WDA), Archives of the
Augustinian Canonesses of Paris (hereinafter OSA), MS ‘Diurnall of
the English Canonesses Regulars of St. Augustin’s Order established
in Paris upon ye fosse of Saint Victor’ (hereinafter MS ‘Chronicle,
vol. I’), fol. 7.
2. Laurence Lux-Sterritt, ‘Divine Love and the Negotiation of

Emotions in Early Modern English Convents’, in The English
Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity,
ed. Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013),
229–45.
3. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that What
Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to
Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220.
4. ‘Patriotism’, OED Online. Loyalty to king and parliament dates

from 1716.
5. Christoph Wulf, ‘Memory, Mimesis and the Circulation of Emotions
in Rituals’, in Emotions in Rituals and Performances, ed. Axel
Michaels and Christolph Wulf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 79.
6. Ibid., 80.
7. Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf, ‘Emotions in Rituals and

Performances: An Introduction’, in Emotions in Rituals and
Performances, ed. Michaels and Wulf, 16–17.
8. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Ritual in Early Modern Christianity’, in
Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 6 Reform and Expansion
1500–1660, ed. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 379–80. See also Mary Carruthers, The
Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images,
400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14–16,
40–4 for the relationship between memory, emotion and
pilgrimage.
9. Harvey Whitehouse, ‘Modes of Religiosity: Towards a Cognitive
Explanation of the Sociopolitical Dynamics of Religion’, Method and
Theory in the Study of Religion 14 (2002): 296–303, esp. 297–9.
10. Ibid., 303–8, esp. 303–4, 307.
11. Ibid., 309.
13. See also Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 4–9.
14. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 201, quoting Pierre

Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990), 54.
16. Ibid., 209.
17. Ibid., 210.
18. Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook’,

Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16(2) (2012):
241–58.
19. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 210; Reckwitz, ‘Affective
Spaces’, 255.
20. Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English
Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 163–72; Claire Walker, ‘An Ordered Cloister?:
238 C. WALKER
Dissenting Passions in Early Modern English Convents’, in Gender

and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern England: Destroying
Order, Structuring Disorder, ed. Susan Broomhall (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2015), 197–214. See also Nicky Hallett, The Senses in
Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of
Pleasure’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 51–67.
21. Claire Walker, ‘Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and
Intelligence Networks’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 42(3) (2012): 635–55.
22. Figures from the Who were the Nuns? Database, http://wwtn.his-
tory.qmul.ac.uk (accessed 15 October 2016).
23. Walker, Gender and Politics, 38–41, 109.
24. Claire Walker, ‘When God Shall Restore Them to Their Kingdoms’:
Nuns, Exiled Stuarts, and English Catholic Identity, 1688–1745’, in
Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660–1760, ed. Sarah Apetrei and
Hannah Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 84–5.
25. The ritual centred upon St Justin’s relics did not occur upon his
official feast day, which was not set until 1882. I will use ‘feast’ for
the liturgical events surrounding the relics because the chronicler
used this term.
26. Trevor Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the
Counter-Reformation in Bavaria’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
47(2) (1996): 274–97; Katrina Olds, ‘The Ambiguities of the Holy:
Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Renaissance
Quarterly 65 (2012): 135–84.
27. WDA, OSA MS ‘A Relation of some Remarkable Things that hap-
pened to my Lady Abbesse in her Latter Dayes’, fols 167–8.
28. Ibid., fols 168–9.
29. Ibid., fols 169–72.
30. Ibid., fols 172–3.
31. Ibid., fol. 173.
32. Ibid., fol. 174.
33. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fols 67, 80, 92, 265.
34. From 1730, even this detail ceases and the chronicler simply notes
‘this day ye Procession of St Justin’s Rekicks as usuall made’ or simi-
lar wording. However, from this point, all entries are minimalist,
most likely the result of a change in chronicler.
35. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fol. 72. See fol. 194 for another
instance which occurred upon the death of Princess Louisa Mary
(daughter of James II and Mary of Modena) in April 1712. The rel-

ics remained exposed in the nuns’ choir until the convent sang a
requiem for the princess.
36. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fols 206, 207.
37. Dom Geoffrey Scott, ‘Sacredness of Majesty’: The English Benedictines
and the Cult of James II, Royal Stuart Papers, 23 (Huntingdon:
Royal Stuart Society, 1984); Niall MacKenzie, ‘Gender, Jacobitism
and Dynastic Sanctity’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003).
38. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fols 72, 76.
39. Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), 171.
40. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fols 7, 80, 92.
41. Ibid., fols 55, 115, 127, 137, 180, 206, 225, 236, 304.
42. Geary, Living with the Dead, 208.
43. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fol. 115.
44. Geary, Living with the Dead, 191–2.
45. Guy Lazure, ‘Possessing the Sacred: Monarchy and Identity in

Philip II’s Relic Collection at the Escorial’, Renaissance Quarterly
60(1) (2007): 58–93.
46. WDA, OSA MS ‘A Relation’, fol. 173. For Philip II’s pragmatism
regarding the authenticity of relics, see Lazure, ‘Possessing the
Sacred’, 60.
47. Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications’, 280.
48. Ibid., 289–91.
49. See Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
50. WDA, OSA MS ‘A Relation’, fol. 174.
51. WDA, OSA MS ‘Chronicle, vol. 1’, fol. 67.
52. Ibid., fols 80, 158, 169.
53. Ibid., fol. 206.
54. Ibid., fols 214, 226.
55. Ibid., fol. 226.
56. Ibid., fols 55, 56, 80, 92, 102, 115, 126, 138, 147, 157, 168, 169,
179, 193–4, 205, 206, 214, 225, 226, 235, 236, 242, 252, 265.
57. Whitehouse, ‘Modes of Religiosity’, 307.
58. Reckwitz, ‘Affective Spaces’, 255. See also Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a
Kind of Practice’, 210.
60. Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications’, 296–7.
CHAPTER 12
Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional

Salience of Conversion Rituals
Jacqueline Van Gent
Every year on 17 August, Moravian congregations around the world

remember and celebrate with a special children’s feast the public conver-
sion rituals of a revival movement in south-east Germany in 1727. Here
conversions, and their associated emotional performances, became a driver
for both personal as well as wider social change as the ecstatic conver-
sion experiences of individual girls soon extended to the whole commu-
nity. The revival resulted in the social transformation of the population
of Herrnhut and Berthelsdorf, two newly founded religious communities
belonging to the estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig of Zinzendorf. The
conversion ritual, which became foundational for all Moravian congrega-
tions across the world, was itself modelled on earlier revival experiences
of Protestant religious refugees from Moravia in the Habsburg Empire,
who had to flee the violent and enforced Catholic Reformation and who
had only very recently arrived in Herrnhut. Most of the key female pro-
tagonists came from these families and had experienced existential crises
J. V. Gent (*)
School of Humanities, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_12
242 J. V. GENT
on account of incarceration and the attempts to resist an enforced re-

Catholicisation in the Habsburg Empire. This prophetic movement, in
which adolescent girls acted as ritual leaders, urged the congregation to
repent their sins and to transform their social and spiritual fragmentation
into a unified religious community. The emotional intensity of the conver-
sion ritual continued to live on in the individual memories of its partici-
pants as well as the collective memory of the Moravian Church as a whole.
The ecstatic nature of the very first public Moravian conversion rit-
ual shaped the emotional style of Moravian conversions for the future:
intense somatic experience, exchange of heart and a sequence of emotions
from shame to joy.1 In ritual conversion practice, the painful experience of
self-erasure and spiritual terror and shame was the key to a fundamental
transformation. This central emotion work enabled personal as well as
communal change. The intense event retained its emotional salience not
only in the memoirs of the leading ritual girl actors, but is also remem-
bered and re-enacted across the world to this very day for the power of
ritual transformation which it brought to this community and its ensuing
global mission movement.
The first section of this chapter discusses the emotional salience of con-
version rituals in the memoirs of the female ritual leaders of the 1727 revival
and argues that it was the power of emotions that enabled Moravians to
remember this spiritual and somatic experience that took place in their
childhoods. In the second section, I explore how the collective memory
of this foundational conversion event in Germany impacted on the per-
formance of conversions and the shaping of identities in cross-cultural
encounters at Moravian missions and in the memoirs of indigenous con-
verts. This raises new questions about how emotions tied to conversion
rituals could create emotional salience in a culturally heterogeneous global
community and also provide an effective template for affective strategies
that would allow for the alignment of indigenous converts in missions
across the world.
The Moravians are the earliest global Protestant mission society. During
the eighteenth century, they established missions on all continents except
Australia (which was to follow in the mid nineteenth century) and prosely-
tised across the Danish, Dutch and British empires. These very disparate
Moravian communities were connected through an epistolary network
and through the consistency of religious practice through rituals. In this
chapter I am interested in the concept of emotional salience, that is, the
remembrance of ‘affective experiences of collective rituals’ as one-off and
MORAVIAN MEMOIRS AND THE EMOTIONAL SALIENCE OF CONVERSION... 243
significant self-shaping events which also became important for group for-
mations.2 I argue that the emotional salience of these Moravian conversion
rituals, as expressed in memoirs which were composed many years after
the conversion experience, sustained gendered power relations within the
community and was an important affective strategy for the integration of
colonial converts into the Moravian mission stations across the globe.
The interpretation of replicated conversion rituals, semantics and emo-
tions as part of Christian proselytisation in vastly different cultures and in
the political context of unequal power relations in colonial empires raises
methodological concerns for historians. The similarities seen in such ritu-
als, down to the utterances, gestures and emotions, in cultures that have
very different ideas about the sacred, the self or divine intervention pro-
vokes necessarily critical questions about representations, sources and the
nature of religious change. Critical historical and postcolonial scholarship
has shown convincingly how, at least in the first generations of indigenous
conversions, the attraction to missions was rarely grounded in locals’ theo-
logical acceptance of the Christian message. Indeed, missionaries’ own
letters and diaries are full of examples of misunderstandings and local mis-
interpretations of European Christian teachings. Instead, Christianity, and
indeed the mission regimes themselves, were reinterpreted in light of local
cosmologies and social networks by indigenous Christians.3
Historians of early modern conversions have not yet fully explored the
‘contagious’ nature of emotional arousal produced in conversion rituals.4
Anthropologists, on the other hand, have suggested that ‘strong emo-
tional arousal’ (such as in conversion rituals) can indeed be easily transmit-
ted between cultures and that this necessitates investigating ‘how universal
features of human emotional systems might help to explain cultural trans-
mission’.5 Harvey Whitehouse proposes that imagistic rituals, which are
associated with a singular event of revelatory character, such as conversions,
are defined by high emotional intensity and therefore are remembered
more vividly as profoundly self-shaping events.6 I would add that such
emotionally intense and transformative events lend themselves especially
well to becoming foundational events for the self-understanding of new
communities like the Moravian Church and are transmitted in the collec-
tive memory. Furthermore, the analytical categories of ‘strong emotions’
and their associated ‘motivational effects’ in imagistic rituals might help
us to explain why ritual patterns could be transferred from one context
to another and why indigenous people engaged with Christian missions,
244 J. V. GENT
in particular with Moravian missions, which placed so much emphasis on

emotional rituals as social bonding mechanisms.7
Embodied Moravian Emotions

The embodied nature of emotions was as evident in the European
Moravian congregations as it was in the many mission stations that were
rapidly established around the globe.8 Indeed, the transformation of the
convert was spoken of in Moravian texts as a somatic renewal process—
converts had to acquire a new body, and in particular a ‘new heart’, as the
seat of a Christian spirituality. It was only when missionaries were satisfied
that such a ‘new heart’ was acquired that the conversion was seen as com-
pleted. Earlier indications of a willingness—or unwillingness—by indig-
enous people to accept and internalise the Christian message were spoken
of in terms of them having ‘moved’ or ‘unmoved hearts’.9 The emotional
intensity that was conveyed in this performance of conversion rituals, in
the ritual weeping, kneeling and praying, was frequently repeated and
described as ‘infectious’—that is, the emotional arousal allowed others to
join in (see the similar discussion of the impact of public baptisms in Chap.
6).10 The transformation that was supposed to be achieved in a conversion
ritual was also a transformation of the body and its somatic nature contrib-
uted to the emotional salience of the ritual.
Moravian conversion narratives were usually composed as an individual
experience, but a closer examination reveals a strong, social component
that was expressed in affective bonding with peers of the same age and
gender.11 These social associations between the ritual actors significantly
shaped power relations between community members. The ritual actors of
the Herrnhut conversion movement discussed in this chapter—all adoles-
cent girls at the time—emerged as new political leaders and all achieved
positions of power within the Moravian Church.12 This dynamic confirms
traditional, Christian, power relations that afforded female subordinates
the opportunity to gain the status of a prophet and to demand a public
voice, as long as their male superiors supported them.13
Moravian conversion rituals were instigated by a meditation upon
Christ’s wounds and suffering, which was held to result in a longing for
his love and for repentance. In the 1727 religious revival, adolescent
girls ritualised the components of Moravian conversion—crying, pray-
ing, prostrating oneself, sharing prophetic insights, expressing the need
to receive a new heart and admitting one’s own worthlessness—for the
first time publicly and committed them to the social memory of future
Moravian generations. These rituals were drawn from earlier traditions of
popular prophecy, especially those that had occurred during the Counter-
Reformation, when minority groups, like Protestants in Catholic areas,
came under considerable political duress—and then transferred across very
different historical and cultural contexts as part of the Moravian expansion.
Within these ritual groups, peer associations of sex- and age-segregated
social units called Choirs were the primary social ties, whether they were in
Herrnhut, India or the Caribbean, until at least the end of the eighteenth
century, if not beyond.
Moravian Memoirs
Moravians had been encouraged since the 1740s to write or dictate their
spiritual autobiographies, or Memorien, which were completed after their
deaths by a member of their Choir. These memoirs were read out at the
believer’s funeral and copied into the diaries of the respective Choirs.
The memoirs of prominent members of the congregation were often
later published in the Moravian journals, and they were regularly read
out as a ritual at Congregational Days in other Moravian congregations
around the globe, thus enabling Moravians to model their own perfor-
mance of emotions on these memoirs.14 A memoir would typically com-
mence with the recounting of significant childhood experiences, such
as a spiritual awakening, and would then chart the convert’s spiritual
progression and lapses throughout their life. The final days of life and
the circumstances of the author’s death were added by church members
from the same Choir.
These memoirs adhered to specific and well-established genre con-
ventions which determined the kind of narratives that could be told.
Despite the confinements of the genre, Moravian memoirs still allowed
for the narration of a wide range of spiritual pathways and emotional
life experiences, which makes them a useful source for investigating how
Moravians remembered significant events in their lives.15 While formu-
laic, the narratives allowed for individual self-fashioning of which emo-
tional performances were important to each individual. Another great
advantage of the Moravian memoir collection is that it allows us to
unearth the experiences of a large number of indigenous converts; only
very rarely do historians have access to indigenous voices from the eigh-
teenth century.16
246 J. V. GENT
The Herrnhut Revival (1727)

I shall now consider the textual representation of the children’s awaken-
ing movement in the memoirs of the female ritual leaders of the Herrnhut
revival in 1727. While the Moravian memoirs of both men and women
would lend themselves equally well to a discussion of the role of emo-
tional saliences, I shall restrict my discussion here to the surviving texts of
these leading girls to explore how the conversion ritual was remembered
and what kind of emotional significance was assigned to it (for a parallel
discussion of girls’ religious emotions, see Chap. 9). How did participants
experience emotions in Moravian conversion rituals? What social and emo-
tional alignments were built between the ritual actors, and what forms of
spiritual and social power could they enact? And, finally, what gave these
rituals their emotional salience?
Of the surviving memoirs of Anna Quitt (1706–29), Anna Caritas
Nitschmann (1715–60), Susanna Kühnel (1716–85), Johanna Sophie von
Seydewitz (1718–1801) and Anna Gold (1718–78), the recollections of
Kühnel and Gold contain the most detailed descriptions of the emotional
dynamics of the Herrnhut conversion rituals, but all contain useful informa-
tion that helps us to understand these rituals. The memoir of Quitt, who
sadly passed away at the young age of 23, was written not by herself, but by
a member of her Choir and therefore does not contain her personal recollec-
tions of the conversion ritual. The memoir instead emphasises the position
of authority she had gained, such as her supervision of the younger girls in
the Moravian orphanage and her leadership of the Single Sisters Choir.17
Anna Nitschmann was an active leader in the conversion ritual and
became the most famous female leader of her generation. She was the
daughter of the prominent Hussite leader David Nitschmann, whose fam-
ily had experienced the severity of the Counter-Reformation in Moravia
and Bohemia, where David and his sons had been incarcerated for their
refusal to give up their Protestant beliefs. Together with other perse-
cuted Protestant families, they moved to Herrnhut to take up refuge on
Zinzendorf’s estate in 1722. Anna Nitschmann had been present at the
awakening movements that took place in Zauchtenthal (Bohemia) in 1724,
where hundreds of people had met in her father’s house for c ommunal
praying.18 By the time the Nitschmann family arrived in Herrnhut, she had
experienced the trauma of religious persecution, the incarceration of her
family and their escape. At the time of the revival, she was 12. In 1729,
aged only 14, she became the successor of Anna Quitt as the leader of the
Single Sisters Choir, a role that she retained for almost 30 years. She
worked in the Zinzendorf household, tending to the Count’s daughter
Benigna, and she became Zinzendorf’s constant, and closest, female trav-
elling companion from the 1730s. In 1757, she married Zinzendorf after
the death of his first wife, Erdmuth Dorothea von Reuβ.
Anna Nitschmann wrote her memoir not at the end of her life, as it
was customary for Moravians to do, but at the very young age of 22, and
no later memoirs of hers survive in the archives. Even more surprisingly,
she does not mention the revival movement of 1727, but instead recol-
lects her confirmation and first Eucharist as her most important conver-
sion experience before she was elected as leader of the Single Sisters Choir
in 1729. In the year before her confirmation, she lived through a spiritual
crisis that manifested itself in strong emotions: ‘This brought my heart
and my eyes to many thousand tears and I began to seek Him with all of
my heart. I asked Him to forgive everything and He did so, but I could
not believe it and thought this was too soon’.19
Anna’s self-assessment identifies a moment of deep crisis when she
realised that she was still a spiritually ‘dead’ person, someone who had not
yet been awoken. She sought Christ with all her heart, and not only her
eyes but also her heart were moved to tears. Despite his reassurance that
she had been forgiven her sins, she felt unworthy of Christ’s grace. The
timing of her conversion is crucial: it took place just before her confirma-
tion, a ceremony that marks the ritual transition from childhood to the
entry into the Choir for older girls. It is noticeable that her memoir does
not refer to any social bonding that took place as part of her conversion,
while in the memoirs of the other girls she is clearly remembered as a lead-
ing participant in the ritual.
This is the case, for example, in the memoir of Johanna Sophie von
Seydewitz (married Molther) who was at the time a boarder in the school
for aristocratic girls at the Zinzendorf estate in Berthelsdorf, not far from
Herrnhut.20 In Johanna’s memoir, the conversion ritual and its emotional
power, as well as the social bonding with the other girls as part of the
ritual, are clearly recalled. When Zinzendorf held the ‘children’s hour’,
she recollected, ‘we initially listened to [him] with indifference’. However,
this changed in May 1727 when:
These words so strongly entered our hearts that we all dissolved in tears.
From this day on I was concerned about my blessedness. I quietly cried and
prayed to the Saviour to make me one of his children.21
248 J. V. GENT
Moravian conversional emotions of crying, praying and self-erasure—

