CBTR-17-petkov.

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THE KISS OF PEACE

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CULTURES, BELIEFS
AND TRADITIONS
medieval and early modern peoples

Editorial Board:

william brinner, University of California at Berkeley

florike egmond, Leiden University
gustav henningsen, Danish Folklore Archives
mayke de jong, University of Utrecht
miri rubin, Pembroke College, Oxford University
eli yassif, Tel Aviv University

VOLUME 17
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THE KISS OF PEACE

Ritual, Self, and Society
in the High and Late Medieval West

BY

KIRIL PETKOV

BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2003
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

On the cover: “The Mondzoen” (The Kiss on the Mouth) by P. van der Ouderaa.
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Petkov, Kiril, 1964-
The kiss of peace : ritual, self, and society in the high and late medieval West / Kiril Petkov.
p. cm. – (Cultures, beliefs, and traditions ; v. 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 90-04-13038-1
1. Kissing–Political aspects–Europe, Western–History. 2. Reconciliation–Political
aspects–Europe, Western–History. 3. Symbolism in politics–Europe, Western–History.
4. Rites and ceremonies, Medieval–Europe, Western. 5. Social history–Medieval,
500-1500. 6. Europe–History–476-1492. 7. Europe, Western–Social life and customs. I.
Title. II. Series.

GT2640.P45 2003
306.4–dc21
2003045205

ISSN 1382–5364
ISBN 90 04 13038 1

© Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal

use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910
Danvers MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands

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v

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...................................................................... vii

Introduction: Sub specie osculi .................................................. 1

PART ONE

THE LEGAL BONDS OF PEACE

Introduction to Part One ...................................................... 33

Chapter One The Contest for Supremacy: Ritual and
the Law in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries ............ 37
Chapter Two Transformations: Legal Ritual and the
Evolution of Peacemaking in the Thirteenth Century .... 80
Chapter Three Withdrawal: The Decline of Legal
Ritual in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and
Its Consequences ................................................................ 109
Conclusions to Part One ...................................................... 128

PART TWO

THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF RITUAL

Introduction to Part Two ...................................................... 137

Chapter Four Sentiments at Work .................................... 144
Chapter Five Discourses and Practices .............................. 188
Chapter Six Emotions and Ritual Efficacy ........................ 211
Conclusions to Part Two ...................................................... 234
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PART THREE

BUILDING IDENTITIES

Introduction to Part Three .................................................... 239

Chapter Seven Identity From Without .............................. 245
Chapter Eight Identity From Within: Self and Person ... 290
Chapter Nine Ends and Networks: Ritual Identity and
the Other ............................................................................ 310
Conclusions to Part Three .................................................... 320

Conclusion .................................................................................. 323

Bibliography ................................................................................ 333

Index ............................................................................................ 353
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Above all, I would like to thank Jill Claster for her encouragement,
sound critique, and understanding. Without the help of some peo-
ple and institutions this project would have been different. Without
Jill Claster, it would not have existed at all.
David Hicks, always helpful, and Antonio Feros, a courtier and a
gentleman, have been with me from the beginning and lent me their
unflinching support when I needed it most. I owe them more than
I can possibly ever repay. Lois Drewer directed my attention to
visual sources. Nancy Regalado, Adnan Husain, Thomas Head,
Geoffrey Koziol, Penny Johnson, and Willem Frijhoff each read parts
of the manuscript at an early stage, offered invaluable corrections
and suggestions, and spared me many blunders. So did the anonymous
reader for Brill, from whom I received the sound criticism that forced
me, among other things, to rethink the manuscript’s structure and
bring it into its current shape. My contact at Brill, Marcella Mulder,
has been a pleasure to work with. Being a non-native speaker, I
would not have dared to offer this book to the reading public with-
out the assistance of Cynthia Soderholm. All errors, of course, are
mine.
The Open Society Institute was instrumental in bringing me, a
European blissfully ignorant of the U.S. academic world, to New
York University, and provided the bulk of the funds for my train-
ing and living in New York City. When these ran out, New York
University’s Department of History took over and allowed me to
continue working. Projects in the humanities are not foundations’
darlings. I am grateful to the Director and staff of Hill Monastic
Manuscript Library, who were so kind in extending two short-term
grants and letting me work a month in their magnificent collection
of microfilmed manuscripts, facilitating my research in every possi-
ble way. Seymour Patterson and Truman State University came for-
ward with a small but significant contribution that allowed me to
complete the manuscript’s preparation for print. Finally, Torbjorn
Wandel’s friendship kept me sane during that very taxing period of
my life.
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viii 

New York University’s great research library has been my home

for the past eight years, but it is the staff of Interlibrary Loan Services
to whom I would like to express my deep gratitude. The speed,
accuracy, patience, and professionalism with which they handled my
innumerable requests are truly amazing.

The Author
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1

INTRODUCTION

SUB SPECIE OSCULI

Inter omnia vero pacis signa, que actibus transiguntor, precipuum

et magis expressum est osculum, non dico pedis aut frontis aut
auris aut alicuius membri alterus, sed oris tantummodo. Quia enim
evidentius per oris officium quam per ceterorum membrorum nutum
animi votum exprimimus, ideo per osculum oris pacis beneplacitum
apertius annotamus. . . .
Rufinus of Sorrento, De bono pacis, II, 28.
It is hardly a surprise that the earliest surviving systematic treatise
on the medieval peace, Rufinus’ De bono pacis, was composed by a
person who had been a canon lawyer earlier in life and was arch-
bishop of Sorrento at the time he wrote.1 Ever since the early Middle
Ages, clerics of all ranks had spearheaded the effort to justify the
peace as a highest religious demand on the denizens of the West
and infuse its practice with the precepts of the Christian religion.
Ranging from theoretical compilations with limited applicability to
practical programs with increasingly secular orientation, such endeavors
sought to involve the lay population in non-violent modes of conflict
resolution.2 Around the dawn of the new millennium the religious

1
Roman Deutinger, ed. and trans., Rufunus von Sorrent, De bono pacis (Hanover,
1997), 1–29 and De bono pacis, chs. 18–26. Deutinger’s introduction contains a fine
historiographical essay on earlier scholarship. See also Klaus Arnold, ‘De bono pacis:
Friedensvorstellungen im Mittelalter und Renaissance,’ in Jürgen Petersohn, ed.,
Überlieferung: Bildung als Leitthemen der Geschichtsforschung (Wiesbaden, 1987), 137–44.
2
There is a solid corpus of studies on the medieval peace. See, among other
works, Ludwig Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landesfrieden.
Vol. 1: Die Friedensordnungen in Frankreich (Ansbach, 1892); Roger Bonnaud-Delamare,
L’idée de paix à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 1939); La Paix, Recueils de la societe Jean
Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, vol. 14 (Brussels, 1961); Hartmutt
Hoffman, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei (Stuttgart, 1964); Thomas Renna, ‘The Idea of
Peace in the West, 500–1500,’ The Journal of Medieval History, 6:3 ( June 1980),
143–68; Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence
and Religious Response around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992), and, most recently, Ben
Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340–1560 (University
Park, PA, 1997); Udo Heyn, Peacemaking in Medieval Europe: A Historical and Bibliographical
Guide (Claremont, 1997); and Diane Walfthal, ed., Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for
Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout, 2000). On representation
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2 

ethics of peace, although not seldom disregarded, had seeped down

into lay society and constituted the organizing frame of a welter of
social practices. When, by the thirteenth century, lay authors took
over the peace theme, they had a solid foundation to build upon.
The concept of peace had evolved from a set of religious precepts
to an ethical agenda designed to inform action at the grass-root level
of politics. Little interested in theology as they were, the lay theo-
rists strove to unveil the peace’s sociopolitical base, but the ethical
justification was already there and they drew heavily upon it.
Against the background of this trend, Rufinus, writing in the 1170s,
shows no awareness that he was at the threshold of a new era. And
yet, while the scope and pre-scholastic approach of his work was
somewhat outdated, the trend to moralize and sacralize peacemak-
ing was not. The conventions of theological thought and the reli-
gious fervor for penitence informed the major outbursts of medieval
peacemaking throughout the high and late Middle Ages, from the
late tenth- and eleventh-century Peace and Truce of God, to the
Alleluia of the 1230s, to the Bianchi of 1399 and beyond.
Characteristic of all these movements as well as of smaller-scale
group drives for peace is the concept that the condition of peace
was the sum of the private peace acts undertaken by individual peace-
makers and embodied in standardized performances. Peace was not
thought of as an accomplishment of the authorities even though it
was frequently propagated and orchestrated by them. It was an
intensely personal involvement, invariably described in terms of giv-
ing up personal hostility and of demonstrations of individual good-
will. The medieval peace, it seems, was unthinkable without the
face-to-face, personal encounter and co-operation of former enemies.
Personal encounters, quite naturally, were clothed in rituals. And just
as Rufinus had argued, peacemakers all over the medieval West
agreed on the reasons for which one among these rites, the kiss of
peace, stood out as the most powerful peace act. The kiss brought
about the fulfillment of the most perfect condition, the ‘Peace of

of peace in fine art of the period see Stephan Kubisch, Quia nihil Deo sine pace placet.
Friedensdarstellungen in der Kunst des Mittelalters (Münster, 1992). John Bossy’s Peace in
the Post-Reformation (Cambridge, 1998) and Markus Vogl, Friedensvision und Friedenspraxis
in der frühen Neuzeit, 1500–1649 (Augsburg, 1996) cover the beginnings of the early
modern period. An elegant short discussion of private peace as a technical legal
issue is Antonio Padoa Schioppa, ‘Delitto e pace privata nel pensiero dei legisti
Bolognesi. Brevi note,’ Studia Gratiana, 20 (1976), 271–87.
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Jerusalem,’ through which God reconciled humankind. It was the

mechanism that linked social and heavenly orders in ‘the concord
of brotherly peace’ by freeing the heart of worldly hatred.3 The holy
kiss borrowed from the mass, that ‘great mystery’ of the early Church
fathers, was the symbolic core of all true peace for it reaffirmed the
Christian identity of the peacemakers.
The idea that theologically loaded rituals served as the hinge
between the theory and practice of peace, between the sacred and
the secular world and between the inner man and outer behavior,
was not peculiar to Rufinus. It was widely shared during the Middle
Ages. Embodying the commitment to peace in ritual was certainly
paying homage to the pre-modern Western preoccupation with form
and the belief that form and content were inextricably intertwined.
In the selection of a specific set of rites for the purpose, the kiss of
peace, however, was going beyond that commonplace. Direct bor-
rowings from Christian ritual life reflected the perception that genuine
peace was inseparable from forgiveness and necessitated reconcilia-
tion. The paradigm of this mode of thought went back to the union
of peace and forgiveness in Christ’s ministry. The New Testament
peace program was an extension of the thirst for salvation. It stressed
the internalized harmony, justice, love, and grace that permeated
the whole being of the individual member of the Christian com-
munity. Peace was the free gift of the worshipper who has overcome
the evil of dissent and joined others in the mystical body of the Lord
and the Church. This was not the only conception of peace, of
course. Peace had been understood as absence of hostility and open
warfare as well as in the positive sense of concord, prosperity, jus-
tice and, above all, order, ever since Antiquity. The Roman peace
of the classical era, the Pax Romana, had a pronounced legal dimen-
sion, both in its sense of legal relationship between two parties and
in the sense of the power relationships Rome imposed on the polit-
ical bodies it came to dominate through conquest.4 Since the high
Middle Ages, however, it was the Christian ideal of peace as a pos-
itive disposition and a relationship based on mutual confidence and

3
De bono pacis, 175, ch. 28.
4
There is a succinct summary of the Christian and Roman traditions in Ronald
G. Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition (Maryknoll, 1986), 9–20. See also his Catholic
Peacemakers: A Documentary History. Vol. 1: From the Bible Era to the Era of the Crusades
(New York-London, 1992).
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4 

benevolence which coordinated the hierarchy of the relationship

among most if not all other representations of the perceptions and
practices of peacemaking. The rites centered on the kiss of peace
were the centerpieces of this worldview. The high and late medieval
periods, roughly between the years 1000 and 1600, abounded in ref-
erences to and debates about the implications of the peacemaking
kiss and its accompanying rites. Reaching its heyday by the end of
the 1200s, the tide of commentaries abated in the following cen-
turies as the main interpretations of the meanings of ritual recon-
ciliation crystallized, but the ritual peace with the kiss continued to
be discussed well into the early modern era. ‘References to the kiss,’
Klaus Schreiner remarks, ‘are legion.’5 It is part of my argument
that it was so because in the kiss of peace the two traditions, that
of a power relationship and that of inner disposition and participa-
tion, physical and mystical, in a community, blended in a single
practice. The ritual kiss persevered in peacemaking for it facilitated
the effort of the authorities to legitimize their power to command
by converting external authority into an inner disposition, a drive
that is evident ever since the Peace of God popular movements were
taken over by ecclesiastical and lay lords to impose law and order
on their own terms.
This book then, is an attempt to address the question of what
made the holy kiss of the Christian reconciliation and the rites clus-
tered around it a strategic device of the medieval peace. Thus posed,
the problem is quite broad and barely manageable. My focus, therefore,
will be on one of its basic dimensions. Although recent decades have
witnessed burgeoning research on both ritual life and peacemaking
in the Middle Ages, the practices at the intersection of these crucial
phenomena have not been tackled adequately. The study of the
mechanisms by which the syntax of ritual peace structured the geom-
etry of everyday politics on an individual level is in its infancy and
its analytical agenda is still underdeveloped. The pages that follow
aim to further the inquiry by identifying a subject matter that has
been largely neglected. What is of interest to me is the long-term
operation of ritual in face-to-face politics and personal peacemaking

5
Klaus Schreiner, ‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes’ (Osculetur me
osculo oris sui, Cant 1, 1). Metaphorik, kommunikative und herrschaftliche Funktionen
einer symbolischen Handlung,’ in Hedda Ragotzky and Horst Wenzel, eds., Höfische
Repräzentation: Das Zeremoniel und die Zeichen (Tübingen, 1990), 79.
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as an example of a total practice linking individuals, groups, and

societies. From this perspective, down to the seventeenth century
Western ritual peace appears to have been, among other things, a
demonstration of the political sovereignty of the premodern person.
Sovereignty means different things in different contexts, but its core
contents remain relatively stable: it refers to the possession of a cer-
tain measure of political power. If, as ample evidence from the period
indicates, peacemaking (to reverse the mantra of the theorists of vio-
lence) provided the real stuff of politics, it is worth examining the
ritual peace as a means to shed light on the ways individual sover-
eignty was asserted, contested, and appropriated.
Exploring the practice of peace as reconciliation embodied in rit-
ual interaction relates to the issue of sovereignty in several ways.
Two of these will occupy me throughout the book and need to be
identified at the outset. First, the form and therefore the content of
the medieval peace act affected in a complex manner the personal-
ities of the individuals involved and their position within the com-
munities to which they belonged. Unlike other types of peace,
reconciliation was supposed to order the political relations between
persons and groups in a way that eliminated the sources of conflict.
To succeed, reconciliation necessitated in equal measure the trans-
formation of the person and the redefinition of the linkages to the
social bodies within which the conflict and its resolution occurred.
Second, the transition from conflict to peace was an issue of con-
tested sovereignty and thus the bedrock of premodern politics. Ritual
reconciliation was a means by which authorities at all levels sought
to enter interpersonal relationships, de-legitimize the individual and
group rights of violence, and monopolize violence themselves. Their
strategy was to select a rite with acknowledged efficacy, transplant
it into the field of peacemaking, and sublimate it as a standard form
which, in spite of the variety of meanings borne by ritual, had fairly
predictable effects on the interacting parties. The authorities were
concerned with the outcome of a ritual, not with its pre-set mean-
ings. Control over the form of interaction ensured the possession of
a strategic leverage in the appropriation of the corpus of traditional
rights and privileges enacted in ritual.
The struggle over sovereignty was a long process with many dimen-
sions. I am concerned with it only insofar as it played itself out in
the field of the specific ritual cluster dominated by the kiss of peace.
But this does not mean that the inquiry is a self-serving endeavor
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6 

with limited application. On the contrary, the focus on this partic-

ular ritual calls attention to the logic that dictated that social bonds
be sustained by physical proximity, mingling, and coalescing of human
bodies. Involving the body implies, first, dealing with processes evolv-
ing at the level beneath the specifics of the local and the particular
and, second, taking the long view. The rites of peace were employed
because throughout the medieval centuries, social relatedness, perhaps
more than in any other period in Western history, was embodied in
incorporated practices subject to the ‘habitus,’ to borrow Bourdieu’s
term, or ‘controlled spontaneity’ type of governance.6 This book is
about the latter’s normative principles.
While I would not identify my position with that of Rufinus, I
cannot help noting that the quest for principles is a systematic enter-
prise at a time when this approach, widely practiced in the past, is
not treated kindly by current scholarship. The modern axiom is that
ritual is above all about contextual symbolism and its appropriations,
with the context determining all meanings: that of the ritual encounter
which actually took place in a specific historical past, of the ways it
was recorded to posterity, and of the thrust of present-day inter-
pretations. Modern students of ritual tend to stress the contingent,
fluid, and historically specific character of these meanings. One does
not need to go into details to notice that important as it is, such a
methodological stance is only part of the story. It broadens indefinitely
the scope of the inquiry. While offering an alternative to the older
concepts of universal frames and dismissing general explanatory laws,
this radically ethnomethodological epistemology, if taken by itself,
would undermine the very possibility of reconstructing past practices.
If meaning only emerges in the contextually interpreted practices of
unrepresentative historical figures and is skewed by later authors sub-
ject to their own biases, can we talk about a specific historical past
at all? Or should we, in the post-modernist fashion, deny the past
any ontology? That the evidence about rituals is rarely more than
isolated fragments from epochs that are rather poorly documented
and is subject to the conventions and dangers of the recording and
explication of past practice, as Philippe Buc has forcefully reminded
us, seems to reinforce the ethnomethodologists’ argument.7

6
See note 12 below.
7
Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific
Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2001).
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Be that as it may, to me the undeniable fragmentation of the cul-

tural and social space of the medieval West and the added disadvantage
of distortion in the course of its transmission to posterity are only
parts of the inquiry into the operation of ritual. To concentrate exclu-
sively on the segments of a practice’s implications would be a his-
torical reduction akin to the ‘grand narrative’ approach to the study
of ideas. Stressing fragmentation enhances, rather than neutralizes,
the dangers of applying modes of theorizing built on acquaintance
with other, non-Western societies. It means, too, that a layer of the
past with a strong functional dimension rooted in the Western heritage
is relegated to obscurity. The systematic approach and the search
for long-term patterns can help redeem this past reality by making
us more sensitive to the broad social and cultural phenomena from
which the local forms of socializing derived their meanings. Ultimately,
these phenomena lead us to a context whose implications would re-
main unacknowledged if only the microscopic lens applied. Although
the complexities of interpersonal interaction seem infinite, I would
suggest that just as the reduction of scale practiced by the micro-
historians is not a reduction to the particular, the quest for fundamentals
is not a preoccupation with monolithic universals. Nor are changes
that take centuries to complete without consequences for the everyday
functioning of medieval societies. The suspicions about the heuristic
value of general principles follow in part from the lack of willing-
ness to deal with the whole range of causality in the fragmented and
incoherent world that current epistemological strategies have recon-
structed. While heightening our awareness of diversity, ethnomethod-
ology contributes to scholarly myopia by obscuring the role and
significance of repeated patterns of conduct, similar representational
forms, and identical emotional reactions, which do not necessarily
stem from biological imperatives. The slant toward ‘local knowledge,’
as Clifford Geertz put it, with its militancy against the collective sub-
conscious and shared mentalities should not edge out alternative
explanatory models. The question, then, is not whether the quest
for systematic principles makes sense at all. Rather, if all meaning
is local, does the unveiling of underlying universals contribute to the
inquiry in any significant way? As we ‘go local’ and become entranced
by contextual diversity, are we not losing sight of the basic operative
principles of the medieval societies?
My answer to both questions is affirmative. Throughout, I attempt
to demonstrate that to ignore the systematic approach imposes
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8 

considerable limitations on our understanding of the workings of the

premodern peace. In the words of one theorist, the attentive observer
‘cannot help but notice that the patterns and forms of presentation
he or she examines do not lead to a specific order, but that they
are that specific order.’8 The persistence of a formalized ritual practice
of peacemaking over the long term indicates that there was a social
consensus as to its functions, diverse as its meanings and local appro-
priations might have been. From this point of view, a series of fur-
ther questions suggest themselves. Is the long-term consensus about
the uses of the ritual embodying the concept of peace as reconcili-
ation an expression of the consent to surrender or suspend individ-
ual and collective rights of violence as a means of conflict resolution?
In other words, does the social consensus about a practice imply the
appropriation of agency, or, on the contrary, did the broad range
of meanings this very consensus pre-supposed (otherwise it would not
have existed) actually preserve the sovereign rights of individuals and
groups? How was consent induced and what made a particular,
rather than any, set of rites necessary for its induction? Was the
choice of form related to the contest over political rights? Were the
meanings informing ritual peace exclusive products of the local and
the singular, or did they rest on common assumptions? Assuming
such assumptions, were they validated by official discourses func-
tioning across cultural, social, and political boundaries? If so, how
do standard and relatively stable Western discourses and institutions
operative in peacemaking—Roman law, family practices, the feudal
contract, urban communes, and Christian theology, to mention but
a few—affect the meaning of local ritual practices? All of these are
crucial problems that most current inquiries either do not engage or
do not seem to tackle in a satisfactory manner.
To address these problems, the evidence about the rites of peace
ought to be put in an analytical context. As Bernard Cohn has con-
vincingly argued, an analytical context is not necessarily characterized
by a temporal—or, by the same token, geographical or social—unity.9
To recover the dispersed empirical fragments means not only to

8
Hans-Georg Soeffner, The Order of Rituals: The Interpretation of Everyday Life, trans.
by Mara Luckman (New Brunswick, 1997), x.
9
Bernard Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play,’ Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 22 (1980), 198–221 and ‘Toward a rapprochement,’ Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), 227–52.
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reconnect them to their historical environment but also to restore

them to a world of meaningful interconnections.10 Their intelligibility
depends on our understanding of how their linkages to local contexts
were structured by the operative principles of the analytical category
to which they belonged. Hence the need to reconstruct the context
that allows us to make sense of the diversity and evolution of the local
rites of peace while accounting for the emergence of rituals that
came to be universally accepted in the high and late medieval West.11
My contention is that the analytical field neatly accommodating
these requirements in the context of the struggle over political sov-
ereignty is the construction of hegemony. Peacemaking embodied
diverse and, as we shall see, competing modes of conflict resolution.
Each was coordinated by a system of beliefs, existed as a distinct
ritual practice, and construed its own symbolic interpretative links
to the social environment in which it took place. Handshake, embrace,
symbolic ‘handing-over’ of the guilty party, eating and drinking
together, and other forms of peace were all practices with age-long
pedigrees, which, while invariably embodying the concept of sociability,
were also rooted in local custom and belief. Each of them reflected
a tradition of zealously guarded political rights determining individual
and group identities. None of them acknowledged an authority higher
than the family, clan, or at most the local community. The emergence
of a standard mode of ritual conflict resolution all over the high and
late medieval West was an effort therefore to promote reconciliation
and the Christian ethics supporting it as the exclusive interpretation
of the peace act at the expense of local traditions. It was an attempt
to override other interpretations and integrate the diverse rites of

10
For a forceful methodological argument see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the
Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980), xxv–xxvi, and the
discussion in John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder,
1992), 15–8 and ch. 10.
11
As recent criticism of the new cultural history’s interpretative modes has shown,
the second part of the problem is of crucial epistemological importance. See Richard
Biernacki, ‘Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History,’ in Victoria E.
Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of
Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999), 62–95; idem, ‘Language and the Shift from Signs
to Practices in Cultural Inquiry,’ History and Theory, 39:2 (2000), 289–310. For critical
notes from a different perspective see Jordan Goodman, ‘History and Anthropology,’
in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London and New York, 1997),
783–804. For a defense of interpretation as a strategy of grasping meaning, under-
stood as intention and significance, see Michael Stanford, An Introduction to the Philosophy
of History (Oxford, 1998), 16ff.
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10 

peace in a hierarchy subjected to the doctrine preached from the

pulpit and adopted by the secular authorities. The local, traditional,
and to a great extent pre-Christian meanings of the peace had to
compete with a powerful newcomer propagated by Church and state
alike to make up for the illegitimacy and impossibility of coercion
by imposing a new ethics of political interaction. Behind the value
system borne by the symbolism of the holy kiss of Christianity stood
the authorities’ will to power, the power to acquire, preserve, and
monopolize the agency exercised in the act of peacemaking.
Ritual played a crucial role in the effort to reformulate the discourse
on peacemaking. Through the kiss-centered rites the forces of law,
order, and official morality strove to render their value system hege-
monic, using bodily mnemonics to form, affect, and control personal
dispositions that in other contexts would appear as natural, sponta-
neous, and improvised. 12 Ritual ‘sedimented’ ideological precepts into
the body; it thus secured the acquiescence of individuals in the net-
works of intentionalities in which they were enmeshed.13 The operation
of the ritual kiss exemplifies the postulate of Alltagsgeschichte that social
systems acquire agency by engaging in cultural practices.14 The logic
of the strategy was corporeal. The kiss acted as a bodily mechanism
that guided conduct towards the mode of conflict resolution targeted
by the authorities. More than any other rite, it was capable of induc-
ing dispositions intimately associated with the period’s basic forms
of socialization. It is my contention that the performance of ritual
integrated such personality traits into a different context, that of
peacemaking, for the dispositions were not just cognitive and affective
abstractions. They were parts of a corporeal habit as well and were

