Political rituals and political imagination in the medieval west from the fourth century to the eleventh 1

'Medieval political rituals' is a problematic topic. For one thing, the category of the 'political' is fundamentally a creation of modernity; for another, the wide concept of 'ritual' is not only even more recent than 'politics' but also extremely vague. Conciliar records themselves offer an indirect glimpse into what one may call the 'native anthropology' of early medieval assemblies. Early medieval political culture treasured the display of personal interaction in public settings. Tenth-century historiography from outside Germany proper, however, allows the historian to make bets on what may actually have happened between 1918 and 1973 and what was cultural imagination. Christian armies carried relics of the saints into battle–a behaviour attested in the West by the sixth century, and like so many other practices standing at the intersection between cult and politics, emerging in full light thanks to Carolingian legislative activity.