‘we all dissolved in tears’—created an experience Johanna could recall in
detail at the end of her life. She emphasised the social bonding nature of
this experience in her memoir, recalling that: ‘We also spoke about this to
each other’.22 Even precise names and the ritual places like the Hutberg
are vivid in her memoir, as these were part of the emotional dynamics of
the ritual sequence. She remembered how the girls at the boarding school
in Berthelsdorf were visited by their peers Anna Nitschmann and Susanna
Kühnel, and she recalls details of the ritual places and the importance of
social bonding: ‘We went to the Hutberg with children from Herrnhut who
were in alliance with us, where we prayed to the Saviour, some laid down
here and there with their faces down and prayed until late into the night’.
Susanna Kühnel (married Hennig) was 11 years old when she insti-
gated the children’s movement in 1727.23 All Moravian sources acknowl-
edge her as the leader of the revival and in the Herrnhut death register she
is even described as a ‘Firstling of the children’s awakening’, a title that is
otherwise only bestowed on the first converts of the Moravian missions.24
Her father, Friedrich Kühnel, moved his family, including his two daugh-
ters Susanna and Elisabeth Maria, to Herrnhut in 1724. Susanna describes
her early childhood years as part of a pious Protestant family in Moravia
who first fled to another village in Upper Lusatia before finally moving
to Herrnhut. She explicitly recalled the piety of her grandparents and
could remember her grandmother’s frequent praying. Her parents played
an equally distinct role in Susanna’s religious development and after her
mother passed away when Susanna was still a child, her father’s spiritual
downfall, despite his initial high standing in Herrnhut, caused her many
years of grief and tied her spiritually to the congregation.
Susanna’s memoir gives us a detailed contextualisation of the ritual and
emotional patterns employed by her and the other girls in the 1727 revival.
The traumatic experiences of her family, and others, who had fled the
Catholic Reformation persecution in Moravia and Bohemia had already in
the preceding few years led to ecstatic revivals which were ritually enacted
by prostrating, crying and the desire to ‘change one’s heart’. Susanna wit-
nessed her mother’s death in early May 1727, on which occasion she ‘was
touched for the first time’.25 On this deathbed scene, her mother had
urged the congregation to remain people of the Lord, which had made a
strong impression on the girl. However, it was later reported that ‘her true
awakening took place on the well-known 17 August 1727, the day which
is still celebrated in memory of the first awakening of the girls’.26
Like Anna Nitschmann and Susanne Kühnel, Anna Gold (married

Kriegelstein) came from a Protestant refugee family and she shared their
pre-Herrnhut experiences of religious persecution.27 Her mother’s brother
was Johann Nitschmann and another uncle, David Nitschmann, had been
imprisoned for his Protestant beliefs in Kunvald in Moravia, where Anna
recalled visiting him.28 These early experiences of religious persecution,
the experience of spiritual terror and the grace of the Saviour form the
context for her reflections on the 1727 revival in Herrnhut.
In her memoir, Anna recalls how she ‘experienced a merciful protection
by God’ at the age of two while still living with her family in Moravia.29 Her
mother had taken her along with her to cut grass for their cattle, and had
rested the young Anna under a tree. Just as her mother returned to check
on her, a wolf approached Anna. The animal did not hurt the child, but
rather stepped to the side when her mother came running and took her
into her arms. This apparent supernatural intervention triggered a spiritual
self-reflection and conversion in the young girl, and Anna emphasised in her
memoir that her spiritual development commenced as a result of this event
and God’s miraculous protection. The girl deliberately chose the Pietist
path of a virtuous life in her early childhood, which was understood in retro-
spect by her as predestination for her later life in a Moravian congregation.
In Moravian spirituality, children were understood to be capable of self-
reflection, which was an essential part of a Pietist understanding of self.30
The conventions of the memoir allowed her to fashion her identity by using
an early childhood event that she could scarcely have remembered herself.
Most importantly, Anna had been part of the children’s awakening ritu-
als in her native Moravia in 1724, at the peak of Counter-Reformation
persecution of the Moravian Brethren. In her memoir, she recalls these
events, which already contained all the significant ritual markers that
would later shape the Herrnhut revival:
In the year 1724, an awakening took place among the children in Moravia.
There I heard that one needs to have a new heart if one wanted to be
blessed, and that one could receive such a new heart only from the dear
God. This put me into new grief because I could see that I was lacking such,
and this made me very sad. I sought out some friends with whom I could
discuss my desire, and the Saviour granted me eight peers who shared my
thoughts. These fell down with me in lonely places and prayed with many
tears for this new heart. I now received the hope that I would be given such
a new heart, but I felt utterly undeserving of this.31
250 J. V. GENT
This passage reveals an astonishing similarity to the key ritual pattern,

including its emotional and somatic expressions, that we find three years
later in the Herrnhut revival: a social association of a group of peers, the
existential crisis of realising one’s spiritual failure, the somatic expressions
of prostrating, the place of fields outside the settlement, right down to the
exact semantic phrase of exchanging one’s heart for a new one. The ritual
transmission here follows an established pattern, confirming Whitehouse’s
suggestion that ritual actors are ‘rehearsing stereotyped procedures that
have been fixed by others in advance’.32
Anna’s family arrived in Berthelsdorf in early July 1727, just in time
for a very emotional, communal celebration of Holy Communion, which
she recalls in her memoir: ‘I can also remember that I felt something very
special during the big Holy Communion in Berthelsdorf on 13 August,
and that I asked Lord Jesus with many tears to think of me as well’.33 It
was the experience of ‘feeling something very special’ that singled this
event out for her. Then, Anna provides us with a detailed description of
the emotional meaning the awakening had for the children:
At the time, when in Herrnhut the great awakening among the children
began, Mr Krumpe [the teacher] once asked his pupils if they truly loved
the Saviour and if they were willing to give Him their hearts so that He
could cleanse them with His blood? He then made with those, who showed
a desire, a pact to love Him, who has loved us first and in whose eyes we are
worth being loved. The Saviour was so close to us that we could feel him.34
This emotional narrative indicates a required willingness to surrender, to

feel the Saviour, and joy. Somatic expressions are present in the form of cry-
ing and communal praying, while adults in position of authority—here the
teacher—supervise and guide the children through these stages of the ritual.
The Memoir of Maria Magdalena of Malabar

(1774–1827)
It is striking and in fact quite unsettling how similar the Moravian reports
about conversion experiences are across vastly different societies.35 The
awakening experiences of Moravian converts, especially prominent converts
whose experiences were recorded in detail and published in mission maga-
zines, repeat key ritual elements of the 1727 events: the awakening takes place
at night, in a place away from the settlement (a ‘wilderness’ such as a forest
or by a river), it is experienced in somatic forms through kneeling down or

prostrating, accompanied by uncontrollable weeping and the acknowledge-
ment, for the first time, of one’s own ‘sinfulness’ or moral worthlessness,
and the need for redemption which is granted though the Saviour. Let us
now turn to the memoir of an Indian convert, Maria Magdalena Malabar,
in Tranquebar (today Tharangambadi in India) who related in her memoir
her own spiritual awakening and conversion directly back to the children’s
revival in distant Herrnhut, about 50 years before she was even born. Maria
Magdalena led a truly transnational life that was not unusual for Moravian
converts of this period. Her frequent moves between mission fields took her
from India to Germany, from Germany to the Caribbean, and finally back
to Europe, to the Danish congregation in Christiansfield where she died.
Maria Magdalena Malabar—we only know her Christian name—was
born on 21 July 1774 at the Moravian mission in Tranquebar, at the time
a Danish colony on the south-eastern coast of India, and was baptised
as an infant. She was the daughter of a slave woman named Aurora and
was only the third convert at that mission since its inception in 1760.36
We learn nothing of her parents in the memoir, only that the child was
immediately ‘devoted through the bath of baptism to the Saviour’.37 In
her memoir, dictated before her death, she begins her recollections, sig-
nificantly, with the impact the stories of the 1727 children’s awakening
had on her when she was a child in Tranquebar:
Already in my early childhood years the feeling of love for Jesus was alive
in my heart, and I attached myself to Him in childish naivety [because of]
the stories of the great awakening of the children in Herrnhut in the year
1727. [I] made a pact with other children to love only the Saviour. This pact
we renewed every week, for the lasting blessing of my heart, because the
impression [it made on me] has lasted to this very hour.38
In this recollection, Maria Magdalena’s awakening is triggered by and

enacted according to the ritual example of the 1727 Herrnhut events:
she makes her submission to Christ a priority and she acts in collaboration
with other children of her age through a pact that is periodically renewed
to sustain its emotional power. Even the semantics of the centrality of the
heart metaphor are the same: spiritual emotions are located in the heart,
the blessing of the heart results in beneficial spiritual development and
there is a requirement to love the Saviour. The salience of the emotions is
simultaneously spiritual and somatic.
252 J. V. GENT
Maria Magdalena describes two other self-shaping childhood rituals

that marked her spiritual development and retained a strong emotional
salience, judging by the way they are recalled (details of place, time, who
spoke) in her memoir and the lifelong moral insights they produced. One
is a reference to the Moravian ritual of Speaking, which was a confessional
conversation regularly undertaken with members of each Choir, includ-
ing children.39 One such devotional conversation with 12-year-old Maria
Magdalena is remembered for its emotional and spiritual impact: ‘he [a vis-
iting Moravian Brother] spoke also individually with each of us older girls.
With heartfelt intensity he admonished me to remain loyal to the Saviour
and to give myself to him as a reward for his suffering’.40 This episode
reinforces the message from the awakening experience: to devote herself
to the Saviour, as a reward for His suffering and to remain loyal to him.
There is again a strong thematic undercurrent of suffering and pain.
Maria Magdalena identifies her First Communion as a further ritual step in
her emotional reorientation. This public entry into the congregation was
an important ritual for every convert: ‘On 13 April 1789 I was gracefully
received into the congregation and in the following year I enjoyed for the
first time the Holy Communion. At this occasion I felt the utmost peace
of God’.41 But this high point of positive experience and spiritual joy had
another emotional subtext—that of sheer terror: ‘Now I got to know the
fundamental depravity of my heart and everything that had brought the
Saviour to the cross [that is, the sinfulness of mankind] thoroughly’.42 The
escape from this unbearable emotional state was the acknowledgement
of Christ’s authority and the submission to his guidance, here phrased in
terms of friendship, trust and redemption: ‘Whereas He, the most loyal
friend of my soul, gracefully attended to me. He allowed me glances into
His heart full of love and I felt his redemption forcefully inside me.’43
The acknowledgement of Christ’s authority was implicitly also an accep-
tance of the mission hierarchy—it was the visiting Moravian Brother’s
admonishments that Maria Magdalena took to heart. And within this mis-
sion hierarchy, she maintained a position that led to a transnational life as
part of the missionary household: to look after the missionary children
and even to accompany them across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to
Europe, where they had to attend boarding school. Maria Magdalena had
not gained the same authority of the girl leaders of 1727; her conversion
rituals had stayed within the frame of her peer group and did not expand
to a more public event. The power that was available to the leading girls of
the Herrnhut revival was out of reach for the Indian convert.
In 1796, the Moravian mission at Tranquebar was dissolved. Maria

Magdalena accompanied the missionaries initially to live in Europe, but
because the climate caused her to be sickly, it was decided that she would
join the Moravian Brethren and Sisters on St Croix in the Danish West
Indies.44 She was trusted with the care of the missionary children and
accompanied them on a second journey to Europe, where the children
were taken for further education in the missionary boarding school. Finally,
after 25 years in the West Indies, Maria Magdalena crossed the Atlantic
again to retire to the Moravian congregation in Christiansfield, Denmark,
where she had to join the Single Sisters in their communal house, which
she recalled in her memoir ‘was very hard for me, it was only after a whole
year that I got used to it’.45
In her memoir, Maria Magdalena modelled her life according to the
main requirements of this literary genre: the emotional performance of
conversion as a ritual of self-transformation (as a response to inner and
outer terror) with a lasting emotional salience. As daughter of a female
slave, she would have been no stranger to the experience of social disrup-
tions and the need to remake one’s identity. It was the conversion ritual
and its narration in the literary genre of a memoir that enabled her to
construct a new identity for herself and to integrate into a new social asso-
ciation of the Moravian Church. The ecstatic conversion ritual allowed
female power to arise out of self-erasure: just as adolescent Moravian girls
in Germany extended their emotional experiences to a community revival
and gained leadership in this movement, Maria Magdalena emphasised
the social bonding with her peers at the Tranquebar mission. It was their
weekly ritual of the ‘pact’ that mattered spiritually and socially, as her
memoir emphasises.
In Tranquebar, the Indian girls were not able to initiate a public
revival—the number of converts was too small—but did this mean that
Maria Magdalena had no aspirations for leadership? It is true that she did
not acquire a political position of authority, as her role models Susanne
Kühnel and Anna Nitschmann had achieved. But we should remember
that these two women also served initially in the household of the Church
leader before they advanced to public positions of leadership. Perhaps this
gave rise to the hope for Maria to achieve the same? Yet, by the end of the
eighteenth century, the gendered structures of authority had changed in
the Moravian Church and aspiring female converts were no longer able to
gain political authority to the same extent as they had earlier. This change
might have not been so clearly visible to the historical actors at the time.
254 J. V. GENT
They still modelled their narratives of their spiritual paths, and the emo-
tional transformations conversions entailed, on the transmitted memory of
the 1727 ritual which continued to hold the appealing promise of a radical
transformation of self and community.
Conclusion
This chapter has discussed Moravian conversion rituals and their emo-
tional saliences as represented in the memoirs of young Moravian women
in Europe and India. The vivid and detailed recollections of the rituals,
including the names of other ritual actors and the ritual places, functioned
as personal and as collective mnemonic devices. Conversion rituals led not
only to behaviour-modifying spiritual reorientations at the time, but also
carried their salience throughout the life spans of the converts. Because
the experiences at the centre of these rituals were essentially painful ones
of self-erasure (‘shame’), social and spiritual crises (‘terror’) or of physi-
cal exhaustion (extensive crying, prostrating and exhausting praying),
they were etched into the convert’s somatic memory. These daughters of
Protestant refugees transferred their filial obedience from the authority of
their fathers to the patriarchal authority of the Church leader, and future
converts at Moravian missions had to do the same symbolic reorientation
of affective bonding away from their home communities to the mission
authority.
The emotional performances that were the conversion rituals were
transmitted across cultures as part of a global, Moravian expansion.
Moravian converts, like Maria Magdalena of Malabar who was associ-
ated with the Moravian mission in Tranquebar, used the ritual pattern to
convey their own experiences of self-erasure many decades later, and in
completely different social and cultural contexts. These similarities are, of
course, grounded in the very genre of Moravian memoirs, which requires
the description of spiritual states and above all the awakening or conver-
sion moment. However, the heightened ‘emotional arousal’ of the rare,
public revival movement offered the opportunity to accept the remaking
of self, for example, through the severing of ties with family and com-
munity of origin as part of the integration into a Christian mission com-
munity. This ritual remaking of self, community and authority produced
emotions of social bonding which could help people to re-align with con-
flicted and heterogeneous communities, such as Moravian missions.
Just as the daughters of Protestant refugees from Moravia moved, in

the 1727 revival, from the authority of their fathers to the patriarchal
authority of Zinzendorf, and had previously experienced the impact of
trauma and violence on their families and communities of origin, so could
indigenous people of later periods identify with these experiences and
model their own required transfer of loyalty to a new Moravian authority.
Not only did they understand the necessity of erasure of self in order to
obtain a new identity in the emerging Moravian congregations, but the
feelings of terror, grief and chaos that had surrounded the 1727 spiritual
outpouring in Herrnhut (and the earlier revivals on which it was mod-
elled) were all-too-familiar scenarios reflecting indigenous experiences in
the colonial outposts that Moravian missions inhabited. In very prevail-
ing ways, emotions transformed spiritual, gendered and social power by
means of conversion rituals.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the concept of ‘emotional styles’, see William
M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History
of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Reddy further develops his concept of ‘emotional styles’ in his
recent book The Making of Romantic Love (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).
2. For a discussion of this concept, see Harvey Whitehouse, ‘From
Mission to Movement: The Impact of Christianity on Patterns of
Political Association in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 4(1) (1998): 43–63 (50).
3. For a similar discussion of cross-cultural miscommunication, see
Chap. 7.
4. While many scholars have observed that emotions were important
and spread fast between great numbers of ritual participants in
revival movements, more detailed historical studies of the nature of
these emotions are only beginning to emerge. For an analysis of
emotions in German Methodist movements, see M. Scheer,
‘Empfundener Glaube. Die kulturelle Praxis religiöser Emotionen
im deutschen Methodismus des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für
Volkskunde 105 (2009): 185–213.
5. Harvey Whitehouse, ‘Emotion, Memory and Religious Ritual: An
Assessment of Two Theories’, in Mixed Emotions: Anthropological
256 J. V. GENT
Studies of Feelings, ed. Kay Milton and Maruška Svašek (Oxford:

Berg, 2005), 91–108 (92).
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 99.
8. For a discussion of the link between embodiment and emotions as
a social practice, see Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of
Practice (and is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A
Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and
Theory 52 (2012): 193–220. I have elsewhere discussed the rela-
tionship between embodiment and the material force of emotions.
See Jacqueline Van Gent, Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-
Century Sweden (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
9. For a more detailed discussion of conversion experiences and emo-
tions in the colonial contexts of Moravian missions, see Jacqueline
Van Gent, ‘The Burden of Love: Moravian Emotions and
Conversions in Eighteenth-Century Labrador’, Journal of Religious
History 39(4) (2015): 557–74.
10. For an overview discussion of this topic, see Christian von Scheve,
‘Collective Emotions in Rituals: Elicitation, Transmission and a
“Matthew-Effect”’, in Emotions in Rituals and Performances, ed.
Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (London: Routledge, 2012),
55–77 (67–9).
11. Craig D. Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in
Colonial Bethlehem (University Park: Penn State University Press,
2004); Craig D. Atwood, ‘Zinzendorf’s Litany of the Wounds’,
Lutheran Quarterly 11 (1997): 189–214; Craig D. Atwood, ‘The
Mother of God’s People: The Adoration of the Holy Spirit as
Mother in the Eighteenth-Century Brüdergemeine’, Church
History 68 (1999): 886–909; Craig D. Atwood, ‘Sleeping in the
Arms of Christ: Sanctifying Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century
Moravian Church’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1997):
25–51; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus is Female. Moravians and
Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
12. For a discussion of the revival movement in Herrnhut, see Pia
Schmid, ‘Die Kindererweckung in Herrnhut am 17. August 1727’,
in Neue Aspekte der Zinzendorfforschung, ed. Martin Brecht und
Paul Peucker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006),
115–33; Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘Gendered Power and Emotions:
The Religious Revival Movement in Herrnhut in 1727’, in

Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder: Gender and Emotions in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Susan Broomhall
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 233–47.
13. As Phyllis Mack, ‘Women as Prophets during the English Civil
War’, Feminist Studies 8(1) (1982): 19–45 (24) has argued, Quaker
women’s transcendence of self through ecstatic prophecy could
provide them with religious agency, despite remaining in a state
of dependency.
14. The importance of reading aloud memoirs and letters at the

Congregational Days for the creation of a Moravian shared identity
has been discussed specifically in Gisela Mettele, Weltbürgertum
oder Gottesreich? Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale
Gemeinschaft 1760–1857 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2009); Peter Vogt, ‘“Everywhere at Home”: The Eighteenth-
Century Moravian Movement as a Transatlantic Religious
Community’, Journal of Moravian History 1 (2006): 7–29; Robert
Beachy, ‘Manuscript Missions in the Age of Print: Moravian
Community in the Atlantic World’, in Pious Pursuits: German
Moravians in the Atlantic World, ed. Michele Gillespie and Robert
Beachy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 33–49.
15. For a discussion of Moravian memoirs as a literary genre, see

Katherine M. Faull (ed. and trans.), Moravian Women’s Narratives:
Their Related Lives, 1750–1820 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1997); Christine Lost, Das Leben als Lehrtext. Lebensläufe
aus der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider
Verlag Hohengehren, 2007); Thomas Ruhland, ‘Religion, Space
and Community: The Topos of “the World” in Moravian Memoirs’,
in Bridging the Gaps: Sources, Methodology and Approaches to
Religion in History, ed. Joaquim Carvalho (Pisa: PLUS-Pisa
16. The use of a European, Christian, self-narrative genre by Moravian
converts in a colonial context has been problematised by an increas-
ing number of scholars. See, for example, Katherine Faull, ‘Self-
Encounters: Two Eighteenth-Century African Memoirs from
Moravian Bethlehem’, in Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa
and Germany in the Modern World, ed. D. McBride, L. Hopkins
and C.A. Blackshire-Belay (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998),
29–51; Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘The Lives of Others: Moravian
Indigenous Converts’ Writings and the Politics of Colonial
258 J. V. GENT
Autobiographies’, in Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle

Perspektiven, ed. Hans Medick, Angelika Schaser and Claudia
Ulbrich (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 87–102.
17. Unitätsarchiv Herrnhut (hereinafter UA), R. 22.9.12, Memoir of
Anna Quitt.
18. ‘Lebenslauf der Anna Nitschmann von ihr bis 1737 in ihrem 22.
Lebensjahre eigenhändig verfasst’, Nachrichten aus der Brüdergemeine
26 (1844) (hereinafter ‘Anna Nitschmann’), 577–611.
19. ‘Das brachte mein Herz und meine Augen zu vielen tausend

Thränen, und ich fing an, Ihn mit ganzen Herzen zu suchen, bat
Ihm alles ab, und Er vergab mirs auch; aber ich konnte es nicht
glauben und dachte, es wäre zu bald’. Ibid., 578. All translations
are the author’s own.
20. UA, R. 22.79.38, Memoir of Johanna Sophie Molther (née von
Seydewitz) (hereinafter ‘Johanna Sophie von Seydewitz’).
21. ‘Diese Worte drangen uns so mächtig zu Herzen, daβ wir alle in
Thränen zerflossen. Von diesem Tage an wurde ich um meine
Seligkeit bekümmert, darum betete ich in der stille zum Heiland,
daβ Er mich zu einem Ihm wohlgefälligen Kinde machen wolle.’
UA, R. 22.79.38, Johanna Sophie von Seydewitz.
22. ‘Wir unterhielten uns auch miteinander von unseren Herzens

Anliegen.’ UA, R. 22.79.38, Johanna Sophie von Seydewitz.
23. UA, Gemeinnachrichten 1786, I. Beilage zur 4. Woche I, 2,
Memoir of Susanna Hennigin (nee Kühnel) (hereinafter ‘Susanna
Kühnel’), 11–40.
24. Schmid, ‘Die Kindererweckung’, 121.
25. ‘wurde sie zum erstenmal gerührt’; Susanna Kühnel, 15.
26. Ibid., 16.
27. Memoir of Anna Kriegelstein, née Gold (1713–78), Nachrichten
aus der Brüdergemeine, I, (1886) (hereinafter ‘Anna Gold’), 163–84.
28. Ibid., 164.
29. ‘Erfuhr ich eine gnädige Bewahrung Gottes’; ibid., 163.
30. Recent studies of Moravian childhood include Pia Schmid, ‘Orte
für Kinder. Zur Architektur pädagogischer Räume in der Herrnhuter
Brüdergemeine des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Unitas Fratrum 52/53
(2003): 81–96; Josef N. Neumann and Udo Sträter (eds),
Waisenhäuser in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 1998); Katherine Faull, ‘“Girls Talk”—das “Sprechen” von
Kindern. Herrnhutische Seelsorge an den grossen Mädchen im 18.
Jahrhundert’, Unitas Fratrum 57/58 (2006): 183–96; Christine
Lost, ‘“Kinder in Gemeinschaft bringen”. Zu Konzept und Praxis

der Kindererziehung in der frühen Brüdergemeine’, in Das Kind in
Pietismus und Aufklärung, ed. Josef N. Neumann and Udo Sträter
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 95–109; Pia Schmid,
‘Die Entdeckung der Kindheit sub specie religionis. Kindheitsbild
und Kindererziehung in der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine des 18.
Jahrhunderts’, Unitas Fratrum 57/58 (2006): 37–56.
31. ‘Im Jahre 1724 entstand in Mähren eine Erweckung unter den
Kindern. Da hörte ich, daβ man ein neues Herz haben müsse,
wenn man selig warden wollte, und daβ man ein solches allein vom
lieben God erhalten könne. Dies versetzte mich in neuen Kummer,
da ich sah, daβ es mir daran fehlte und ich war darum sehr verle-
gen. Zugleich suchte ich einige Gespielinnen, denen ich mein
Verlangen entdecken könnte, und der Heiland schenkte mir, acht
Altersgenossen zu finden, die meines Sinnes waren, und mit mir an
einsamen Plätzen niederfielen, und um dies neue Herz oft unter
vielen Thränen beten. Ich erhielt nun auch die Hoffnung, daβ mir
dies neue Herz zuteil warden würde, fühlte mich aber desselben
ganz unwürdig.’ Anna Gold, 164–5.
32. Whitehouse, ‘Emotion, Memory’, 92.
33. ‘Ich weiβ mich noch zu besinnen, daβ ich unter dem groβen
Abendmahl in Berthelsdorf am 13. August 1727 etwas ganz
besonderes gefühlt und den Herrn Jesum unter vielen Thränen
gebeten habe, an mich zu denken.’ Anna Gold, 166.
34. ‘Um die Zeit da in Herrnhut die groβe Erweckung unter den
Kindern anging, fragte Herr Krumpe einmal seine Schüler, ob sie
auch den Heiland lieb hätten, und Ihm seine Herzen hingeben
wollten, auf daβ Er sie mit seinem Blute waschen möge? Er machte
dann mit denen, die ein Verlangen danach bezeugten, den Bund,
Ihn, der uns zuerst geliebt hat und in dessen Augen wir so wert
seien, von ganzem Herzen wieder zu lieben. Dabei war uns der
Heiland fühlbar nahe.’ Ibid., 166–7.
35. I have discussed some of the methodological problems that letters
and memoirs of indigenous converts pose in Jacqueline Van Gent,
‘Sarah and Her Sisters: Identity, Letters and Emotions in the Early
Modern Atlantic World’, Journal of Religious History 38 (2014):
71–90; see also Van Gent, ‘The Lives of Others’.
36. Thomas Ruhland, ‘The Moravian Brethren and the Danish-Halle
Mission in Tranquebar: “The Garden of the Brothers” at the
Centre of a European Conflict’, in Halle and the Beginning of
260 J. V. GENT
Protestant Christianity in India, ed. A. Gross, Y.V. Kumaradoss

and H. Liebau, 3 vols (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen,
2006), ii, 743–66 (760).
37. ‘durch das Bad der heiligen Tauffe Gott meinem Heiland geweiht
worden.’ UA, R. 22.84.21, Memoir of Maria Magdalena of
Malabar (hereinafter ‘Maria Magdalena’). On the Moravian
Tranquebar mission (1759–95), see J. Ferdinand Feyer, History of
the Tranquebar Mission (Tranquebar: Tranquebar Mission Press,
1863); Hartmut Beck, Brüder in vielen Völkern: 250 Jahre Mission
der Brüdergemeine (Erlangen: Verlag der Ev.-Luth. Mission,
1981); Karl Müller, 200 Jahre Brüdermission. Vol. I: Das erste
Missionsjahrhundert (Herrnhut: Missionsbuchhandlung, 1931);
Ruhland, ‘The Moravian Brethren’.
38. ‘Schon in meinen frühen Kinderjahren, regte sich das Gefühl der
Liebe Jesu in meinem Herzen, u. ich hing an Ihn mit kindlicher
Einfalt bey den Erzählungen von der großen Erweckung der
Kinder in Herrnhut im Jahre 1727, schloß ich mit einigen anderen
Kindern den Bund, nur einzig und allein den Heiland zu lieben.
Diesen Bund erneuerten wir alle Wochen, meinem Herzen zum
bleibenden Segen, denn der Eindruck davon ist mir bis in diese
Stunde lebendig geblieben.’ UA, R. 22.84.21, Maria Magdalena.
39. Faull, ‘“Girls Talk”, 183–96.
40. ‘sprach er auch einzeln mit jeder von uns größeren Mädchen. Mit
Herzens Anglegenheit ermahnte er mich dem Heiland treu zu ble-
iben u. mich Ihm auf ewig zum Lohne seiner Schmerzen zu wei-
hen.’ UA, R. 22.84.21, Maria Magdalena.
41. ‘Den 13. April 1789 ward mir die Gnade zu Theil, in die Gemeine
aufgenommen zu werden, u. im folgenden Jahre genoß ich zum
erstenmal das heilige Abendmahl mit derselben. Bey dieser feyerli-
chen Gelegenheit wurde ich dem Frieden Gottes auf das Fühlbarste
inne.’ Ibid.
42. ‘Nun lerne ich die Grundverdorbenheit meines Herzens und alles
was den Heiland ans Kreuz gebracht hat, immer gründlicher ken-
nen.’ Ibid.
43. ‘wobey Er, der treuste Freund meiner Seele, sich gnädig meiner
annahm. Er ließ mich diese Blicke in sein Herz voll Liebe thun,
und ich fühlte Seine Vergebung in meinem Inneren kräftig.’ Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. ‘Das Eingewöhnen im Schwesternhause wurde mir sehr schwer,
erst nach Verlauf eines Jahres gewohnte ich mich ganz ein.’ Ibid.
CHAPTER 13
The Transformation of Sabbath Rituals

by Jean Crépy and Laurent Bordelon:
Redirecting Emotion through Ridicule
Charles Zika
In 1710, the highly successful Parisian author, the abbé Laurent Bordelon,
chaplain of St Eustache in Paris, published his best-known satirical work,
one of more than 30 he had published during his lifetime. The work was
entitled The Story of the Extravagant Imaginations of Monsieur Oufle,
Occasioned by his Reading of Books Treating Magic, the Demonic Arts,
Demoniacs and Witches, and appeared in Paris and in Amsterdam (both in
French) in the same year.1 Oufle was an anagram for le fou (the fool), and
Bordelon’s book recounted the adventures of this foolish and credulous
gentleman obsessed by magical beliefs and fears. The book was remarkably
successful and was translated into English in the following year and into
German in 1712. It was republished in French in 1754 and 1793.
The two 1710 French editions, the 1754 French edition and the 1712
German edition were illustrated with full-page prints that depicted vari-
C. Zika (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_13
262 C. ZIKA
ous scenes from Monsieur Oufle’s adventures.2 These three French edi-
tions also included a larger fold-out print (157 × 280 cm) engraved by
the French printmaker Jean Crépy, which accompanied the last chapter
of Bordelon’s work, entitled ‘A Description of the Witches’ Assembly
called the Sabbath’ (Fig. 13.1).3 Bordelon’s work is witness to a monu-
mental transformation in attitudes towards witchcraft in the early eigh-
teenth century, and Crépy’s print demonstrates the critical role played by
Sabbath rituals in this transformation. This chapter attempts to explore
the way in which Crépy makes use of visual and emotional strategies in
that print to neutralise the fears and disgust associated with older images
of the Sabbath. Sabbath rituals are shown to be no more than mental
and emotional folly, the product of human fear and credulity created by
‘an extravagant imagination’. Through parody and ridicule, Crépy is able
to communicate the powerlessness of Sabbath rituals and the consequent
folly of any belief and emotional investment in magic and witchcraft.
Fig. 13.1 Jean Crépy, A Description of the Witches’ Assembly called the Sabbath,
engraving, in Laurent Bordelon, L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de
Monsieur Oufle (Paris: Nicolas Gosselin and Charles Le Clerc, 1710), vol. 2,
between 306 and 307. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 12 Theta
1637
THE TRANSFORMATION OF SABBATH RITUALS BY JEAN CRÉPY AND LAURENT... 263
Although the rituals of the Sabbath were clearly described in a number

of documents from the Western Alps, southern Germany and Burgundy in
the second third of the fifteenth century, witchcraft only became strongly
identified with Sabbath rituals throughout much of Europe over the course
of the seventeenth century. The demonologies of authors such as Jean
Bodin, Nicolas Rémy and Martin Del Rio, as well as the questionnaires or
interrogatories that began to be widely used in judicial procedures in the
seventeenth century, were critical in elaborating Sabbath rituals as paro-
dies of religious ceremonies involving dancing, feasting, cannibalism, ini-
tiation and other acts of religious desecration, all of which were presided
over by the devil and culminated in the ritual obscene kiss on the backside
of the devil and a collective sexual orgy. The witches’ Sabbath also only
appears in the visual imagery from the very late sixteenth century. Prior to
the 1590s, very few illustrations of the Sabbath are to be found.4 From the
first decade of the seventeenth century, however, artists begin to depict
the various rituals of the Sabbath in great detail, stimulated most prob-
ably by the increasingly graphic literary descriptions. Frans Francken II,
Jacques de Gheyn II, Jan Ziarnko and, a little more than a decade later,
Michael Herr and Matthäus Merian the Elder, developed an iconography
of the witches’ assembly or Sabbath similar to the descriptions found in
the demonologies.5
These images of Sabbath rituals developed in different ways over the
course of the seventeenth century, but by the early eighteenth century,
they had decreased in number under the pressure of increasing scepticism
towards witchcraft beliefs and of the critiques levelled against the abuse of
judicial procedure in witch trials through much of Western and Central
Europe. By this time, the number of trials had either ceased or declined
radically in most European states and territories, the exception being parts
of Eastern Europe such as Hungary and Poland. In response to this decline
and increasing scepticism, the imagery of witchcraft also begins to change,
and one of the new themes to emerge is the use of parody and ridicule.
Jean Crépy’s use of such techniques in his depiction of witches’ rituals at
the Sabbath serves to diminish the hold that Sabbath rituals must have had
over the imagination of many Europeans and to transform an earlier ico-
nography suffused with disgust and fear concerning the a bominable prac-
tices of witches into one that represents these rituals as patently ridiculous
and belief in them a product of naïve and superstitious credulity.
This chapter is an attempt to uncover these emotional strategies
adopted by Crépy to bring about this fundamental transformation in
264 C. ZIKA
attitudes towards Sabbath rituals and witchcraft, first in the minds of the
readers of Bordelon’s work and, second, in the wider society as a whole.
In the first section, I locate Crépy’s engraving of the rituals of the witches’
Sabbath firmly within the context of Laurent Bordelon’s attack on witch-
craft as superstitious and credulous. In the second, I show how Crépy’s
engraving was modelled on an influential image of the Sabbath created a
century earlier in 1613 by Jan Ziarnko, in which the witches’ ritual dance
represents a key to the collective and emotional threat of witchcraft. In
the third, I discuss how Crépy used this ritual dance of the Sabbath as an
instrument with which to lampoon and neutralise such beliefs and dismiss
the underlying fears that sustained them.
Laurent Bordelon’s History—Credulity

and Anxiety
A History of the Ridiculous Extravagances of Monsieur Oufle, the satirical

novel in which Jean Crépy’s depiction of Sabbath rituals is found, com-
bines a number of quite different literary genres.6 It presents the adven-
tures of Monsieur Oufle in the manner of romance novels in order to
demonstrate the utter credulity of a man obsessed by his belief in the
magical and occult arts, and totally resistant to any critique of them,
let alone any scepticism as to their efficacy. The novel relates Monsieur
Oufle’s various adventures subsequent to his belief that he has been trans-
formed into a werewolf; his employment of various magical practices to
uncover the supposed infidelity of his wife; his intransigence towards the
marriage of his daughter because of a horoscope that foretold she would
become a nun; his attempts to rid himself of apparitions and ghosts that
tormented him; and his fear of various animals such as pigs, dogs and flies,
which he suspects are embodiments of the devil. These stories are often
highly comic, but their purpose is strongly didactic. As is the case with
many of his other works, Bordelon’s aim is to use such entertaining and
comic accounts to reveal fundamental truths about human nature and to
attack what he sees as the superstitions of his age.7 From the very outset,
his work contrasts credibility, scepticism, truth and reason with credulity,
superstition, prejudice, fraud and folly. As already indicated, Oufle’s name
is an anagram for le fou (the fool), and his extravagantes imaginations8
(or ‘ridiculous extravagances’ in the English translation) result from his
credulity and his fear. Within the narrative, Bordelon’s didactic claims are
supported by long ‘discourses’ and ‘critico-comical reflections’ by Oufle,
by his sceptical brother Noncrede and by his credulous elder son, Abbot
Doudou, on subjects such as apparitions, judicial astrology and devils, and
these serve to break up and create a kind of philosophical commentary on
the narrative chapters.9
A feature of Bordelon’s History that distinguishes it from most con-
temporary and earlier romances is the abundance of scholarly works on
which it draws for its information. These are referenced, as the title of
the work indicates, in the numerous notes included at the bottom of each
page, notes that on some pages are longer than the actual text itself. In the
early editions, the references used are also listed in Chap. 3 (‘Of Monsieur
Oufle’s Library’), together with comments on the contents and useful-
ness of some of the more important titles.10 The purpose of this catalogue
and the notes that draw on the individual titles are central to the aim
of Bordelon’s History, for Bordelon’s argument throughout the work is
that Oufle’s credulity and superstition, his prejudices and monomaniacal
obsession, have been formed and continue to be nourished by his reading
of such books.11 In other words, Oufle does not represent the ignorance
or superstition of the common man; his credulity and prejudice stem from
literature, from books on magic and witchcraft written by those he refers
to as ‘daemonographers’. So the ridiculous situations in which he finds
himself embroiled, as well as the fear and anxiety that govern so many of
his decisions, stem from an ignorance that is formed through the read-
ing of these books. This does not mean that he needs to abandon books,
argues Bordelon. He just needs to read other books, books that develop a
healthy scepticism and cure him of his ‘extravagant imagination’.
Of the 120 or so titles listed in Chap. 3, those drawn on most frequently
by Bordelon include the works of Gabriel Naudé, Balthasar Bekker, Jean
Bodin, Martin Del Rio, Cornelius Agrippa, Jean-Baptiste Thiers and the
pseudo-Albertine Book of Secrets.12 This broad selection is used for the
most part by Bordelon to sketch out a comprehensive account of claims
about witchcraft, while drawing on a few occasions on the scepticism that
supports his own views. A very important source for Bordelon, and also for
this study, is Pierre de Lancre’s Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels
and Demons (1612). De Lancre’s work is cited throughout and it is the
primary source for the chapter that concludes Bordelon’s work, entitled
‘A Description of the Assembly of the Sorcerers, called their Sabbath’.13
It is to this chapter that Crépy’s etching of Sabbath rituals was appended,
an image, as we shall see, that draws heavily on a print of the Sabbath by
the Polish artist Jan Ziarnko, which was appended to the 1613 edition of
266 C. ZIKA
de Lancre’s work. Bordelon’s chapter on Sabbath rituals is very different