12
The issue is not new of course, and there is a burgeoning literature on it,
although Pierre Bourdieu appears to have put it forth best. See his Outline of a
Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), 94ff. Habitus can be succinctly defined as the
‘principle of controlled spontaneity and improvisation.’ In this study the reference
is to the spontaneous creation of cross-cutting ties between symbolic domains. For
a concise survey of further theory see Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the
Historical Imagiation, 70–80.
13
On ‘sedimenting’ see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989).
See also Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, 1987),
esp. 173 about the body as a ‘memorial container,’ holding memories of joy or
pain that can be relieved involuntarily. Both Connerton and Casey build on Merleau-
Ponty’s theoretical insights, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
(New York, 1962). As for ‘intentionality,’ I am paraphrasing Alfred Gell, Art and
Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), viii.
14
Goodman, ‘History and Anthropology,’ 795.
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   11

therefore carried by the socialized body itself. Mobilized by the kiss,

habit sublimated the ideological contents of the authorities’ ethics of
peace embodied in the ritual they strove to assert to an order of
signs and practices that were natural and universally accepted—that
is, habit forged the authorities’ ideology into a hegemonic category.
Through habit, the interpretative scheme of the authorities became
non-negotiable, for now it emanated from the very body of the indi-
vidual. Ritual transformed the authorities’ paradigm into a hege-
monic principle dominating personalities and actions.
The choice of the kiss as the main vehicle of this strategy was not
accidental. The kiss is a universal, although also a historical category
that reaches back into the mists of time. As a function of the orifice
of the mouth, the organ of speech and communication, yet suggesting
connections to hunger and sex, and ingestion and incorporation as
well, the kiss is at once a metonym and metaphor, corporeal and
cultural, involving controlled, social interaction and uncontrollable
individual reaction. It establishes contradictory yet constitutive linkages
between the individual person, his or her body and inner self, and
the outer social world. Kissing, even more so in the premodern
period for reasons I shall explore in detail later, was a total practice
on its most fundamental level.
The major value of the kiss as a reconciliatory rite was that it
produced an intensely physical experience in which a set of obligatory
relations was rooted.15 Combining cultural and extra-cultural dimen-
sions of existence, these relationships accounted for the application
of the kiss as a recurring phenomenon. The ritual kiss’s capability
to mobilize such relationships within the dominating discourses of
Church and state was key to the rite’s sublimation as a strategy for
hegemonic action.16 The action played itself out on many levels.
Three of these seem to be of special importance: the socialization

15
For the theory of obligatory relationships see Paul Friedrich, ‘Shape in Grammar,’
in Janet Dolgin, David Kemnitzer, and D. Schneider, eds., Symbolic Anthropology (New
York, 1977), 381–93. Friedrich defines the concept as operative in the perception
of shape and space; however, he examines anatomical relations only in linguistic
context. The concept certainly has broader implications, as Friedrich himself notes,
for obligatory relations of taxonomic and paradigmatic types; the ritual kiss works
in the field of paradigms. See also Renaat Devish, ‘Space-time and Bodiliness: A
Semantic-Praxiological Approach,’ in Rex Pinxter, ed., New Perspectives in Belgian
Anthropology, or, the Postcolonial Awakening (Göttingen, 1984).
16
For the definition of ritual as a strategy for action see Catherine Bell, Ritual
Theory, Ritual Practice (New York-Oxford, 1992).
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12 

of affects, the transformation of informal interaction into legal oblig-

ation, and the construction of personality. Let me exemplify this by
briefly looking back to the applications of the kiss prior to the period
dealt with here.
The kiss carried a double moment of secular and sacred affect
for the ancient Hebrews and Greeks.17 Classical antiquity witnessed
the conventionalization of the kiss. Nonetheless, as a ritual the kiss
was still used to translate ontological but highly structured social rela-
tions, such as kin and family ties, into instantiations of affection.18
In the later Roman Empire the domain of relatedness embodied by
the kiss transcended the realm of pure social convention and per-
meated the field of the political, from acts formalizing ties of patron-
age on local level, to rites of submission and protection in imperial
adoration where sacred and secular overlapped.19 An obligatory ele-
ment had already been present in the secular adoration rites.20 Early
medieval Germanic custom, as far as it is possible to trace it, preserves
references to similar referential fields.21
The early Christian tradition built on these connections, and yet,
for all this, the pre-Christian and early Christian kiss was not, despite
appearances, an established rite of the secular peace. Late antiquity
knew the kiss above all as a gesture of affection between close kin,
as an intensely spiritual rite of peace and unity in Christ, and as a

17
August Wünsche, Der Kuss in Bibel, Talmud und Midrasch (Breslau, 1911); Karl-
Martin Hoffman, Philema Agion (Gütersloch, 1943).
18
For the Roman custom, see Nicholas James Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane:
An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1969), 1–50.
19
For patronage, see a remark of Maximus, a fifth-century bishop of Turin; I
quote after Edmund K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (London, 1903), vol. 2, 295;
for the kiss of adoration see Franz Dölger, ‘Verweigerung von Kuß, Händegedruck
und Salzgemeinschaft aus Gewissensbedenken,’ ACh, V, 55 and especially Gladis
Amad, Le baiser rituel: un geste de culte meconnu (Beirut, 1973).
20
Amad, Le baiser rituel, passim.
21
William Foulke, ed. and trans., Paul the Deacon, History of the Langobards (New
York, 1971), 150; Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem, V, 17; IX, 11 and 20;
VII, 29, quoted after Bruno Kruschi, ed., MGH, SRM, 1, 2nd edition (1937–1951).
English translation in O. M. Dalton, trans., The History of the Franks by Gregory of
Tours (Oxford, 1927), vol. 2, 185–6, 381–92, 305–6. The Anglo-Saxon custom is
documented by the use of sibbe cos to translate ‘kiss of peace,’ Joseph Bosworth and
T. Northcote Toller, eds., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, 1983), 868. It needs to
be remembered that the term appears in a monastic environment and might have
reflected the notion of the monastic community as an artificial kin-group. Be that
as it may, the root of the concept would lead us, once again, to the natural ‘sib’
community to which it originally referred.
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   13

legal rite regulating property issues between prospective marriage

partners. The contents, local variations, and evolution of these pheno-
mena have been studied in detail and are by and large clear. Except
in the case of the unlikely appearance of a large body of new mate-
rial very little can be added to or changed in the findings of three
generations of critical scholarship. As the rites of the medieval sec-
ular reconciliation drew the most important of their meanings from
the stock of religious paradigms, it is worth outlining the theologi-
cal and liturgiological implications of the holy kiss of early Christianity.22
The genius of the early Church fathers grasped the importance
of the powerful hub of meaningful linkages packed in the kiss and
introduced it into the central Christian mysteries. The kiss emerged
as a distinctly Christian act with pneumatological significance in Paul’s
Epistles and acquired dimensions quite different from these of the
formal kiss in the Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. As L. Edward
Phillips put it, for Paul the kiss carried the spirit which, even when
having a strictly anthropological referent, was understood as God’s
pneuma given to the believers, as the Divine Spirit animating the flesh.
But the kiss was more than that. Sharing the kiss, the early Christians
delineated the boundaries of their community in the same way that
the secular kiss of the Roman family delineated family boundaries.
The physical contact between the members of the group, by virtue
of the kiss’s pneumatology made brothers and sisters in Christ of
persons unrelated by blood. Furthermore, already by the first century
the kiss might have carried the implication of reconciliation.23 In the
second and third centuries the link between the peace and the sacred
pneuma was reinforced in several venues. Such, for example, is the
function of the kiss in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus.24 For
Tertulian, the spirit exchanged between Christians through the kiss
was the bond of Christian fellowship, communicating the peace of
God among his children. Attributing holiness to peace and reconciliation

22
For the following paragraphs I am indebted to L. Edward Phillips, The Ritual
Kiss in early Christian Worship (Cambridge, 1996), 9–25; Eleanor Kreider, ‘Let the
Faithful Greet Each Other: The Kiss of Peace,’ Conrad Grebel Review, 5 (1987);
Nicholas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 1–50, and Yannick Carré, Le baiser sur
la bouche au Moyen Age: Rites, symboles, mentalités, à travers les textes et les images, XI e–XV e
siècles (Paris, 1992), 221–53.
23
If Cumming’s interpretation is correct, see G. J. Cumming, ‘Service Endings
in the Epistles,’ New Testament Studies, 22 (1976), 110–113.
24
G. J. Cumming, ed., Hippolytus. A Text for Students, Grove Liturgical Studies, 8
(Bramcote, 1976), 18–19.
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14 

was not just a dogmatic precept for the worshippers of the God of
Peace. It had a strictly practical dimension. Those who had lapsed
in times of persecution made their peace with God by being rein-
stated in the community through the holy kiss of peace. In Cyprian
of Carthage and even more so in Cyril of Jerusalem, the kiss’s impli-
cations of peace and reconciliation gained added momentum and
strengthened its sacramentality. Cyril added another touch for future
exegetes by stating that the kiss was a ‘commingling of souls.’ The
kiss, he postulated, ‘is a sign of a true union of hearts, banishing
every grudge . . . [the kiss is] a reconciliation and therefore holy.’25
From such beginnings the kiss expanded to cover man-to-man recon-
ciliation in preparation for participation in the sacramental mysteries
of worship. In the third-century Christian community, peace, recon-
ciliation, and unreserved forgiveness became mandatory prerequisites
for practicing the Christian religion, as the Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum
maintained.26 In Theodore of Mopsuestia’s succinct late fourth-cen-
tury formulation, the ritual kiss was holy only if it signified the sec-
ular reconciliation of those who exchanged it.27 Some of the sanctity
of Christian mystery thus rubbed off onto the everyday practices of
life in peace and conflict.
For all these reasons, already by the second century the kiss was
linked to such liturgical acts as communal prayer and initiation rites.
By the fourth century, the extant evidence about the nascent liturgies
of the early Eastern communities points to the presence of the kiss
in the eucharistic liturgies. In Western practice, if we may judge
from Augustine, the late fourth-century kiss was tied to the Lord’s
Prayer and the communion. He also endorsed yet another theological
dimension of the kiss that was to be stressed in later times, the suppli-
cation for forgiveness in the traditional Roman do ut des spirit in the
invocation ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who tres-
pass against us.’ The kiss now stood for the true offering to the Lord,
the gift of peace and reconciled relationships among the members
of the community.
This rich array of theological connections kept the liturgical kiss

25
Richard W. Church, trans., St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments
(Oxford, 1951), 72.
26
Robert H. Connolly, ed., Didascalia Apostolorum (Oxford, 1929), 116.
27
Theodore of Mopsuestia, On the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and
the Eucharist (Cambridge, 1933), 93–3.
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   15

alive during the shifts of doctrine and practice following the triumph
of the fourth-century Church. The rite could not escape, however,
the consequences of the transformation of Christianity into an official,
state, and mass religion. Around the beginning of the fifth century,
with the changed scale and context of the increasingly ceremonial
Christian worship, the ‘holy kiss’ metamorphized into a liturgical
device in search of meaning. From the point of view of the clergy,
as a letter of Pope Innocent I to the bishop of Gubbio of c. 416
linking the kiss to the communion testifies, the kiss was the ‘closing
seal’ or the assent of the congregation to the act of consecrating the
mysteries. This stance, even though coming from the bishop of Rome,
does not seem to have been generally accepted. The Augustinian
link to communion proved more authoritative. For the individual
faithful, in Eleonor Kreider’s apt formulation, the kiss became part
of a sanctifying process related to personal piety rather than predo-
minantly an act of assertion of the Church’s corporate essence. The
fifth-century kiss completed the transition from relational to legal,
from outward to inward, and from corporate to personal concern.28
The rite preserved this position, if not the liturgical meaning of
assent throughout the Middle Ages, in spite of recurring suspicions
about its connection to idolizing trends as late as the ninth century.29
By the late tenth century, with the limitation of the lay access to
the sacred and the hierarchization of the relationship between the
Church and the secular society, the functional dimension of the kiss
was transformed in an important way. The rite came to mark the
dependence of the lay folk on the clergy officiating at the sacred
mysteries.30 The kiss was associated to the act of commingling sym-
bolizing Christ’s return to life in preparation for communion; with
time the kiss came to substitute for the latter. In stark contrast to

28
Kreider, ‘Let the Faithful Greet Each Other,’ 33–43.
29
For the later theological complications of the kiss see Ann Freeman, ed., Opus
Caroli Regis contra Synodum (Libri Carolini), in MGH Concilia 2, Supplement 1 (Hanover,
1998), 544–50.
30
For the early medieval period see Georg Nickl, Der Anteil des Volkes an der
Meßliturgie im Frankenreiche von Chlodwig bis auf Karl den Großen (Innsbruck, 1931), 47–51.
For later developments see Charles Caspers and Marc Schneiders, eds., Omnes
Circumadstantes: Contributions towards a History of the Role of the People in the Liturgy
(Kampen, 1990). The early liturgical kiss referred, above all, to the drama of the
last super, the resurrection of Christ, and the unity of Christian community in
Christ, see O. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages:
Essays on the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, 1971), 35–77.
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16 

earlier practice, however, the mystery was received by the officiating

priest via the kiss of the altar and the chalice and then, through the
kiss again, communicated to the congregation according to rank and
status. The break with tradition has as much to do with transformations
of doctrine as with the structure of the Christian community of
believers as a body politic. With the new arrangements came a hier-
archy in the relationship between clergy and lay folk absent in the
earlier tradition. Sharing the kiss at the invitation of the priest was
one thing; ‘receiving it’ from above, as it were, another matter alto-
gether. Lay people’s capacity to induce action that was not exclu-
sively sacramental, but with a pronounced social dimension as well,
was not denied altogether but was seriously curtailed. The point was
that clergy and congregation were now integrated into a hierarchy
reflecting the monopolization of agency, or the power to validate
practice by the Church.
Although the legacy of the early Church fathers had an internal
logic to it, it was anything but orderly, and diverse theological inter-
pretations continued to sprout throughout the high and late Middle
Ages. At the beginning of our period, however, scriptural exegesis
seconded liturgical practice and moved toward constructing a hier-
archy of the rite’s meanings. The tendency was in synch with the
formation of the scholastic mode of thought and was already clear
in the works of the leading high medieval exegetes. Twelfth-century
exegeses of the Song of Songs, for example, tended to link the kiss to
the Sermon on the Mountain, that is, to reconciliation instead of the
traditional stress on commemoration, resurrection, and incarnation.31
Liturgiologists, for their part, recognized that accommodating diver-
sity of theory strengthened the functionality of the rite. John Beleth
in the 1160s and Innocent III in the early 1200s were instrumental
in organizing the loosely floating body of concepts about the sym-
bolism of the kiss into an elaborated scholastic edifice attempting to
integrate all available theological thought.32 The great canon lawyer

31
The standard studies on the Song of Songs are Friedrich Ohly, Hohelied-Studien.
Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200 (Wiesbaden,
1958) and Helmut Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den leteinischen Hohelied-
kommentaren des Mittelalters (Münster, 1958).
32
Herbert Douteil, ed., Johannis Beleth Summa de ecclesiastici officiis, 2 vols. (Turnholt,
1976), vol. 2, esp. 83 ch. 48, and Innocent III, De sacro altaris mysterio, book 6, ch.
4: De osculo pacis, in PL, vol. 217, col. 807 and especially cols. 909–10. Less influential,
but also popular was the simplified version of Sicard of Cremona, emphasizing the
fraternity in Christ and the incarnation, PL, vol. 213, cols. 139–40.
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   17

and compiler, Guillaume Durand, borrowed generously from them

to formulate the definite explicatory canon in the last quarter of the
thirteenth century.33 With slight variations his texts provided the
material with which lesser minds filled the pages of scores of expli-
cations of the mass throughout the pre-Reformation period.34
The theological and liturgical implications of the kiss of peace
attached a value to the rite, which seemed to facilitate its seeping
down to lay society in a number of fields. The kiss, as it were,
carried its own justification. Hence, it is fully possible that, when in
the early fourth century the kiss was formalized as a legal device of
the late-Roman pre-marriage contract, it occurred because secular
law was reinforced by the relations already present in the theologi-
cal and liturgical function of the kiss.35 The appearance of an impor-
tant link between the two perceptions of the public kiss, the legal
and the theological, is suggested by the legal language in which the
early eucharistic feast was couched.36 With these implications the rit-
ual kiss was preserved in the legal canon as it was handed down
through the ages. The spread of customary law after the fall of the

33
A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau, eds., Guillelmi Durandi Rationale divinorum officiorum
(Turnholt, 1995–1998), vol. 1, 287–90, Liber Quartus, ch. 9 and especially 543–7,
ch. 53, ‘De pacis osculo.’
34
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries explications of the mass followed either the
canon as established in the early thirteenth century or Durand’s amended version.
So do, for example, definitions of the role of the kiss in Eggeling Becker of
Braunschweig, Expositio canonis missae, MS Barth 93, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek
Frankfurt am Main, HMML, # 44779 271v–272v; Albertus Magnus, Bedeutung der
Heilige Messe, MS Bernkasterl-Kues, HMML # 95, 82r–83r; Nicolas Stoer, Expositio
canonis missae, Universitätsbibliothek Giessen HS 746, HMML # 45526, 88r–89v;
Guillaume of Gouda, De expositione missae, Historisches Archiv Köln, HMML # 36946,
61–6, 72, 77–9, 104–8; Bernard of Parento, Tractatus de officio missae, Universitäts-
bibliothek Bonn MS S373, Nr. 188, HMML, # 39087, 134v–136v; Heinrich Liebl,
Expositio canonis missae, HMML # 11629, 98–101. I would like to express my grat-
itude to the staff of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library for supporting in every
possible way my research in their rich microfilm collection. For an English collec-
tion of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples see J. Wickham Legg, ed., Tracts
on the Mass (London, 1904), 14–5, 26–7, 48–9, 64–7, 74–5, 82–3, 102–3, 162–3,
174–5, 210–211, 226–7.
35
For a discussion of Constantine’s laws instituting the kiss as a formal expression
of legal obligation see most recently Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges
from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford, 1991), 151ff. To the best of my
knowledge, none of ancient and modern commentators of Constantine’s law links
the theological teaching about the kiss with its appearance in the legal frame of
marriage in the early fourth century.
36
See the evidence in Franz Dölger, ‘Ein wichtiges Zeugnis für agere im Sinne’
von ‘Meßliturgie begehen,’ ‘die Eucharistie feiern,’ ACh, I, 63–4.
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18 

last authorities following the Roman imperial legal tradition, the

Visigothic kingdom of Spain, did not affect its vitality as a legal rite
and, I would suggest, detached it from the theological background
against which the law operated. More importantly, however, while
the diversity of custom-defined meaning characterizing the early
medieval local usage of the kiss-centered rites has been demonstrated,
and cannot belie the link between law and dogma, the essence and
evolution of the legal bond established by the kiss during the fol-
lowing centuries remains to be investigated. This is worth remem-
bering, for around the beginning of the period the kiss migrated in
the rites of vassalage, the second most important form of social rela-
tions in the high medieval period. What matters is that in all cases
the operation of the ritual kiss throughout the high Middle Ages was
influenced by theological thought but could not be reduced to it.37
The codification of the legal formalism of peacemaking in the period
from the last quarter of the thirteenth to the first quarter of the
fourteenth century betrays sociopolitical rather than religious-ethical
principles of organization. Again, it was the ubiquitous and indus-
trious Durand, following his teachers of the Bolognese school of legal
systematizing, who furnished the backbone which later legal com-
mentaries fleshed out.
The contours of the evolution of the ritual kiss thus seem clear.
What is unclear is how the concepts of relatedness embodied in the
informal kiss of kin and feudal affiliation, the holy kiss of Christianity,
and the legal kiss played themselves out in the remarkable expan-
sion of the rite in secular peacemaking. Each of these spheres of
action had its own social agents, the lay people, the Church, and
the secular authorities. There are sporadic references to the kiss as
a peacemaking device before the tenth century, but the kiss-centered
rites were overshadowed by other practices, above all by the ubiq-
uitous handshake, and a roster of words, things, and actions with
long Biblical, Greco-Roman, and Germanic pedigrees.38 The ritual

37
I infer this from Émile Chénon, ‘Le rôle juridique de l’osculum dans l’ancien
droit français,’ Mémoires de la societé nationale des antiquaires de France, 8th ser., VI
(1919–23), 124–55 and Giorgio Tamassia, Osculum interveniens (contributo alla storia
dei riti nuziali),’ Rivista storica italiana, 11 (1885), 241–64.
38
Rufinus of Sorrento has a short list in his De bono pacis, ch. 27, see Deutinger,
Rufinus von Sorrent, 172. Thirteenth-century legalists elaborated a roster of cases. A
classic late-medieval moralistic example is Johannes von Paltz, Coelifodina, ed. by
Christoph Burger and Friedhelm Stasch (Berlin-New York, 1983), 155–7.
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complex coordinated by the kiss became highly visible only in the

late tenth century. In any event, it was propagated on a grand scale
by ecclesiastical and lay authorities alike by the year 1000. Gaining
a solid foothold in the official peace theory and practice, the ritual
kiss did not surrender it for at least three centuries and remained
influential long thereafter.
Students of the Middle Ages have not failed to notice this, ask why
it was so, and attempt to provide answers to the question. Indeed,
the increasing frequency with which the kiss-centered rituals appear
in evidence from the turn of the first millennium on has attracted
the attention of generations of scholars. There is a valuable scholarly
tradition on the subject. Much of what has been done, however,
remains inadequate to the task. Three aspects, in particular, invite
criticism. First, in spite of the interest in ritual there are no studies
explaining the persistence rather than the reasons for the initial incor-
poration of the kiss of peace and its accompanying rites in the con-
text of conflict resolution.39 Second, there is no coherent, conceptual
argument revealing the evolution of the modes of social interaction
embodied by peacemaking ritual. Third, the relations between the
forms of the peace act and the analytical fields endowing them with
meaning seem to pose the greatest challenge to the students of peace
and remain practically unexplored.
These problems are well demonstrated in the first modern surveys
of the kiss-centered rites. The most representative of these, Christopher
Nyrup’s collection of historical anecdotes and case studies from all
over Europe, was published at the turn of the twentieth century. It
did not go beyond empiricism and basic structural functionalism.40
Attempting a systematization of a large amount of material, Nyrup’s
method followed contemporary descriptive ethnography aiming to
preserve records of practices near extinction rather than utilizing
them as heuristic devices for the study of ritual and society.

39
Peace with the kiss appears only episodically in the two major recent contri-
butions to the study of early and high medieval ritual life, namely, Geoffrey Koziol,
Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992)
and Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde
(Darmstadt, 1997).
40
Christopher Nyrup, The Kiss and its History (London, 1901). There is a shorter
version of the same approach in Ernest Crawley, The Mystic Rose (London, 1902).
A similarly anecdote-like survey of mostly modern material is Charles Carroll
Bombaugh, The Literature of Kissing, Gleaned from History, Poetry, Fiction, and Anecdote
(Philadelphia, 1876).
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20 

The same observation holds partly true for the largest group of
specialized studies, the work of liturgiologists discussing the Christian
osculum pacis, the kiss exchanged at mass. The sophisticated empiri-
cal skills of this discipline’s practitioners produced a roster of inquiries,
which can be grouped in three categories. The earliest trend was to
discuss the kiss as a symbolic rite within the framework of Christian
worship. Building on the rich tradition of liturgical exegesis from the
early Christian centuries to the age of the antiquarians, modern litur-
giologists mapped out the evolution of the liturgical kiss, as well as
its place, role, symbolism, and significance in Western liturgies from
its earliest occurrences to the post-Reformation era.41 The relationship
between liturgical and social function, however, was not a concern
of theirs. Nonetheless, the wealth of detail gathered by these metic-
ulous researchers allowed a second wave of scholars, from those writ-
ing in the pastoral vein to the more socially minded, to place ritual
within a larger interpretative scheme. The kiss-centered rites and
their shifting contexts were explored to chart the transition of the
early Christian communities into the hierarchical, stratified edifice of
the medieval Catholic Church.42 While most of these scholars oper-
ated from within the theological discourse, a third group, consisting

41
Such as Adolph Franz, Die Messe im deutschen Mittelalter. Beiträge zur Geschichte der
Liturgie und das religiösen Volkslebens (Freiburg, 1902); August Wünsche, Der Kuss in
Bibel, Talmud und Midrasch; Karl-Martin Hoffman, Philema Agion; Josef A. Jungman,
The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Solemnia), trans. by
Francis A. Brunner (New York, 1951–55), vol. 2, 321–32; Franz Dölger, ‘Der Kuß
im Tauf- und Firmungsritual nach Cyprian von Karthago und Hippolyt von Rom,’
ACh, I, 186–96; ‘Der Kuß der Kirchenschwelle,’ ibidem, II, 156–8, ‘Der erste
Friedenskuß der Täuflinge im Kreise der Gläubigen,’ ibidem, 159–60, ‘Zu den
Zeremonien der Meßliturgie: II. Der Altarkuß,’ ibidem, 191–221, ‘Verweigerung
von Kuß, Händegedruck und Salzgemeinschaft aus Gewissensbedenken,’ ibidem, V,
51–9, ‘Christen verweigern Heiden den Kuß. Ein Volksbrauch in Kappadokien
nach der Georgslegende,’ ibidem, 147–9; Ludwig Eisenhofer, Handbuch der katolis-
chen Liturgik (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1964); Joseph Braun, S.J., Das Christliche Altergerät
in seinem Sein und in seiner Entwicklung (Munich, 1932), 557–72; Klaus Thraede,
‘Ursprünge und Formen des “Heiligen Kusses” im frühe Christentum,’ Jahrbuch für
Antike und Christentum. Erganzungsband, vol. 11–12 (Münster, 1964), 124–80; Edmund
Bishop, Liturgica Historica. Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church
(Oxford, 1962); and Rudolf Suntrup, Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden und Bewegungen
in lateinischen und deutschen Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1978).
42
Phillips, The Ritual Kiss; Eleanor Kreider, ‘Let the Faithful Greet Each Other,’
28–49; Walter Lawrie, ‘The Kiss of Peace: A Declaration of Koinonia,’ Theology Today,
12:2 ( July 1955), 236–42; Stephen Benco, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians
(Bloomington, 1984), 78–103. See also Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward
Yarnold, S.J. and Paul Bradshow, eds., The Study of the Liturgy (New York, 1992).
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of historians and sociologists, adopted a secular perspective. The best

contribution here belongs to John Bossy, whose historico-sociological
analysis of the late medieval mass exposed the dynamics of the social
textures hidden behind the theological façade of ritual.43 Bossy’s ana-
lytical approach poised the kiss at the hub of the linkages binding
individual to community, but it also invited the criticism of later
scholars who focused on the conflict over rank and status inherent
in the late medieval liturgical practices.44
The evolution of the liturgical kiss from a theological into a socio-
logical problem and a heuristic device of social and cultural history
is indicative of the shift in scholarly interest demonstrated by the
second major group of studies of the kiss, the work of the legal his-
torians. Following a tradition of their own, the post-medieval stage
of legal inquiry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century focused
on the two large fields where the rite still had legal implications at
the time they were writing: namely, marriage and vassalage. The
antiquarian revival, perhaps best exemplified by Charles Du Cange,
broadened these spheres to include the cataloging of evidence about
property exchange and peacemaking. Like Du Cange, the early legal
scholars saw their task in collecting and classifying instances of rit-
ual practice which they considered to be the forms or ‘vestments’ of
the various contractual ties explicated in the commentaries of the
medieval Romanists.45 By the turn of the nineteenth century, this
approach was abandoned. French and Italian legalists working on
the rituals of vassalage and property exchange and German legal

