ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a specifically medieval strategy for forgetting and producing absence: ritual excommunication. The chapter outlines the textual tradition of early and high medieval excommunication formularies and the main features of their performative implementation. It reflects on the notion of an active, voluntary forgetting in the inventory of cursing formularies, especially with regard to the anticipated erasure from the Book of Life, in order to address excommunication as an imperative to forget. The chapter then examines the effect of excommunication as a threefold social, spiritual and posthumous liminality which placed the person concerned on the threshold between this life and the next. Based on these premises, the final part of the chapter discusses the paradox that the ritually forgotten excommunicant became an unforgettable protagonist. Though the majority of the material under examination is of French origin, examples from English, German and Italian sources are also included to widen the focus of the analysis.