from the previous narrative and didactic chapters of the History, insofar
as Monsieur Oufle is not directly involved in the action. As the prologue
to the chapter describes, Oufle is only present as a spectator, not as an
actor. He attends the Sabbath, the reader is told, because of his immense
desire to observe it once in his life, a desire which has been nourished by
‘his reading that everything was surprising, prodigious and astonishing in
these Diabolical Assemblies [emphasis added]’. Oufle wishes to ‘discover
whether all he had read or heard of it were true’.14 It is Oufle’s curios-
ity and his desire to witness the marvellous and wondrous, expectations
nourished by his reading, that drive his attendance at the Sabbath (see also
Chap. 6 for discussion of reading about ritual).
The Sabbath chapter is also linked to the rest of Bordelon’s work visually
by the depiction of Monsieur Oufle’s presence in the bottom left corner
of Crépy’s etching (Fig. 13.1). Dressed in contemporary eighteenth-
century clothing, Oufle is accompanied by a figure behind him dressed
in the traditional costume of the fool—a hood and cowl with ass’s ears,
a dagged tunic and long boots, all festooned with small bells—and holds
a fool’s bauble in one hand, while pointing at Monsieur Oufle with the
other.15 He looks out at the viewer, moreover, revealing to his audience
the true fool in front of him. These two figures can be found in the nine
other prints that illustrate Bordelon’s text (Fig. 13.2). In each scene, the
same fool is positioned behind Monsieur Oufle, quite often pointing or
gesturing towards him in the same way, while looking out at the viewer.
Monsieur Oufle’s desperate wish to be present at a Sabbath is clearly
being represented visually as nothing but folly, a sign of Monsieur Oufle’s
‘extravagant imagination’ at work.
The Model Sabbaths of Jan Ziarnko and Pierre de

Lancre—Disgust and Fear
Visual images do not simply illustrate and enliven Bordelon’s narrative
of Monsieur Oufle’s follies; they also play a crucial role in the process
of revealing truth. While reading and fear constitute the primary sources
of Monsieur Oufle’s credulity concerning witchcraft and the ‘pretended
Diabolical Assembly’ at which the Sabbath rituals take place, seeing is also
critical.16 In the very first chapter of the book, Bordelon claims that ‘a great
number of pictures which he [Monsieur Oufle] had caused to be painted
Fig. 13.2 Jean Crépy,

Monsieur Oufle and the
Astrologers, frontispiece
engraving, in Laurent
Bordelon, L’histoire des
imaginations extrava-
gantes de Monsieur Oufle
(Paris: Nicolas Gosselin
& Charles Le Clerc,
1710), vol. 1. The
Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford, 12
Theta 1637
at a great expense by the ablest masters of the country … proved and rep-
resented his prejudice’.17 Amongst a number of such pictures that the nar-
rator describes as being in Monsieur Oufle’s library—depictions of ritual
magicians, astrologers, diviners, fortune-tellers, contorted d emoniacs and
all manner of devils—there was one picture so big that it covered the floor
of a whole gallery: ‘a very large picture which represented the Sabbath,
or nocturnal rendezvous of conjurors and witches; it was crowded with a
great number of figures, some of which struck horror, and others excited
laughter’.18 There is no indication that this passage refers to an imagined
blown-up version of the Crépy print that illustrates the Sabbath towards
the end of Bordelon’s book. However, the mixture of horror and laughter
that the narrator claims such a print would stimulate in its viewers certainly
seems to be pertinent to Crépy’s depiction of the Sabbath and its rituals.
268 C. ZIKA
Jean Crépy’s representation of the Sabbath primarily drew on an earlier

and very influential etching of the Sabbath created a century earlier in
1613 by Jan Ziarnko, a Polish artist from Lwow, who spent most of his
career in Paris working at the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII (Fig.
13.3).19 Ziarnko’s print was specifically produced to illustrate the descrip-
tion of the Sabbath by the French magistrate, Pierre de Lancre, in the
second 1613 edition of his Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and
Demons (1612), a work based on evidence collected during de Lancre’s
four-month stay in 1609 in the Pays de Labourd, the Basque region of
south-west France.20 This followed de Lancre’s appointment by Henry IV
Fig. 13.3 Jan Ziarnko, Description and Depiction of the Witches Sabbath, etching,
in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris:
Nicolas Buon, 1613), following 118. By permission of University of Glasgow
Library, Special Collections
as head of a royal commission established to investigate the activities of

witches in this region and was also complemented with evidence related to
the trials on the Spanish side of the border, culminating in the large auto-
da-fé staged in the city of Logroño in November 1610 and a subsequent
investigation by the Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías.21
Pierre de Lancre, a magistrate of the Bordeaux Parlement, was strongly
convinced of the reality of witchcraft and actively pursued its elimination
in the Labourd. As Gerhild Scholz Williams has argued, witchcraft for de
Lancre was not simply a threat to individual souls, as was heresy and apos-
tasy; it threatened the very body politic, the political order of the French
kingdom and state. De Lancre’s work was meant to demonstrate the
sacred power of the king and state in the eradication of witchcraft, a reaf-
firmation of power in a period following the instability of the civil wars and
in a territory that had only become part of the kingdom a century earlier.22
He describes the Labourd as a completely foreign country, comparing its
inhabitants at times to the Indians of the New World, and attributing their
coarseness, wildness and lack of tranquility to the inconstancy of the sea.23
The inconstancy of the sea and the absence of the menfolk for half the
year while fishing is also the basis for the hedonism and lasciviousness of
the women. Indeed, the environment, social structure and customs of the
inhabitants of the Labourd shape the physical behaviour and emotional
disposition of its inhabitants and constitute the principal reasons why ‘this
nation has a remarkable inclination to perform witchcraft’.24 As de Lancre
claims:
People are easily swayed in body and soul, quick and hasty in all their actions,
with one foot always in the air, as one says, hot-headed … They are more
inclined to murder and vengeance than toward theft and forgiveness. They
walk about at night like hooligans. They love revelling and dances at night
as well as during the day—and not grave and slow dances, but rather frenetic
and fast ones. To them the kind of dance that most contorts and agitates
their bodies and is the most painful seems the best and the most becoming.
And they dance to the same tambourine that they customarily use at the
Sabbath dances.25
A love of dancing movement, especially disorderly movement that con-

torts the body, signifies and communicates an inner lack of constancy, a
fickleness, a disposition to vice and, ultimately, an attraction to the perver-
sions of witchcraft.
270 C. ZIKA
Dancing therefore occupies a very prominent place in de Lancre’s

description of Sabbath rituals in the Labourd. These rituals are given far
more detailed exposure than in earlier demonological works, such as those
of Jean Bodin, Nicholas Remy or Martin del Rio. All of Book 2 and sec-
tions of Books 3 and 6 are concerned with the various rituals that occur at
the Sabbath, where and when the Sabbath takes place, how witches travel
to it, what they produce there and how it concludes—whereas most other
sections of the work also refer to aspects of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is
central to de Lancre’s understanding of witchcraft, insofar as it represents
the infernal kingdom with all its inversions of Christian values and the
rightful order of a Christian society. The Sabbath dance is one of the key
rituals that subverts that order for de Lancre, and so it is not so surprising
that both Ziarnko and (a century later) Crépy pick up on the ritual of the
Sabbath dance as a key to the emotional power exercised by witchcraft in
the minds and imaginations of believers and sceptics alike.
Jan Ziarnko’s depiction of the witches’ Sabbath (Fig. 13.3) features six
tableaux located around a central scene that shows three women work-
ing at a cauldron, cutting up toads and snakes to throw into the seething
potion, and fanning the flames with large bellows. In the thick, dark smoke
that belches from the cauldron, witches are seen riding their brooms,
together with demonic spirits, bones and body parts. Ziarnko drew heavily
on Jacques de Gheyn’s 1610 engraving Preparation for a Witches’ Sabbath
for many of these details.26 His own distinct contribution to Sabbath ico-
nography was the group of five different tableaux positioned around this
central turbulent vertical shaft, depicting Sabbath rituals: the presentation
of a child by a witch and devil to Satan, shown seated on a throne in the
form of a goat, and flanked by the Queen of the Sabbath and another
consort; a back-to-back dance of naked witches and devils around a tree;
a group of witches and their demonic paramours seated at a table and
feasting on the flesh of unbaptised children;27 a second group of younger
naked women dancing back to back in a circle to the music of a female
consort; a large crowd of noble and wealthy men and women, some of
them masked, attended by devils; and in a scene peculiar to Basque witch-
craft, a group of children securing within a small pond the toads used to
cook up witches’ poisons and ointments.
One of the surprising aspects of Ziarnko’s print is his inclusion of two
dance scenes. Given the number of Sabbath rituals described in de Lancre’s
work, Ziarnko could have included other rituals—such as the renunciation
of God and the saints, the baptism of toads, the performance of black
masses and the so-called obscene kiss.28 But he did not. Why, then, did
he devote two scenarios to dances at the Sabbath dance? The answer, I
believe, is that this reflected the prominence given to the dance in de
Lancre’s account, and these two scenes represented two of the three types
of Sabbath dance that de Lancre described.29 The first of these was the
circle dance depicted at centre left (Fig. 13.4), which de Lancre describes
in this way:
It is said that people always dance with their back turned to the centre of
the dance, which means that the girls are so accustomed to dancing this
circle dance with their hands behind them that they drag their entire bodies
with them, giving them the appearance of bending backwards, with their
arms half turned. Thus the majority of them normally have their stomachs
sticking out, swelled up in front of them, and are leaning forward a little.30
De Lancre adds that he is unsure whether such movements are really part
of the dance or the result of ‘the filth and aweful food’ the women are
Fig. 13.4 Jan Ziarnko, Circle Dance at the Witches Sabbath, detail from
Description and Depiction of the Witches Sabbath, etching, in Pierre de Lancre,
Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 161),
following 118. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections
272 C. ZIKA
made to eat. He calls it a gipsy-style dance that is half demonic; and at

another point, he claims that the Sabbath dances that ‘stir up and torment
the body, those that disfigure it the most’ are really ‘acts of incest’ and
that, unlike the ‘noble dances’ of France, these come from Spain.31
The dance at centre right in Ziarnko’s print (Fig. 13.5) would seem to
be another circle dance that is performed, de Lancre’s text tell us, with
one person turned one way and the other the other way, but with hands
joined: ‘They come so close together that they touch each other and have
their backs touch each other, every man touching a woman. And, dancing
Fig. 13.5 Jan Ziarnko, Circle Dance at the Witches Sabbath, detail from
Description and Depiction of the Witches Sabbath, etching, in Pierre de Lancre,
Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613),
following 118. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections
to a certain beat, they bump each other and wantonly bring their backsides
up against each other’.32 This might well be a version of the saraband,
which de Lancre describes as ‘the most lewd and shameless dance that
one could ever see … the most violent, animated, and impassioned dance
whose gestures, while silent, seem to ask with silence more of what the
lustful man desires of the woman than any other gesture does’.33 The key
to the letter F in Ziarnko’s print describes it as an after-dinner dance, in
which each demon takes the witch seated next to him at table to a position
under the cursed tree, and there they ‘dance, stamping and beating their
feet with the most indecent and filthy movements possible’.34
Ziarnko’s depictions of the Sabbath dances were clearly intended to
communicate de Lancre’s deep emotional messages of disgust at dance
rituals that he consistently describes as dirty, filthy, lewd, wanton and
depraved. One of the visual codes used to relay such a message is the
nudity of the dancers. Three of the four women dancing around what is
clearly a reference to the Walnut Tree of Benevento (Fig. 13.5)—a clas-
sical site for Sabbath assemblies in Italy from the fifteenth century—have
clearly disrobed after the meal, while another awaits her turn.35 Another
visual code is the vigorous and erotic nature of the dancers’ bodily move-
ments, some with arms and legs raised in jagged and exaggerated fashion,
others depicted in full-frontal nudity and with legs spread. Moreover, one
of the women has free-flowing frizzy hair, frequently a sign of sexual avail-
ability,36 whereas the naked dancing devil who looks directly out at the
viewer is a part-satyr figure, linking this dance to Bacchanalian orgies—a
comparison made quite explicitly in de Lancre’s text.37 Those dancing the
gipsy circle dance (Fig. 13.4) clearly flaunt their bodies and their sexuality
by leaning back and pushing out their stomachs and genitals to the viewer
in a blatant fashion. Their thrusting bloated stomachs might even suggest
pregnancy, drawing attention to ‘the diabolical couplings’ that de Lancre
said occurred very openly during these dances.38
So Ziarnko’s wild and uncontrolled dances give concrete visual expres-
sion to the sexual perversions and moral disorder of witchcraft and are
meant to stimulate emotions of disgust and revulsion in its viewers.39 But
they do more than that—they present a choreographed linking of hands
and bodies, between witches and demons and between the witches them-
selves. They focus the attention of viewers on the bonds created between
the dancers and their demonic paramours. The most common explanations
for the origins of Sabbath dances in de Lancre and other demonologists is
to link them either to dances performed at times of war—when they arouse
274 C. ZIKA
warriors’ passions, help them focus on their immediate task, encourage the
cowardly and calm their fear—or to dances performed as part of Dionysian
religious rituals—to induce ecstasy and communication with pagan gods
and demons.40 Sabbath dances seem to have been understood as rituals
that would arouse and galvanise the spirits of witches for the war they
were required to consistently wage against humanity. The choreographed
physical movements of the dance were not only a foreplay to sex with the
devil; they also represented a periodical tightening of witches’ collective
bonds, and acted as a bodily war cry to focus and harden their resolve in
their ongoing campaigns to create evil and instil terror.
Jean Crépy’s Sabbath Engraving—Ridiculing

the Dance Rituals of Fools
The reasons why dancing came to be depicted as such a prominent ritual at

witches’ meetings during the seventeenth century, to the extent of becom-
ing representative of witchcraft itself—a transformation also suggested by
the increasing use of the German terms Hexentanz for the Sabbath meeting
and Hexentanzplatz for its location—are complex.41 Critical to that process,
I would suggest, was the emotional impact of the witches’ ritual dance in the
ways I have outlined for Ziarnko’s seminal print. It helped establish an under-
standing of witchcraft not simply as a series of individual malefic acts, but as a
choreographed linking of hands, bodies, emotions and minds that threatened
the moral and physical fabric of individuals and societies. It is perhaps not sur-
prising, then, that when faced with illustrating Laurent Bordelon’s description
of the Sabbath in 1710, Jean Crépy would have taken Jan Ziarnko’s etching
of Pierre de Lancre’s Sabbath (Fig. 13.3) as his model, possibly following the
advice of Bordelon, who drew heavily on de Lancre’s text, as we have seen.
Moreover, Jean Crépy was not simply an engraver, but a Parisian print pub-
lisher and seller, and must have been familiar with Ziarnko’s work.
Yet although Crépy modelled his representation of the witches’ meet-
ing on Ziarnko’s print, he introduced a significant number of minor and
major changes (Fig. 13.1). Most significantly, he moved the figure of
Satan to the centre of his composition, with the result that the scenario of
witches around the cauldron became more marginal. This was in line with
Bordelon’s account of the Devil’s role at the Sabbath:
the Devil passes there for the Sovereign Lord; ’tis by his order, and
particularly by him, that the festival is celebrated; he commands there with
an absolute authority; no body dare resist him; his empire there is entirely
despotic, and those who assist at it are wholly devoted to him.42
This absolute ruler has at his right a Master of Ceremonies, who holds a
gilded staff and acts as Governor of the Sabbath;43 at his left is the Lady
Martia Balsarena, with the four toads with which she had previously danced
seated on each shoulder and on each hand, one of them dressed and the
others naked.44 To either side of these central figures, most of the cameo
scenes from Ziarnko’s print are included: the dance around the Walnut
Tree, the Sabbath feast, the cooking-up of potions, the children looking
after the toads and the witch riding the goat with two children. New ele-
ments to ratchet up the horror are included, such as the dismembered
body parts of a child by the cauldron—to replace the skulls in Ziarnko’s
print and possibly to match the child’s body parts on the banquet table.
Other new details reflect Crépy’s careful attention to Bordelon’s text, such
as the obscene kiss planted on the backside of a devil by a witch holding
a candle at middle left,45 the rooster that brings the ceremonies to a close
at top left,46 or the two women who dance around the Walnut Tree with
cats fastened to the tail of their shifts.47 Some changes remain puzzling,
such as the insertion of the witch at centre left, bent over with a candle
and following the devil.
The most dramatic change introduced by Crépy in his print is the cen-
tral position he gives the dancers that cavort in a circle in front of Satan.
This is an innovation of the artist, for such a ritualised dance is only
given a brief mention in Bordelon’s text: ‘After the impieties, follow the
obscenities, the filthy embraces, prostitution, incests, the most dissolute
and extravagant dances, and somersaults done to songs and instrumental
tunes’.48 In a footnote, the reference to a somersaulting dance is sup-
ported by the case of a lame woman, Jeanette Biscar, who in de Lancre’s
report was said to have made somersaults before the devil.49 It is likely
that this reference by Bordelon to a single case of a somersaulting dancer
found in de Lancre’s work became the stimulus for Crépy’s transforma-
tion of the Sabbath scene he modelled on Ziarnko’s earlier print. This is
certainly a very significant transformation, for the somersaulting figures
who dance before Satan’s throne create a completely different mood
within the action of the print, and as a consequence would have evoked
a radically different response from viewers. This ritualised dance literally
turns the meaning of the Sabbath, as well as the emotional responses of
viewers, on their head. The dance clearly represents the theme of inver-
276 C. ZIKA
sion or the world turned upside down, a common feature in Sabbath

descriptions. But unlike Ziarnko’s dancers, or the women in Crépy’s
print who dance around the Walnut Tree at top right, the four somer-
saulting figures do not display attributes of witchcraft. Their interpola-
tion is not meant to underscore a view of the Sabbath as an inverted
world. They are at odds with the Sabbath world, a fact further empha-
sised by their male gender. The function of their ritualised somersaulting
dance is to invert the Sabbath world, to subvert its supposed reality into
a figment of the imagination. It becomes a world created by folly, as the
fool figure helps to remind the viewer, in the ‘extravagant imagination’
of men such as Monsieur Oufle.
While Crépy’s inverted dance was possibly stimulated by Bordelon’s
reference to the somersaults of the lame woman Jeanette Biscar in the
Labourd, I suspect that the visual model was the somersaulting figure
in the popular print by Pieter Bruegel, The Feast of Fools (Fig. 13.6).50
Bruegel’s print presents an allegory of folly. The balls in the game of bowls
played by fools in the print are a pun on the Flemish word sottebollen
(found in the text beneath the print), which can mean either ‘foolish balls’
or ‘foolish heads’, that is, ‘dumbheads’ or ‘numbskulls’.51 While the fools
in the background perform a dance to the tune of various instruments,
those in the foreground are also dancing and gesturing individually, pos-
sibly to the tune of the flautist at lower right. In the very centre, immedi-
ately to the right of the nose-thumbing fool with the bauble tucked in his
belt, is a fool standing on his head. Bruegel’s didactic message is clear in
the second set of verses beneath the print:
Numbskulls are found in all nations