43
John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700,’ Past & Present, 100
(August 1983), 29–61, and his ‘Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community, and
Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,’
in Derek Baker, ed., Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World (Oxford, 1973),
129–43.
44
Virginia Reinburg, ‘Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation
France,’ Sixteenth Century Journal, 23:3 (1992), 526–47; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The
Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge-New York, 1991) and Eamon Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT,
1992).
45
For a selected list of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘osculatorians’ see
Hans-Wolfgang Strätz, Der Verlobungskuss und seine Folgen rechtsgeschichtlich besehen. Nebst
drei Anhängen (Konstanz, 1979), 51–2. Among the early modern authors, two works
stand out, Martin Kempe, Dissertatio historico-philologica gemina: prior, de osculo in genere,
ejusque variis speciebus, posterior de osculo Judae (Leipzig, 1665), and Stephan Wiesand,
Disputatio de osculis iuris symbolis (Leipzig, 1764). The best inventory is still Charles
du Fresne Sieur Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Graz, 1954), vol. 6,
coll. 71–4.
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22 

historians studying feud and reconciliation attempted to clarify the

role of the kiss-centered rites within the formal legal procedures in
which ritual was included. The contribution of the critical legal school
consisted of adding a structural dimension to the uses of the kiss
and in postulating the law of obligations as its operative field.46
Having accomplished this during the period between the World Wars,
modern legal science considered its job done and shelved the case
of peace ritual.
Shifts in the study of liturgy apart, the post-World War II era
witnessed a re-orientation of the inquiry into new fields. Developments
in related disciplines stimulated renewed interest in pre-modern
Western ritual in general and the kiss-centered rites in particular.
Anthropology, especially its symbolic interpretative branch, proved
most inspiring. Under such influences, the new studies tended to
address the ritual kiss as a cultural practice rooted in the function-
ing of a self-sufficient, coherent system of signs and symbols.
The advent of cultural symbolism was heralded by an attempt at
a synthesis, Nicolas Perella’s monographic discussion of the kiss as
a religio-erotic rite. Perella’s main target was the symbolism of the
love kiss. He focused on a few primary metaphors harking back to
the early Christian epoch, such as the kiss-soul and kiss-spirit, and
drew almost exclusively on fictional and narrative evidence. His work
was a specimen of literary theory in the field of migratory discourses
and excluded sociopolitical causality.47 This approach was shared by
shorter literary and linguistic studies on the kiss. One of the few
works in this area, Jones’s survey of the kiss in Middle High German
literature was limited to highlighting the principles according to which
the conventions of social interaction were converted into literary

46
Émile Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ Nouvelle
revue historique du droit français et etranger, 16 (1912), 573–660, and especially his ‘Le
rôle juridique de l’osculum;’ Lucien Anné, Les rites de fiançailles et la donation pour cause
de mariage sous le Bas-Empire (Louvain, 1941), 63–85, and 296–306, esp. 82; Giorgio
Tamassia, Osculum interveniens; Mary Brown Pharr, ‘The Kiss in Roman Law,’ The
Classical Journal, 42:7 (April 1947), 393–7; Rudolf His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen im
Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1901) and his short but instructive references in ‘Gelobter und
gebotener Friede in deutschen Mittelalter,’ ZRG, 66 (GA, 33) (1912), 139–223, esp.
197ff.
47
Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane. Perella’s approach provoked Le Goff ’s some-
what justified remark that this was ‘just another book on courtly love,’ see note 49.
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   23

tropes. Jones then discussed the latter as signs operative within the
literary discourse’s own conventions.48
At the other end of the spectrum absorbing the fresh theoretical
impulse, Jacques Le Goff ’s seminal study of the symbolic rites of
vassalage abandoned earlier legalistic schemes in favor of a ‘thick
description’ in a Geertzian fashion and built on a crossbreed of sym-
bolism and structural anthropology. Le Goff saw the kiss as the
embodiment of the social equality and reciprocity characterizing
exclusively the French feudal custom.49 The idea was present in the
medieval legal tradition on reconciliation throughout the continent,
but Le Goff ’s preoccupation with structurally oriented, closed sign
systems prevented him from grasping the connection. Another study
of the rites of vassalage from the vantage point of symbolism,
J. Russel Major’s, although locked in a different explanatory scheme
(Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process), introduced histori-
cism to the problem. Russel Major supplied a dynamic dimension
to Le Goff ’s structural interpretation by considering the reasons for
the demise of the rite and attempted to broaden the range of causal-
ity by adding a socio-cultural perspective, the field of manners.50
Russel Major’s work reflects the impact of the most recent trend
in the study of Western ritual, the new cultural history. This approach
drew attention away from explanation and instead embraced inter-
pretation. The act of reading the kiss as a cultural sign now con-
stituted the fundamental analytical issue. The practitioners of this
school approached the kiss as a fluid, multivalent cultural practice.
They highlighted the diversity of meaning, the distinctions between
public and private, and, in a modification of Van Gennep’s and
Victor Turner’s theories, the function of the kiss as a liminal ritual.51

48
George F. Johnes, ‘The Kiss in Middle High German Literature,’ Studia
Neophilologica, A Journal of Germanic and Romance Philology, 38:2 (1966), 195–210; see
also Peter Flury, ‘Osculum und osculari. Beobachtungen zum Vokabular des Kusses
im Lateinischen,’ in Sigrid Krämer and Michael Bernhard, eds., Scire litteras: Forschungen
zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben (Munich, 1988), 149–57.
49
Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rituals of Vassalage,’ in Time, Work, and Culture
in the Middle Ages, trans. by Athur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), 237–87.
50
J. Russel Major, ‘Bastard Feudalism and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in
Late Medieval and Early Modern France,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17:3
(Winter 1987), 509–35.
51
Michael Camille, ‘Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral,’
in Daniel Poirion and Nancy Regalado, eds., Context: Style and Values in Medieval Art
and Literature. Yale French Studies, Special Issue (New Haven, 1991), 151–70. I would
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24 

Michael Camille’s and Willem Frijhoff ’s inquiries, for example, focused

on the capability of the ritual kiss to refer to signs and symbols orig-
inating in distinct, internally consistent systems of meaning to reflect
the affective scales and cultural values of different social groups.
These studies enhanced our grip on the generation of meaning, but
their weakness is in the reduction of ritual action to its semiotics
and the failure to fully integrate causal functionalism into the inter-
pretation. This shortcoming is neatly illustrated in Klaus Schreiner’s
two recent essays on the kiss. Treating the rite above all as a symbol-
ically communicative and performative practice situated exclusively
within systems of signs exchange Schreiner reverted to a new ‘sym-
bolic positivism,’ being unable to explain sociopolitical causality out-
side the range of the symbolic links.52
The cultural trend in post-war historical inquiry was most thor-
oughly integrated in the recent synthesis in the field, Yannick Carré’s
monograph on the symbolism of the Western kiss from the fifth to
the fifteenth century.53 This interdisciplinary study had three pro-
fessed aims.
The first was to make an overview of what the author called vari-
ables—that is, kissing in specific contexts, such as the kiss of peace,
the vassal kiss, the kiss in greetings, in reconciliation, and the mys-
tic kiss. Carré’s task was to explicate the symbolism of the rite within
each category and define the categories’ chronological frames. Following
a model harking back to Nyrup’s, Carré’s new-style symbolic inven-
tory did provide more substance, especially of French provenance,
and underscored the observation that the kiss-centered rites had
indeed been a central ritual complex of the pre-modern West. Unlike
earlier discussions, Carré positioned the symbolic dimension of rit-
ual within the historical uses of the kiss. His inquiry was thus clear-
ing the ground for a future ‘historical ethnography’ of the ritual kiss,

like to thank Prof. Regalado for bringing this article to my attention. See also
Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Kiss Sacred and Profane: Reflections on a cross-cultural
Confrontation,’ in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History
of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day, with an introduction by Sir Keith Thomas
(Cambridge, 1991), 210–36.
52
Schreiner, ‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes;’ and idem, ‘Gerechtigkeit
und Frieden haben sich geküßt (Ps 84:11). Friedensstiftung durch symbolischen
Handeln,’ in Johannes Fried, ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im hohen und
späten Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1996), 37–85.
53
Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age.
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based on better regional and quantitative studies. The second aim

of Carré’s book was to reconstruct the constants, or the historically
stable dimensions of ritual. Building on earlier findings, above all Le
Goff ’s, Carré discussed the functioning of the kiss as a masculine,
an egalitarian, an elitist, and a public gesture. Finally, Carré’s real con-
tribution was the presentation of the evolution of the kiss as a syn-
thetic reflection of the metamorphoses of individual and society from
the twelfth to the fifteenth century. He postulated that the kiss stood
for the symbolic union of carnal and spiritual that resolved the anti-
nomy between the City of God and the City of Man. The ritual
kisses among the members of the three orders of society embodied
two types of harmony, the one interior and individual, the other
social and collective, realized on four levels—corporeal, affective,
spiritual, and intellectual. That harmony, in Carré’s view, charac-
terized Western civilization in the high Middle Ages. The break-
down of that social order and the theories that informed it spelled
the demise of the kiss. Carré’s conclusion set the research agenda
for the future; only the total, interdisciplinary, minute inquiry into
the functions of the kiss, he insisted, will help us understand the fun-
damental premises of harmony, order, and interdependence upon
which medieval Western society was built.54
The unfolding of Carré’s synthesis as a progression from the par-
ticular to the general and from the empirical to the analytical captures
the theoretical evolution of the now century-old critical inquiry into
the ritual kiss. It is a convenient point of departure to assess the
achievements and shortcomings of modern research, as well as the
venues for further investigation emerging from it. Three major points
deserve scrutiny, regardless of whether we address ritual peace on a
local, regional, or inter-regional level.
First, there persists the trend to substitute an inventory of the
applications of the kiss and their symbolic ‘reading’ for an analyti-
cal approach. This is best seen in the study of legal ritual. Inquiries
fail to account for the principles that underlay the connection between
local forms, their generic functional context, and social environment.
Carré’s ‘intellectual’ interaction, for example, included the kiss in the
rites of vassalage and property contracts—both legal rites—but paid
no attention to the features these ‘variables’ shared. Early critical

54
Ibidem, 323–36.
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26 

legal scholarship captured some of the general patterns in the shift-

ing legal contexts of the rite. Subsequent work, however, did not
follow up on that. Legal ritual as an analytical issue disappeared.
The problem of how the changes in the nature of the legal concepts
embodied in the kiss reflected the evolution of its political environ-
ment, and therefore the power relations which played themselves out
in peacemaking was overwritten by preoccupations with the sym-
bolism of the kiss. This double reduction curtails our capacity to
analyze ritual’s role as a legal form. The symbolic inventory approach
to the legal field misses the main question, the nature of the oblig-
ation generated by the kiss and the reasons for which it was cho-
sen over or worked along with other legal forms or symbols, such
as the seal or the written record. Was the principle making the kiss
operative in legal contexts applicable in other types of legal rela-
tionships? The substitution of symbolic interpretation for sector analy-
sis does not allow us to address this issue and, assertions to the
contrary notwithstanding, gives an ahistorical slant to the investiga-
tion. Equally neglected is the question of whether the legal substance
that was clothed in one and the same ritual changed over time and
what conclusions can we derive about the sociopolitical premises of
such an evolution. Finally, where did legal agency reside? Legal,
social, and cultural historians so far have not attempted a geneal-
ogy of legal ritual on such terms, being content with identifying its
local symbolism and social referents, its origins, and its demise.
Second, the evidence does not support the argument for the exis-
tence of coherent, independent ritual discourses operating within
closed symbolic systems and the suggested division of variables, con-
stants, and levels of symbolic integration. These proposals, again,
seem to mask an empirical solution as an analytical one. The ritual
kiss of peace was more like a porous hub of partial connections, car-
rying over meanings from one symbolic field to another and mediating
between symbolic and non-symbolic worlds. The alleged constants
in the operation of the rite—rank, gender, and the public-private
dichotomy—do not appear to be structural phenomena. On an ana-
lytical level, the practice of ritual reconciliation collapses the difference
between constants and variables as postulated by Carré. The quest
for the stable parameters of the ritual action needs to be reoriented
toward hermeneutic constants, such as the actors’ affective and cog-
nitive dispositions and the habit-memory that bodily practices induced
and orchestrated.
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This observation leads us to the third point, the main thrust of

the inquiry. Those engaging the kiss-centered rites on some analyt-
ical level maintain that the rites of peace were above all a symbolic
representation. Accordingly, the analysis is directed to ritual’s semi-
otic structure and the cultural code behind it. Within this broad con-
sensus there are two camps, parting ways on the issue of ritual’s
functional dimension. The majority shares the idea that ritual com-
municated a common social ethos and values. Reading the rite within
a self-contained symbolic system or reinserting it into a historically
specific background, this view presents the kiss as a device of social
stability and equilibrium, since the rites of peace articulated symbol-
ically and made intelligible the forces of cohesion in the represented
social reality. Carré’s reconstruction of the high medieval ‘symbolic
harmony of the kiss’ is the most forceful expression of this paradigm.
The second interpretation goes along postmodernist lines. Its pro-
ponents conceive of ritual as contested grounds and the kiss of peace
as a cultural form disguising and denying social conflict. Ritual inter-
action did not mirror and reinforce pre-existing social structures. On
the contrary, it attempted to order social systems. This type of analy-
sis allows us to break through the crust of social harmony and dis-
cern the conflicts simmering underneath.55 Introducing contestation,
this approach moves away from symbolism and emphasizes the func-
tional dimension—i.e., what matters for the inquiry is what ritual
actually did.
The search for such functional patterns is at the heart of my
inquiry. It seems to me that if there is an epistemologically sound
strategy for the reconstruction of the functional dimensions of the
kiss over the long term and all over Latin Christendom, it is the
snapshot technique. What follows, then, is an analysis of clusters of
data gathered after extensive sifting of evidence from the regions
where the kiss was consistently used as peace ritual. Monastic charters
from the eleventh- and twelfth-century France, notarial records from
the thirteenth- to sixteenth-century northern Italian communes, and
the city statutes and other legal evidence of the late-medieval urban
centers of northwestern Germany and the Low Countries are my
main sources, along with narrative and corroborative evidence from
other locales. Where possible, I have tried to analyze coherent action

55
Rubin, Corpus Christi, 76–7; Duffy, The Stripping of Altars, 126–7.
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28 

sequences and detect recurring patterns within their local social con-
text. To integrate the bewildering variety of local, regional, and
supra-regional appropriations of the kiss-centered rites into a coherent
reconstruction of ritual efficacy is no easy task. What makes it man-
ageable is that the operation of the rites of peace can be analyzed
in discrete categories.
The first of the fluid referential fields of the ritual kiss is the legal
dimension of peacemaking. Legal evidence provides, among other
things, the time frame of the inquiry. The earliest extant evidence
of the kiss as a legal instrument of the peace is in the legislation of
Emperor Henry II in 1019. One of the last statutory injunctions I
use is in the re-issue of the legal code of Antwerp in 1586. The
analysis unfolding between these two chronological poles aims (1) to
reveal the legal principles informing the functioning of the rites of
peace; (2) to identify the shifting meaning of the obligation ensuing
from the binding promise of ritual as the fundamental feature of the
kiss’s legalism; and (3) to trace the interaction of the secular rites of
peace with the ecclesiastical discourses attempting to control them.
Discussing the uncoupling of the legal discourse from the religious
field, I attempt to pin down the social essence of obligation and the
legally actionable conditions it created.
Second, the legal contract was stabilized by ritually governed emo-
tionality. Emotions were induced, mobilized, or suppressed with the
deployment of the kiss of peace. In the absence of legitimate coer-
cion, the agreement to reconcile and forgo insult and injury, even
when reached under pressure and couched in legally binding terms,
was a shaky social device. If all habit is, in a sense, affective dispo-
sition, whether the peace would stand or not depended on the abil-
ity of the reconciliatory act to suppress the asocial emotions induced
in the course of the conflict, to remove or neutralize them as con-
ditions of revenge, and to induce positive emotions of socializing.56
The ritual kiss tackled this demanding task by causing individual
actors to go through acts of emotion work that linked agency and
context, orchestrating the coordination of emotion and affect in such
a way that asocial sentiments were suspended, suppressed, or destroyed.
The chronologically evolving feelings of the feud, such as anger,
hatred, and grief, cultural artifacts as they are, are exposed in the

56
Connerton, How Societies Remember, 93–4.
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ritual interaction as having their roots in both organic affect and

social sentiment. Juxtaposing this emotional texture against the author-
itative ecclesiastical discourses based on love, mercy, and forgiveness
by examining the evolution of a major reconciliatory narrative, The
Tale of the Forgiving Knight, I seek to reveal the linkages between nor-
mative prescription and ontological affect. Finally, I select four emo-
tional states induced in the course of the ritual encounter—anxiety,
catharsis, disgust, and respect—to discuss the emotional efficacy of
ritual.
Third, a major issue for the student of ritual and power rela-
tionships is the constitution of identity in the contexts of the ritual
peacemaking. High- and late-medieval ritual was a dynamic means
of individuation, operating against the backdrop of the shift from
traditional to functional mode of social stratification, the interaction
enfolding within two historically consecutive structural frames, exchange
and representation, and ritual being a remembrance-generating device
unifying personality in action. In all cases identity was determined
by the political and social contexts in which its appropriation took
place, creating one type of identity in twelfth-century France, for
example, another in a thirteenth-century Flemish commune, and yet
another in sixteenth-century Florence. The rites of peace operated
as linkages between self, role, and person and a contextual device
validating the internal hierarchy of these identity building-blocks.
Ritual peacemaking, it turns out, can be used to test the plausibil-
ity of the controversy over embodied continuity of identity versus
identity resting on the continuity of other persons’ perceptions.
The three categories, ritual in legally binding arrangements, its
emotional economy, and its role as an identity-building device lead
us, in their turn, to some of the fundamental principles of social and
political interaction in the period. Without claiming to exhaust the
whole range of implications of ritual, I outline by way of conclusion
those that seem to have been of significance for the functioning of
the peace rites. Let us, however, follow the order of things ritual
and, without further ado, turn to the legal bonds of peace.
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PART ONE

THE LEGAL BONDS OF PEACE

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INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

THE LEGAL BONDS OF RITUAL

Ley. IIII. Que cosa es paz, e en que manera

deue ser fecha, e que pena meresce aquelque
la quebranta.
Paz, es fin, e acabamiento de la discordia, e
del desamor que era entre aquellos que la fazen.
E porq el desacuerdo, e la mal querencia q los
omes ha entresi nasce de tres cosas. Por ome-
zillo, o por daño, o por deshonrra que se fazen,
o por malas palabras que se dizen los unos a
los otros. Porende queremos demostrar en q
manera deue ser fecha la paz sobre cada vno
destos desaquerdos. Onde dezimos que quãdo
algunos se quisieren mal por razon de omezillo,
o deshonrra, o de daño, se acaeciere q se acuer-
den para auer su amor de consuno, e ferel amor
ver dadero conuiene que aya, y dos cosas que se
perdonen, e se besen. Esto tuuieron por bien
los sabios antiguos porque de la abundancia del
coraçon sabla la boca, e por las palabras que ome
dize da testimonio de lo que tiene en la voluntad
porque el beso es señal que quita la enemitad del
coraçon, pues que dixo que perdonaua, a aquel
que ante queria mal, e enel lugar de la enemistad
puso, y el amor. Mas quando la mal querencia viene
e malas palabras que se dixeron, e non por omezillo,
si se acordaren para auer su amor de consuno, abon-
da que se perdonen, e en señal quel perdonamiento
es verdadero, deue se abraçar. Otrosi dezimos que
quien quebrãtare la paz despues que suere puesta
reteniendo en el coraçon la enemistad de la mal
querencia que ante auia non la faziendo por ocasio,
nin por otro yerro que acaeciesse entre ellos de
nueuo, que deue auer aquella mesma pena, que han
aqllos q quebrantã la tregua en aquella manera
que de suso diximos.
Alfonso the Wise, Las Siete Partidas, VII, 12, iv

In 1555, the learned licenciado Gregorio López published what proved

to be the most authoritative edition of Las Siete Partidas, the fundamental
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34    

law of the Spanish realm. Working with versions dating back to the
thirteenth century, López followed tradition and wove through the
text an extensive gloss of his own.1 His contribution makes clear that
ritual was still a legitimate part of most legal actions. Peacemaking
was no exception to that rule. López traced down its subtleties all
the way back to Aristotle, drawing heavily on Guillaume Durand,
Giovanni Andrea, and Baldus’s late medieval compendiums, but gave
little credit to the neo-Latinists who maintained that consent alone
made the peace act binding.2 To López, without ritual there was no
actionable legal bond. There were two ways to make peace, he ex-
plained, with words and an embrace, and with words and a kiss.
And while embracing was the standard gesture on most occasions,
the kiss was required for reconciliation after homicide, grave injury,
or insult. Supporting his argument with excerpts of Bernard of
Clairvaux’s sermons heavily loaded with affective spirituality, López
saw in the kiss the sign of the pure love that transformed the hearts
of former enemies. In the context of the law, the kiss translated the
individual emotive transformation into a formal legal bond. This was
necessary, for although peacemaking was enforced and monitored
by the state, it was still a private contract and without the parties’
total commitment the peace would not hold.
López’s gloss reflects a discourse in which the ritual kiss was the
central feature of the legal instruments constituting the peace act.3
Contrary to the assertions about the fading of ritual efficacy, six-
teenth-century legal systems still made good use of the kiss’s legal
potential. On this point the Spanish lawyer was not alone. At the
time López was busying himself with the commentary, several Italian
cities in the Papal States promulgated codes with detailed regula-
tions of the implications of the ritual kiss of peace. About thirty years
after the publication of the Salamanca Partidas, in 1586, the gov-
ernment of Antwerp published its own authoritative edition of the
city’s statutes with similar references to the legal efficacy of the kiss
of peace. Early modern legislation on peacemaking, following in the
footsteps of high medieval jurisprudence, clearly considered the rit-

1
See Jerry R. Craddock, The Legislative Works of Alfonso X, El Sabio: A Critical
Bibliography (London, 1986), 72, for López’s edition as parent of all subsequent
editions.
2
Las Siete Partidas: Setena partida (Salamanca, 1555), 45.
3
I use the term ‘discourse’ with the meaning of the ‘general domain of the pro-
duction and circulation of rule-governed statements,’ see Sara Mills, Discourse (London,
1997), 9.
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ual kiss something more than a tenacious formality that went against
the grain of contemporary legal theory. And although the kiss soon
lost its legal meaning and disappeared altogether from the law, among
other reasons because of the increased coercive powers of the state,
its continuous presence in medieval legal theory and practice is a
phenomenon that requires explanation.
At the heart of this phenomenon was the conviction that the kiss
operated a legal instrument constituting the legal pact of peace. The
task of the following discussion, therefore, is to explore the role of
the kiss by unveiling the evolution, essence, and implications of the
legal substance represented in ritual. Just as in the sixteenth century,
the medieval kiss thrived in a wide range of local, regional, and
inter-regional traditions and provided the formalism for a host of
legal instruments. Probing several of those across the high and late
medieval West is no easy task. I doubt the possibility to ever accom-
plish the ‘total inquiry’ which Carré called for. In the absence of
such, we have to admit that one cannot study the workings of a
legal rite that registered all over Latin Christendom by leafing through
the contents of a single archive, nor can we cast the net deep and
wide enough to cover all of the archives. The methodology I worked
out had to take stock of the patchy and chronologically uneven infor-
mation about the usages of the legal kiss and acknowledge the neces-
sity of conjecture. My guidelines can be summarized as follows.
First, on a macro-level it is possible to define relatively homoge-
neous geographical and cultural environments in which, compared
to other places and times, the extant data documents substantial evi-
dence about the kiss-centered rites over a discrete time period. Almost
invariably these regions demonstrate a high level of political frag-
mentation, social strife, and the absence of centralized, legitimate,
and coercive monopoly on power acknowledged as such by the par-
ties to the reconciliation. Such are the French kingdom and the south
of France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Castilian towns
of the twelfth century, the North Italian communes and city-states,
and the urban centers of the Low Countries and Northern Germany
from the late twelfth trough the fifteenth century. Within these regions
operated diverse and often idiosyncratic legal traditions, many of
which took on the formalism of the kiss as the central rite of peace-
making. Each of the areas, however, displays common, recurring
patterns that impose a degree of coherency on the hodge-podge of
local custom. These patterns are revealed in the nature of the legal
bond embodied by the kiss, its role compared to other ritual forms,
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36    

the legal instruments which adopted the formalism of the kiss, the
social agents engaged in peacemaking, the binding force borne by
the kiss, and the legal character of the agreement enacted in ritual.
Second, although the legal forms and instruments of peacemak-
ing in each area followed their own rhythm, it is possible to discern
broad shifts in the evolution of the kiss-centered rites as a Western-
wide peace form. The set of features defining legal ritual as a regional
phenomenon help anchor it in time as well. The fact that we can-
not chart these developments in minute detail and that there are
huge regional ‘blank gaps’ in the evidence does not mean that the
attempt to analyze the changes in the legal implications of ritual is
unwarranted. On the contrary, I would argue that the ‘total inquiry’
advocated by Carré is unnecessary for the understanding of the major
political dimensions of peacemaking ritual. These can be understood
fairly well if the fundamental principles governing the internal evo-
lution and transformation of the binding forces of ritual practice are
grasped. The evolution of the kiss as a legal rite reflects the process
by which the struggle for the imposition of a hegemonic concept of
the peace reformulated the nature of the legal bond established by
ritual. In each of the above broadly defined socio-cultural environ-
ments, the contest enfolded according to its own rules, and although
there are inter-regional borrowings and overlapping, each area can
be examined as representing a distinct chronological stage in the
application of the kiss as a legal device. The picture we will arrive
at does not necessarily stand for a composite, pan-European pro-
gression of the relationship between peace ritual, law, and political
power, but it will enhance our understanding of the principles gov-
erning their interaction as the Middle Ages unfolded.
My inquiry into the legal bonds of peace therefore combines the
chronological with the topical approach. On each of its stages of
development legal ritual was characterized by features that are region-
ally specific and typologically distinct from what can be observed at
the same time in other locales. From humble beginnings in the
eleventh century, to becoming the exclusive form of peacemaking
during the thirteenth and most of the fourteenth centuries, to its
subsequent decline in secular jurisdictions in the following centuries,
the legal kiss of peace followed a trajectory which has remained
obscured by preoccupation with other dimensions of ritual. Let me
now turn to the rapid expansion of the ritual kiss as a legal form
to lay the foundations for revealing the logic governing that trajectory.
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37

