Court Ceremonies and the Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean

When approaching this book, a reader doubtful of the importance of studying ritual for understanding the political structure and workings of past societies is unlikely to be reassured by Alexander Beihammer’s designation of ‘modern ritual studies’ as a ‘young discipline’, or by his open-ended definition of this novel discipline’s scope as ‘all kinds of symbolic acts’, or by his definition of rituals as ‘essential modes of human expression, creating and confirming cultural meaning’ (p. 1). Such a reader may well feel a suspicion of there being a combination of overstated claim and vagueness in all this, a suspicion not altogether alleviated by the book’s contents. In his introduction, Beihammer goes on to review ‘modern ritual studies’, ranging, predictably enough, from David Cannadine and Simon Price’s Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (1987; rev. ante, civ [1989], 409–10), through the highly influential work of Gerd Althoff, to the critical stance of Philippe Buc in his Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (2001). He explains that the particular contribution of the present volume is to deal with rituals in the Mediterranean world, apparently a neglected aspect of the ‘young discipline’

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