Even though they don’t wear fool’s caps on their heads
Who dance so gracefully
That their foolish heads spin like tops.52
Crépy’s ritualised somersaulting dance would seem to draw on this

well-known literary and visual trope of the fool, a strategy reflected in the
deployment of the very same kind of fool figure with a bauble who accom-
panies Monsieur Oufle to the Sabbath. Indeed, at the time that Crépy was
creating these prints, there was a strong revival of interest in the fool as an
instrument for parodying and satirising powerful groups. Between 1702
and 1734, the Régiment de la Calotte, a fictive military regiment dedicated
to fighting with satire, was established at the courts of Louis XIV and
Louis XV in the tradition of the court fool, with Momus, the Greek god of
Fig. 13.6 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Feast of
Fools, engraving, after 1570. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.
metmuseum.org, 2013.452
satire, and the fool’s bauble as its attributes.53 Crépy’s dance embodies and
performs the fundamental emotional response that Crépy and Bordelon
want to stimulate in viewers; it parodies and derides. This aim is certainly
assisted by Crépy’s much lighter bodies and playful mood associated with
the early Rococo, in comparison to Ziarnko’s much heavier Mannerist
scenario. These bodies are all movement, flighty, inconstant; they embody
parody and a double inversion, and are in marked contrast to the stiff
posture of Monsieur Oufle, who fails to grasp its reality as a product of ‘an
extravagant imagination’.
Conclusion
How the ritual dance of the Sabbath could become one of the key lit-
erary and visual markers for witchcraft during the seventeenth century
has not been given the scholarly attention it deserves and requires close
278 C. ZIKA
study.54 But even on the basis of an analysis of Pierre de Lancre’s work

and Jan Ziarnko’s accompanying illustration, as I show above, the ritual
dances of the Sabbath helped establish the moral turpitude of witches and
their reality as a unified and galvanised force which was ready to do battle
with Christian societies. In both these ways, witchcraft posed a danger-
ous threat to the moral and social order, and stimulated emotions of dis-
gust, revulsion, fear and even terror. For as Bordelon states very clearly,
‘the Devil and his disciples think of nothing but doing mischief, or at
least, of striking fear and terror’.55 The threat of witchcraft only becomes
clear when readers become aware, through both text and image, of the
emotions that supposedly drive witches’ behaviour and become evident in
their ritual practices.
Crépy’s transformation of the witches’ dance into an object of mockery
and ridicule needs to be understood as a device to persuade readers of the
fantasies of witchcraft. For it is not simply the foolish credulity of Monsieur
Oufle, as he stands on the perimeter of this Sabbath scene, that needs to be
corrected; it is the fears and terrors which feed his credulity that need to be
removed. Crépy’s inverted Sabbath dance is a pictorial attempt to reveal
the nature of that fear to the book’s readers, to have them neutralise it and
ultimately to remove the power it exercises over them. As I have mentioned
above, Bordelon claimed that some of the figures in the Sabbath picture
that covered the floor of a gallery in Monsieur Oufle’s library ‘struck hor-
ror’, while others ‘excited laughter’. Jean Crépy is the first of a number of
artists in the early eighteenth century such as Claude Gillot, who attempt
to excite laughter in response to depictions of witches’ rituals on paper in
order to show that while such horrors might certainly be real, they are hor-
rors created by ‘an extravagant imagination’. The disordered imaginations
that give rise to supposed Sabbath rituals now begin to be represented as
the real threat to the proper ordering of societies rather than the imagined
and credulous fears of witches themselves. While Bordelon clearly argues for
the power of credulity and fear to be countered by scepticism and reason,
artists like Jean Crépy are content to gradually deplete their power by the
emotional strategies of parody and ridicule.
Notes
1. I thank Julie Davies, Charlotte-Rose Millar, the anonymous assessors
and the editors for assistance with this chapter. All quotations and
page references are from the English translation published in London
by J. Morphew in 1711 or in French from the original two-volume

Paris edition of 1710. I have modernised the spelling and capitalisa-
tion. The original French edition was L’histoire des imaginations
extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, causées par la lecture des livres qui
traitent de la magie, du grimoire, des démoniaques, sorciers, loups-
garoux, incubes, succubes & du sabbat… (Paris: Nicolas Gosselin …
& Charles Le Clerc, 1710). The 1710 Amsterdam edition had the
same title and was published by Estienne Roger, Pierre Humbert,
Pierre de Coup & les frères Chatelain.
2. Although the 1710 Amsterdam edition contains the same ten scenes
from Monsieur Oufle’s adventures found in the Paris editions, the
scenes appear in different locations and in a different order.
3. The 1710 Paris version of the print, located in vol. 2 between 306
and 307, is signed by Crépy, as is the identical print in the 1754 Paris
edition, located in vol. 5, following 174. The 1710 Amsterdam ver-
sion of the print, located in vol. 2 between 186 and 187, is not
signed and is clearly a copy of Crépy. A third (inverted and slightly
different) version is held by the Welcome Institute (33376i) and is
also reproduced in Brian Levack, The Witchcraft Source Book
(London: Routledge, 2004), 312. Levack’s source is incorrect, and
the widespread attribution of these prints to an original by
Bartholomeus Spranger seem to be based on a confused claim by
Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, trans. J. Courtenay
Locke (London: George Harrap, 1931; New York: Dover, 1971),
76–8, Figure 47, which I cannot pursue here. For the engraver
Crépy, see Günter Meissner (ed.), Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon: Die
bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Munich: K.G. Sauer,
1999), XXII: 246; Marcel Roux, Inventaire du fonds français.
Graveurs du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1946), V:
351–85.
4. Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture
in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007), 209.
5. See Charles Zika, ‘The Witch and Magician in European Art’, in The
Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft, ed. Owen Davies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2017).
6. The fullest account of the work is found in Valerie C. Ferguson,
‘Scepticisme, surnaturel et mystifications: le fantastique dans la
prose narrative de l’age classique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles)’ (PhD
thesis, University of Arizona, 2008), 100–96. See also the short
280 C. ZIKA
introduction by Josephine Grieder to Laurent Bordelon, A History

of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle (New York:
Garland, 1973).
7. For this broader context for Bordelon’s work, see Lucie Desjardins,
‘Des croyances populaires à une poétique du divertissement litté-
raire: le Monsieur Oufle de Laurent Bordelon’, BIBLIO 17(195)
(2011): 177–88; Desjardins, ‘Laurent Bordelon face la croyance.
Lecture et influence du passé dans le discours contre la superstition
(1680–1730)’, Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29
(2010): 117–28; Desjardins, ‘Archéologie de la superstition (xvie-
xviiie siècles). Histoire des croyances ou histoire littéraire?’, Revue
d’histoire littéraire de la France 111 (2011): 29–43; and for
Bordelon’s other works, see Jacqueline de la Harpe, L’abbé Laurent
Bordelon et la lutte contre la superstition en France entre 1680 et 1730
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1942). For a
listing of Bordelon’s works, see de la Harpe, L’abbé Laurent Bordelon,
202–8; Ferdinand Hoefer (ed.), Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris:
Didot, 1853–66), V: cols 685–6. See also Jane Davidson, ‘Bordelon,
Laurent (1653–1710)’, in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western
Tradition, ed. Richard M. Golden (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2006),
IV: 138.
8. In the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française of 1694, ‘extravagant’ is
explained as ‘Fou, bizarre, fantasque, qui est contre le bon sens,
contre la raison’. See Ferguson, ‘Scepticisme, surnaturel et mystifica-
tions’, 106–7.
9. Parts of Chapters 23, 24 and 27, which include Noncrede’s dis-
course on devils, are not included in the 1710 Amsterdam edition.
10. Chapter 3 is missing in the 1793 edition; for discussion, see
Ferguson, ‘Scepticisme, surnaturel et mystifications’, 188–90.
11. This is already very clear in the title. See note 1 above.
12. For a longer list with brief accounts of how some of these sources
were used, see Ferguson, ‘Scepticisme, surnaturel et mystifications’,
122–30.
13. Unlike the 1710 Paris (Figure 13.1) and 1754 Paris editions, which
include the same caption, the 1710 Amsterdam edition does not
include one. The ‘sorciers’ in the caption can mean either ‘sorcerers’
or ‘witches’, but it clearly refers to a ‘witches’ Sabbath’ in this case.
14. Bordelon, A History, 287; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 307.
15. In the third reversed version of the print, the fool is not depicted
pointing.
16. Bordelon, A History, 288.
17. Bordelon, A History, 3; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 1, 5: ‘prouvoient
et représentoient son entestement’.
18. Bordelon, A History, 4; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 1, 8: ‘il étoit chargé
d’un tres-grand nombre de figures, dont les unes faisoient horreur,
et les autres excitoient à rire’.
19. For Ziarnko, see Charles Zika, ‘Ziarnko, Jan (ca. 1575–ca. 1628)’,
in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Golden,
IV: 1235–6; Stanislawa Sawicka, ‘Jan Ziarnko. Peintre-graveur
polonais, et son activité à Paris au premier quart du XVIIe siècle’, La
France et la Pologne dans leurs relations artistiques 1 (1938): 103–
257; Stanislawa Sawicka, ‘Jan Ziarnko: A Polish Painter-Etcher of
the First Quarter of the 17th Century’, Print Collector’s Quarterly
23 (1936): 276–99.
20. Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas
Buon, 1612). The print, together with a key describing its different
scenes, is located at the beginning of Book 2, Discourse IV: ‘A
description of the Sabbath, of the poisons produced there; and some
depositions of very experienced witches that clearly prove the reality
of witches being transported.’ All translations below are taken from
Pierre de Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches, ed. Gerhild Scholz
Williams et al. (Tempe, Arizona; ACMRS and Turnhout: Brepols,
2006). On de Lancre and his work, see the ‘Introduction’ by Gerhild
Scholz Williams in de Lancre, Inconstancy, xxvi–l; Gerhild Scholz
Williams, Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft
in Early Modern France and Germany (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995).
21. On the Logroño trial and Frías investigation, see Gustav Henningsen
(ed.), The Salazar Documents: Insquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías
and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Leiden: Brill, 2004);
Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and
the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (Reno: University of Nevada
Press, 1980). The report of the Logroño trial is found in de Lancre,
Inconstancy, 393–405 (Book 5, Discourse III).
22. De Lancre, Inconstancy, xxix–xxxi; Williams, Defining Dominion,
89–93.
282 C. ZIKA
23. De Lancre, Inconstancy, 58–9; see also Gerhild Scholz Williams,

‘Der Zauber der neuen Welt: Reise und Magie im sechzehnten
Jahrhundert’, German Quarterly 65 (1992): 294–305.
24. De Lancre, Inconstancy, 61; for the Labourd, see 51–65.
25. Ibid., 61.
26. Claudia Swan, ‘The Preparation for the Sabbath by Jacques de Gheyn
II. The Issue of Inversion’, Print Quarterly 16 (1999): 327–39.
27. This and similar details are described in a key below the print that
matches up with the letters A–M.
28. A number of these scenes were represented in the series of woodcuts
illustrating the Sabbath in Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium
Maleficarum, first published in Milan in 1608. This work also
included two representations of the Sabbath dance, but it is unclear
if Ziarnko had knowledge of these woodcuts.
29. De Lancre, Inconstancy, 224–5.
30. Ibid., 224.
31. Ibid., 218–19, 224.
32. Ibid., Inconstancy, 225.
33. Ibid., Inconstancy, 219.
34. Key to the Ziarkno woodcut, in Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais
anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613), following 118: ‘ils dan-
sent, trepignent et tripudient, avec les plus indecens et sales mouve-
mens qu’ils peuvent’.
35. Paolo Portone, ‘Benevento, Walnut Tree of’, in Encyclopedia of
Witchcraft, vol. 1, 109–10.
36. Charles Zika, ‘Hair’, in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 2, 467.
37. De Lancre, Inconstancy, 218.
38. Ibid.
39. For an alternative discussion of representation and the production of
emotion, see Chap. 10.
40. For two examples, see De Lancre, Inconstancy, 215–18; Remy, 60–5
(Book I, chs 17, 19); Nicolas Remi, Daemonolatreiae libri tres
(Lyon: Officina Vincentii, 1595), Book I, chs 17, 19.
41. I pursue this question in a forthcoming article, ‘Emotions and
Exclusion in Seventeenth-Century Images of the Witches’ Dance,’ in
Feeling Emotions: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early
Modern Europe, ed. Giovanni Tarantino & Charles Zika (London,
Routledge, forthcoming 2017).
42. Bordelon, A History, 294; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 324.
43. Bordelon, A History, 297; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 330. For this
surprising information, Bordelon specifically draws on de Lancre,
Inconstancy, 146–7.
44. Bordelon, A History, 302; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 342. In de
Lancre, she is called Martibalserena (Inconstancy, 153) and
Martiabalfarena (226).
45. There is a brief reference to this in Bordelon, A History, 302, note
(n); Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 342. The identification of this ritual
is very clear in the 1710 and 1754 Paris editions, in which a face can
be seen on the posterior of the devil.
46. Bordelon, A History, 303; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 344; de
Lancre, Inconstancy, 171–83.
47. Bordelon, A History, 302; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 342. This
follows de Lancre, Inconstancy, 147, but in the same note, Bordelon
also cites a passage in de Lancre (220), in which the cats are attached
to the backsides of the dancers.
48. Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 342: ‘Après les impietez, suivent les
ordures, les caresses immondes; les prostitutions, les incestes, les
plus dissoluës, et les plus extravagantes, aux chansons, et au sondes
instrumens on y fait des culebutes.’ I have changed the last clause of
the 1711 English translation (Bordelon, A History, 302), ‘to tunes
and instruments, even on their heads’, to what seems a far more
faithful translation.
49. De Lancre, Inconstancy, 159. Bordelon’s English translator recounts
that Biscar ‘stood on her head before him [the Devil]’ (Bordelon, A
History, 302). But the original French text, ‘fait la culebute devant
lui’ (Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 343), would seem to mean a more
dramatic action such as tumbling or somersaulting.
50. We know of three states of the print engraved by Pieter van der
Heyden, and a copy by Jan Galle. See René van Bastelaer, The Prints
of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Catalogue Raisonné, trans. and revised by
S. Gilchrist (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1992), 259–62.
51. Keith Moxey, ‘Pieter Bruegel and The Feast of Fools’, The Art Bulletin
64 (1982): 640–6 (646).
52. Ibid., 640.
53. For the Régiment, see Joachim Rees, Die Kultur des Amateurs:
Studien zu Leben und Werk von Anne Claude Philippe de Thubières,
Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für
Geisteswissenschaften, 2007), 248–52, 529, Figure 33; Léon
284 C. ZIKA
Hennet, Le Régiment de la calotte (Paris: Libraire des bibliophiles,