CHAPTER ONE

THE CONTEST FOR SUPREMACY:

RITUAL AND THE LAW IN THE
ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

Legal ritual has long been a subject of interest and the kiss of peace
has had its fair share of attention in the writings of legal scholars.
In spite of this centuries-old tradition, legalists have not placed the
rites of peace, and indeed few other rituals, in the context of the
legal institutions within which pre-modern ritual formalism operated.
The task of this chapter is to chart the early stage of the expansion
of the kiss of peace along five major lines. I will explore (1) ritual
as the form of the legal instruments employed in the reconciliatory
contracts, (2) the binding forces of obligation borne by the kiss and
(3) the traditions informing them, (4) the nature of legal bond the
kiss embodied, and, (5) the conditions of peace created by the rite
during the period of its expansion, the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies. The choice of this time frame is not arbitrary. Although I do
trace the genealogy of the traditions supplying content to the legal
kiss of peace, a set of features characterizes the two centuries between
c. 1000 and 1200 as a discrete period in the history of legal ritual.
The period is marked by the extraordinary expansion of the kiss in
customary law, its adoption in numerous legal instruments, and the
struggle of the traditions in which it was already established to dom-
inate the ritual forms of peacemaking. Above all, however, the high
Middle Ages are remarkable, as we shall see, for the quite uniform
legal concept engaged by the kiss.
It seems appropriate to organize the inquiry in a topical manner,
paying attention both to the genealogy of the legal customs discussed
and their geographical distribution. I begin with a survey of the legal
instruments operated by the formalism of the kiss in the course of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries and work my way through the
conditions they created and the legal forces which sustained them.
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38  

Instruments and Traditions

Having entered the continental legal traditions in the early fourth

century as the formal rite of betrothal, the kiss was slow to expand
into other legal fields in general and the sphere of legal peacemak-
ing in particular. Uninterrupted ecclesiastical insistence on the pos-
itive social implications of the kiss employed at mass notwithstanding,
the customary practices of peacemaking built on Roman legal tra-
ditions and the Germanic influences upon them were hesitant to
endorse the kiss as their formal expression, or ‘vestment.’ The break-
through must have occurred sometime in the late tenth century. The
data are inconclusive, but if we can judge from the extant evidence,
the first explicit reference to the kiss as the ritual form of a legally
binding instrument is a case of firmantia.
The medieval instrument of firmare in its technical sense is recorded
in the earliest Bavarian and Langobard legal codes and had a con-
tinuing existence in all kinds of legal transactions throughout the
Middle Ages.1 Closely related to a family of legal terms, such as
obligare, adramire, auctorisare, and inwadiare, firmantia appears to be an
instrument akin to the Langobard wadia and the Frankish fides facta
but had strong connections to late Roman law as well. Since the
high Middle Ages, firmantia was a common occurrence in the heav-
ily Romanized southern European provinces and appeared in sources
written in Latin, Catalan, and Provancal.2 In Italy, the adherence
to the legal custom of vulgar Roman law was perhaps the main rea-
son for the preservation of firmantia in twelfth- and thirteenth-century
notarial practice. In this environment, customary firmantia made its
way into civic legislation and was associated with the kiss. One of
the earliest occurrences of the kiss of peace in Italian statutory law,
for example, is in the statutes of Verona, where, drawing on sources
from the eleventh century, the legislators expressly understood oscu-
lum as formal firmantia.3 The late registration of the rite, however,

1
Ernst Schwind, ed., Lex Bajwariorum (MGH Leges, Sec. I, Leges nationum germani-
carum, Hanover, 1926), vol. 5 part 2, title XV, ch. 11.
2
For firmantia see Alex Franken, Das französische Pfandrecht im Mittelalter. Erste
Abteilung: Das Engagement und sein Verhältniss zu der sogenante ältere Satzung des deutschen
Rechts (Berlin, 1879), 220–40.
3
See the article about those who break the peace with exiles in the Statutes of
Verona from 1228. The text of the law strongly suggests a connection with Liber
Papiensis and the Constitutions of Henry II from 1019; see below.
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    39

reminds us to exercise caution in connecting the kiss to the legal

instrument at this stage of its evolution.
In the territories of what is today France, the kiss-firmantia appears
to have been in use much earlier and not only in the Romanized
South. An example from the political history of the late Carolingian
period, widely echoed in early eleventh-century historiography, the
murder of William Longsword, testifies to its existence in northern
France as well. On December 17, 942, in the neighborhood of the
small village of Picquigny, about ten miles west of Amiens, Count
Arnulf of Flanders met with his long-time enemy, Duke William
Longsword of Normandy. The purpose of the meeting was to estab-
lish indelible friendship and peace. All principal sources, the Deeds
of the Norman Dukes, Dudo of St. Quentin, Richer, and Raoul Glaber,
confirm the official character of the meeting. The two princes first
kissed at seeing each other; after reaching an agreement, they sealed
it with an oath of friendship and, again, with kisses of peace.4 How
this peaceful and otherwise cautiously prepared conference ended is
well known. Duke William was treacherously called back, attacked,
and murdered by Arnulf ’s henchmen. What counts for our discus-
sion, however, is not the precarious character of the bond embod-
ied in the kiss and oath, but the clear indications of the legal character
of the two practices. It is true that none of the Norman-affiliated
writers who raised an outcry at Arnulf ’s treachery went beyond the
moral side of the story. There are, however, sufficient reasons to
believe that the kiss was the embodiment of a formal legal instru-
ment referred to by the Deeds with the technical term firmare. Duke
William was caught off guard because to him ritual was not merely
an affective or ‘symbolic’ gesture, ‘confirming’ or ‘strengthening’ the
bond but a working device securing the contract. Arnulf ’s subse-
quent reconciliation with the king, too, indicates that the breaking
of the bond was an offense against the Capetian ruler’s theoretical
jurisdiction, feeble as it might have been in practice.

4
The terms used by the earliest authors are, respectively, cum eo amicitia uelle
habere pacemque indelebilem firmare and post jurata amicitiarum sacramenta et plurima pacis
oscula. See Elizabeth M. C. van Houts, ed. and trans., ‘The Gesta Normanorum Ducum’
of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni. Vol. 1: Introduction and Books
I–IV (Oxford, 1992), 90–3, Book iii, 11–12. Compare also Dudo of St. Quentin,
History of the Normans, translated with introduction and notes by Eric Christiansen
(Rochester, 1998), 81–5.
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40  

The sources thus support the conclusion of continuous and wide-

spread application of the instrument within definable legal parame-
ters. Firmantia entailed the giving of a pledge or security to guarantee
the integrity of the act, and oftentimes included the pledge of the
firmator himself—a practice well-known from the Frankish laws—or
his fideiussor, or his material possessions. Its infringement triggered
penalties. These varied locally, and ranged from losing one’s secu-
rity, according to the tradition preserved in the thirteenth-century
Tübinger Rechtsbuch but dating from a much earlier epoch, to seizure
of the offender’s goods or body, to destruction of his property, to
payment of indemnity or ban from the country.5 The main feature
of firmantia as a legal instrument in all cases appears to be its promis-
sory, interim character and its operation within the domain of the
law of obligations.6 Finally, from the geographical distribution of the
instrument we may conclude that firmantia was not a Roman insti-
tution, but rather a Romanized indigenous form. It was most prob-
ably brought to life by the practical necessities of the early medieval
Romanized and Germanic societies struggling to define their legal
structures with the vocabulary of Roman law.7
Throughout the early and the high Middle Ages firmantia was
enacted through the performance of a rite or the presentation of an
object. The handshake, the insertion of hands or immixtio manuum,
the transfer of a rod or festuca, of a charter, or of a certain amount
of money, or the touching of relics or the Gospels—that is, all the

5
Tübingen Law Book, ch. 127 (I use the microfilm copy in HMML) for losing
one’s firmantia in case of failed third arbitrage. For a discussion of this case see
Linda Fowler, ‘Forms of Arbitration,’ Proceedings of the Second International Congress of
Medieval Canon Law (MIC, Series C, Subsidia; vols. 1, 4, 6) (Vatican City, 1972),
138–9.
6
Here I use obligation as a general category. Thereafter I will distinguish between
legal liability (Haftung) and duty (Schuld ) in the manner of the distinction elaborated
by Otto von Gierke, Schuld und Haftung im älteren deutschen Recht, insbesondere die Form
der Schuld- und Haftungsgeschäfte (Breslau, 1910). Gierke’s theory has been criticized
and for good reason. It does introduce a too neat distinction in the procedural
development of early Germanic law. However, it does provide conceptual tools that
are indispensable in a discussion of the function of legal ritual.
7
On the most recent condition of the lively dispute about the relationship between
continuity and change of Roman law and culture in the French south see Christian
Lauranson-Rosaz, ‘La Romanité du Midi de l’an mil: Le point sur les sociétés
méridionales,’ in Robert Delort, ed., La France de l’an Mil (Paris, 1990), esp. 49–53.
Jeffrey A. Bowman, ‘Do Neo-Romans curse? Law, Land, and Ritual in the Midi
(900–1100), Viator, 28 (1997), 1–32 focuses specifically on a ‘cultural pool’ of shared
ideas and practices in the integration of written legal rules and their ritual sanction.
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habitual gestures accompanying the swearing of an oath—were its

standard embodiments. With the adoption of the kiss of peace in
the legal formalism of firmantia, an uneasy relationship with the other
forms developed. High medieval law did not have such a concept
as excess in formalism, but between the occurrence of the kiss-firmantia
outlined above and the appearance of a substantial body of refer-
ences to the rite by the middle decades of the eleventh century, a
major development seems to have taken place. The kiss supplanted
older customary forms, especially the different kinds of hand gesture,
and acquired a fixed place at the concluding part of the firmantia
procedure. Its stable position in the transaction and its role as a con-
cluding form suggest that the kiss gained in importance or came to
embody a specific dimension of the contract whose implications were
expanding and whose legal significance was subjected to increasingly
sophisticated interpretation. Was the new formal expression of firmantia
a reflection of an attempt at a redefinition of the interpretative dis-
course within which the legal instrument operated? In charters from
the first half of the eleventh century employing firmantia, the expres-
sion ‘insertion of hands and kiss [of peace]’ appears repeatedly. The
formula is remarkable for two reasons. The same ritual sequence
created the legal bond between lord and man in the rites of vassalage.
Its presence there has traditionally been explained with the attribu-
tion of the rites to the two facets of the formal bond of vassalage,
homage and fealty, but sources of the early twelfth century—Galbert
of Bruge’s account for example—do not support that conclusion.8
Because no comparable inquiry into the rites formalizing the settle-
ment of conflicts over property has been made, the formula appears
to justify the convention that the kiss of peace was a mere ‘reinforce-
ment’ of the contract enacted by the handshake or the insertion of
hands. Both assumptions are in need of further scrutiny.
The analysis of clusters of relatively homogeneous evidence pre-
served in high medieval monastic charters suggests a possibility of
addressing the question. The settlements of various calumniae between

8
Jacques Le Goff had to argue that Galbert ‘confused’ the stages of the ritual
ceremony in order to overcome the difficulty that the contradiction poses to the
standard perception of the formal parts of the vassalic contract. See Jacques Le
Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rites of Vassalage,’ 237–87. I would rather suggest that Galbert
knew well what he was talking about and that Le Goff ’s problem stems from his
disregard of the legal dimensions of ritual on this occasion.
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42  

eleventh- and twelfth-century French religious houses and lay folk of

the military class shed light on the connection between the ecclesiastical
concepts of morality and obligation, so prominent in the indignation
of the pro-Norman narrators of William’s story, and the customary
legal practices of the lay estates. Calumniae over property were a prin-
cipal source of social conflicts and a major opportunity to amalgamate
theological morality and pragmatic explication of the legal custom
in defending one’s position. Records of settlements of disputes are
also a major source for the formalism of the obligatory contracts
between monks and lay people. The cartularies of houses located in
the south of France, where the Roman tradition was much more
pronounced, preserved more references to the kiss. As one goes north
the evidence gets thinner, but scattered cases are documented as far
north as Mont-St-Michel.9 Whether the difference results from the
limited use of firmantia in the north during the period or stems from
a hesitance to adopt the kiss as the formalism of the legal act of
firmare is open to conjecture.
The manner of settling calumniae gives us a clue about the rela-
tionship between the two ritual forms, the kiss and the handshake,
and indeed between the kiss and a roster of other legal forms. On
a number of occasions the kiss appears to have functioned as a sec-
ondary device supplementing the hand gesture. If the insertion of
hands or the handshake and the acceptance of a certain sum of
money or an object created the contract and gave rise to legal oblig-
ation that was to be executed in the future, the kiss concluded the
agreement that the obligation would be discharged. An example of
the formula used for the purposes of reconciliation is preserved in
the cartulary of the abbey La Sauve Majore in southwestern France.
Between 1107 and 1147 the abbey was entangled in a series of con-
troversies with a group of relatives from the clan of Bernard of
Tartanac, namely Arnaud Guillaume and his mother, and Hélie of
Lamothe. The problem was that the clan had ‘donated’ the land
of Garifont to the abbey in exchange for 100 solidi, but failed to
provide the land with settlers. Sometime between 1107 and 1118
the clan conceded to the conditions set by the abbey and Arnaud

9
In a case recorded in the cartulary of Mont-St-Michel under 1121, the trans-
action was concluded [ firmiter statuerunt] through the kiss only. Quoted after Jean
Yver, Les contrats dans le très ancien droit normand (XI e–XIII e siecle) (Domfromt, 1926),
45, note 5.
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Guillaume received five more solidi from Abbot Geoffrey IV and

confirmed his grant ‘in the hand of the abbot.’ The rest of his kin
followed suit. Then, in order to make the peace even firmer, all pre-
sent kissed the abbot.10 It is important to note that the two rites
complemented each other and constituted a discrete whole which
ensured the legally binding force of the transaction. All other ritual
gestures, verbal arrangements, and the donation or exchange of objects
preceded the ritual kiss, whose place was reserved at the end of the
legal settlement. A typical entry, unfortunately the account is too
brief to clarify the meaning of the kiss-firmantia.
The cartulary of the same house, however, preserved more specific
indications that the kiss-firmantia functioned as a legal instrument in
its own right. A charter dating from the second decade of the twelfth
century recorded how the transaction between Abbot Geoffrey IV
and a certain Amauvin of Daignac ended the conflict between the
abbey and the layman. Amauvin made a solemn verbal promise,
supported by his pledge [ pignus] and guaranteed by fideiussors. The
abbot gave him a tunic worth about twenty solidi and Amalvin kissed
him.11 Contemporary records from other southern houses confirm
the conclusion that the practice was widespread in the Midi. The
settlement of a conflict between the count of Albi, Guigo III, and
Hugh, bishop of Grenoble, in the course of which the count had
seized and plundered lands, churches, and cemeteries belonging to
the cathedral of Grenoble and harassed the clerics in every possible
way, followed a similar pattern. The formal settlement, designated
as a concordia arranged by appointed arbiters, stipulated that the count
and the bishop should first renounce the possessions which each side
claimed and divide jurisdiction over the contested property. The
bishop then reinvested the count with some of the rights he himself
had claimed. To pay back the gesture and show good will, the count
granted market rights and other sources of income to the church of
Grenoble. Finally, on September 5, 1116, the parties gathered together
in the presence of witnesses, heard the decision of the arbiters,
approved it, and closed the settlement with the kiss of peace.12

10
In manu G. IIII abbatis firmaverunt et ut firmus esset osculum ei dederunt, see Charles
Higounet and Arlette Higounet-Nadal, eds., Grand Cartulaire de la Sauve Majeure (Études
et documents d’Aquitaine, VIII, Bordeaux, 1996), 69–70, N. 56.
11
Pro confirmatione promissionum arum, Amalvinus abbati dedit osculum, ibidem, 96, N. 105.
12
Hic concordia facta est in presentia nostra et sub osculo pacis confirmata, et ab episcopo et
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44  

The cartulary of another major house, St. Julien of Tours, features

several more cases of kiss-firmantia whose legal significance has not
been recognized in the recent detailed study of this monastery’s legal
interaction and peace settlements with lay folk.13 For the purposes
of this inquiry, an illuminating case is a charter from c. 1106 record-
ing the life-grant of landed property originally belonging to the chapel
of St. Remy. To guarantee the deed, Abbot Phillip and all the monks
in the chapel personally ‘promised, swore an oath over the sacred
relics, and confirmed the oath with a kiss of peace.’14 The oath over
the relics, possibly involving touching the sacred objects as well, was
not considered an act capable of its own to fulfill the requirement
for the legal efficacy of the transaction. The latter had to be com-
pleted with the confirmation constituted by the kiss.
From this brief survey of the use of the kiss as the legal form of
firmantia, three conclusions suggest themselves. In the first place, there
was a steady trend to substitute traditional rites with the kiss as the
formal instrument of firmantia in a variety of legal dealings of eccle-
siastics with laymen. In the second place, it is important that the
oath, the insertion of hands (or the handshake), and the touching of
the Scriptures needed to be supplemented with the kiss. The bond
constituted by the kiss appears to have secured the contract guar-
anteed with the oath. Third, all this was recorded in a charter and
witnessed by a group of men, and their seals were attached to the
written instrument. Evidently, the constitutive function of the verbal
agreement and the oath which guaranteed it were one thing, the
concluding kiss another, and the record of the agreement and its
authentication with the signatures of witnesses and their seals a sep-
arate matter altogether.15 Finally, these developments offer insights

a comite, see Jules Marion, ed., Cartulaire de l’eglise Cathédrale de Grenoble, dits Cartulaires
de Saint-Hugues (Paris, 1869), 229–31, N. 81.
13
Stephen D. White, ‘Feuding and Peace Making in the Tourraine around the
Year 1100,’ Traditio 45 (1986), 195–263; ‘Pactum . . . legem vincit et amor judicium. The
Settlement of Disputes in Eleventh-Century Western France,’ The American Journal
of Legal History, 22 (1978), 281–308; and his more theoretical piece ‘From Peace to
Power: The Study of Disputes in Medieval France,’ in Esther Cohen and Mayke
B. de Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context (Leiden,
2001), 203–18.
14
Promisimus et super sanctas reliquias juravimus et juramentum pacis osculo firmavimus, see
Abbot J.-L. Denis, ed., Chartes de Saint-Julien de Tours (1002–1300) (Le Mans, 1913),
75–6, N. 56.
15
This case only is enough to cast doubts on Carré’s assertion that the reason
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    45

into, but do not provide decisive evidence about, the fundamental

question of whether ritual had acquired an independent functional
dimension and, more importantly, the nature of its legal function.
The problem will be better addressed against the background of
the gradual expansion of the kiss into another major legal instru-
ment of the period, fides facta. Traces of fides facta are documented
at a very early date. During the early Middle Ages, it was widely
used in most areas of the Empire east of the Rhine, in Italy, and
in the French kingdom, more specifically in Aquitaine, Toulouse,
Gascoigne, some regions of western France, and Normandy. Its pris-
tine form was a gesture of giving the right hand or both hands, as
in the forms of commendatio in manum or immixtio manuum, or in the
oath.16 Fides facta’s association with the ritual kiss is witnessed from
the first quarter of the eleventh century, when references to its use
in the creation of legal bonds between churchmen and milites began
to appear. As with firmantia, the kiss, which later functioned as testi-
monium fidei, appears also to have originally carried fides together with
the handshake. Also, the employment of the kiss-fides facta followed
an order in the procedure of establishing contractual bonds similar
to that of firmantia. This phenomenon pre-dated the Germanic settle-
ment west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. The practice of assim-
ilating the two rites in the context of fides facta had Roman origins.
In the form per osculum et dexteras, late Roman sources attest to the
plainly contractual meaning of the kiss in informal peacemaking and
the rites of betrothal. These seem to have been the contexts in which
the kiss had legal connotations, although it was a common occur-
rence in conventional associations without legal implications.17
Between the Roman custom, with its more social rather than

for the disappearance of the kiss from the contracts was its substitution with other
forms, ‘individualizing’ the document, see Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche, 158–62. If
anything, the kiss coexisted with festuca and other objects serving the same purpose
for quite a while.
16
MGH SRM, I, 787–8, see for some episodes Nino Tamassia, ‘Fidem facere,’
Archivio giuridico ‘Filippo Serafini,’ n. s., XI (1903), 367–71 and Walter Kienast, Die
Fränkische Vasallität. Von den Hausmeiern bis zu Ludwig dem Kind und Karl dem Einfältigen
(Frankfurt a. M., 1972), 78–9.
17
See Lucien Anné, Les rites de fiançailles, 63–85, 296–306, esp. 82. For osculum
interveniente in betrothals see the fundamental studies of Tamassia, ‘Osculum interve-
niens,’ and Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ 573–660.
Most recently Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage, discussed in detail the legal kiss in
Roman law.
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46  

specifically legal implications and the appearance of the medieval

kiss-fides, there is, however, a substantial time gap, which calls atten-
tion to changes in the contents of fides. The infusion of a religious
dimension in the contractual Roman osculum, which led to the well-
known double meaning of osculum pacis et fidei as Christian faith on
the one hand, and personal trustworthiness, reputation, protection,
and obligation on the other, was a post-Carolingian phenomenon.18
Although typologically linked, these concepts seem to have had an
uneasy coexistence under a single ‘vestment.’ Even after the turn of
the eleventh century, the tension between the distinct forms of fides
facta continued to exist. An episode of Abelard’s life story suggests
that the formalism of fides facta was not yet solidly linked to the kiss
in the first decades of the twelfth century. When Heloise’s uncle and
his kin cooled their wrath and decided on peace with Abelard to
salvage the girl’s reputation, the agreement was made by engaging

18
Fides seems not to be mentioned alongside the kiss in formal contracts or cases
of reconciliation that appear sporadically in sources down to the eleventh century.
In Merovingian times, the kiss accompanied the oath in at least one recorded case
of peacemaking that could be assimilated to fides facta—Chilperic’s deceitful recon-
ciliation with Merovech and Brunchild, but there is no direct reference to the mean-
ing of the kiss. See Liber Historiae Francorum, MGH SRM, II, ch. 33, and translation
in Bernard S. Bachrach, Liber Historiae Francorum (Lawrence, KS, 1973), 83–4. After
the partition of the Carolingian empire, during the frequent meetings, negotiations,
and settlements between the heads of the Carolingian successor-states, the kiss
appears several times but fides is not mentioned. See Reinhard Schneider, Brüdergemeinde
und Schwurfreundschaft. Der Auflösungsprozeß des karlingerreiches im Spiegel der caritas-Terminologie
in den Verträgen der karlingischer Teilkönige des 9. Jahrhunderts (Lübeck and Hamburg,
1964), 52ff. for the meeting of Savonières in 862, and Louis the Pious’s reconcili-
ation with his son Louis, ibidem, 117–9. Nor does one see fides in some of the most
conspicuous cases of tenth-century reconciliation. Flodoard’s account of King Raoul’s
and Duke William of Aquitaine’s meeting in 924 narrates how, after a day of intense
negotiations during which envoys crossed several times the Loire near Autun, the
two princes met and kissed, but there is no indication of the legal content of the
ritual act. See Philipp Lauer, Les Annales de Flodoard, publiées d’après les manuscrits, avec
une introduction et des notes (Paris, 1905), 19–20. In a similar way, Richer conveys the
essence of Count Heribert of Vermandois’s fatal meeting with King Charles the Simple
in 923, an interview that ended with the capture and imprisonment of the king.
After receiving the oath of Heribert’s envoys, who swore on their fides [ad legatis
jurisjuradum pro fide accepit], Charles proceeded to meet Heribert with a kiss, see Robert
Latouche, ed. and trans., Richer: Histoire de France (888–995), Vol. 1: 888–954 (Paris,
1930), 94. In Gerbert of Aurillac’s short note about Duke Hugh Capet’s reconcil-
iation with King Lothar and his wife in 985 we read only that ‘on June 18 Duke
Hugh kissed the king and the queen;’ quoted after Heinrich Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen
des 10. Jahrhunderts. Studien über Denkart und Existenz im einstigen Karolingerreich (Stuttgart,
1984), vol. 1, 29, N. 98.
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their fides and kiss.19 As the account goes, it is not clear whether the
kiss and fides were one and the same or separate elements of the
ceremony. The expansion of the kiss into the realm of fides facta
seems to have been impeded by its being anchored in a discrete
Christian religious discourse to which the legal sphere opened only
haltingly and by the tenacity of the hand gesture formalism.
In the reign of the eastern Franks and the new polity, the German
Empire, the kiss as fides facta appeared episodically as a borrowing
from the French custom from the time of Lothar III (1125–1137)
in the rites of vassalage only, and did not establish itself elsewhere.
Even in the central and northern French territories, where it even-
tually became the norm in the rites of vassalage, down to the early
eleventh century fides facta was exclusively clothed in the formalism
of the oath.20 Similar was the situation in Langobard Italy, where
wadia and the investiture were the most popular legal instruments.
As in Catalonia, most of Italy, despite the widespread use of fides
facta in Italian vassalage, remained largely immune until the twelfth
century to the new ritual form in the creation of vassal bonds, the
field par exellence of application of the kiss in the French kingdom.21
By the second quarter of the thirteenth century, the kiss was definitely
established in Italy.
The broad overview of the formalism of fides facta thus confirms
the impression of the slow and uneven but ultimately successful
expansion of the kiss as the form of this fundamental instrument of
the medieval legal obligation. The survey does little, however, to
shed light on the specifics of the rite’s meanings and functions in
this environment. The issue of what was the role of the kiss in the
framework of fides facta can be addressed by comparing it to its role
in the formal sequence constituting firmantia. Three questions suggest
themselves. First, if the handshake or another form of hand gesture
was the principal companion and rival of the kiss in pacts of peace

