ABSTRACT
To write of ‘rituals’ over time is fraught with dangers, since the functionalist baggage with which anthropology is still loaded renders the historian only too ready to seek an excessively rigid correlation between changes in ritual practice and changes in social or political structure. Many a study ends with, or hinges on, the end of (or crisis in) a system of rituals, or its transmutation through institutionalization (Kelly and Kaplan 1990; Buc forthcoming (a)). A second problem lies in the nature of the medieval evidence: authors were prone to invent rituals, which clearly were, next to miracles, the strongest keystone to a narrative. But given a culture which, like imperial Rome, took solemnities seriously, the issue of their recycling or transformation in moments of historical transition remains, despite this danger, worth exploring. All the more so as we can expect a certain degree of self-consciousness on the part of Christian authors. They thought of the relationship between an old order – that of the Old Law of Moses – and a new order – the New Dispensation inaugurated by Christ – in terms of the abrogation of earlier ceremonies; they also read into the history of Ancient Israel a series of purifying reforms inaugurated with the invention or restoration of religious practices.3 In the following pages, I will therefore risk a diachronic approach, while well aware that clerical circles had their own sense of the relationship between ritual and history.4