1886). For fools and folly in the art of early modern Europe, see
Yona Pinson, The Fools’ Journey: A Myth of Obsession in Northern
Renaissance Art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).
54. See Charles Zika, ‘Emotions and Exclusion’.
55. Bordelon, A History, 289; Bordelon, L’histoire, vol. 2, 311–12: ‘Car
le diable et ses disciples ne songent qu’à faire du mal, ou du moins,
à donner de la crainte et de la frayeur.’
CHAPTER 14
Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power
Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François
Social scientists have long argued that collective rituals produce social
cohesion and this has something to do with their emotionality. The
fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that emotionally intense
rituals constituted a fundamental driving force in political history. In
the medieval Muslim world, powerful dynasties commonly traced their
ancestry from peripheral tribal groups, and urban elites were periodically
overthrown and replaced by such groups. This pattern could easily be
generalised to many other civilisations—from the dynastic cycles of China
and Persia to the barbarian invasions of the Graeco-Roman and Christian
worlds. Khaldun’s explanation for this pattern hinged on the notion of
aṣabı̄yah (roughly ‘social cohesion’). Rural tribes derived their aṣabı̄yah
from collective rituals that served to bind them into tight-knit military
units, capable of standing together on the battlefield and carrying out dar-
ing raids. It was this quality of aṣabı̄yah that enabled rural tribes to invade
H. Whitehouse (*)
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK
P. François
School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_14
286 H. WHITEHOUSE AND P. FRANÇOIS
and displace urban dynasties periodically. But having successfully deposed

a ruling elite, the invading tribe’s emotional rituals would become sani-
tised and rendered ineffectual as part of the process of becoming educated
into more literate forms and expressions of religiosity. Thus, the urban
dynasty would become vulnerable over time to invasion and overthrow by
another rural tribe, whose aṣabı̄yah remained intact. This cyclical theory of
history has been taken up and developed in novel ways in recent decades.1
If emotional collective rituals do indeed unite groups, then they may be
capable not only of motivating coups and rebellions but also of legitimat-
ing established authority structures. Voluminous literatures in the social
sciences, commonly inspired by the functionalist logic of Durkheim’s The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,2 have provided ample examples of
this legitimating role of ritual.3
So the idea that there is an intricate connection between ritual, emo-
tion and power is nothing new. What has been lacking until quite recently
is a set of precise and testable theories of how emotional rituals produce
social cohesion, how cohesion causes pro-group behaviour, and how these
psychological and behavioural outcomes impact the exercise of power in
society. The aim of this afterword is to showcase the value of testing theo-
ries with historical datum and to highlight the progress that has already
been made in this regard. We begin by outlining the theory of ‘modes of
religiosity’—a theory that is potentially testable using datum assembled
by historians. We then consider how the modes theory can inform and be
informed by historical research. Since the modes theory makes predictions
about trends in human history rather than providing a lens through which
to explain particular cases, testing the modes theory requires the evidence
of historians to be assembled in a database that would allow quantitative
analysis of the material across space and over time. To build such a data-
base is not a simple undertaking, but requires the collaboration of many
historians. We describe progress that has been made in this regard and
discuss the difficulties of organising historical materials in ways that histo-
rians never intended. We use material from the chapters in this collection
to illustrate the process.
The Theory of ‘Modes of Religiosity’
Collective rituals tend to fall into two basic clusters. On the one hand,
there are those, such as initiation rites and fraternity hazings, that are
dangerous, painful, frightening or humiliating. We call these imagistic
AFTERWORD: RITUAL, EMOTION AND POWER 287
practices, because they make a strong impression on people and leave a

lasting image in their minds. To qualify as ‘imagistic’, a ritual complex
must not only generate intense emotions but it must also engender unique
events that shape the life histories of participants and are felt to be shared
(and therefore defining of) the group. Many imagistic rituals are rare or
once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. The chapters of this volume do not fur-
nish clear-cut examples of early modern imagistic practices. Among pos-
sible candidates are the Moravian conversion rituals analysed by Jacqueline
Van Gent involving both intense euphoric (e.g. joy) and dysphoric (e.g.
shame) aspects. The coronation of nuns in late medieval Germany ana-
lysed in Julie Hotchin’s chapter is likewise a relatively emotional occa-
sion, in which feelings of joy are tempered by doubts about one’s own
worthiness, but it is arguable whether these rituals are truly defining
moments in the formation of imagistic groups. Susan Broomhall’s analy-
sis of seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company correspondence
through the lens of ‘correspondence as a communicative ritual’ highlights
a range of emotional states including dysphoric ones, for instance, when
contemplating the threat of shipwreck and the fear this evokes. But these
appear to have been pervasive and recurrent feelings rather than unique
emotionally charged episodes.
By contrast, the global repertoire of ritual forms also includes more
sedate or mild practices, like those observed in church on Sundays or the
mosque on Fridays, which are performed regularly, usually as part of a
system of religious doctrine. Such rituals serve as markers of group iden-
tity, but are not typically remembered as unique episodes in one’s life his-
tory. We call these doctrinal practices. Most of the chapters of this volume
describe rituals that are highly doctrinal in nature. A good example is the
leave-taking ritual performed by members of the gentry and aristocracy
in early modern England. Lisa Toland’s analysis of the leave-taking ritual
highlights well both the mildness and frequency of the ritual. Although
doctrinal traditions always incorporate high-frequency, low-arousal prac-
tices, not all their rituals are either mild or regular. But infrequent ritu-
als in the doctrinal mode are relatively mild, while the more emotional
ones are regular and/or conducted in solitude (and thus incapable of
producing imagistic dynamics). An example of a relatively infrequent
doctrinal ritual is the public baptism of Muslim converts in early mod-
ern Spain discussed by François Soyer. Whilst being a significant public
event, this ritual does not reflect the heightened emotions created by an
imagistic ritual. The procession of St Justin’s relics by an early modern
English Catholic convent in Paris as described by Claire Walker, on the

other hand, appears to be an example of a relatively emotional but regular
ritual within a wider doctrinal tradition. Doctrinal and imagistic practices
are thought to trigger divergent patterns of group cohesion in religious
traditions—and have consequently been dubbed ‘modes of religiosity’.4
But it has become increasingly clear that the theory applies equally to
secular rituals and groups, such as football clubs and military organisa-
tions (to take some modern examples).5
Imagistic and doctrinal practices have quite different psychological
effects. Imagistic rituals typically bind together small networks of par-
ticipants who know each other personally into tightly knit, emotionally
bonded groups. The ties they create are relational, triggering a sense of
shared essence and psychological kinship. Doctrinal rituals work differently.
They are generally standardised over much larger groups of people than
imagistic rituals and are linked to standardised belief systems (ideologies
or orthodoxies) that can be exported wholesale to entire populations. The
frequent repetition of doctrinal rituals—from daily prayers to weekly Holy
Days through to all the events that fill up religious calendars—cements
the social identity of much larger social groups encompassing potentially
millions of individuals. Such ties are categorical and impersonal, triggering
a sense of shared identity, but not necessarily shared essence or kinship.
Each one of us has a personal identity—a set of traits that make us who
we are, as distinct from other people. A lot of these unique traits derive
from our past experiences, events that have shaped our lives—our personal
autobiography. The most self-shaping experiences are often rather nega-
tive ones—ordeals that we have overcome, which are often perceived as
making us stronger or wiser. This is partly because emotionally distressing
experiences are remembered better than good ones and we tend to think
about them more afterwards.6 When self-shaping experiences are felt to
be shared with other people—when we feel like they have been through
what we have been through—the boundary between the core personal self
and the social self seems to become more porous. It becomes harder to
say where you end and the social group begins. We refer to this as ‘fusion’
with the group.7
Psychologists have shown that in many countries around the world it
is quite common for people to be highly fused with their families, even if
with no other group. It makes some evolutionary sense that sharing tough
experiences should serve as a way of fusing kin groups—if, for example,
in ancestral conditions the people with whom you shared life’s struggles
were mainly your kin. Fusion might best be understood, therefore, as an

expression of psychological kinship that is effectively hijacked by imagis-
tic practices. Painful or frightening initiation rituals, for example, serve
as life-changing experiences that we never forget—and because they are
also causally opaque, we reflect deeply on their meaning and significance.8
Initiations shape our autobiographical selves, but they also make us feel
we share these experiences with others who have gone through the same
rituals. This bonding mechanism has been used for thousands of years in
small-scale societies, especially ones that needed to bind together young
men so that they would stand by each other on the battlefield or when
engaging in other high-risk pursuits like hunting large and dangerous
animals.9
By contrast, doctrinal rituals create social identities that are separate
from our personal identities. Imagine that the most important rituals for
your group are conducted on a daily or weekly basis—like calls to prayer
or Sunday services. When religious rituals are routinised in this way, group
beliefs and practices are stored as general schemas in semantic memory,
forming part of each worshipper’s general knowledge of the world. Nobody
could remember every single call to prayer or Sunday service as a distinct
experience; instead, they form prototypes for what to believe and how to
behave. Such prototypes are inherently depersonalising—they specify who
does what in terms of roles and functions rather than actual people (e.g.
the priest does this and then the congregant does that—but not Peter does
this and Jane does that). And so we enter the world of large-group think-
ing and identification with large ‘imagined communities’.10
The modes theory advances a series of specific hypotheses about the psy-
chological effects of collective ritual on various aspects of group alignment
and behaviour, depending on their frequency and emotionality. Many of
these hypotheses have been tested using carefully controlled psychologi-
cal experiments.11 The modes theory also advances a number of hypoth-
eses about the social consequences of these psychological and behavioural
tendencies that have been tested using surveys and databases containing
ethnographic, historical and archaeological materials.12 Although we will
consider later the use of historical databases to test the modes theory,
here we set to one side psychological, ethnographic and archaeological
evidence for the modes theory which bears less directly on the central
concerns of this book.13 First, however, we survey some efforts to explore
the applicability of the modes theory to historical case studies. Such efforts
have been quite wide-ranging, both regionally and temporally, but in
keeping with the focus of the present volume, we will consider only illus-
trative cases from the late medieval, early modern and modern periods.14
Grounding Modes of Religiosity

in the Historiography of the Late Medieval, Early
Modern and Modern Periods
In Arguments and Icons, Whitehouse characterised late medieval
Christianity as weakly doctrinal in the monasteries and convents, but pre-
dominantly imagistic among the laity.15 On this account, the emotionality
of Christian rituals changed during the Reformation, and with it forms
of group bonding. Medieval imagistic tendencies were suppressed and a
more thoroughly doctrinal mode of religiosity enthusiastically embraced.
This transformation would have entailed a change in the way in which per-
sonal and social identities were experienced and articulated. Participants
in rituals that induce very strong negative emotions tend to remember
those experiences and to regard them as self-defining. Identity fusion is
thought to result from sharing personally salient experiences with oth-
ers.16 Examples of groups that become fused in this way include New
Guinea initiation grades, mystery cults in the ancient world, elite forces
in the military, and even sports teams. Arguably such practices have been
progressively muted in the Christian world. While emotionally intense
rituals do persist in some regions, for instance, among self-flagellants at
Easter parades in the Philippines or local groups of firewalkers in northern
Greece, church authorities tend to distance themselves from such prac-
tices.17 With these changes in group alignment, we would expect to see a
shift in the way in which personal identities were construed.
To the extent that imagistic rituals were once more central to Christian
worship, they would most likely have fused members of the tradition. For
fused individuals, the boundary between self and group is porous. Making
the group salient activates personal agency and vice versa. It may be hard
to say where the personal self ends and the group begins. Whitehouse has
argued that medieval Christianity had the kinds of rituals that tap into
this form of group alignment. By contrast, in the early modern period,
Christian reformers sought to tamp down or even eliminate imagistic
practices, focusing instead on more repetitive, logocentric and sanitised
forms of worship. Instead of fusing with the group, modern worshippers
came to see their personal and social selves as more sharply distinct.
Most historians responding to these arguments have taken their bear-

ings on the modes theory from a table summarising the contrasting
features of doctrinal and imagistic dynamics (reproduced here in Table
14.1).18 Among the first historians of medieval Christianity to engage with
the modes theory was Anne Clark, an expert on monastic life communities
and their rituals.19 Clark broadly agreed with Whitehouse’s characterisa-
tion of monastic rituals in the Middle Ages as routinised, observing that,
in theory at least, monks and nuns performed as many as eight rituals in
the daily diurnal-nocturnal cycle, as well as frequent recitations of psalms,
antiphons and hymns. Such rites were low in emotional intensity, required
deference to an ecclesiastical hierarchy and entailed strong identification
with a large ‘imagined community’ of fellow adherents. Yet there were also
aspects of the doctrinal mode that were lacking or muted in the monaster-
ies. For example, there was not a great emphasis on oratory as a vehicle
for the transmission of doctrinal orthodoxy and not all monks and nuns
were equally learned in religious matters. The emphasis instead was on the
repetition of textual materials.
However, while acknowledging that monastic ritual life lacked high
emotional intensity, Clark was at pains to emphasise that it was far from
emotionless. Moreover, although the doctrinal mode is thought to rely on
Table 14.1 Contrasting modes of religiosity

Variable Doctrinal Imagistic
Psychological features
1. Transmissive frequency High Low
2. Level of arousal Low High
3. Principal memory system Semantic schemas Episodic/ flashbulb and implicit
scripts memory
4. Ritual meaning Learned/acquired Internally generated
5. Techniques of revelation Rhetoric, logical Iconicity, multivocal-integration,
narrativity and multivalence
Socio-political features
6. Social cohesion Diffuse Intense
7. Leadership Dynamic Passive/absent
8. Inclusivity/exclusivity Inclusive Exclusive
9. Spread Rapid, efficient Slow, inefficient
10. Scale Large-scale Small-scale
11. Degree of uniformity High Low
12. Structure Centralised Non-centralised
the social transmission of beliefs and practices rather than the construction
of shared personal experience as in the imagistic mode, Clark observed
that monastic rituals involved meditative reflection and emotional engage-
ment in ways that were probably experienced as transformative and self-
shaping. Of particular note are the well-documented visionary experiences
and revelations of both monks and nuns. In an extended account of the
lives of Elisabeth of Schönau (a twelfth-century Benedictine nun) and
Gertrude of Helfta (who lived a century later), Clark presents evidence of
a richly personal engagement with God bearing many of the hallmarks of
imagistic ritual experience. She concludes:
So were medieval monasteries islands of doctrinal religion? Semantic sche-

mas abounded, authoritative interpretations were available, hierarchy was
enforced, policing of orthodoxy was more possible than in the world outside
the monastery walls. Yet the highly routinized ritual of the divine office
offered its congregants the opportunities for intense emotional, visionary
experience that became the foundation for personal spontaneous (and later
deliberative) exegesis that may or may not have accorded with the prevailing
orthodoxy.20
Clark’s detailed and careful case study material suggests that although
medieval monastic life might be accurately characterised as conforming to
the doctrinal mode, it did not exclude the kinds of intense religious expe-
rience associated with imagistic practices. However, a crucial question to
ask from our theoretical perspective is whether the ecstasies of individuals
like Elisabeth and Gertrude were perceived as shared with other mem-
bers of the monastic community and, as such, were capable of motivating
fusion within such groups. Clark tells us they were not and thus, while
revelatory episodes may have formed an important part of individual reli-
gious experience in the monasteries, they were not sufficiently widespread
or collectively regulated to establish a truly imagistic mode of religiosity.
Clark goes on to consider whether the religiosity of the medieval
laity can be justly portrayed as ‘imagistic’. Specifically she addresses the
claim that ‘it is precisely within those populations that lack access to the
authoritative corpus of religious teachings, and so cannot be adequately
motivated by these teachings, that we find the greatest profusion of imag-
istic practices’.21 Clark acknowledges that lay Christians in the Middle Ages
were unsophisticated in matters of theology and religious scholarship,
and agrees that their religiosity was experienced in a much less doctrinal
f ashion than in the monasteries and universities. By way of illustration, she

focuses on the cult of the Virgin Mary that, although part of the Christian
tradition from much earlier times, took on a special importance among the
laity in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries:
Effusions of love, dedication, and praise overtake the more staid, theologi-
cally centered hymns and prayers of the early Middle Ages. Devotion to the
Virgin Mary was expressed in major feasts celebrated publicly (there were
four annual feasts dedicated to the Virgin) and in private domestic practices.
The public festivals were celebrated with Mass in a language that lay people
did not generally comprehend.22
However, Clark is reluctant to describe these practices as ‘imagistic’ since

they did not typically evince strong emotions and self-shaping episodic
memories. Yet she goes on to discuss evidence of the often very intense
relationships lay Christians developed with Mary. Moreover, as Clark also
concedes, the violent nature of visionary experience, iconography and
Marian devotion complicates the picture.
In Arguments and Icons, as noted above, Whitehouse argued that the
European Reformation set out to create a more thoroughly doctrinal mode
of Christian worship to the exclusion of imagistic elements. Theodore Vial
assembled a substantial body of historical evidence in support of this the-
sis.23 He argues that early Protestantism was defined by a highly routinised
programme of doctrinal transmission and supervision, often expressed in
a highly codified form. Focusing on one such programme, instigated by
Martin Luther in Saxony, Vial describes efforts to abolish or eliminate folk
ritual practices while strengthening doctrinal ones. He illustrates this argu-
ment by describing how rituals surrounding baptism and the Eucharist
were systematically modified, reducing or de-emphasising elements of
exorcism and ‘magic’ respectively, so prominent in their medieval forms.
With regard to Luther’s reforms of the rites of baptism, Vial concludes:
The result is a service that was just as long as the Catholic one, but one in
which explanations and exhortations took the place of repeated exorcisms
… Surely this is an example of a doctrinal mode seeking to displace an imag-
istic one … Civil authorities, with the encouragement of religious leaders,
began cracking down on the festivities surrounding baptism, especially the
lavish parties, the practice of delaying baptism to allow friends and relatives
time to travel to the party, and expensive gifts.24
Following a careful description of Luther’s many reforms to the prac-

tices associated with the Eucharist, Vial goes on to argue that the process
was one of strengthening its doctrinal character. Communion, and other
major rituals, became occasions for doctrinal transmission and instruction,
emphasising that the efficacy of ceremonial depended on the understand-
ing and faith of participants as much as on the acts themselves. According
to Vial, these same patterns of transformation were evident in the Catholic
Reformation as well:
Protestants and Catholics were both purveyors of logically coherent per-

suasive bodies of teachings; both had clearly marked leaders and systems
for checking on the orthodoxy of their adherents; both stressed frequent
repetition of rituals during which doctrine was rehearsed and authorized
exegeses of the rituals provided; both made efforts to transmit these bodies
of beliefs far and wide.25
Both Clark and Vial, among many other historians, have assembled case
study material that is broadly consistent with the modes theory, but
they also present challenges and queries too numerous to discuss here.
Attempting to apply the modes theory to particular cases studies, such as
late medieval Christianity and the Reformation, has proven to be a use-
ful exercise for a number of reasons—not least because the process has
revealed significant conceptual shortcomings and lacunae in the original
theory, leading to modifications and improvements. But case studies do
not easily serve as a direct test of the modes theory. This is so for two
reasons. First, the modes theory is an effort to pick out general patterns
across many cases rather than to predict in a law-like fashion every par-
ticular case. Many and, indeed, perhaps most particular cases may diverge
from the aggregated pattern in a wide variety of unpredictable ways.
Second, even if we had enough detailed cases studies to detect aggregated
patterns, the sample could be skewed. Indeed, it is likely that historians
who have been attracted to the modes theory have been mainly those
whose particular case studies present a good ‘fit’. Perhaps there are many
more historians who have studied cases that conform less well or not at
all. To address these problems, we need a more objective way of examin-
ing patterns in the recorded past. This is partly why historical databases
are needed.
Exploring Early Modern Rituals through the Lens

of Seshat: Global History Databank
‘Seshat: Global History Databank’ was created in 2011.26 Initially the aim
was to test theories pertaining to the evolution of social complexity, social
cohesion, warfare, agricultural resources and ritual. Testing the theory of
modes of religiosity with historical datum was one of the central drivers
behind the creation of Seshat. To this end, historical and archaeological
datum on over 600 variables are being brought together for all known
polities of the past 5,000 years globally. The datum are bias-free in terms
of both the life span and the geographical reach of the polities. Vast or
long-lived polities are not favoured over small or short-lived polities. One
of the advantages of working with historical databases is that the risk of
cherry picking, so difficult to avoid when relying on case studies, is greatly
reduced or eliminated.
In addition to variables relevant to testing the modes theory, Seshat
now also contains variables pertaining to norms, institutions, religions and
economic resources. To make the task manageable in the intermediate
term, the focus has been on a sample of 30 geographical areas of roughly
100 km by 100 km (e.g. Latium, Upper Egypt and Big Island Hawaii).
These 30 geographical areas are evenly spread across the globe. Ten of
these geographical areas are characterised by a deep history of social com-
plexity, a further ten by an intermediately long history of social complexity
and the ten remaining areas by a shallower history of social complexity.
Geographical areas where social complexity arose early, such as Upper
Egypt, are counter-balanced with regions in which social complexity and
early state formation arose much later, such as Big Island Hawaii. For each
of these 30 geographical areas, datum for the variables are gathered for
all the polities that were present in or ruled over the geographical area at
any point during the past 5,000 years. For geographical areas with a long
history of social complexity, this usually means that datum are gathered
for well over 20 different polities. For geographical areas with a shallower
history of social complexity, this can mean that datum are collected for
fewer than five polities.
The datum are collected in a dual format containing a machine-readable
code, like a numerical value or an ‘absent/present/unknown’ code, and
an often lengthy narrative paragraph explaining not only the code but also
pointing out complexities and disagreements. The coding scheme can deal
with, and in fact encourages, debate and differences of interpretation among
historians both in the machine-readable components and in the narrative