19
Et tam sua quam suorum fide et osculis eam quam requisivi concordiam mecum iniit, see
Jean Monfrin, ed., Abélard: Historia Calamitatum. Texte critique avec une introduction (Paris,
1959), 75.
20
Elizabeth Magnou-Nortier, Foi et fidélité. Recherches sur l’évolution des liens person-
nels chez les Francs du VII e au IX e siècle (Toulouse, 1976), 19–64.
21
For Catalonia see Perre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du millieu du X e a la fin du XI e
siècle. Groissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse, 1976), Vol. 2, 741–3. For central
Italy see Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval. Le Latium méridional et la
Sabine du IX e siècle à la fin du XII e siècle (Rome, 1973), Vol. 2, 1138–9.
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48  

concluded with fides facta, does the evolution of the relationship of

the two rites display features similar to that occurring in firmantia?
Second, was the kiss allocated a particular position of importance in
the ritual sequence of fides facta? And third, does the evolution of the
formalism of fides facta supply any additional clues as to the nature
of the obligation embodied by the kiss and its role in the legally
binding contract?
Among the substantial body of eleventh- and twelfth-century evi-
dence about the uses of the kiss-fides facta, there are a few instances
that offer suggestive insights. Although the data comes almost exclu-
sively from the territories of the French kingdom, and the cases are
far apart chronologically, they consistently display similar features
and evidently represent the evolution of a distinct legal phenomenon.
The ancient formula ‘handshake and kiss,’ which had its roots in
Roman antiquity, and which we already saw employed in cases of
firmantia and fides facta alike, was coming under pressure by the late
eleventh century when applied to a single legal act. More importantly,
the tensions arose not so much from a trend to simplify or regularize
the uses of ritual by assigning a specific operational field to each act
or gesture, as from the clash of the value systems informing the per-
ception of contemporary legal instruments.
The issue is perhaps best exemplified by a late eleventh-century
case from the county of Bourge. Sometime in 1095, Gill of Seuly,
a local high noble, perhaps enticed by the crusading spirit of the
time and certainly in need of cash, decided to ‘return’ a church that
had been in his family for generations to the monks of St. Florent
from the abbey of St. Pierre. For their part, the monks, who in the
wake of the Gregorian reform had an agenda of their own con-
cerning property, were willing to pay the handsome sum of a thou-
sand gold solidi of Blois for the reacquisition of the church. The sum
was considerable indeed, and precautions were taken to hedge the
agreement. The contract stipulated that, if at any time during his
life, Gill decided to take back his ‘gift,’ he would pay back the
monastery the sum that he now received. Yet the monks were unwill-
ing to commit until Gill guaranteed [affidavit . . . per fidem suam] that
he would hold his part of the deal. The knight duly offered his fides,
as was the custom, through his hand. Oh no, said the monks, they
did not want his hand, ‘because the hand is not fides; words and the
soul/will are the fides that a Christian should observe as a Christian.
Besides, it is not in the monks’ custom to accept the giving of fides
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    49

through the hand.’ Gill complied, and in order to do what he was

asked, he obligated his fides through the holy kiss and received the
benefit of their prayers.22
This document illuminates a number of matters. There was a lay
and an ecclesiastical way of engaging fides: the lay though the hand
gesture, the ecclesiastical through the kiss. The two forms coexisted
by the end of the eleventh century and had not yet fused into a
homogeneous concept. Both were recognized legal instruments, but
the hand-fides was ‘not Christian,’ and as such was not the monks’
custom. The monks did not trust the customary formalism of secu-
lar fides, but accepted the pledge of fides as a generic legal form. The
lay custom of the time did make routine use of the formalism of the
religious legal devices. The kiss was introduced and substituted for
the established form of secular fides under ecclesiastical pressure.
Finally, although we cannot know for sure what the knight’s fides
was, nor whether under animus we must understand the old Roman
instrument designating the legally binding will of the parties to the
agreement or the Christian soul of the knight, the monks’ fides was
certainly the Christian faith.23
The tensions between the traditional handshake and the kiss are
visible in the arrangement accommodating the kiss in the procedure
of fides facta. As in firmantia, the kiss came to conclude the legal act.
A calumnia of 1127 sheds light on this development. A certain Paien
the Norman laid claims on and later seized by force a mill in the
locality of Blanchard belonging to the regular canons of the abbey

22
Respectively, non manu ubi non est fides, sed verbis et animo ubi est fides qualem decet
christianum erga christianum observare, non enim est monachorum ex manu alicujus fidem accipere,
and in fide et societate osculatus est monachos . . . and promittens eis fidem in osculo sancto,
see Count of Toulgoët-Tréanna, ed., Histoire de Vierzon et de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre,
avec pièces justificatives, plans, sceaux, monnaies seigneuriales (Paris, 1884), 474–5, N. 15.
For convenientia as a type of contract see Paul Ourliac, ‘La convenientia,’ in Études d’his-
toire du droit privé offertes à Pierre Petot (Paris, 1959), 413–22.
23
On Roman animus see J. L. Barton, ‘Animus and possessio nomine alieno,’ in Peter
Birks, ed., New Perspectives in the Roman Law of Property. Essays for Barry Nicholas (Oxford,
1989), 43–60. Animus applicability in this case stems from its being a designation
of the will of a person concluding a transaction with another or acting unilateraly
to accomplish an act with legal effects. Intention mattered most, since it made the
distinction of what a person promised orally and his or her formal promise, see
Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, n. s., 1953, vol. 43 pt. 2), 362. Roman law knew the written guarantee of
intention, but the custom of the early and high Middle Ages easily switched to ges-
ture and ritual as well.
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50  

of St. Laon at Thuars. The canons brought pressure to bear on the

knight by taking their case to his overlord Aimery, the son of the local
viscount Geoffrey. Aimery ordered the knight to give up the claim,
return the mill, and sue for reconciliation. The quitclaim ceremony
took place as Paien, having fallen on his knees, was kissed by the
monks in faith and promised to make sure that neither he nor any
other person would ever again claim the mill.24 Such pressure was
not always necessary. In 1137, making a formal concession to the
monks of Noyers, Eschivard of Preuilly and his son Geoffrey enacted
the transaction merely by kissing abbot Bernier in testimony of their
faith.25 The use of the kiss as fides facta legalized the arrangement by
involving not only the principal parties, but the fideiussores who guar-
anteed that the obligation would be fulfilled as well. In yet another
case, a charter of bishop Bruno of Hildesheim from 1158, composed
on occasion of his authorization of a transfer of a certain property
to the cathedral chapter of Hildesheim, recorded the guarantors’
obligation as embodied in the kiss and some kind of hand gesture
to engage their fides.26 In cases of calumniae, such transactions were
frequently witnessed, but it was the ritual act that constituted the
legal renunciation of the claim. Such was the procedure when, some-
time around the end of the eleventh century, Alberic Suaviton gave
up, after a calumnia, his claim over a decima belonging to the Benedictine
abbey of St. Vincent in Le Mans. Giving the right to the abbey as
an annuity, Alberic placed his donum, the symbolic object signifying
the gift, on the altar, and then kissed three of the monks pro fide
conservanda.27

24
Flexis genibus in satisfactionem se ipsem per gulam tradidit et eos in fide osculatus est in
eo quod nec ipse nec alius super molendinum ullum facerent calumpniam, see Hugues Imbert,
ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Laon de Thouars (Niort, 1876), N. 48, discussed in
Émile Chénon, ‘Le rôle juridique de l’osculum, 131–2.
25
Et ex hoc abbatem Bernerium in testimonium fidei osculaverunt, see Abbot C. Chevalier,
ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Noyers (Tours, 1872), 540, N. 506.
26
Predicti ergo fidejussores fide sua interposita ore ad os et manu ad manum ita se mihi et
ecclessie obligaverunt, ut, si predictus venditor aut heredes sui hanc vendicionem aliquando in irritu
ducere temptarent, ipsi fidejussores persolverent. The charter is published in Zeitschrift des his-
torischen Vereins für Niedersachsen (1868), 103, N. 6. I quote after Paul Puntschart,
Schuldvertrag und Treugelöbnis des sächsischen Rechts im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Grundauffassung
der altdeutschen Obligation (Leipzig, 1896), 360. Puntschart’s work is one of the finest
discussions of the medieval law of obligations and its formalism, but on this occa-
sion he failed to recognize the existence of the kiss which, in my opinion, is unde-
niable in the form ore ad os.
27
Abbot R. Charles and Menjot D’Elberne, eds., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-
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The wording of the last case is explicit in addressing our major

puzzle, the legal role of the kiss as the form of fides facta in contracts
terminating calumniae. The issue has two dimensions: the extent to
which the ritual act constituted the contract itself—that is, was the
legal efficacy of the contract borne by its ‘vestment’ or by another
legal device—and, more importantly, the exact legal significance of
the kiss. The first problem is relatively easy to address. All contracts
involving transfer of property to the monastic houses, be they quit-
claims, donations, concessions, or ‘pure’ gifts were duly recorded,
witnessed, and sealed. The legality of the transfer, however, rested
on the act being guaranteed. The enactment of the ritual ‘vestment’
constituted the guaranty. This is illustrated by the complicated trans-
fer of a forest, donated in early 1116 by Bernard, viscount of Comborn,
to the abbey of Uzerche. The property went ultimately to the pri-
ory of Ventadour, but only after a long and bitter contest. At the
official closing of the agreement on April 17, 1116, Abbot Mauricius
and the monks of Uzerche who had gathered in the chapter as wit-
nesses gave their solemn consent and Philip, prior of Ventadour,
received the ‘gift’ from the hands of the abbot. Then, to guarantee
that Philip and his successors would enjoy undisputed rights over the
property in the future, Abbot Mauricius and his monks approached
and kissed him.28 The technical term used was fideliter, which was a
common expression in cases of fides facta, and its form was the kiss.
The monks of Uzerche engaged their fides after the case went through
mediation and arbitration, though no formal sentence was pronounced.
Uzerche’s ‘gift and concession’ were confirmed, so that they remained
valid in the future, with the signature of the abbot, and the signa-
ture’s validity was reinforced with his seal.29 The kiss, on the one
hand, and the seal and signature on the other, clearly had different
functions in this peaceful settlement of a property dispute that engaged
the efforts of so many parties. The kiss evidently expressed consent:
but consent to what? For the purposes of this study, the question is

Vincent du Mans (Ordre de Saint Benoit). Premiere cartulaire: 572–1188 (Le Mans and
Mamers, 1886–1913), 200–201, N. 334.
28
Et ut haec dona fideliter ei et suis successoribus illibata conserventur, ego Mauricius abbas
et omnes fratres nostri qui in ipso capitulo adherant ipsi Philippo osculum pacis praebulmus, in
J. B. Champeval, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye d’Uzerche (corrège). Avec tables, identifications,
notes historiques du X e au XIV e siècle (Paris, 1901), 217–20, N. 370.
29
Ibidem, 220.
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52  

most important for grasping the implication of the legal kiss in con-
tracts terminating conflicts over property.
A series of calumniae, that took place between the 1030s and 1070s
and involved the abbey of Marmoutier in Tours and a prominent
troublemaker, the knight Theobald, supplies a number of clues. This
long story of contested rights, showdowns, legal maneuvers, and
peaceful resolutions began with a conflict over the juniorat of Naveil,
which, Theobald claimed, had not been sold to the abbey by his
wife’s kin, nor had he authorized the transfer. His case was settled,
in the court of the count of Vendôme, but apparently via an extra-
judicial procedure, with forty solidi for him and presents and small
sums for his wife, Hélia, on whose behalf the claim was pursued,
and for his four sons. Soon afterwards the knight reasserted his wife’s
claim, this time for some decime in Brenières. The monks paid another
twenty-five solidi and gave the couple the benefit of association with
the community to settle the case. As his part of the deal, Theobald
renounced the claim at the altar of the local priory. The term used
to define the obligation he undertook was sponsio. Shortly thereafter
Theobald changed his mind and began a new contest, for the allod
of Leschére. Although this time around the affair almost came to a
judicial duel, in the last moment the duel was called off, and again
the deal was settled peacefully and outside of court. Theobald got
another forty solidi for his consent to quit his claims over all former
rights and possessions of his clan in the Vendôme. The charter does
not mention what was the form of that particular concordia. The trou-
bles were not yet over for the monks, for Theobald’s wife still had
rights of her own in the region, and he was always quick to seize
the opportunity and cause yet another calumnia. It took another twenty
solidi to convince the knight to quietly give up that new claim.
Finally, in 1072, two years after the death of prior Eude, with
whom most of the previous transactions had been negotiated, Theobald
apparently decided that there was a fresh opportunity and seized the
appurtenances he had renounced before. This time the case was
heard in full formality, in the court of Guy de Nevers, count-regent
of Vendôme. Theobald asserted that the latest deal he had struck
with Eude was not a concordia, but a conditional conveniencia, for which
he was supposed to receive annual allowances. Instead of pulling out
the charter and quoting the conditions of the concordia and the other
clauses of the deal stipulated there, the monks decided to pursue a
new concordia. It cost them dearly but it was worth the money. Fifty
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more solidi were given to Theobald, three solidi to his spouse, and a
certain sum of denarii to all of his children, four sons and a daugh-
ter. For this, Theobald made a wide range of promises, from giv-
ing up all his claims to allowing the monks to decide on any further
issues. To give official expression of this final settlement, he kissed
the new prior in sign of faith. All this happening in the hall [aula]
of the count, the prior and his witnesses then took to Theobald’s
home, where the money for his family was disbursed and they author-
ized the agreement. To mark his entry into possession, the prior had
to redeem, for two more denarii, a poor peasant’s beast of burden,
which Theobald’s sons had purloined.30
With this last deal, Marmoutier’s troubles with Theobald were
practically over. Although the knight and his daughter each tried
their luck once again, declaring that certain small properties were
excluded from the settlement reached at the placitum, and succeeded
in extracting more money from the monks, they never contested the
validity of the central agreement. In the course of nearly four decades
of calumniae, the parties had gone through several extra-judicial set-
tlements and two preliminary court decisions (the duel and the final
settlement); at least two formal legal institutions, sponsio and fides facta,
were applied, and a series of agreements of convenientia and concordia
type took place. Each step of this long struggle reflects Theobald’s
diminishing credit with the monks and their efforts to obtain a solid
guarantee backing up his promises without pressing the knight all
too much.
The course of the events makes clear the progressively shrinking
options of legal instruments left to Theobald, and pins down the
point at which it became necessary for him to engage his fides. In

30
The affair is recorded in six charters from the cartulary of Marmoutier, see
M. de Tremault, ed., Cartulaire de Marmoutier pour le Vendômois (Paris-Vendôme, 1893),
10–21. The final settlement is recorded in the following way: et de his adfiduciavit nos
per fidem osculans inde ob signum fidei priorem nostrum supradictum. The fundamental work
on Vendôme is Dominique Barthélemy, La société dans le conté de Vendôme. De l’an mil
au XIV e siècle (Paris, 1993), see esp. 430ff. and 664ff. The name of Theobald appears
frequently in the sections on the relations between monks and lay folk; the regis-
ter on page 1069 has more than thirty entries. Barthélemy does not deal with legal
ritual on the level I do, but my conclusions are consistent with his main observa-
tions. He states that most of the agreements were preliminary and Theobald had
a fairly ambiguous relationship with the abbey, in spite of his official affiliation with
the religious. I have some reservations as to his assertion that Theobald did a
‘homage of peace’ to the monks, when he had to kiss them.
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54  

the direct dealings with the monks, it was up to him to choose the
way to settle and decide with what promise to guarantee his words.
As the affair progressed and a higher judicial institution got involved,
he had less room to maneuver. At the culmination of the case, at
count Guy’s placitum, he had no other choice but the recourse to the
formal fides facta, given by the kiss to guarantee the promise of ter-
mination of his claims.
It is remarkable that after all the legal struggles and the knight’s
showdown, the definite settlement was reached in court, even though
no sentence was pronounced. Throughout the controversy at least
some of Theobald’s claims were legally sustainable, and it was a
legal instrument that turned decisive in the end. This only suffices
to raise serious doubts as to the correctness of both the functional-
ist interpretation of legal anthropologists and the argument of ‘sym-
biosis’ suggested in recent scholarship of more traditional bent.31 That
Theobald did not break the promise sealed with the kiss was most
probably due to factors outside the area of ritual and the law.
Nevertheless, it is telling that he reserved fides facta for the last case
and there was no going back on his word any more. The conflict
moved within a legal frame, acknowledged as authoritative and bind-
ing by all concerned, not outside of the law. From a legal point of
view, something must have occurred that fundamentally changed
Theobald’s bargaining stance. My contention is that up to that point
the monks evidently were in no position to extract from Theobald
a guarantee that he would stand by the deal. The kiss gave them
his fides, and for one reason or another the knight felt reluctant to
forfeit it. The consent he had given to abide by the terms of the
contract was a liability he would rather not forgo. As we shall see,
it would appear that the concept of liability might have been the
chief technical obstacle to his raising further calumniae and a major
functional dimension of the kiss during the period.
If firmantia and fides facta were the two basic institutions that struc-

31
Barthélemy, La société dans le conté de Vendôme, 664–5 is again closest to my inter-
pretation. He defends a more shaded and workable these of high medieval justice
as a living practice against the somewhat one-sided assertions of the legal anthro-
pologists, who are prone to eschew most legalism to promote a kind of functional
‘equilibrium.’ One wonders, as Thomas Kuehn remarked once, if such was the
reality, how did law manage to survive at all; see note 37 below. About the thesis
of ‘symbiosis’ see Penelope D. Johnson, Prayer, Patronage, and Power: The Abbey of la
Trinite, Vendôme, 1032–1187 (New York, 1981).
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tured the legal texture of those societies whose high medieval legal
formalism adopted the kiss of peace into their legal fabric, there is
fragmentary evidence documenting the expansion of the rite into a
roster of other legal forms. The instrument of sponsio mentioned in
the record of Marmoutier’s conflict with Theobald is one of these
legal devices.
Back in 1880, in his perceptive analysis of the legal history of the
Roman and Germanic charter, Heinrich Brunner suggested that
behind the instruments recorded as fides facta or wadiatio in early
medieval charters we must look for vestiges of Roman institutions
disguised in Germanic forms. Brunner stated that late Roman provin-
cials could have designated with these terms the venerable Roman
legal institutions of sponsio and stipulatio. His hint was one of the first
indications that the legal science of the late nineteenth century, until
then divided between bitterly quarreling Romanists and Germanists,
would fare better if paying more attention to the process of mutual
influence and ultimately the fusion of the two legal traditions.32
Brunner’s recommendation was rigorously followed in the study of
most legal and social fields. Legal formalism, however, remained a
murky area. The institution of sponsio, given as an illustration by
Brunner but not pursued further, is a case in point.33
In Marmoutier’s cartulary the reference to sponsio is casual and
implies familiarity with the term and its connotations. In cartularies
from central and northern France registering settlements of conflicts
sealed with the kiss, it was a rare occurrence. Sponsio was regularly
employed in the South, particularly in Languedoc. In the diocese of
Grenoble it was the standard legal instrument, which could take on
a variety of ‘vestments.’ On occasions, especially in cases of recon-
ciliatory contracts, it was embodied by the kiss. The applications of
sponsio clothed in the formalism of the kiss confirm Brunner’s hint
and allow us to add a further dimension to the understanding of
the mingling of legal forms and contents originating in different legal
traditions. The appearance of the kiss demonstrates that, as it was
with fides, the changes in the Roman forms occurred not only under

32
Heirich Brunner, Zur Rechtsgeschichte der römischen und germanischen Urkunde (Berlin,
1880), 222, n. 9.
33
On Roman sponsio in general see Berger, Dictionary, 713, and in more detail
Valerio Bellini, ‘Foedus et sponsio’ dans l’evolution du droit international romain,’
Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 40 (1962), 509–39.
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56  

the impact of Germanic practices, but with the adoption of Christian

concepts as well.
Sponsio was a forward-looking device with the function of guaran-
teeing the contractual promise by pledging fides embodied by the kiss.
An early twelfth-century case that illustrates the many-sided relation-
ships between the comital house of Albi and the diocese of Grenoble
will shed light on the role of the ritual kiss in the procedure of the
legal settlement enacted through sponsio. On April 30, 1108, after
many calumniae between different lay persons who contested the rights
over the decimae of three parishes in the diocese of St. Vincent, Count
Guigo de la Mota, the principal owner of the rights, arranged for
their transfer to Hugh I, bishop of Grenoble. The bishop recipro-
cated with two excellent mules. The jurisdiction over the decimae
having been partitioned and enjoyed for so long by so many peo-
ple, Guigo knew something might go wrong. He promised that in
case of conflict with a third party he would either help settle it, or
repel the offenders, or compensate the bishop with a comparable
income. With that the deal was not concluded, for Guigo himself
entered the service of the bishop. This complicated the affair, since
it added another element to the contract, the personal bond between
Hugh I and Guigo. Nonetheless, the transaction was closed with a
single ritual complex: the well-known oath in the consecrated hand
of the abbot and the kiss as sponsio of Guigo’s good faith.34
The final act of the contract defined the kiss-sponsio as a guarantee
of the count’s personal promise to uphold all conditions of the contract
for an indefinite future. The giving of fides through the kiss represented
a separate dimension to the contract that took place in the ‘here
and now’ of the transaction. Count Guigo had taken care to ensure
the inviolability of the current deal by other means. The bishop, for
his part, had secured the deal with the gift of the mules, perishable
but tangible ‘objects’ that could be invoked as proof. In addition,
Guigo had all those who could have been potential claimants—his
wife Hermangardis, his sons, and some of his lesser feodales—confirm
the transaction in present. The ritual oath and kiss, however, embody-
ing the sponsio of fides, constituted a different type of obligation, and

34
Et hec promitto me servatorum, pro juramento in sacrata manu prenominati episcopi Hugonis,
et inde do ei osculum, cum bone fidei sponsione, Marion, Cartulaires de Grenoble, Cartulary
B, 175, N. 119.
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conform well to what we have already seen in cases of firmantia and

fides facta.
Other local legal instruments, among them the widespread laudatio,
served a similar function. Around 1140, the next bishop of Grenoble,
Hugh II, and Count Guigo Delfinus of Albi, the son of Guigo de la
Mota, fell out with each other [discordia habuerunt inter se]. The bishop
complained that Guigo had broken the agreement concluded years
ago by Hugh I and the count’s father. Guigo, it appeared, had griev-
ances himself. The affair escalated into a formal quarrel, but the
parties soon agreed [laudaverunt] to arbitration. After meeting with
each of the parties, the bishop of Die, who served as an arbiter,
pronounced a formal judicium. It was accepted as a whole by both
count and bishop, who then sorted out a minor point of disagreement
concerning a village. To seal the agreement, Guigo Delfinus went
to the house of the bishop and there, in the presence of witnesses,
officially ratified the judicium by exchanging a kiss with the prelate.35
The term denoting the ritual act of acceptance of the decision of
the arbiter was laudatio. This was a common technical term in high
and late medieval Roman law, whose social dimensions have recently
been thoroughly explored on material from western France.36 None-
theless, its role in the legal procedure and the formalism of peace-
making remain obscure. What is important in the case quoted above,
for example, is that the ritual ratification of the arbiter’s decision
did not constitute the peace agreement, the official concordia. The
kiss-laudatio was only a provisional step that allowed the peaceful set-
tlement to proceed. It opened the possibility for further negotia-
tions—definition of property boundaries, ironing out other minor
problems, hearing the testimony of witnesses, asking the opinion of
‘queen’ Mathilda, the mother of the count, etc. At any juncture of
this long procedure, another conflict could have erupted. After the
ritual kiss, Count Guigo and the bishop rode out to a place where
they could oversee the process of demarcation of properties in per-
son. After much labor, again in the presence of witnesses, the prin-
cipals pronounced their final laudatio that completed the concordia, and
had a charter made, thus settling the affair. The charter does not
give any indication about the actual act of laudatio at the other stages

