Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T03:29:17.561Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Royal Inauguration and the Liturgical Calendar in England, France, and the Empire c. 1050–c. 1250

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2023

Elisabeth M. C. van Houts
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Rigord included a story in his Gesta Philippi Augusti concerning the postponement of the young prince’s consecration from 15 August to 1 November 1179. The mysterious tale of the illness Philip developed after becoming lost in the forest of Compiègne, and his father’s visit to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury to pray for his safe recovery, has understandably intrigued scholars. Less attention, however, has been paid to the importance of the dates, which are stressed by Rigord himself. Rigord twice mentions that the young king should have been consecrated on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, before invoking Mary as a protector of Philip as he wandered through the forest. He also twice mentions that Philip had been born on the feast of Saints Symphorian and Timotheus and remarks thrice that he was eventually consecrated on the feast of All Saints. That Rigord emphasizes the liturgical importance of these dates through repetition indicates that, while the story of Philip’s adventure and illness might well bear the imprint of chivalric romance, this was not at the expense of a sacral conception of kingship. By returning to medieval conventions of recording time and considering the evidence provided by royal inauguration and marriage in England, France, and the Empire in the high Middle Ages, this essay will demonstrate a hitherto overlooked aspect of royal image in this period. In doing so it will be shown that liturgical conceptions of kingship weathered the storm of Gregorian reform and continued to thrive in an age of burgeoning bureaucracy and with the advent of chivalry.

Diana Greenway has rightly commented that ‘it has been largely through the activity of historians that the passage of time has come to be measured in dates’. Indeed, historians are accustomed to reading medieval chronicles in editions in which the chronological information provided in the text is annotated by the date written in the margin or footnotes in the modern manner. Such information is obviously essential for placing events in the correct chronological order, but it also divorces modern readers from the relative chronology practised in this period, in which dates were recorded with reference to saints’ days, feasts of the church, regnal years, and years since the birth of Christ, amongst other things.

Type
Chapter
Information
Anglo-Norman Studies 37
Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2014
, pp. 83 - 98
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×