paragraphs.27 Datum are entered through a combination of the involve-
ment of domain experts and research assistants. At the end of the process,
all datum points are approved by at least one expert and in many cases
several. In the near future, this fast-growing community of scholars from a
wide range of academic backgrounds will be able to add new insights and
alternative interpretations at any time.
Whereas this approach has many benefits, it also creates many novel
methodological challenges. It creates a need, for example, to ensure con-
tinual feedback from professional historians as we develop our coding con-
ventions and variables. As part of our quest to obtain input from as wide a
range of historians and archaeologists as possible, we asked the contribu-
tors to this edited collection to fill in part of our ritual coding sheet using
material relating to the particular ritual that is the focus of attention in
their individual chapters.28 Whereas the number of coded rituals receiv-
ing treatment in the present volume is too low to analyse statistically in a
rigorous fashion such that we could hope to derive general trends from
the medieval and early modern period, the exercise turned out to be very
useful in other ways. In particular, it allowed us to assess the extent to
which our approach may complement existing historiography and, at the
same time, to discover various ways in which our approach still needs to
be nuanced. Above all, being involved in Seshat requires historians to look
at familiar datum from a new longitudinal perspective. This can present a
challenge to deeply ingrained practices and disciplinary conventions. Two
clusters of challenges can be distinguished here. The first cluster concerns
the way in which the relative importance of change and continuity is con-
strued by historians. The second cluster concerns the way we think about
the absence of datum.
Most historians, especially those focusing on the early modern and mod-
ern periods, are used to working with relatively short timescales of a few
decades or a century and tend to privilege the study of change over that of
continuity. For example, of the authors who engaged with our coding exer-
cise, only one, François Soyer, took into account more than two centuries.
Explaining changes in ritual practice is at the heart of all the chapters. This
is preferred to explaining why ritual aspects remained unchanged in respect
to the preceding and following periods, although both Katie Barclay and
Julie Hotchin point out that the rituals they studied persisted for several
centuries. Seshat aims above all to detect big changes over long timescales.
Whereas, for example, a doubling of the audience attending a particular

ritual or an increase in length by half an hour of a ritual might seem a
lot when placing the ritual in its contemporary context, such changes are
not of an order of magnitude relevant to the big societal changes with
which Seshat is primarily concerned. As a result, what historians working
with shorter timescales have typically perceived as evidence of change, the
broader comparative approach of Seshat can encourage them to view as
relative continuity. Of a piece with this, from the perspective of the modes
theory, the vast majority of early modern rituals in Europe can be labelled
‘superdoctrinal’: their level of emotionality is low when compared with the
dysphoric intensity of rituals of, let us say, male initiation cults in Papua
New Guinea or Bacchanalian cults in Antiquity. This is, understandably,
not the frame of reference used by medieval and early modern historians,
who are instead used to placing a given ritual only in a much more localised
historical context, for example, by drawing comparison with other con-
temporaneous rituals. If such rituals provide the only point of comparison,
then a given ritual might stand out as highly emotional.
Constructing codebooks that are sufficiently complex to capture big
societal transformations playing out over long timescales and that at the
same time do justice to rapid small-scale or local changes is a key challenge
for Seshat. This can only be achieved by engaging with a wide range of
historians studying both data-poor and data-rich societies. Compared to
many of the much earlier societies captured by Seshat, the medieval and,
especially, the early modern periods provide extremely rich datum, and
it is thus possible to analyse specific rituals in great detail. Change over
time playing out on short timescales can be carefully reconstructed. The
interaction between ritualistic behaviour and a fast-changing context are
at the heart of many of the chapters in this volume. For example, Charles
Sowerwine described quite minute changes over time in the annual pil-
grimage to les Jardies, the home where Léon Gambetta died in 1882.
Sowerwine’s detailed analysis made it possible to identify a heyday of this
practice (1884–1900) and a period of decline (1900–14), before it even-
tually disappeared in 1920, and he was able to link this transformation to
the larger political context and background of pilgrims. Similarly, Walker
presented us with a rigorous analysis of the procession of St Justin’s relics
by placing the ritualistic behaviour in both a larger religious and politi-
cal setting of a single early modern English Catholic convent in Paris.
Barclay incorporated into her analysis many intricate and absorbing
details of individual testimonies on the experience of the bedding ritual

in eighteenth-century Scotland. Finally Charles Zika cleverly links an
in-depth discussion of Jean Crépy’s engravings of the rituals of the witches’
Sabbath for Laurent Bordelon’s The Story of the Extravagant Imaginations
of Monsieur Oufle with an early eighteenth-century transformation in atti-
tudes towards witchcraft. In addition, a focused temporal scope allows
for a detailed exploration of conceptual themes. For example, Helen Hills
explores in detail the complex intersection between ‘affect, matter, mate-
riality, and artistic invention’ in the context of baroque Italy. Similarly,
Bronwyn Reddan explored the intricate complexities of gift-giving in the
courting rituals of early modern France. Finally, Nicole Starbuck examined
ritualistic dimensions of cross-cultural encounters between French eth-
nographers and Oceanian peoples during the second half of the eighteenth
century, highlighting various ways in which these encounters are entwined
with assertions of power and identity. Historians studying much earlier
periods seldom have such rich materials to work with. Only by engaging
with such detailed scholarship on data-rich periods like the medieval and
early modern periods and by seeking ways to compare it with datum from
data-poor societies can we start to understand how ‘big’ change relates to
‘small’ change and how patterns playing out at different timescales inter-
act. These should be fundamental questions not only for the Seshat proj-
ect but also for history as a discipline.
A second distinct cluster of issues is raised by the ways in which we
deal with the absence of datum. From a ‘Seshat’ perspective, the absence
of datum is an acceptable limitation and there are many statistical tech-
niques to deal with absences. However, what is crucial is that a strict unit
of analysis is maintained throughout the coding. When coding a ritual,
the datum must pertain to that ritual alone. Datum concerning somewhat
related rituals or to overall belief systems or other practices in the society
at large are not necessarily relevant. For many historians, it is quite the
reverse. Their area of expertise is often the larger belief system, group or
society, and the ritual is merely a facet of that. Rather than systematically
highlighting the absence of evidence, the temptation instead is to broaden
out the unit of analysis and bring in related topics on which richer datum
are available. Again, establishing ways to keep the unit of analysis highly
focused yet doing justice to the domain of expertise of contributing histo-
rians is key to maintaining the high-quality and long-lasting collaborations
necessary for building a database like Seshat.
Concluding Remarks
We have considered the potential benefits and challenges of using histori-
cal evidence to test theories emerging from the human sciences, with a
concluding focus on two particular clusters of challenges. Our main focus
has been on the theory of modes of religiosity advancing hypotheses about
the relationship between ritual, emotion and changes in social organisa-
tion, themes that are of particular relevance to this volume. Our aim here
is to highlight how an integration of the approaches and methodologies
of early modern historians and social scientists might be accomplished.
This has produced a set of desiderata for such an integration—a Seshat
‘wish-list’. A different wish-list would no doubt be proposed by medieval
and early modern historians. We recognise, for example, that not all his-
torians would recognise the value of tracking historical trends or patterns
spanning very long periods of time. And not all scholars would be inter-
ested in extracting variables for special attention or willing to tolerate the
associated loss of contextual information that this entails. Nevertheless,
we would argue that it is possible to reconcile these viewpoints with our
own. We have already worked productively with scholars as diverse as
archaeologists working on Neolithic Europe, classicists and historians of
Ancient Egypt, and experts on early modern Europe. Each of these intel-
lectual engagements has brought novel insights on the question of how
to combine the need for context with the need for standardised theoreti-
cally informed variables. This process has led to further fine-tuning of the
Seshat code book, leading to improvements that sit increasingly comfort-
ably with each network of historians we approach. It is thus a collabora-
tive rather than an invasive process. The ever-richer dataset that Seshat
represents has the potential to help shape, but not to usurp or overturn,
the historical research agenda for generations to come.
Notes
1. Ernest Gellner, ‘A Pendulum Swing Theory of Islam’, in Sociology of
Religion: Selected Readings, ed. Roland Robertson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969), 127–38; Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War:
The Rise and Fall of Empires (New York: Penguin, 2006); Peter
Turchin, ‘Religion and Empire in the Axial Age’, Religion, Brain,
and Behavior II(3) (2012): 256–60.
2. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans.

Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1912 [1995]).
3. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale
4. Harvey Whitehouse, Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and
Transmission in Papua New Guinea (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995); Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent
Modes of Religiosity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Harvey
Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious
Transmission (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).
5. Harvey Whitehouse and Brian McQuinn, ‘Ritual and Violence:

Divergent Modes of Religiosity and Armed Struggle’, in Oxford
Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Margo Kitts, Mark
Juergensmeyer and Michael Jerryson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 597–619.
6. Martin Conway, Flashbulb Memories (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1995).
7.
William B. Swann, Jolanda Jensen, Ángel Gómez, Harvey
Whitehouse and Brock Bastian, ‘When Group Membership Gets
Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion’, Psychological Review,
CXIX(3) (2012): 441–56.
8. Harvey Whitehouse, ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor, and

Memory in Melanesian Initiation Cults’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute IV (1996): 703–15.
9. Harvey Whitehouse and Ian Hodder, ‘Modes of Religiosity at

Çatalhöyük’, in Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük
as a Case Study, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 122–45.
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
11. Much of the work currently in preparation or submitted builds on
early studies by Rebekah Richert, Harvey Whitehouse and Emma
A. Stewart, ‘Memory and Analogical Thinking in High-Arousal
Rituals’, in Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive
Foundations of Religiosity, ed. Harvey Whitehouse and Robert
N. McCauley (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005), 127–45.
12. Quentin D. Atkinson and Harvey Whitehouse, ‘The Cultural

Morphospace of Ritual Form; Examining Modes of Religiosity
Cross-culturally’, Evolution and Human Behavior XXXII(1) (2010):
50–62; Peter Turchin, Harvey Whitehouse. Pieter François, Edward

Slingerland and Mark Collard, ‘A Historical Database of Sociocultural
Evolution’, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantative History and
Cultural Evolution III(2) (2012): 271–93; Harvey Whitehouse,
Camilla Mazzucato, Ian Hodder and Quentin D. Atkinson, ‘Modes
of Religiosity and the Evolution of Social Complexity at Çatalhöyük’,
in Vital Matters: Religion in the Organization and Transformation
of a Neolithic Society, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Cambridge
13. For an up-to-date overview, see Harvey Whitehouse and Jonathan
A. Lanman, ‘The Ties that Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and
Identification’, Current Anthropology LV(6) (2014): 674–95.
14. Panayotis Pachis and Luther H. Martin (eds), Imagistic Traditions
in the Graeco-Roman World (Thessaloniki: Vanias, 2009); Harvey
Whitehouse and James Laidlaw (eds), Ritual and Memory: Towards
a Comparative Anthropology of Religion (Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press, 2004); Harvey Whitehouse and Luther H. Martin
(eds), Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004); Harvey Whitehouse and
Luther H. Martin (eds), Implications of Cognitive Science for the
Study of Religion, Special Issue of Method and Theory in the Study of
Religion XVI(3) (2004); Harvey Whitehouse and Robert
N. McCauley, The Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of
Religiosity, Special Issue of Journal of Cognition and Culture V(1–2)
(2005); Harvey Whitehouse and Robert N. McCauley (eds), Mind
and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005); Harvey Whitehouse and
Luther H. Martin (eds), History, Memory, and Cognition, Special
Issue of Historical Reflections/ Reflexions Historiques XXXI(2)
(2005); Harvey Whitehouse and James Laidlaw (eds), Religion,
Anthropology and Cognitive Science (Durham, NC: Carolina
Academic Press, 2007).
15. Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons.
16. Whitehouse and Lanman, ‘The Ties that Bind Us’, 674–95.
17. Dimitris Xygalatas, The Burning Saints: Cognition and Culture in the
Fire-Walking Rituals of the Anastenaria (London: Equinox, 2012).
18. Harvey Whitehouse, ‘Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Explanation
of the Sociopolitical Dynamics of Religion’, Method and Theory in
the Study of Religion XIV (2002): 293–315.
19. Anne Clark, ‘Testing the Two Modes Theory: Christian Practice in
the Later Middle Ages’, in Theorizing Religions Past, ed. Whitehouse
and Martin, 125–42.
20. Ibid., 130–1.
21. Whitehouse Arguments and Icons, 15.
22. Clark ‘Testing the Two Modes’, 131–2.
23. Ted Vial, ‘Modes of Religiosity and Changes in Popular Religious
Practices at the Time of the Reformation’, in Theorizing Religions
Past, ed. Whitehouse and Martin, 143–56.
24. Ibid., 148.
25. Ibid., 151.
26. The ‘Seshat: Global History Databank’ project was founded in 2011
by Peter Turchin, Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François. The
project is supported by an ESRC Large Grant to the University of
Oxford, entitled ‘Ritual, Community, and Conflict’ (REF RES-060-
25-0085), a John Templeton Foundation grant to the Evolution
Institute, entitled ‘Axial-Age Religions and the Z-Curve of Human
Egalitarianism’, a Tricoastal Foundation grant to the Evolution
Institute, entitled ‘The Deep Roots of the Modern World: The
Cultural Evolution of Economic Growth and Political Stability’, and
a grant from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and inno-
vation programme (grant agreement No 644055 [ALIGNED,
http://www.aligned-project.eu]). We gratefully acknowledge the
contributions of our team of research assistants, postdoctoral
researchers, consultants and experts. In addition, we have received
invaluable assistance from our collaborators. Please see the Seshat
website (http://seshatdatabank.info) for a comprehensive list of
private donors, partners, experts and consultants, and their respec-
tive areas of expertise. For a detailed account of the methodology
underpinning Seshat, see: Peter Turchin, Robert Brennan, Thomas
E. Currie, Kevin C. Feeney, Pieter François, Daniel Hoyer et al.,
‘Seshat: The Global History Databank’, Cliodynamics: The Journal
of Quantative History and Cultural Evolution VI(1) (2015):
77–107; Pieter François, Joseph Manning, Harvey Whitehouse,
Robert Brennan, Thomas Currie, Kevin C. Feeney and Peter
Turchin, ‘A Macroscope for Global History. Seshat Global History
Databank: A Methodological Overview’, http://seshatdatabank.
info/publications/macroscope-article-website (accessed 15 October
2016); and Turchin et al., ‘A Historical Database’.
27. The machine-readable code is set up in a way that it can handle

numerous ways of coding for both uncertainty and disagreement
among domain experts. This feature makes Seshat stand truly at the
crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences, and makes it
different from many social sciences databases that capture datum in
a much more black or white fashion.
28. For all polities, we code the following five rituals: the largest scale,
the most widespread, the most frequent, the most euphoric and the
most dysphoric rituals. The coding scheme for these five rituals is
identical and focuses heavily on variables pertaining to group size,
frequency of the ritual, emotionality for the participants and back-
ground of the participants. For this exercise, we used a coding
scheme derived from the original that allowed us to gather as much
useful feedback as possible. Obviously the coded rituals here do not
necessarily fall into one of the five categories we usually code for.
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Index
A and affect, 15, 193–219