35
Facta est autem illius judicii laudatio, et de vico communiter possidendo, in episcopali domo,
dato vicissim osculo, see Marion, Cartulaires de Grenoble, Cartulary C, 243–5, N. 122.
36
White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to the Saints, passim.
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58  

of the affair, but it is significant that it expressly linked the kiss to

the ratification of the bishop of Die’s arbitrated decision.37
The meaning of the kiss in this case, and indeed of the instru-
ment of laudatio throughout the negotiations, was clearly that of a
preliminary, conditional, and limited consent to the decision of the
arbiter to whom the parties had delegated their judicial powers. It
adds another dimension to the functionality of the formalism of the
kiss by including a third party in the resolution of the conflict. It is
important to note that the consent thus expressed constituted only
a temporary submission to an authority constructed by the alien-
ation of one’s own sovereign powers, and the ritual obligation by
the kiss had a pronounced preliminary character. At any point the
principals could have withdrawn the powers they had delegated. As
we shall see, with time, as the powers to fully exercise one’s cus-
tomary judicial rights were restricted, this conditional and tempo-
rary character of the kiss was gradually abandoned in favor of its
interpretation as the device of the ‘ultimate’ peace.
The survey of the local legal institutions, which assumed the for-
malism of the ritual kiss to ensure the validity of contractual peace,
must include auctorizamentum as well. A number of references to this
instrument come from the Benedictine abbey of St. Serge and St.
Bach, situated on the left bank of the Maine in the vicinity of Angers.
It appears to have been the prevailing term for a variety of the
abbey’s legal transactions.38 The eleventh century was a troubled
period for the abbey, as with so many other houses, due to the
growing presence of the counts of Anjou in the region. Matching
the aggressive expansion of their lay neighbors, the monks of St.
Serge and St. Bach sought to augment their own domain and fre-
quently made deals with the local minor nobility.
The scribes of the abbey used a number of technical legal terms,
but their most common designation for a party’s involvement was

37
Recent studies of arbitration emphasize the relatively late development of this
legal instrument, but there are traces of it in the cases discussed here. Good ori-
entation can be found in Karl S. Bader, ‘Arbiter, arbitrator seu amicabilis com-
positor,’ ZRG KA, 77 (1960), 239–76; Karl-Hans Ziegler, ‘Arbiter, arbitrator und
amicabilis compositor,’ ZRG RA, 84 (1967), 376–81; and especially in Thomas
Kuehn, ‘Arbitration and Law in Renaissance Florence,’ Renaissance and Reformation,
n. s., XI: 4 (1987), 289–319.
38
Yves Chauvin, ed., Premier et Second livres des Cartulaires de l’abbaye Saint-Serge et
Saint-Bach d’Angers (XI e–XII e siècles) (Angers, 1997), vol. 1, iii–vii.
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auctorizare. The term covered a wide range of meanings, all denoting

the explicit consent expressed by one of the concerned parties, most
often the lay donor, to the alienation of the rights or properties over
which there had been a conflict. In simple transfers of property,
when no quarrel was anticipated or terminated, the term was reg-
ularly used in the meaning of ‘authorize,’ i.e., giving one’s assent to
the transaction, without any additional qualifications.39 On occasions,
auctorizamentum served the purpose of firmantia, and was embodied by
an object that the lay person placed on the altar of the abbey’s
church. This was the procedure followed by Aimery the son of
Loupell, who, in the beginning of the twelfth century, confirmed the
donation of certain lands given to the abbey, many years previously,
by his ancestors and his mother. The legal meaning of the act was
the knight’s taking of an obligation to honor the gifts of his predecessors,
extending the deal they had made to his own person and those
dependent on him. Aimery’s auctorizamentum was a book.40
It is in situations like this that the kiss appeared, apparently to
replace the object carrying the auctorizamentum. Thus, for example,
sometime in the second half of the eleventh century the monks of
St. Serge and St. Bach established at Thorigné bought an arpentum
of land from a certain Berengar Borlerius. The final stage of the
deal, the formal emptio or renunciation of rights, took place at a local
landmark, the fountain of Aussigné, in the presence of Berengar’s
son-in-law, who, as a collateral relative and heir, must have had
some rights over the property that exchanged hands. To ‘authorize’
the transfer, he kissed the two monks representing the abbey and
received from them two denarii in addition to the twelve coins they
had already given to Berengar.41 Far from the abbey’s chapel and
in the absence of another sacred object, the public space, the pres-
ence of witnesses, and, above all, the ritual kiss-auctorizamentum gave

39
Chauvin, Cartulaires de l’abbaye Saint-Serge et Saint-Bach, vol. 1, 197, Cartulary A,
N. 203: Tescelin, becoming a monk, donates land to the abbey. His sister Algarde
and her husband, Renaud, give their assent to the deal [auctorizaverunt].
40
Et ut haec concessio firmissime teneretur, portavit ipse Aimericus autorizamentum concessio-
nis suae super altare Sancte Sergii cum quodam libro, ibidem, vol. 1, 8–10, Cartulary A,
N. 8.
41
Duos denarios recepit ipse filiaster, jamdictus nomine et causa auctorizandi osculatos est
monachos Frotmundum et Walterium qui hanc emptionem faciebant, ibidem, vol. 2, 612,
Cartulary B, N. 205. Chénon was the first critical scholar to note that the kiss
could be a replacement for an object. Of that more later.
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60  

legal validity to Berengar’s son-in-law’s own deal with the monks.

The young man guaranteed the abbey peace of possession by clothing
the monks with and transferring to them his rights over the property.
Legalizing the transfer of property in that way seems to be a local
development, yet it was related to a form that had virtually univer-
sal application throughout the premodern West: the investiture [seisin,
Gewere, vestitura]. The first known employment of this technical term
as a legal instrument was to designate acts by which the control over
a piece of land was conveyed in a legal manner. Later it came to
mean the results of this act and covered movables (chattels) and
rights as well, and ended up having the general meaning of posses-
sion.42 Since the high Middle Ages, the most important field of appli-
cation of investiture was, as with fides facta, the legal acts of enfeoffment.
A basic feature of the medieval law of things and the real contracts,
investiture complemented homage and fealty in the feudo-vassalic
bond by creating the rights of the vassal over the fief conceded to
him by the lord. The rights conferred by investiture were real rights
[ jus in re], and medieval feudal law held that these real rights were
a category distinct from all others.43 The institution held this exclu-
sive character most tenaciously in the property rights of high medieval
Italy, and since the thirteenth century was routinely expressed by a
kiss, but the example of auctorizamentum quoted above demonstrates
that offshoots of the practice can be traced in the French kingdom
as well. It is worth noting that the corporeal investiture of Langobard
law dominating early medieval Italian practice conferred real rights
even though, in the strict sense of Roman law to which the neo-
Latinists adhered, it was not creating a perfect actual possession. The
promissory character of the institution agrees well with what we have
seen about the instruments operated by the kiss. To the best of my
knowledge, no legal treatise on Italian feudal law defined the func-
tion of the kiss in investiture. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence
from legal practice to support the conclusion that for the feudists
the transfer was more like an act that gave rise to an obligation,
rather than an actual conveyance of property or rights.44

42
Rudolf Hübner, A History of Germanic Private Law, trans. by Francis S. Philbrick
(Boston, 1918), 185ff.; Andreas Heusler, Institutionen des deutschen Privatrechts (Leipzig,
1885), vol. 1, 74, 97, 219, 321, 382–5; vol. 2, 68, 70–1, 76, 154, 178.
43
Heusler, Institutionen, vol. 1, 384ff.
44
Hübner, Germanic Private Law, 244ff.; and Anton Heymann, ‘Zur Geschichte
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One of the central conclusions that can be inferred from the legal
instruments surveyed thus far is that the ritual kiss was often perceived
as a kind of surety given to guarantee obligations taken unilaterally
by the one or both parties to the peace contract. For the eleventh
century this conclusion can only be surmised. By the beginning of
the twelfth century, there is evidence in which the ritual kiss is directly
referred to as the form of the legal instrument of securitas.
Medieval securitas originated in an ancient Roman custom accord-
ing to which a citizen attacked by his enemies could find safety hid-
ing in a temple. Imperial Rome expanded this tradition in an attempt
to facilitate the handling of private feuds, with which imperial leg-
islation had very little to do. Guaranteeing the safety of the person
who sought protection under the statue of the emperor, securitas served
to allow cessation of hostilities and clear the stage for private nego-
tiations and/or the intervention of the authorities. Frankish legal tra-
ditions tied securitas even closer to peacemaking, assimilating it to
those elements of the private contract that mediated the relationship
between individuals. Frankish securitas was used almost exclusively in
cases of grave crimes, such as rape and homicide. In this way Frankish
traditions contributed to the development of the penal character of
the institution as well, employing it to regulate relationships between
individuals and groups on the one hand, and the authorities on the
other hand, in cases of criminal offense. In sixth-century Frankish
formulae, securitas was the instrument protecting the offender who had
made formal attempts at reconciling with the wronged party from
the vengeance of the injured and his or her clan, and from formal
prosecution on the part of the public authorities. In the late- and
post-Carolingian era, the application of the instrument widened.
Securitas came to be employed in a roster of civil and penal cases,
from guaranteeing the payment of a debt, another feature going back

des jus ad rem,’ in Festgabe Otto von Gierke dargebracht (Berlin, 1911), 1167–85. For a
number of cases illustrating the Italian practice of kissing to invest see Augusto
Gaudenzi, ed., Scripta anecdota glossatorum, 3 vols. (Turin, 1892–1913), vol. 2, 57, N.
iiii. On Italian feudal law and its stress on fealty see the Langobard Libri Feudorum
in Karl Lehmann, ed., Consuetudines feudorum (Libri feudorum, jus feudale langobar-
dorum), (Göttingen, 1892), 119–23; Ludwig Wahrmund, ed., Die Ars notariae des
Rainerius Perusinus (reprint from 1917, Aalen, 1962), 40–41, ch. 31; Gino Masi, ed.,
Formularium Florentinum artis notariae (1220–1242) (Milan, 1943), 50–51; and Hans
von Voltelini, ed., Die Südtiroler Natariats-Imbreviaturen des 13. Jahrhunderts (Aalen, 1973,
first published Innsbruck, 1899), vol. 1, 315, N. 638.
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62  

to Roman legislation, to bestowing of safe-conduct, and ensuring

immunity from vengeance.45
At this stage of its development, the kiss became one of the formal
‘vestments’ of securitas. Its uses display the characteristic mix of entan-
gled civil and penal elements. Three of the formal areas of application
of securitas, each with its distinct legal context and functional dimen-
sions, were particularly well-served by the formalism of the kiss.
The first of the functions of the kiss-securitas referred to the early
Roman and Germanic custom of taking an obligation to ensure the
immunity of the wrongdoer. The cartulary of the abbey of Sobrado
in Galicia in the province of La Coruña registered, under 1162, a
case in which the instrument was employed to settle the feud between
two local noble clans, headed respectively by Juan Arias and Pelagius
Ovequo. Both families were frequently involved in various transac-
tions with the abbey throughout the late eleventh and the twelfth
century. In the recorded case Juan Arias made a gift in apprecia-
tion of the role of the monks for the ‘redeeming’ of his son on occa-
sion of the murder of tree members of the Ovequo family. The
abbot of Sobrado mediated the reconciliation, and it was sealed at
a meeting of the feuding parties, on the feast of the Assumption of
the Virgin Mary, in the chapter of the abbey. The adversaries kissed
with ‘the kiss of peace and security’ and shook hands.46 Working, as
it was the custom, in conjunction with the handshake, the kiss was
explicitly understood as the securitas feature of the deal.
A second field of operation of the kiss-securitas was to guarantee
the contract for cessation of hostilities between warring parties rather
than the safety of the parties themselves. Such was the role of the
instrument in an episode of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s fifth

45
Gino Masi, Collectio chartarum pacis privatae medii aevi ad regionem Tusciae pertinen-
tium (Milan, 1943), 9–12; Du Cange, securitas, in Glossarium, vol. 6, 392–3. Further
documents in Karl Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, MGH, Leges V, Formulae
(Hannover, 1886), 12, 19, 20, 88, 277, 382, 538.
46
Et osculum pacis et securitatem et dextras in perpetuum dare fecistis et hoc ita totum com-
pletum est. See Eduardo Hinojosa, ‘La fraternidad artificial en España,’ in his Obras,
ed. Alfonso Garcia Gallo (Madrid, 1948), vol. 1, 277, N. 51, quoting from Archivio
General de Galicia in La Coruña. The charter is not in the collection published by
Pilar Loscertales de G. de Valdeavellano, ed., Tumbos del monasterio de Sobrado de los
Monnjes, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1976), where there are a number of charters mentioning
the two families. On Sobrado and its twelfth-century expansion see Maria del
Carmen Pallares Méndez, El monasterio de Sobrado: un ejemplo de protagonismo mónastico
en la Galicia medieval (La Coruña, 1979), esp. 130–45.
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Italian expedition. On April 16, 1175, the emperor and the Lombard
League concluded the truce known as the ‘Peace of Montebello.’47
On the next day, Umberto Clemente, consul of Pavia, on behalf of
the Lombards, and Margrave William of Monferrat, on behalf of
the emperor, swore the truce known as treuga Alexandrie. To guaran-
tee the truce, four imperial advisors gave their surety ‘with hand
and kiss’ [ fecit securitatem per manum et osculum]. Three of them, Margrave
Henry of Dietz, the Imperial chancellor, and the Count-Palatine
Otto, guaranteed only that the emperor would keep the truce. The
count of Savoy added to this, by the same securitas, that were the
emperor to default on the truce the count would personally come
to Vercelli and allow himself to be imprisoned by the Lombards.48
This example of temporary cessation of conflict throws into greater
relief the legal uses of the kiss-securitas. The truce consisted of a sworn
and witnessed oath. Only when it came to providing a guarantee
that it would be honored did the parties arrive at the ritual kiss.
The nobles who guaranteed it were apparently acting as fideiussores.
As disputed as the meanings of fideiussio are, it is clear that they
could not be proxies for the emperor. The count of Savoy’s promise
was a form of judicial hostage, a facet of the fideiussio institution.
These observations help clarify the circumstances in which it was
appropriate to deploy the kiss as a form of securitas, who could give
it, and the conditions under which it was thought acceptable. The
treaty also sheds light on the relationship between the different means
of creating an obligation and guaranteeing it with the kiss-securitas.
The rite itself did not create the obligation. While the kiss and hand-
shake provided surety through a general and unspecified pledge, from
the securitas of the count of Savoy it is clear that they could also
involve the bodily seizure of the person giving it. The kiss could thus
secure a corporeal obligation, which depended on the willingness of
the fideiussor to stand by his ritual engagement. It is also clear that
such a form of fideiussio was binding and effective, which explains

47
Further literature in Peter Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics
(London, 1969), 304. See also Ferdinand Oppl, Friedrich Barbarossa (Darmstadt, 1990),
114–7.
48
Quod venient and mittent se in carcere ad Uercellas in potestate Lombardorum. The peace
pact is preserved in two copies of the original notarial instrument composed in
April 1175, now in the city archives of Piacenza and Modena, see MGH, Die Urkunden
Friedrichs I, vol. 3, 135–8, N. 638. The negotiations are discussed in detail by Anton
Heinemeyer in Deutsches Archiv, 11 (1956), 101ff.
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64  

the unwillingness of the other nobles to pledge themselves in the

manner of the Savoyard.
As straightforward as its primary function was, the kiss-securitas
could therefore refer to fairly complex legal affairs and co-ordinate
the relationship between a number of institutions. This conclusion
is well illustrated by the final stage of the dramatic conflict between
King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. When on November
18, 1169, the king and Becket’s representatives met at Montmartre,
the king promised that he was ready to accept Becket in his grace
and love [in amorem et gratiam suam], giving up all rancor. Then, sud-
denly, Becket’s clerks raised the issue of the kiss of peace. Henry
backed off immediately. He had sworn, he said, in a fit of anger,
that he would never give the kiss to Becket again. The oath pre-
vented him from kissing the archbishop. In spite of Pope Alexander
III’s willingness to annul the oath, at that point the negotiations
halted and, despite all attempts to proceed, dragged on for more
than a year to end without ritual resolution.
The chief obstacle was the kiss, the keynote, securitas.49 Personal
emotions, to Henry himself, were not an issue. We may doubt his
sincerity, but not the formal implications of the security requested
by his opponent. Becket insisted on the kiss because he had con-
sulted the pope on what guarantee to request and the papal answer
had been that the kiss should suffice, since as a priest he could not
legitimately accept an oath. Note the putting of the two devices on
an equal footing, a fact that stresses equivalency in functional aspect.
The king’s first reaction was to declare the kiss a trifle [modicum].
He had given his word, Henry insisted, and the archbishop should
have been content with it.50 Yet Becket and his supporters evidently
knew the difference between a ‘simple promise’ and the kiss. Put
under pressure, Henry proposed that his son, the young Henry, give
the kiss to Becket. The archbishop declined the offer. The pope,
albeit haltingly, supported him. The kiss had to be given by the king
personally because of the king’s slippery character.51

49
The conflict is discussed best in Frank Barlow’s definitive twentieth-century
biography, Thomas Becket (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986).
50
The king reportedly said ejus nobis verbum placiut, et admisimus, see James C.
Robertson and J. Brogstocke Sheppard, eds., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket,
Archbishop of Canterbury (canonized by Pope Alexander III, A.D. 1173), vol. 7 (London,
1885), 78–9.
51
In osculo pacis recipias, et ei pacem et securitatem tuam, necnon et universas possessiones
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For yet another reason young Henry could be neither proxy nor
fideiussor for his father. As the papal emissary, cardinal Vivian, put
it, only the kiss would allow Becket to return to England and enter
his church ‘in good peace and complete security,’ without fearing
that the king would change his mind and prevent him from acquir-
ing his seat with all its former rights and privileges.52 The kiss guar-
anteed not only Henry’s personal goodwill and commitment to the
deal, but protected by warranty the reacquisition of Becket’ s prop-
erty, that is, the king would reinvest the prelate with the possession
of the Church of England. The assumption is plausible enough, based
as it is on the already discussed link between the kiss and investi-
ture. Finally, the argument for the kiss rested on custom only. The
kiss was, with all peoples and religions, the solemn form of restored
peace after it had been broken.53 In the end, Becket did not receive
the kiss and the securitas he wanted, neither for his Church’s repos-
session nor for his life. In spite of the French king Louis VII’s advice
to stay in France until given the kiss of peace, some months later
the archbishop crossed the Channel and returned to Canterbury,
only to be murdered by four of the king’s knights a few days there-
after. Whatever the reasons for his murder, the absence of the kiss-
securitas meant no peace and no safety.

The Binding Force of Obligation

The legal instruments adopting, in the course of the high Middle

Ages, the formalism of the kiss demonstrate some of the ways in
which different facets of the Christian, Roman, and Germanic tra-
ditions combined to build the complex structure of local legal cus-
tom. Yet behind the bewildering local diversity there were a few
basic concepts, developed by the premodern Western societies to
capture the legal essence of the bonds that wove the texture of the

suas et suorum . . . clementer restituas; Sed quomodo certam concipietis spem ab homine lubrico,
cujus verba et juramenta eandem vim habent, et pari sunt lance pensanda? ibidem, 206, 248.
52
Secure ad ecclesiam suam accederet, et in bona pace et securitate ecclesiam suam cum omni
integritate, sicut habuit antequam exiret, ibidem, 80.
53
Quae forma solemnis est in onmi gente et in omni religione, et citra quam nusquam pax
antea dissidentium confirmatur, ibidem, 246. See now Anne J. Duggan, ed. and trans.,
The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, 2 vols. (Oxford,
2000), vol. 2, 1045–66 and 1165–77, letters 243, 244, and 274.
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66  

obligatory contract. Three stand out prominently. Fides, caritas/amor,

and gratia were the fundamental principles on which the edifice of
the legally binding peace was erected. All were Latin forms con-
structed in the official language of Roman legal documents to con-
ceptualize a variety of practices. During the first Christian centuries,
new dimensions were added to their core meanings. Finally, it was
the Merovingian-Latin legal parlance [Rechtsaufzeichnungssprache] of the
early Germanic kingdoms that set the seal on their medieval usage
as fully developed legal concepts.
All-important during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (and most
debated in modern scholarship) was fides. Although its role in late
Roman and early Germanic custom seems clear, the legal nature of
fides during the high and late Middle Ages and the early modern
period is still under discussion.54 Fides was the operative force in a
number of legal transactions. In a legal substance, it supplied the
content of firmantia, fides facta, laudatio, investiture, sponsio, etc. It was
the most widely employed device of the formal peace contract as we
have seen it thus far. Current scholarship emphasizes the fact that
fides appears frequently in Roman sources describing patron-client
relationships, and that the earliest references to Germanic fides [ foi,
triuwe, triuwa, Treue] are in Latin-speaking sources. The old Roman
fides seems to have been an almost exclusive quality of the patron.
It denoted his reputation, reliability, social prestige, and the ensuing
power and ability to manage social relationships and protect his men
[Herrschaftsgewalt]: in short, everything that made possible the build-
ing of a following of clients.55 Some scholars also insist that the rela-
tionship based on Roman fides was a feodus iniquum, and that if there
was mutuality in the obligation, its meaning for the patron was very
different from that of the client.56 Most important for this study is

54
The literature on fides, Roman and Germanic, is enormous. Among the younger
scholarship the excellent survey of Karl Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue in der deutschen
Rechtsgeschichte,’ Studi Medievali, 10 (1969), 465–89 stands out; see also the works
of Heinze, Hagemann, Kienast, Bartmuß, and Helbig quoted below. Frantisek Graus,
‘Über die sogenannte germanische Treue,’ Historica, 1 (1959), 71–121; and idem,
‘Herrschaft und Treue. Betrachtungen zur Lehre von der germanischen Kontinuität,’
Historica 12 (1966), 5–44, seems to be motivated more by a spirit of contradiction
than a cogent analysis of the extant sources.
55
Richard Heinze, ‘Fides,’ Hermes, 64 (1929), 140–66; and Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue,’
476ff.
56
Hans-Joachim Bartmuß, ‘Die “fides” in der erzählenden Quellen des 10. und
beginnenden 11. Jahrhunderts und die sogenannte “germanische Treue”,’ Jahrbuch
für Geschichte des Feudalismus, 3 (1979), 52–3.
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that loaded with ethical and social meaning as it was, Roman fides
had no direct legal application. It designated a social virtue that can
be summed up for convenience sake in the concept of ‘loyalty.’
The early Middle Ages witnessed the rapid transformation of this
understanding of fides. The institution was formalized and objectified.
In the Merovingian formula De regis antrustione, for example, the pledge
of fides, although still constituting the fidelity which determined the
moral worth of the individual, was also the formal obligation of the
client to his lord.57 Germanic triuwa, which might have appeared as
a derivative from the Latin fides but acquired more formal dimen-
sions during the eighth and ninth centuries, preserved the ethical
meanings of the Roman form if not its subjectivity. The elements of
objectivity and sociability were bequeathed to the high Middle Ages,
when, under the impact of Christianity, the notion of Middle High
German triuwe as the connotation of a personal, subjective quality
developed. In the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, this shift
can be observed elsewhere in Western Europe, regardless of the bal-
ance of Germanic and Roman elements in the legal tradition of the
particular region. The referential field of fides shifted from relations
to personality, making a full circle back to the Roman concept.
These were the basic characteristics of fides in the Christianized
Romano-Germanic tradition. It is worth dwelling on a few more of
them, for in the forms embodied by the ritual kiss they can be wit-
nessed until the early modern era, especially in the Low Countries,
where Frankish law remained strong for centuries. The unilateral
character of fides was an important feature, amply documented in
Frankish sources from the seventh to the ninth century, as were its
promissory character and the time limits (ten, fourteen, and forty
days) set for its fulfillment, according to Lex Salica and the Edict of
Chilperic.58 As we shall see in the next part, the latter element remained
in force well into the fourteenth century. Another element was the
strongly sacral connection of the Germanic fides. Relegating the in-
stitution to the relationship between humankind and God, by the
ninth century this allowed for the assimilation of the secular substantive

57
Karl Zeumer, ed., Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi: accedit ordines iudiciorum
Dei (Hanover, 1886), Marculfi Formula I, N. 18. See also Magnou-Nortier, Foi et
Fiédelité, 20–21; Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue,’ 476–7.
58
Magnou-Nortier, Foi et Fidélité, 33.
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68  

fides/triuwa by the Christian faith.59 The process was slow and the
results varied by locale. In practice, as we have seen in the case of
Gill of Seulli, it was still going on in the late eleventh century. Finally,
engaged through an object or a ritual gesture, early medieval fides
had an especially strong connection to peace.60 When fides was kept,
asserted in the tenth century Widukind of Corvey in his Deeds of the
Saxons, there was peace; breaking a fides-promise meant the end of the
peace.61 Quite naturally, the kiss of peace could only be given once.
Practically all of these features of fides as a legal institution tran-
spire in the legal texture of the peace contracts surveyed in the pre-
vious section. The high medieval fides/triuwe/Treue engaged through
the kiss carried a marked legal connotation radically different from
that of the old Roman concept. Its deployment gave rise to a strong,
formal obligation. These implications of fides were worked out in the
early Middle Ages. The common Germanic root-word that trans-
lated fides, preserved in the Old High German triuwa, meant a bind-
ing promise or contract. The legal meaning of the contract it created
in post-Merovingian times and the high Middle Ages is a subject of
dispute. The most contested issue is whether the pledge of fides cre-
ated a liability [Haftung] that gave rise to action ensuing from an
existing legal duty, or constituted the legal duty itself [Schuld ], or
was an act of renunciation of rights [Verzicht].62
From the already discussed cases it would appear that in the major-
ity, if not the entirety of the eleventh- and twelfth-century applications

59
Walther Kienast, ‘Germanische Treue und Königsheil,’ Historische Zeitschrift, 227
(1978), 265–324. See also Helga Albrand, Untersuchungen über Sinnbereich und Bedeu-
tungsgeschichte von ahd. Triuwa und mhd. Triuwe bis einschließlich Hartman von Aue (Diss.,
Göttingen, 1964), passim; Karl Friedrich O. Kraft, Iweins Triuwe: Zu Ethos und Form
der Aventuirenfolge in Hartmanns ‘Iwein.’ Eine Interpretation (Amsterdam, 1979), 36ff.
60
Gierke, Schuld und Haftung, 133ff.
61
Quoted after Bartmuß, ‘Fides und germanische Treue,’ 53.
62
For the first opinion see von Gierke, Schuld und Haftung, 297. A different the-
sis is developed in Franz Beyerle, ‘Der Ursprung der Bürgschaft,’ ZRG, GA, 47
(1927), 567–645. See also Hans Rudolf Hageman, ‘Fides facta und wadiatio. Vom
Wesen des altdeutschen Formalvertrages,’ ZRG, GA, 83 (1966), 1–34. See also the
criticism of Werner Ogris, ‘Die persönlichen Sicherheiten in den westeuropäischen
Rechten des Mittelalters,’ in Les sûretés personnelles (Recueils de la Societe Jean Bodin pour
l’histoire comparative des institutions, vol. 39, Brussels, 1971), 7–26. For a most recent
evaluation of the debate see Bernhard Diestelkamp, ‘Die Lehre von Schuld und
Haftung,’ in Helmut Coing and Walter Wilhelm, eds., Wissenschaft und Kodifikation
des Privatrechts in 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 6 (Frankfurt a. M., 1982), 21ff.
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of the kiss-fides, we are dealing essentially with a liability-producing

institution. The reconciling parties did not acknowledge the condition
of peace as an objectively existing duty, which they were supposed
to appropriate in the act of the ritual kiss. Whether a voluntarily
taken commitment, a forced entry into a reconciliation, or a submission
to the decision of an arbiter or a judicial institution, the obligation
that the parties undertook referred to the contract and its terms
alone. Nor did the kiss constitute a complete renunciation of rights
for the settlement was often, if not always, followed by another set
of negotiations. Renouncing the right of forceful solution of one’s
problems too was derived from the ritual’s primary function as a lia-
bility. To forswear a party’s right of violent response to insult and
injury stemmed from the liability one agreed to take to honor the
peace. The kiss of peace did indeed limit the range of the means
by which one’s rights could be pursued, but it did this by virtue of
the liability that the parties took to abide by the terms of the contract.63
If this line of thought is correct, it links the high medieval kiss to
the legal concept that was arguably one of the most fundamental
mechanisms of the premodern political interaction. In the early
Romano-Germanic legal procedure, the pledge of fides resulted in
the personal, formal, and legally obligating promise to fulfill the sen-
tence of the court or the decision of arbiters [Urteilserfüllungsgelöbniss].
In societies where the rights and obligations of the individual to pur-
sue private feud were legally established, there were no effective
external legal means of coercing the warring parties to make peace.
Homo faidosis lived under a law that did not require the acknowledgment
of the validity of any other law as a duty of the sovereign, free per-
son. Public law could appeal only to the feuding parties to accept
the court’s or the arbiter’s decision by promising to fulfill its sen-
tence. Only the breach of that specific obligation enshrined in the
promise entailed licit legal action. Such action could be pursued by
the authorities, the other party, or the fideiussor with consequences
for the wrongdoer’s or debtor’s property, body, or personal freedom,
in short, for his total person, depending on the particular form in

63
On liability see Reinhard Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations
of the Civilian Tradition (Oxford, 1996), especially 2–5. The transition from duty to
liability, which Zimmermann traces in early Roman law, was duly repeated in the
high medieval period, most notably during the thirteenth century in Italy and later
elsewhere in the West. See Chapter Two below.
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70  

which the pledge was made. Without the pledge of fides, no such
action was legally defendable, the concept of duty could not be in-
ternalized, and coercion remained illegitimate or, in the very least,
contested.
As noted, fides was not the only institution supporting such a legal
condition. Although to a lesser degree, the engagement of the other
institutions with binding force of obligation borne by the kiss, gratia
and caritas/amor, had similar effects. If the extant sources do not
create a distorted picture, gratia appeared more often in high medieval
evidence. Unlike fides, a second concept borne by the kiss, gratia,
originally flowed down from the top of the social hierarchy. It was
also imbued with a strong religious meaning. As a legal institution,
its function lay in the field mapped out by fides: individuals built
gratia bonds to take or fulfill obligations ensuing from a duty, legally
or socially defined.64 Up until the eleventh century, gratia was almost
exclusively a royal prerogative. In the High Middle Ages it devolved
down the social hierarchy, penetrating knightly and bourgeois quarters.65
Whatever its social milieu, in essence high medieval gratia meant
protection, immunity, and safe-conduct—in short, peace—guaran-
teed to those who sought them in the presence of the person bestow-
ing gratia. As such, it could relate to both duty and liability, establishing
a connection with significant implications for the perception of the
formal kiss. The dimension of liability appears more pronounced.
The protection of native subjects was a duty of the leader, but in
the environment of formalized man-to-man relationships duty was
not automatically mobilized. The ruler could extend peace and pro-
tection to those who sought it by ritually conferring his gratia with
the kiss of peace, which could also be performed by proxy.66 In
eleventh-century royal eulogies, the ‘sweet mouth of the king, which
gives the kiss of peace’ was hailed, as Helgaud of Fleury wrote about
Robert the Pious, and Benzo of Alba about Henry IV.67 High-rank-

64
Gerd Althoff, ‘Huld. Überlegungen zu einem Zentralbegriff der mittelalter-
lichen Herrschaftsordnung,’ in his Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 202ff.
65
Ibidem, quoting the law of the ministeriales of the archbishop of Köln; see also
the tale of Melibeus below.
66
For the lady of royal birth as mediatrix for the king, protecting his charisma
from contamination, see Michael J. Enright, Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophecy,
and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tene to the Viking Age (Dublin, 1996). For
royal officials bestowing the kiss see the following discussion of Ruodlieb.
67
Hans Seyffert, ed., Benzo of Alba: Sieben Bücher an Kaiser Heinrich IV (Hanover,
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ing individuals explicitly asked for the kiss-gratia as they entered ter-
ritories where their legal status was uncertain. Given in public, the
rite made clear that the person was under the king’s mund and there-
fore protected by the law of the land. Thomas Becket knew that full
well when demanding the kiss of peace from Henry II. The kiss-
gratia of Emperor Henry VI at the Diet of Speyer in March 1193
carried the Emperor’s formal obligation ( promisit; promittens firmiter, in
the English king’s own words) to reconcile Richard the Lionheart
with the king of France.68 Judging from twelfth-century local laws
stipulating the duties of the ministeriales in the German Empire, gra-
tia was legally definable.69 I was not able to locate comparable ref-
erences for the French kingdom and other regions.
If fides and gratia stood for the forces informing the legality of the
peace agreement, how did the provisions of customary law and the
legislators ensure that the pledge of the institutions carried by the kiss
was binding? The evidence from the period is patchy and incon-
clusive, as one may expect given the social agents engaged in peace-
making and the absence of coercive authority capable of legitimately
enforcing the law above local custom. At the time the kiss was
adopted as a formal instrument of peacemaking, the concept of cor-
poreal obligation seems to have sustained the legal custom of embod-
ied responsibility. The earliest imperial legislation to mention the
kiss, Emperor Henry II’s Constitutions of Strasbourg, of which more
later, denied the right of substituting a champion in judicial duel to
the murderer who had committed the crime after the kiss of peace
had been exchanged.70 The idea evidently was that just as the peace
was guaranteed by the body of the party, so in case of default the
party’s responsibility had to be bodily discharged. The law also
stipulated the loss of the hand in case of proven guilt. It did not

1996), 614; Robert-Henri Bautier and Gillette Labory, eds., Helgaud de Fleury, Vie de
Robert le Pieux, Epitoma Vitae Regis Rotberti Pii (Paris, 1965), 58.
68
See, among others, Roger of Howeden in William Stubs, ed., Chronica magistri
Rogerii de Houedene (London, 1870), vol. 3, 199. The best modern survey is John
Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven and London, 1998), 237–8.
69
Ahrer Dienstrecht in Theodor J. Lacomblet, ed., Urkundenbuch für die Geschichte des
Niederrheins oder der Erzstifts Köln, der Fürstenthumer Jülich und Berg, Geldern, Meurs, Cleve
und Mark und der Reichsstifte Elten, Essen und Werden (Aalen, 1960), vol. 4, 775, N.
624; and Das Kölner Dienstrecht, in Wilhelm Altmann and Ernst Bernheim, eds.,
Ausgewählte Urkunden zur Erläuterung der Verfassungsgeschichte Deutschlands im Mittelalter
(Berlin, 1904), 166, ch. 3. See also Althoff, ‘Huld,’ 207–8.
70
See note 75 and Part Three for discussions of this law.
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72  

intimate whether prosecution was to follow if the accused was van-

quished but remained alive. If the murder was the result of a renewed
feud, that might have been as far as the authorities could go. Although
clearly Italian-inspired, Henry’s laws had their ultimate roots in Caro-
lingian legislation. There, the breach of the peace that had been
guaranteed by fides facta through handshake was punished by cutting
off the hand, establishing a connection between the punishment of
infringement of fides and the part of the body with which it was
given. Henry’s demand for personal participation in the duel, however,
was a new element, apparently resulting from the pledge embodied
by the kiss. Whether this precedent originated a tradition cannot be
ascertained, for secular law was concerned more with protecting the
contract of peace than with the instruments which enabled it. Its
wider implications seem to be corroborated by the local tradition in
Normandy, where in the twelfth century fides was the main institu-
tion guaranteeing the obligatory force of almost any contract, espe-
cially in cases of compromise.71

The Modalities of Ritual Peace

The engagement of the legal instruments embodied by the ritual kiss

gave rise to a number of conditions determining the structure of
non-hostile political interaction. Among the variations of the legally
defined relationships of peaceful coexistence, truce or armistice [treuga],
peace [ pax, compositio], concord [concordia], and friendship [amicitia]
were the standard fields in which the rites of peace operated. Treuga,
concordia, and amicitia seem to have dominated the eleventh- and
twelfth-century settlements enacted with a kiss.
The generic Latin term treuga, in one of its vernacular versions, is
first recorded in its medieval form in 728, in the laws of the Langobard
king Liutprand. Its appearance reflected a general trend, the descent
of certain Roman legal institutions designed for use in interstate rela-
tionships to the level of interpersonal interaction. The Langobard
treuga operated in the field of the Roman inductae.72 Under the name
treuwa it designated a special, interim condition whose main feature

71
Yver, Les contrats normands, 44–83.
72
Berger, Dictionary, 500.
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was the lack of open hostility among parties in conflict. Treuwa was
commonly established through the intervention of a public official
or a judge. It prepared the ground for pacification and reconcilia-
tion through the payment of indemnity. As the latter could be sub-
stantial and required time to collect, treuwa was by definition a
future-oriented condition with a strong temporal dimension. Most of
the vernacular variants of the term have the meaning of ‘temporary
cessation of hostilities,’ ‘armistice,’ ‘truce,’ and ‘contract.’ In prac-
tice, the developed ninth-century Langobard treuwa was established
by a publicly declared promise.
Later local variations of the generic treuga added nuances to the
Langobard pattern without changing its essence. In tenth-century
Francia, triuwam ponere was the legal device of suretyship. The cus-
tom was followed in Normandy. With the same meaning treuga was
rendered in Alfonso’s Siete Partidas. By the end of the tenth and the
beginning of the eleventh century from these meanings sprang the
most widely known variant of treuga, the French-inspired treuga Dei.
Yet in France, with the royal power actively moving to suppress pri-
vate feuds, by the thirteenth century treuga began to be distinguished
from ‘security,’ the difference resulting from the fact that, in the
words of Beaumanoir, ‘treugas are for a time, while peace lasts for-
ever’ [trives sunt à terme, et assurements dure à toz jors]. Note the use of
the term assurement to designate the condition of permanent peace.
By contrast, Italian lawyers, canons, and civilists, such as the Glossa
ordinaria to the decretal collection of Gregory IX, or the commen-
taries of Uguccio and Baldus, while reasoning along the same vein,
kept the meaning of treuga as a security and surety. They justified
their stance with the consideration that treuga designated an unfinished
business, and therefore was an unstable condition that implied guar-
antees by definition.73 With the meaning of ‘truce,’ treuga spread all
over the high medieval West. It was consistently used in civic law
codes to designate the legal condition of temporary cessation of open
hostility imposed on the feuding parties by the authorities, royal or
civic, until a permanent solution of the problem was found and the
parties were pacified.
Up to the thirteenth century, in legal theory treuga was sharply

73
In the discussion of treuga I follow Ludwig Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte
der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden, 234ff., and Kroeschel, ‘Die Treue,’ 484–5.
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74  

distinguished from peace. Yet in practice the difference was blurred,

since treuga was, after all, peace for a given term. We have already
seen that the formalism of the kiss on a number of occasions sup-
ported concordiae, more stable formal agreements without most of the
conditional features of treuga, particularly its temporary character.
The evidence from the high Middle Ages, however, as we have seen
on evidence from southern France, points out that concordia, which
had ancient origins and was perpetuated in ecclesiatical theory and
practice, was quite an unstable condition itself. Due to this over-
lapping and because both peace and treuga were supported by the
same institutions, above all that of fides, the ritual kiss supported the
formal instrumentarium of both concordia and treuga contracts. It would
appear that the formal embodiment of religious concordia, the kiss of
peace, was promoted as the form of treuga to project the latter in
time. The principal formalism of the lay fides, the handshake, guar-
anteed obligatory secular treuga contracts, as postulated in thirteenth-
century Imperial Landfrieden: treuga data, manuali fide interposita.74 Either
as the form of fides, or as an example of the extension of the for-
malism of the kiss as a generic legal device, there is evidence that
between the late tenth and the late twelfth centuries the formal kiss
of peace was occasionally used to support treuga-based relationships.
The only direct reference to this development I was able to locate
is the already mentioned Constitutions of Emperor Henry II, issued at
the Diet of Strasbourg in October 1019. The Diet was attended by
Italian magnates, both lay nobles and ecclesiastics. Matters Italian
were at the heart of the discussion. Among other business, the Diet
legislated on peacemaking. The last of the three laws it promulgated,
now preserved with glosses in the Italian legal collection Liber Papiensis,
deals with breaches of treuga. The law provided that the offender
must put up a fight in person if the case came to judicial duel. The
text of the version now accepted as authoritative goes as follows: ‘If
someone, under treuga, or after having given the kiss of peace, mur-
ders another man . . .’ [Qui vero infra treugam vel datum osculum pacis . . .],
and seems to distinguish treuga from the condition established with
the kiss of peace. At least one of the collection’s versions however,
substitutes ‘after’ [post] in the opening phrase of the law for ‘or’ [vel ],

74
Ludwig Weiland, ed., MGH, Constitutiones, vol. 2, 428, N. 318 and 429 N. 319.
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thus allowing the possibility of equating treuga with the state of peace
achieved by the ritual kiss.75
I am not aware of other direct references in normative evidence
to the ritual kiss in cases of treuga. There is, however, at least one
circumstantial referral to a similar use of the rite. The Usatges de
Barcelona, the fundamental law of Catalonia, recorded in article 119
(130) a special case of unconditional but time-limited restraint from
hostility that corresponded to the usual definition of treuga. ‘No men,’
postulated the article, ‘after they have greeted or kissed each other,
shall commit any crime against the other person on that day.’76 The
text of this article was most probably formulated at the ecclesiasti-
cal peace synod of Barcelona in 1064 and inserted into the compi-
lation at the time of its redaction, in the second or third decade of
the twelfth century.77 The title was part of a series of provisions that
defined temporary peace following formal occasions, the one estab-
lished by the kiss being of the shortest duration. There are reasons
to assume that the kiss continued to operate relationships informed
by the formal features of treuga until a much later time. Narrative
sources from the second and third quarter of the thirteenth century
provide specific references to the condition established by the kiss as
a time-limited—in one case up to forty days—treuga-like respite from
aggression.78
Alongside treuga, the kiss often constituted another widespread
eleventh- and twelfth-century Western peace institution entailing
liability, amicitia. The bond of amicitia was a legal phenomenon of a
qualitatively different character.79 Let us have a look at its genealogy.

75
Georg Pertz, ed., MGH, Leges, IV, Liber Papiensis, 583, N. 3.
76
Ut omnes homines postquam quemlibet habuerint salutatum vel osculatum, nullo ingenio ali-
quid ipsa die ei fortifaciant, see Joan Bastardas, ed., Uzatges de Barcelona. El codi a mit-
jan segle XII. Establiment del text llatí i edició de la versió catalana del manuscrit del segle
XIII de l’arxiu de la corona d’Aragó de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1991), 142, N. 109 (130).
Donald J. Kagay, ed. and trans., The Usatges of Barcelona. The Fundamental Law of
Catalonia (Philadelphia, 1994), N. 109 renders ‘vel’ with ‘and.’ It is a valid transla-
tion but I do not think it reflects the spirit of the original.
77
The date of the Uzatges was convincingly established by Joan Bastardas, Uzatges
de Barcelona, 32–5. For the source of title 119 (130), see, beside Bastardas, Eugen
Wohlhaupter, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottes- und Landfrieden in Spanien (Deutsch-
rechtliche Beiträge, vol. 15, part 2) (Heidelberg, 1933), 340–64; and Gener Gonzalvo
I Bou, ed., Les Constitucions de pau i treva de Catalunya (segles XI–XIII) (Barcelona,
1994), xxivff.
78
I discuss this application of the kiss of peace in the section on the French
courtly romance Silence, see Chapter 6.
79
In what follows I am using the findings of Gerd Althoff, ‘Amicitiae [Friendschips]
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76  

Ancient amicitia regulated several areas of domestic and foreign rela-

tionships in republican and imperial Rome. In the field of interna-
tional law, Roman amicitia obligated client states to the Empire. In
the sphere of private and public relationships within Roman society,
its legal implications are not altogether clear. Most scholars agree
that classic Roman amicitia had an extra-judicial character and was
more of a social than a legal bond. At any rate, the amicitia that
grew up from some kind of objective relationships among Roman
households seems to have had no formal and legal expression and
was as easily dissolved as it was constituted.
Without obliterating the Roman legacy, the influx of Germanic
concepts in the post-classical Roman legal terminology radically
changed the status of the institution. Old High German glosses trans-
lated amicus and amicitia as friunt and friuntscaf, respectively, or, on
rarer occasions, trût and huldî, the latter two being designations for
the Germanic fellowship of arms [Gefolgschaft; friunt also served as a
translation of cliens. While referring to kin and blood-based relationships,
early Germanic glosses also equated friuntschaft to feudus, thus merg-
ing two concepts that Roman practice had kept rigorously apart and
allowing the formal expansion of amicitia in the field of the legally
defined personal relationships. Thus, under the impact of Germanic
custom, Latin amicitia acquired the meaning of a legal covenant with
all the content and formalism it entailed. Germanic ‘friends’ were
obligated to concilium et auxilium [Rat und Hilfe], and the concept of
fides [Treue] was singularly operative in the building of early amicitiae.
As already noted, fides-based relationships also obligated the parties
legally and mutually, two signal features that the Roman institution
lacked. Early medieval sources furnish evidence of this type of amici-
tia by using technical terms of unmistakable meaning, which had no
application in the Roman concept.80 In the post-Carolingian era,
amicitiae were created within the realm of politics to reinforce bonds
of lordship. With the rise of the Ottonian Empire, the bond of amici-
tia between ruler and magnates gradually disappeared. The impli-
cations of equality, which the institution seems to have carried,
precluded its use in the hierarchical alliances informed by fides-bonds,

as Relationships Between States and People,’ in Lester K. Little and Barbara H.

Rosenwein, Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Oxford, 1998), 191–210; Voss,
Herrschertreffen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, 182–98.
80
Fritze, ‘Die fränkische Schwurfreundschaft,’ passim; Maria Wielers, Zwischenstaat-
lische Beziehungsformen, passim.
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above all in vassalage. In the aristocratic circles of the twelfth cen-

tury Empire, amicitia’s application had been narrowed down to an
alliance for specific purposes, loosing the character of covenant.81
The investigation of the legal formalism of amicitia in high medieval
urban environments is an extension of this tradition and allows for
additions to the model outlined above. To begin with, it must be
remembered that fides and amicitia were institutions of a different
order. Amicitia was a condition and a contract. Fides was the opera-
tive substance on which the latter was or could be founded. It also
appears that in an even greater degree than with fides, high- and
late-medieval amicitia was built on bonds of caritas and gratia. Finally,
although as a legal covenant amicitia could be guaranteed by fides
formalized by handshake, reconciliatory amicitia gradually centered
on the kiss of peace.82
The earliest surviving German courtly novel, Ruodlieb, composed
shortly after 1050, captures best the early stage of the evolution of
amicitia carried by the formal kiss. The language used to describe
the alliance of friendship between the noble exile Ruodlieb and the
royal hunter is highly technical. The hunter proposed a foedus built
on fides. It was to last for their lifetime, and entailed that each part-
ner should champion the other’s cause. Ruodlieb accepted the con-
tract [ pactum fidei], which was concluded, according to custom, by a
handshake. The two became formal comrades. To this formal bond,
through the kiss, the bond of amicitia was added. It united their
hearts, so that they could serve each other. The reference to ‘hearts’
united with the kiss was not just a poetic motif. It was a phrase with
a strictly legal content. The relationship thus united in a broad
covenant two distinct and complimentary pacts, foedus and amicitia,
each with its respective formalism.83

81
Althoff, ‘Amicitiae,’ 191–210; Voss, Herrschertreffen, 182ff.
82
Voss, Herrschertreffen, 182; Schneider, Brüdergemeinde, 47ff. Amicitia in settlements
of English conflicts has been investigated by Michael Clanchy, ‘Law and Love in
the Middle Ages,’ in John Bossy, ed., Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations
in the West (Cambridge, 1983), 47–67. Cases of ‘lovedays’ are frequently found in
high and late medieval English court records, but unfortunately there is practically
no evidence to support an analysis of the formalism of peacemaking in late medieval
England, nor is there enough data to determine where we can speak of reconcili-
ation and where settlement prevailed. Reconciliations with the ritual kiss are recorded
exclusively in narrative sources without sufficient background to gauge their legal
meaning.
83
Dando sibi dextras ibi fiunt moxque sodales . . .; Oscula (dando sibi firmi) statuuntur amici,
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78  

Ruodlieb and the hunter were strangers to each other, but amici-
tia could supplement kin ties as well, adding to the blood relation-
ships a legal dimension, as it did in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
Regum Britanniae, despite the fact that blood relations were usually
conceived of as amici. Narrating how the royal brothers Bran and
Belli came to reconciliation and turned amici through the kiss of
peace, Geoffrey seems to reflect contemporary practice when imply-
ing that legal amicitia as a liability was a thing apart from the exist-
ence of natural or artificially made kin ties.84 Apart from the fact
that the one was a natural and the other a social bond, to respect
the latter was a duty of the individual. Geoffrey added a few more
details. The pact was conditional and staked on the willingness of
each of the parties to keep their part of the accord. If any side failed
in this, the pact could be dissolved. Amicitia’s character of liability is
clearly demonstrated.
The eleventh- and twelfth-century practice of medieval reconcili-
ation thus held two institutions, amicitia and the fides contract, to be
distinct legal concepts. The pact of peace was a composite act, enacted
through the formalism of the kiss creating the amicitia-bond and guar-
anteed with fides-exchange. This development was present already in
twelfth-century aristocratic bonds, if the composite amici fideles used
by the Saxon chronicler Bruno is taken into account.85 The formal
amicitia dominated by the kiss of peace and guaranteed by fides grew
up from a distinctive type of covenant, long used to regulate private
feuds between Germanic clans. It is not by coincidence that in most
of the cases where there was a reference to amicitia, the sources made
it explicit that there had been previous hostility between the parties
involved. If amicitia was a formal covenant of peace, its opposite,
inimicitia, was the state of open, legally sustained hostility, often
amounting to formal feud between the two parties. Amicitia was not

alterutrius dominis famulantes cordibus unis . . ., see Edwin H. Zeydel, ed. and trans.,
Ruodlieb, The Earliest Courtly Novel (after 1050) (Chapel Hill, 1959), 30–1, ll. 105–25.
84
Robert Ellis Jones, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Manmouth,
with contributions to the study of its place in early British history (New York-London-Toronto,
1929), 286, vol. 3, vii.
85
This conclusion is supported by an eleventh-century reference according to
which on October 16, 1106, Saxons and Schwabians restored their former alliance
against Emperor Henry IV by having their leaders, the Dukes Otto and Walther,
kiss to guarantee [confirmare] the pact. Then all knights, according to their rank,
kissed in their turn and thus became amici fideles; see Hans-Eberhard Lohmann, ed.,
Brunos Buch vom Sachsenkrieg (Leipzig, 1937), 82.
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a direct derivative from a natural condition. It was constructed

through the obligatory relationship carried by ritual to cancel the
hostility that had interrupted the peaceful social intercourse. It was
not before the thirteenth century, however, before the suppression
of conflict in the framework of amicitia acquired more permanent
dimensions. Let me now turn to the instruments, mechanisms, and
environments of this transformation.
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80

CHAPTER TWO

TRANSFORMATIONS: LEGAL RITUAL AND THE

EVOLUTION OF PEACEMAKING IN THE
THIRTEENTH CENTURY

In the course of its eleventh- and twelfth-century expansion, the kiss

of peace was adopted in the formalism of diverse local, regional, and
inter-regional customs. Having absorbed several facets of the early
medieval cultural, social, and political traditions governing conflict
settlement, legal ritual entered its heyday in thirteenth-century peace-
making practice. Some of the legal devices which the kiss came to
embody—laudatio, for example, and firmantia—continued to be employed
during the later Middle Ages. Others disappeared under the pres-
sure of the new concepts and forms of peacemaking. Nonetheless,
as an established component of legal peacemaking the kiss was well-
poised to provide the form of the instruments which rose to promi-
nence in the thirteenth century and soon came to dominate the
landscape of the revived Roman doctrine. The legal implications of
the ritual kiss were thus preserved in the law of the peace of the
later Middle Ages. Behind this illusion of continuity, however, sim-
mered a new power struggle on a grand scale. The legal concepts
underlying the ritual underwent radical changes. A major shift in
the understanding of peacemaking was taking place. Despite con-
tinuing resistance the legal principles that were worked out in the
process and were embodied in the kiss of peace were to remain the
guiding standard for the future.
Two developments frame the beginnings of that momentous change.
On the one hand, from the thirteenth century on, authorities of all
orders sought to suppress the rights stemming from the sovereignty
of the private person by all means possible. This resulted in a pro-
gressive restriction of the use of formal liability devices, fides included.
The most conspicuous manifestation of the change was the increas-
ingly visible presence of the secular authorities, under whose aus-
pices peace was made as factors sharing agency in the very act of
ritual peacemaking. On the other hand, the original, largely secular
fides was sacralised through its merging with the concept and prac-
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tice of Christian faith and gradually came to (re)present the obliga-

tory linkages that faith stood for. The sum of this double pressure
was the filling of the formal instruments which were informed by
fides with new contents and the reorientation of the persevering for-
malism of the private peace contract toward a new legal construct,
the duty to peace. Both developments are demonstrated in the changed
discourse structuring the functioning of the kiss of peace. In this
chapter, I chart the main contours of the first phenomenon, the infu-
sion of new content into the legal instruments operated by the kiss
of peace.