Admiralty Islands, 128 emotion, 11–12, 14, 194, 200, 201,
adolescence. See youth 215
adulthood, 12, 45, 57, 78, 185, 250 art history and representation of
affect (emotion), 85, 146, 193–219, emotion, 193–5, 197, 215,
223, 225, 242–3, 298 261–84
affection (emotion), 176, 183–5 aṣabı̄yah, 285, 286
affection (love), 25, 27, 29, 35, 73–4, Ashton (Somerset), 63–6, 68, 71–3
76, 78 Augustinians, 221–3, 226, 227,
agency, 11, 64, 76, 127, 132, 138, 229–32
184, 187, 198, 257n13, 290 Australia, 84, 86, 88, 91, 95, 96, 129,
fictive, 184, 187 130, 133, 243
alcohol, 44, 47, 50, 72, 73 Port Jackson (Sydney), 138
alms, 233, 235 Tasmania, 132, 137
Alsace, 146, 147, 150, 152, 155, 160, Azen, Mustafa, 105–10, 111, 113–17,
161 119
Amsterdam, 83, 86–8, 91, 93, 261,
279n1–3, 280n9, 280n13
anger, 3, 66, 69, 89, 90, 95, 105, B
109–15, 117, 118, 235 baptism, 5, 10, 12–14, 103–21, 251,
anthropology, 7, 129, 137, 222–4, 270, 287, 292, 293
243 Barcelona, 103–21
architecture, 116, 155, 195 Baroque art, 193–220
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6
314 INDEX
Basque lands, 268, 270 182, 184, 185, 204, 222, 226,
Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia), 84, 241, 242, 245–53, 270, 275
87–95 Christ, 157, 171–7, 179–87, 190n29,
Batavia (VOC vessel), 84, 88–90 191n38, 246, 247, 249–52
Baudin, Nicolas, 124, 128–34, 136–8 Christiansfield (Denmark), 251, 253
Beacon Island, 84, 88 chronicle, 222, 223, 228, 232–5,
bedding (ritual), 5, 43–61, 298 238n35
beds, 43, 44, 47–57, 59n20, 73, 149 church, 43–5, 47–9, 54, 55, 57, 115,
Bernard, Catherine, 23–41 116, 153, 159, 172, 179, 196,
Berthelsdorf (Germany), 241, 247, 197, 199, 227–31, 233, 235,
248, 250 242–5, 253, 254, 256n11, 287,
blood, 8, 11, 12, 41n53, 49, 64, 290
193–219, 250 discipline, 44, 47
Bodin, Jean, 263, 265, 270 Kirk, 43, 45, 47, 55, 56
body/bodies, bodily, 3, 6, 9, 10, 14, civic, 2, 11, 13, 107, 109, 152, 154,
28, 69, 71, 74, 125, 131, 132, 155, 158, 160, 200–1
134, 146, 147, 149–52, 157, clerical, clericalism, 149, 153, 159
160–2, 176, 179–80, 198, 199, comedy, 262, 276–7
206–7, 217n24, 224, 235, 244, confusion, 49, 50, 56, 57, 123, 180,
269–75, 277 198
Bordelon, Laurent, 6, 261–84, 298 consecration, of nuns, 1171–92. See
A History of the Extravagant also coronation, of nuns
Imaginations of Monsieur Oufle, convent entrance rites, 173–4, 185.
261–84, 298 See also coronation, of nuns;
Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 124, investiture; profession
126–9, 131–4, 136 convents, 10, 14, 108, 171–92, 196,
Bourbon monarchy, 105–18 198, 199, 202, 203, 221–40,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 12, 117, 146, 223 288, 290, 297
bronze, 201–3, 208, 210, 213–15 Ebstorf, 174–7
Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 276, 277 Lüne, 179, 180
Our Lady of Sion cloister of
Augustinian canonesses, Paris,
C 221–40
Cape settlement (South Africa), 91, 95 Wienhausen, 177, 178, 183, 186
Catalonia, 104–7, 111–14, 117 conversion, 104, 106, 110, 111, 115,
Catholicism, 2, 107, 110, 113, 115, 118, 225, 230, 241–60, 287
116, 118, 149–51, 157, 171–87, narrative, 115, 244–5, 250, 254
207–8, 222–6, 229, 231–6, coronation, of nuns, 5, 14, 171–92,
241–2, 245, 248, 288, 293–4, 287
297 courtship, 11, 26, 27, 29, 48, 56, 298
children, 52, 66–8, 70, 88, 89, 103, credulity, 262–6, 278
127, 137, 155, 157, 173, 174, Crépy, Jean, 6, 261–84, 298
INDEX 315
crown, nun’s, 14, 171, 172, 174–8, emotion. See also affect, individual
181–4 emotions (i.e. love, anger etc)
custom, 64, 66–70, 73–5, 78n3, 123, arousal, 4, 7–9, 172, 185–7, 234,
129, 150, 247, 269 243, 244, 254, 287, 291
collective, 3, 4, 9–10, 96, 115, 146,
162, 181–6, 224, 242–3,
D 254–5, 263, 274, 285–7
dances, 9, 47, 50, 263, 264, 269–78 contagion, 9, 10, 133, 135, 224, 243
database, 286, 289, 294, 295, 298 and embodiment, 3, 27–8, 69, 74,
Degérando, Joseph-Marie, 129, 137 146, 149, 161, 183, 205, 235,
de Gheyn, Jacques II, 263, 270 244
de Lancre, Pierre, 265–75, 278 and gender, 26, 36, 54, 56, 57, 77,
Tableau, de L’Inconstance des 80n51, 147, 243, 244, 253, 255
Mauvais Anges et Demons, 268, history of, 6–7, 9, 69, 71
271, 272; culture of Labourd, and memory, 8, 9, 64, 73, 74, 76,
268–70; dances, 269–74; 114, 147, 158, 159, 161, 162,
lasciviousness, 269; women, 242, 243, 254, 289, 291
269–71, 273, 275, 276 methodology, 1–2, 9–10, 14,
D’Entrecasteaux, Bruni, 124, 69–70, 223–5, 243–4, 296–9
128–38 performance, 6–8, 27–8, 34–6, 54,
devil, Satan, 14, 263–5, 267, 270, 71, 77, 85, 146–7, 172, 180,
273–5, 278 182–4, 186, 205, 241, 245,
devotional practice, 110, 182, 196, 253, 254, 277
198–99, 201, 206, 213, 221–36, performative, 3, 6–7, 95, 147
251–2, 293 and representation, 14, 109–10,
reading, 106, 183–4, 186, 266 194, 197, 200–1, 215, 243,
singing, 183–5, 186 246
didacticism, 264, 266, 276 rhetoric, 27, 72, 74, 77, 85, 87, 93,
disgust, 34, 69, 136, 262, 263, 291
266–74, 278 scripts, 28, 138, 184, 186, 187,
Durkheim, Émile, 4, 146, 162, 286 190n28, 223, 291
Dutch East India Company strategies, 49, 242–3, 262, 263,
(Vereenigde Oost-Indische 278
Compagnie or VOC), 5, 10, emotional community, 9, 69–78, 85,
82–102, 287 86, 147, 148, 153, 158, 160–2,
administrative documents, 84–8 174, 177–8, 180–2, 184, 187,
organisational culture, 85, 86 223, 232, 236
emotional effervescence, 4, 9, 125,
224, 234
E emotional intensity, 8, 110, 154, 157,
Easter Island, 127, 134, 135 172, 186, 242–4, 285, 287,
Emeloord (VOC vessel), 92, 93 290–2, 297
316 INDEX
emotionality, 285, 289, 290, 297 gift-giving, 11, 23–41, 67, 68, 74,
emotional regime, 115, 118 106, 123–4, 127, 130, 136, 137,
emotional salience, 241–60 183, 226–7, 229, 293, 298
emotional style, 69, 70, 224, 242 and emotion, 13, 23–41, 67, 136
emotive, 183 and marriage, 11, 13, 23–41
Eucharist, 227, 228, 232, 235, 247, obligation of reciprocity, 24–8, 33,
293, 294 34, 69
exile, 66, 67, 105, 113, 222, 223, Gold, Anna (married Kriegelstein),
225, 226, 229, 231, 233–6 246, 249–50
Great War. See World War I
grief, 1, 3, 9, 64, 66, 69, 75, 89, 90,
F 95, 96, 145–68, 234, 235, 248,
family, 5, 8–10, 12, 27, 29, 30, 44, 249, 255
46, 49, 51, 53, 55–7, 63–80, 87,
124, 126, 150, 173, 185, 223,
225, 228, 230–2, 236, 241, H
246–50, 254, 255, 289 habitus, 7, 224, 225, 235
fear, 33, 41n50, 49, 50, 60n31, 66, heart, 72, 76, 77, 89, 94, 148–50,
71, 72, 77, 78, 91–5, 106, 123, 174, 176, 179, 180, 183, 184,
125, 127, 128, 130–2, 134–6, 190n30, 196, 197, 199
138, 157, 162, 180, 197, 210, Gambetta’s, 149, 157, 159–61
227, 261–74, 278, 287 heresy, 228, 231, 232, 236, 269
feast, 179, 180, 184, 195, 196, 198, Herrnhut (Germany), 241, 244–52
202, 207, 222, 226–36, 238n25, Hugo, Victor, 151, 159, 160
241, 275–7, 293 humoural system, 204–5
feasting, 50, 51, 263, 270
festival/festivities, 47, 103, 105, 110,
113, 116, 131, 179, 222, 231, I
234, 235, 274, 293 identity, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 16, 64, 86,
folly, 262, 264, 266, 276 96, 106, 118, 125, 162, 172–4,
fools, 261, 264, 266, 274–7, 281n15 180, 184, 199, 225, 227, 231,
Franco-Prussian War, 146, 154, 158, 232, 236, 242, 249, 253, 255,
160 287–90, 298
funeral, 5, 13, 150–2, 160, 161, 228, imagination, 89, 114, 145, 261–7,
245 270, 276–8
fusion, 7, 56, 195, 288–90, 292 imagistic rituals, 224, 234, 243,
286–93
India, 245, 251–4
G indulgence, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235
Gambetta, Joseph, 151, 152 intimacy, 28, 43–61, 68, 74, 77, 132,
gentry, 5, 63–80, 287 179, 184, 190n28
gestures, 8, 67, 71, 148, 179, 181, inversion, 270, 275, 277
211, 243, 273 investiture, 173–4, 179, 184, 185
INDEX 317
J M
Jacobites, 11, 222, 223, 236 Maria Magdalena of Malabar, 250–4
James II, 222–31 marriage, 5, 11–13, 23–41, 43–62,
Jardies, les, 149, 152, 153, 157, 65, 70, 181, 247, 264. See also
159–61, 297 gift-giving; love; reciprocity
joy, 50, 76, 104, 107, 115, 134, 136, changing conception of, 24–5, 36,
171, 179–81, 183, 185, 187, 54–5, 185
196, 205, 242, 250, 252, 287 companionate, 24, 29, 35
critique of, 23–41
irregular, 44, 47, 48
K legal definition of, 29–30, 47
kiss, 3, 68, 74–6, 263, 271, 275 spiritual, 173–4, 181, 184
Kiss of Peace, 3 martyr, 14, 116, 171, 175, 179,
182–6, 199, 203, 208, 212,
222–36
L Mary of Modena, 222, 226, 227, 230,
La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup 239n35
de, 124, 126–8, 133–7 materiality, 3, 12, 14, 172, 173, 176,
laughter, 134, 135, 267, 278 185, 193–220, 256n8
law, 12, 26, 29, 30, 34, 41n53, 44, and affect, 193–5, 197, 200, 201,
47, 51, 52, 54, 56, 105, 112–13, 215, 298
173–4, 179, 181 and miracle, 12, 193–219
Commissary Court, Scotland, 43, memoirs, 67, 241–60
48, 49, 59n22 memory, 8, 9, 64, 73, 74, 76, 114,
leave-taking, 5, 11, 13, 63–80, 287 147, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162,
legal records, 29, 43–61, 112 230, 242–5, 248, 254, 291
letter-writing, 5, 10, 14, 30, 63–80, semantic memory, 289
83–102, 104, 133, 222, 227, miracle, 11, 12, 106, 109, 110, 117,
243 193–219, 224, 249
liminality, 4, 65, 214 mockery, 44, 278
liturgy, 154, 171–3, 175, 176, modes of religiosity, 224, 286–99
178–87, 222, 228, 231, 235 monarchy, 2, 10, 67, 103–5, 107,
Louvre, 155, 160 112–15, 118, 147, 153–6,
love, 23–41, 50, 53–7, 63, 64, 69, 74, 226–31
75, 78, 105, 110, 158, 171, monastic, 6, 173–9, 184, 186, 202,
174–87, 190n29, 223, 244, 221, 222, 225, 226, 228, 230–3,
250–52, 269, 293. See also 291, 292. See also convent
gift-giving; marriage monument(s), 109, 116, 150,
loyalty, 27, 67, 68, 71, 72, 77, 152–61, 195, 202, 203, 228,
78, 105, 112, 223, 231, 230, 262
252, 255 mood, 75, 84, 134, 146, 205–6, 275,
obligation of, 24, 28, 33–6 277
318 INDEX
Moravian Church, 7, 241–60 Philip V (King of Spain), 103–22

and conversion rituals, 241–60 phoenix, 110, 116, 117
and memoirs, 241–60 pleasure, 50, 54, 67, 68, 104, 146,
missions, 242–4, 250–3 198, 207
revival movement, 246–50, 254 power, displays of, 10, 54, 105, 110,
mourning, 147–50. See also grief 113–15, 118, 128, 129, 131–3,
music, 45, 50, 51, 110, 124, 154, 136, 195, 253, 274–5
158, 160, 178, 179, 184, 194, prayer, 45, 94, 177, 181, 183, 186,
197, 221, 235, 270. See also 207, 208, 222, 224, 225, 228,
devotional practice 230, 232, 235, 236, 288, 289,
Muslim, 5, 103–21, 285, 287 293
procession, 11, 13, 14, 103, 104,
107–10, 115, 134, 151, 152,
N 154, 158, 160, 173, 179, 180,
Naples, 11, 193–220 202, 208, 209, 221, 222, 224,
nation, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 46, 86, 124, 228, 230–36, 238n34, 287, 290,
128–9, 131, 145–68, 231 297
nationalist(s), 147, 157 profession (nun’s), 173, 174, 179,
natural History, 128–30 184, 185
Nitschmann, Anna, 246–9, 253 Protestant, 2, 86, 173, 207, 232, 241,
nuns, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 171–92, 242, 245, 246, 248, 249, 254,
221–40, 264, 287, 291, 292 255, 293, 294
O Q
obedience, 34, 56, 153, 254 Quitt, Anna, 246
Oufle, Monsieur, 261–84, 298
R
P reading, 6, 11, 15, 24, 85, 88, 89, 92,
Paris, 106, 133, 145–62, 221–40, 94, 106, 110, 123, 136, 158,
261, 268, 274, 288, 297 162n2, 183, 184, 186, 245,
parody, 262, 263, 276–8 257n14, 261, 264–6, 278
patriot, (Gambetta), 145–7, 152–5, reciprocity, 23–41, 69, 74. See also
158, 160 gift-giving; love
patriotism, 11, 87, 117, 134, 145, Reformation, 2, 45, 290, 293, 294
149, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, Counter Reformation, 201, 241,
223, 234 245, 246, 248, 249
patron, 11, 12, 26–7, 109, 116, 177, regeneration, 117, 124, 128, 131,
185, 193, 201, 226, 228–30 134, 186
Péron, François, 130, 137 relics, 13, 14, 157, 159, 160, 196,
Perrault, Charles, 23–41 200–3, 205, 209, 211, 214, 222,
INDEX 319
223, 226–36, 238n25, 239n35, sexual arousal, 9, 272–3

287, 297 Seydewitz (married Molther), Johanna
reliquaries. See relics Sophie von, 246–8
Republic, 84, 133, 138, 145–68 shipwreck, 83–102, 106, 287
Republican(s), 11, 133, 145–59, 161 sibling, 11, 63–80
Revolution, French, 123–43, 146, brother, 43, 63, 64, 70, 71, 73, 89,
154–6, 160, 225 249, 265
revulsion, 33, 273, 278 sister, 63, 64, 70, 71, 73, 74, 177,
ridicule, 261–84 253
ritual. See also bedding; convent Smyth,
entrance rites; conversion; Anne, 66
coronation, of nuns; investiture; Astrea, 71, 73–7
liturgy; marriage; profession; Elizabeth, 71–3, 75
witchcraft Elizabeth (Betty), 65, 75–7
defining, 3–6, 243 Florence, 63, 64, 69, 71–8
desacralisation of, 4 John (Jack), 63–6, 69, 71–5
dysphoric, 4, 8, 287, 297, 303n28 Sir John, 64–6, 70–1, 73, 75–6
euphoric, 4, 287, 303n28 social cohesion, 4, 5, 7–10, 12, 84,
routinised, 4, 93, 123, 127, 128, 224, 182, 187, 224, 234, 285, 286,
289, 291–3 288, 291, 295
sorrow, 69, 74–7, 83–102, 185
space, 9, 11, 12, 51, 65, 70, 74,
S 77, 96, 124, 126, 127, 130–3,
Sabbath, 6, 9, 261–84, 298 138, 139, 155, 177, 195,
Saint(s), 109, 116, 149, 157, 159, 202, 203, 210–12, 225,
193–220, 270 235, 286
St. Agnes, 171, 175, 179, 181–4, 186 Spain, 67, 103–22, 133, 231, 272,
St Justin the Martyr, 221–40 287
Samoa, 134–6 speeches, 148, 149, 152, 154, 155,
San Gennaro (Naples), 11, 193–220 158, 159
Scheer, Monique, 6, 7, 27, 28, 146, spiritual marriage. See marriage
147, 161, 223–5, 235 statue(s), 109, 116, 150, 154, 155,
Scotland, 5, 43–61, 133, 226, 232, 157, 158, 161, 195, 202, 203,
236, 298 228. See also monument(s);
sculpture(s), 155, 157. See also sculpture(s)
monument(s); statue(s) Stuarts, 221–40
semantic memory, 289 superstition, 109, 263–65
sermon, 45, 221, 228, 235 symbols, 11–15, 26–7, 29, 49, 51, 55,
Seshat: Global History Databank, 74, 77, 85, 104–5, 110, 111,
295–8 113–18, 126, 133, 146, 150,
sex, 28, 45, 47, 49, 51–7, 73, 86, 263, 154, 155, 158–60, 172–6, 180,
273, 274 183–4, 206, 231, 254
320 INDEX
T W
Tahiti, 126, 131, 133 Waekende Boei (VOC vessel), 92–5
tears, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 80n51, 149, weeping, 71, 72, 76–8, 80n51, 110,
196, 247–50 145, 158, 244, 251. See also
touch, 68, 74, 85, 124, 205, 272 tears.
trade, 48, 65, 86, 126, 128, 131, 227 witchcraft, 6, 9, 261–84, 298
trust, 106, 112, 126, 129, 136, World War I, 149, 158, 161
180–2, 186, 252, 253 World War II, 161
V Y
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or youth, 44, 56, 63–5, 68, 71, 74–5, 77,
VOC. See Dutch East India 113, 114, 155, 173–4, 181–2,
Company 218n27, 246–8
Vergulde Draeck (VOC vessel), 84, 91–3
Vesuvius, 207–12, 214, 215
Vincq (VOC vessel), 91, 92 Z
visitation, 64, 69 Ziarnko, Jan, 263–78
volcano, 201, 207–15

Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200-1920: Family, State and Church

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History of Emotions

Palgrave Studies in the

Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920

More information about this series at

Emotion, Ritual and

Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956409

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Cover image © PRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Our thanks to the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for

1 Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family to Nation 1

Part I Familial and Personal Rituals: Local and

2 Gift-Giving and the Obligation to Love in

3 Intimacy, Community and Power: Bedding Rituals

4 Late-Adolescent English Gentry Siblings and Leave-Taking

Part II Civic and Nation-Building: Power Created, Power

5 Shipwrecks, Sorrow, Shame and the Great Southland:

6 Ritualised Public Performance, Emotional Narratives

7 Ritual Encounters of the ‘Savage’ and the Citizen:

8 Channelling Grief, Building the French Republic:

Part III Religious Rituals: Relationships with the

9 Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun’s Coronation in Late

10 Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities.

11 Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early

12 Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional Salience

13 The Transformation of Sabbath Rituals by Jean

14 Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power 285

Merridee L. Bailey is a Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of

Medieval and Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),

J. Griffiths) of Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in

of Emotions and Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project,

co-edited a collection of essays on gossip with Heather Kerr, Fama and

Fig. 8.1 The Late Léon Gambetta—the funeral procession leaving

Table 14.1 Contrasting modes of religiosity 291

Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family

M.L. Bailey (*) • K. Barclay

© The Author(s) 2017 1

this idea through Whitehouse’s ‘modes of religiosity’ theory and explores

and physical arousal of participants in the witches’ Sabbath dance, which

volume provide for the possibility of collective emotions, either through

Ritual Contexts: Familial, Political, Religious

with an Afterword by Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François which pro-

nineteenth-century France is testament to the potency of material arte-

NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Sergio Bertelli, The King’s

13. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

25. Uffe Schjoedt et al., ‘Cognitive Resource Depletion in Religious

Familial and Personal Rituals: Local

Gift-Giving and the Obligation to Love

The exchange of marriage gifts is a longstanding ritual in many cultures.

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre

© The Author(s) 2017 23

emotional bond softens the transactional nature of early modern marriage.

Gift-Giving as a Reciprocal Emotional Practice

procity is critical to understanding the social nature of gift-giving. When

as rituals. According to Scheer, emotional practices are ‘things people do

Early Modern Marriage as an Emotional

political institution designed to create a strategic social alliance between the

reflected this complex idea of marriage. Canon law promulgated following

Fulfilling the Obligation to Love in Riquet à la

The reciprocal exchange in Perrault’s tale depicts gift-giving as an emo-

Love can surely inspire me

1 Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family to Nation 1

Part I Familial and Personal Rituals: Local and

2 Gift-Giving and the Obligation to Love in

3 Intimacy, Community and Power: Bedding Rituals

4 Late-Adolescent English Gentry Siblings and Leave-Taking

Part II Civic and Nation-Building: Power Created, Power

5 Shipwrecks, Sorrow, Shame and the Great Southland:

6 Ritualised Public Performance, Emotional Narratives

7 Ritual Encounters of the ‘Savage’ and the Citizen:

8 Channelling Grief, Building the French Republic:

Part III Religious Rituals: Relationships with the

9 Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun’s Coronation in Late

10 Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities.

11 Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early

12 Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional Salience

13 The Transformation of Sabbath Rituals by Jean

14 Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power 285

Table 14.1 Contrasting modes of religiosity 291