Old Forms, New Instruments

By the second half of the twelfth century, the variations in the con-
tractual instruments supported by the kiss of peace already included
a formula that was destined to become the dominant form of peace
ritual, osculum interveniente. Documented in the beginning of the fourth
century as the formal expression of the late Roman betrothal con-
tract [sponsalitia], by the late twelfth century osculum interveniente became
the generic ritual form of the legal pact of peace in the region that
set the trends in the revival of Roman law, the North Italian urban
centers.1 The Interpretation appended to Emperor Constantine’s Constitution
that recorded it for the first time as the form of a legal instrument
offered the following explanation: the kiss was the surety or caution,
given to guarantee that marriage would eventually follow. It was the
central element of the legally sustained promise and embodied the
pledge for the obligation to marry taken by the groom. As such,
the kiss was adopted in the Theodosian code and its Germanic recep-
tion, the sixth-century Lex romana wisigothorum.2 The law survived the
Arab conquest and surfaced in the earliest Spanish fueros.3 Spanish

1
For earlier views see Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 149.
2
Mary Brown Pharr, ‘The Kiss in Roman Law,’ 395.
3
The texts of the fueros are quoted in Tamassia, ‘Osculum intervenies.’ Fuero
Juzgo contains, basically, the law in the spirit of Constantine’s Constitution as pre-
served in the Theodosian Code. Its text is seconded by Las Siete Partidas, IV, 11, iii.
Fuero Real, dating from the second half of the thirteenth century, expanded the pro-
vision. Fuero Viejo de Castiella preserves in a fazaña a unique case, exemplifying the
working of the law and the legal meaning of the formal kiss. This is the famous
case of doña Elvyra, the niece of the archdeacon of Burgos and the daughter of
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82  

legal traditions retained and transmitted the spirit of the legal formalism
of the kiss in this context until the thirteenth century as it had been
in the times of Emperor Constantine. In southern Gaul, soon after
the sixth century, osculum interveniente was Christianized, fusing with
the osculum pacis. There, the uses of the rite in pre-marriage contracts
manifest the misunderstanding of the original meaning of the kiss
and its role as a surety. Local Gallican Church hierarchy associated
the rite with betrothal only.4 The persistent use of the kiss as a for-
mal legal instrument in the field of marital relations blended the pro-
nounced affective dimension of the family bond (emphasized in the
Frankish reception of the ritual kiss in the earliest Merovingian for-
mulae) with the legal implications of Roman law. From that time on,
osculum interveniente operated in a relatively stable frame of reference.
For a lack of a better word I will term it ‘legal affect.’ The kiss
derived a good part of its operational force from a dispositions field—
the affective bond of love—on which the peacemakers could and,
as we shall see later, did draw frequently.
By the middle of the twelfth century, therefore, osculum interveniente
merged the late Roman legal tradition and the Germanic custom of
objectifying legal concepts with Christian overtones and the built-in
affective dimension. With this referential field, it assumed a central
position in the instruments of peace developed by the revived neo-
Latin doctrine of the Italian civilists weaving the legal texture of
their urban communities. Judging from the extant examples of notar-
ial practice generated in the wake of the thirteenth-century con-
frontation between Guefs and Ghibellines, osculum pacis interveniente
established itself as the standard form in the authoritative manuals
on the legal procedure of concluding private pacts of peace.5 It took
time, however, before the rite was attached to a specific legal instru-
ment. Two of the most influential syntheses in the thirteenth-century

Ferrant Gomez of Villa Armiento, and the caballero who wanted to marry her. I
use the text in Eugen Wohlhaupter, Althispanisch-Gothische Rechte (Weimar, 1936), 30
and the translation of Mary Pharr, ‘The Kiss in Roman Law,’ 396–7. For the con-
text see also Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society,
1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1984), 36–57.
4
Émile Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ 590–7;
Konstantine Ritzer, Le marriage dans les Églises chrétiennes du 1er au 12 e siècle (Paris,
1970), 291–302.
5
An excellent short survey of the legal theory on crime and private peace is
Padoa Schioppa, ‘Delitto e pace privata,’ 271–87.
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Italian legal tradition frame the transition of the ritual kiss and the
instrument it embodied into the core of the peace pact.
The Ars notarie of Rainerius Perusinus, imperial notary, professor
of law, and judge of Bologna, composed between 1226 and 1233,
did not mention the kiss in the instructions on how to compose a
formal written record, or carta, in cases of ‘peace, concord, or truce.’
Rainerius’ shorter and more specific article De pace, however, fea-
tured the kiss in the concluding phase of the legal act constituting
the peace, following the oath, sworn corporaliter on the Gospels.6
Rainerius evidently hesitated to give the concept embodied by the
kiss the status of the exclusive legal device of peacemaking. There
were several reasons for this uncertainty. First, for Rainerius the legal
instrument supporting acts of private peacemaking was the stipula-
tion. In the purist neo-Latin tradition, the latter went without any
‘vestments.’ The ‘nude,’ verbally made stipulation in the form of a
question and an affirmative answer made the peace, which was then
recorded in the written carta to ensure the existence of a proof.7 In
spite of the assertion that ‘all this completed, they gave peace to
each other with the kiss of peace intervening,’ it is not completely
clear whether Rainerius was willing to make a concession to custom
and objectify the stipulation in the form of the kiss.8 Next, although
in Rainerius’ legal scenario the stipulatio made the peace contract, it
was the oath that created the obligation to fulfill it. In the way peace
was made, beginning with the stipulation and finishing with the oath,
very little substance indeed was left to ritual—unless we assume that
it was somehow linked to the stipulation. Finally, for Rainerius the
kiss was an instrument of the formal investiture, both in feudal and
civic custom. This vague manner of defining the legal nature of the
kiss before the great summae of the later thirteenth century estab-
lished its uses reflects the confusion that reigned in the matter of
the relationship between legal substances and their vestimenta and

6
Ludwig Wahrmund, ed., Die Ars notariae des Rainerius Perusinus, 40–41, Ch. 31:
Carta feudi, fidelitatis et investiture: IIII Capitulum pactorum; 54–5; Ch. 51: Carta pacis, con-
cordie sive treugue. For the De pace article see Augusto Gaudenzi, Scripta anecdota glos-
satorum, vol. 2, 55 (document N. 121).
7
A short but instructive summary of the development of cartas, notarial records,
and the legal acts these instruments officialized is Voltelini, Die Notariats-Imbreviaturen,
i–xxix.
8
Quibus omnibus sic peractis, pacem inter se, osculo interveniente, dederunt, in Gaudenzi,
Scripta anecdota glossatorum, ibidem.
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84  

sollemnia in the beginning of the thirteenth century. The uses of the

formal instruments for which the kiss stood and the meanings of the
concepts it ‘clothed’ were still fluid.
Half a century later the composite osculum pacis interveniente took
center stage in the legal formalism of the peacemaking pact. In the
Summa totius artis notariae, penned by the most illustrious figure in the
generation educated by Rainerius, Rolandino Passageri, the kiss was
the ritual form of the peace act. The peace was made after insults
and injuries, specific or general, had been inflicted, for which one
or both parties were cited to some of the city’s courts. Rolandino’s
elaborate ‘Instrument of peace and concord,’ which he included in
the ‘Compromise’ category, opened with the kiss: ‘Antonio, on the
one hand, and Conrad, on the other hand, made to each other,
with the mutually given kiss of peace intervening, perpetual peace,
end, remission, and concord.’9 The moving of the ritual gesture to
the beginning of the pact was a significant development. The for-
mula went on to introduce the element of promise, making the par-
ties declare, through a solemn stipulation, that neither they nor their
heirs would proceed against the peace thus made and that they
would keep it forever. Next came another obligation, this time mate-
rial, again expressed through a stipulation pledging the two parties’
property for the keeping of the peace. Rolandino then clarified a
roster of fine issues in the nature of the reconciliation, the legal condi-
tions and obligations it created, and their procedural characteristics.
He, just as Alfonso in his Code, reserved the kiss for acts of peace
[ pax] only. In cases of concord, remission, and ‘end’ of the conflict,
the kiss was not exchanged.
Capturing in full detail contemporary Italian theory and due process
of peacemaking, Rolandino’s Summa became immediately a bestseller,
the source of notarial instrumenta of reconciliation all over the peninsula
and abroad. Adopted verbatim in Guillaume Durand’s Speculum iuris,
by the middle of the fourteenth century Rolandino’s peace formula
spread rapidly throughout Western Europe.10 With Giovanni Andrea’s
and Baldo’s erudite glosses, and accumulating fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century commentaries from numerous lesser lawyers, Rolandino’s for-

9
Rolandinus de Passagerii, Summa totuis artis notariae (Venice, 1546), fols. 158v–159v.
10
Guillaume Durand, Speculum Iuris, with commentaries by Giovanni Andrea and
Baldus (Basel, 1574), 107, Lib. IIII, part. 1, De treuga & pace.
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mula became the normative text defining the legal form of recon-
ciliation for the next two centuries. It ensured the triumph of the
ritual kiss as the dominant form of the legal instruments of peace.
The fact that the kiss of peace was accepted as the exclusive form
of private reconciliation reflects the powerful presence of the rite in
the customary tradition of both peacemaking and the obligatory con-
tract. The collections of cartae pacis with which the archives of the
Northern Italian cities abound flesh out the dry lines of the city
statutes and notarial manuals with the practical concerns of real-life
peacemaking and offer a sweeping vista of the practice of reconcil-
iation. Close scrutiny of some typical cases helps illustrate the work-
ings of the ritual formalism of the kiss within the thirteenth-century
civic legal process. I will limit myself to a well-documented geo-
graphical area, Tuscany, where one can follow intimately the inter-
section of Roman law, the impact of contemporary sociopolitical
structures on legal practice, and local specifics. Apart from their rel-
atively rich evidence on peacemaking, Tuscan urban centers are also
representative in the sense that the legal developments occurring
there were later mirrored in other Italian jurisdictions. Comparative
material from two more regions, the Papal States (on material from
the march of Ancona) and Corsica, will shed light on both the legal
specifics of the Tuscan reconciliation and the formal features it shared
with practices in other geographical and sociopolitical environments.11
In Florence, records of private peace acts are available for study
in an almost uninterrupted sequence from the late twelfth to the late
fourteenth century.12 The first observation from the scrutiny of these
documents is the extraordinary thirteenth-century expansion of the
rite. The kiss of peace was not explicitly mentioned in all records,
and perhaps not widely used in practice during the early 1200s. On
the other hand, references to it steadily diminish after the second
quarter of the fourteenth century. When mentioned, the kiss-osculum
interveniente appears almost exclusively in cases of grave offenses.

11
Gino Masi, Collectio chartarum pacis privatae medii aevi, passim. Another rich col-
lection is the Sienese Caleffo Vecchio, see Giovanni Cecchini, Il Caleffo Vecchio del Comune
de Siena, 3 vols. (Siena, 1931–1940). See also Dante Cecchi, ‘Sull’ istituto della pax
dalle costitutioni Egidiane agli inizi del secolo XIX nella marca di Ancona,’ Studi
Maceratesi, 3 (= Atti dell III Convegno di studi storici Maceratesi, Camerino, 26
Novembre 1967), (Macerata, 1968), 145–7; and Jacques Busquet, Le droit de la vendetta
et les paci corses (Paris, 1920).
12
Masi, Collectio chartarum, passim.
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86  

Manslaughter and bitter fights erupting over injured honor were the
most common preludes to peacemaking requiring the kiss. Most rec-
onciliations were extra-judicial affairs, although there are several men-
tions of law enforcement officials involved in the peacemaking. The
latter trend became more marked in the second part of the century,
when there are reasons to think that reconciliations had regularly
been enacted under the monitoring of the civic authorities. The early
thirteenth-century reconciliations were relatively simple affairs; by the
1270s they run into pages of details. Until the 1260s the ritual kiss
usually went together with a simple promise on the part of the par-
ties reconciling and agreeing to make and keep the peace. From that
point on, the stipulation, which had entered the private pact by the
late 1230s as a side device to arrange the material guarantees for
the keeping of the peace, as was its original purpose in Roman law,
gradually moved center stage to comprise the legal act of peacemaking.
In the earliest instruments the kiss was accompanied by an oath,
most often on the Gospels. Finally, although in the early decades of
the thirteenth century there were considerable variations in the formal
rendering of the written instruments, in the mid-1270s the cartae
began to follow closely Rolandino’s formula.
From the analysis of several hundred thirteenth-century cartae, it
appears that after the entry of the stipulation most of the documents
that omitted the kiss began using the stipulation and vice-versa. Also,
already the earliest documents explicitly mention that the kiss and
the peace it signified were given ‘mutually and in turn.’ The stipulation
itself, when it became associated with the proper act of peace and
not with the obligation to keep it through the pledge of properties,
was invariably clothed in some formalism.13 I am not aware of any
explicit reference to what these sollemnia consisted of. That leaves
room for a tempting speculation; but let me note one more of the
features of the legal pact preserved in the cartae. The way in which
both simple promise and stipulation were defined in the instruments
mirrored the structure discernable in the performance of the ritual
act. The parties solemnly promised or stipulated ‘between themselves,
mutually, and in turn’ to keep the peace and all agreements that
accompanied it.14

13
Fecerunt ad invicem osculo pacis vicissim interveniente . . . sollemnibus stipulationibus hinc
inde intervenientibus, ibidem, 119, N. xxx.
14
Et convenerunt et promiserunt inter se, dicte partes, ad invicem et vicissim inter se, ibidem,
159, N. 40.
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Some conclusions can be drawn at this point. The kiss was evi-
dently a unilateral act, performed in turn by each party who ‘gave’
the peace and the party who ‘received’ it. Then the act flowed the
other way round, i.e., the parties either kissed again, or the single
performance of the kiss was considered to have been an exchange.
The force that created the obligation was solidly linked to the form.
In some cases it was necessary to delegate proxies for the express
purpose of kissing. This was made with special legal instruments,
authorizing the persons who were to make peace on behalf of those
unable to be physically present to perform the rite (they could be
exiles, banniti), or were prevented from doing so for reasons of decency
(mostly women). When the family of Michele Assembrante of Pistoia
made peace with Giovanni, Lombardo, and Giannino, the sons of
Gratio, on January 6, 1283, it was considered inappropriate that
Michele’s wife, Bonaventura, kiss the other party. She had to dele-
gate her rights to Baldo, also called Gregory, with the explicit pro-
vision that he was to ‘receive the peace, end, and remission from
them on her behalf and kiss them on the mouth in her stead.’15
Ritual was indispensable for the legal efficacy of the pact. Unilaterallity,
mutual giving and receiving, physical presence, formal obligation
through exchange of bodily actions, the increasing role of the urban
authorities as a third party with the power to coerce—these were
the features of the legal instrument embodied by the kiss on which
the peace contract was built.
The interdependence between content and form allows for a con-
jecture. As the second half of the thirteenth century saw the advent
of the stipulation in place of the simple promise in the instruments
of peace, the most plausible speculation that can be inferred from
the cartae is that the kiss of peace came to express its formalism. The
conclusion may be startling at first, but it follows logically from the
historical evolution of the stipulation. Already in the early Middle
Ages it was stripped of its original expression and meanings. In the
period from the eighth to the tenth centuries, as stipulatio interposita
and stipulatio subnixa, it came to denote written text, the charter in
which the legal transaction was recorded, the signature of one or both
of the parties, the festuca, or indeed any object embodying the cor-
poreal obligation taken through it. In the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies, during the period concurrent with the revival of the neo-Latin

15
Ibidem, 136, N. 34.
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88  

legal practice, the stipulation regained some of its characteristics of

an oral obligation under certain conditions and began to divest itself
from the formalism it had taken on during the reign of customary
law. It did not break free from all formalism though, nor did it lose
the applications that had accrued to it during the earlier centuries.16
It was only natural, then, that when in the thirteenth century the
stipulation began pushing aside fides facta (at the same time being
itself intensely discussed by the neo-Latinists), the old Roman verbal
questions and answers giving rise to legal action were translated into
the impressive language of ritual. The kiss of peace assumed the
form of another basic legal instrument—that of the private con-
tract—and carried it on long after stipulatio in contracts other than
peacemaking was disrobed from all formalism and acquired the form
of a ‘nude,’ purely consensual verbal exchange giving rise to legal
action. Settlement, termination of hostilities, giving up of the rights
of revenge, and restoration of the legal and social relationships of
peace were captured in the single, legally binding kiss as the form
of the Latin stipulation combining the affective dimension of for-
giveness and the law.
The expanding neo-Latin legal doctrine was not the only legal
field that still required ritual formalism when it came to peacemaking.
Among the indigenous Germanic institutions regulating the conditions
of conflict and peace, the Urfehde was of cardinal import in the Holy
Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern
period. As a legal device, Urfehde entailed a settlement by the grant-
ing of peace and giving up the customarily justified rights of vengeance.
Due to its paramount importance for the judicial framework of
medieval peacemaking in the German-speaking regions of Western
Europe, by the thirteenth century one of the two types of Urfehde
was linked to the reconciliation and developed into a more complex
legal act. Part of it was formally supported by the ritual kiss.

16
For a brief definition of the Roman stipulation see Berger, Dictionary, 716–7.
On the history of the medieval stipulation see Heirich Brunner, Zur Rechtsgeschichte
der römischen und germanischen Urkunde; Francesco Brandileone, ‘Nota preliminare
sull’origine della “stantia” o “convenientia,” ’ in Scritti di storia del diritto privato ita-
liano, ed. by Giuseppe Ermini (Bologna, 1931), Vol. 2, 407–18, and especially ‘La
“stipulatio” nell’età imperiale romana e durante il medio evo,’ ibidem, 418–528;
Carl Karsten, Die Lehre vom Vertrage bei den italienischen Juristen des Mittelalters. Ein Beitrag
zur inneren Geschichte der Reception des römischen Rechtes in Detschland (reprint, Amsterdam,
1967), 179ff.
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Such was the older type of Urfehde, the one of traditional Germanic
stock. It routinely followed a preliminary or pledged promise to ter-
minate feuds over serious matters of bloodshed or injury of honor
[Streiturfehde] and led to cessation of hostilities. This referential field
made the instrument amenable to the entry of the kiss. Although a
private act, Urfehde was a legal instrument upon which both indi-
viduals and public powers could act, since breaking the promise of
reconciliation was considered a public offence that gave rise to cus-
tomary legal action. These implications of the device out-weighed
the fact that the authorities could not get actively engaged in the
Urfehde itself and could only make sure it was employed to pacify
the parties to the conflict or guarantee that the injured party would
renounce his grievances against the officials and institutions who had
mediated the settlement or enforced the end of the conflict. Urfehde
was offered in the first place by the injured party, the one who had
legal rights to begin a feud and seek vengeance, reciprocating the
legal and financial steps that the wrongdoer had done to bring about
reconciliation. Only then could the offender offer his own Urfehde.
The instrument could follow either extra-judicial settlement or a for-
mal court sentence, and co-exist with the fines and punishments that
the authorities were able to enforce against the offender.17
The formalism of Urfehde, which is of primary interest here, was
originally the Old Germanic ritual sequence of an oath and a hand
gesture. A case in point is the Christianized Old-Icelandic Trygäir-
formula. It preserved the cold formalism of the ancient Scandinavian
peace tradition, a true settlement rather than reconciliation, and was
most resistant to the influence of forgiveness and reconciliation borne
by the kiss. The procedure it prescribed consisted of an oath and a
handshake: ‘And now put your hands together, NN. and NN.; keep

17
Carl von Amira, Grundriss des germanischen Rechts (3rd edition, Strasburg, 1913),
247ff.; Heinrich Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, Vol. 1 (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1906),
226–7; Franz Beyerle, Das Entwicklungsproblem im germanischen Rechtsgang. Vol. 1. Sühne,
Rache und Preisgabe in ihren Bezug zum Strafprozeß der Volksrechte (Heidelberg, 1915),
151–68; Wilchelm Ebel, Die Rostocker Urfehden. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen
Strafrechts (Rostock, 1938), 13–24. It is important to note that in the German cities
of the later Middle Ages from the beginning of the thirteenth century another form
of Urfehde was developed. It began to be demanded by the authorities from released
prisoners who in this way acknowledged the right of the public powers to monop-
olize the use of force and deploy coercion to keep the peace through any means
they deemed appropriate, including rights over the bodies, property, and personal
freedom of released felons [Hafturfehde].
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90  

the oath that you have sworn by the will of Christ and all the men
who have witnessed this peace.’18 The overwhelming amount of
medieval German Urfehden adhered to this kind of formal expression.
The early medieval Anglo-Saxon Unfáehäe seems to mark a transition
to the more complex tradition, including the ritual kiss with its deeply
Christian implications, although there is no complete agreement about
its formalism. Designated with the term for reconciliation, halsfang,
which might have meant embrace, by the time it was recorded in
royal legislation Unfáehäe was assimilated to the kiss. Leges Henrici I
explains the term as ‘the English word with which the embrace
around the neck is called.’19
This appears plausible, since it was in the Low Germanic legal
traditions with historical Anglo-Saxon connections, especially in
Western Frisia, Zeeland, and some northern Dutch provinces, that
the kiss as the form of reconciliation displaced the hand gesture and
joined the oath of orveide. The standard expression in Frisian laws,
‘peace with sworn oath and the kiss’ [swerren ed and keste mond ], points
to an implication of the rite in the creation of the peace obligation
on a par with the sworn oath.20 A Münzordnung from the same region
prescribed that the feud remain in force until the parties reconciled
‘and each and every one of those who had sworn the oath had
kissed with their mouth, and given up the feud. . . .’21 On other occa-
sions the kiss framed the indispensable, but preliminary stage of the
payment of wergeld, which in some places was considered to be the
price for the kiss.22 If this is the correct interpretation, then the kiss

18
Nu legia ∏eir hendr sinar saman NN. oc NN.; halldit vael trygäyr at villia cristz oc allra
mana ∏eirra, er nu heyräo trygäa mal; quoted after Beyerle, Entwicklungsproblem, 152–3.
On the strict formalism of northern peacemaking, aimed at reaching a settlement,
rather than reconciliation see Andreas Heusler, Das Strafrecht der Isländersagas (Leipzig,
1911), esp. 85–7.
19
. . . est autem verbum anglicum, quod latine sonat apprehensio colli, see L. J. Downer,
ed. and trans., Leges Henrici Primi, edited with translation and commentary (Oxford,
1973) ch. 76. The term halsfang had the same meaning in Icelandic practice; see
Richthofen, Altfriesisches Wörterbuch, in his Friesische Rechtsquellen, 794. On halsfang see
also Heinrich Brunner, ‘Sippe und Wergeld nach niederdeutschen Rechten,’ ZRG,
GA, 3 (16) (1882), 15–18, and Harold D. Hazeltine, Die Geschichte des englischen
Pfandrechts (Breslau, 1907), 83–5.
20
His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 214, note. 3, discusses examples from Frisian laws.
21
Nu agen him elker lyck deer him diue freedeed swert mit sine mond kessa, ende deer mede
da fayte wrtigia, see Karl Friedrich von Richthofen, ed., Friesische Rechtsquellen (Berlin,
1840), 411, ch. 1, ll. 35–7; 387, ch. 7, l. 3.
22
Als thio seke sened is and thi kos kesseth ist, see His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 201–18.
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seems to have appeared as the formalism of the settlement as a

whole. It came to denote, and indeed to connote, Urfehde in Frisian
peacemaking, imbuing it with the meaning of reconciliation and for-
giveness rather than pure settlement. In northwestern Germany,
where the kiss appeared fairly often, as a rule reconciliation remained
only one of the parts of the peace pact. A typical example would
be the Urfehde that Heinrich, burgrave of Stromberg, gave to the
count of Ravensberg at Elmenhorst, near Ravensberg, on September
22, 1292. The high point of their meeting, after the payment of the
required sum for amends had been arranged, was the kiss and the
oath on the relicts. The reconciliation or kuste sone was tied to the orueide
but did not absorb or displace the legal form that presumably embod-
ied the latter.23
The thirteenth-century German Urfehde betrays a trend that was
only implicit in the neo-Latin stipulation and became even more
pronounced as the century wore on, the growing presence of a third
party whose role was no longer limited to mediation. This evolution
was region-specific and reflected the expanding claims of the public
powers to mediate private conflict. The rights of the public author-
ities concerned with peace and order are quite visible in contracts
involving Urfehden. Another of the thirteenth-century Western legal
instruments employed in peacemaking, the French asseurement, demon-
strates this development even better. On evidence from Northern
France its origins can be traced back to the twelfth century. As a
fully fledged legal instrument, however, asseurement flourished in the
later Middle Ages. Unlike the Urfehde settlements to which the kiss
was a newcomer, the association of the kiss with peacemaking in the
French kingdom had, as we have seen, long roots, and the secular
authorities could use the power of the tradition vested in this accepted
form.
A contract with a preventive character, asseurement initially belonged
to the domain of high justice but with time seeped down to bour-
geois quarters. In its basic form it was a solemn promise by which
the parties to the conflict took an obligation to restrain themselves

23
Vortmer so hebbe wi deme greven eine rechte orueide vnde eine kuste sone also dese bref
sprecht/vnde sinen vrinden/vnde hern ludincgere van bardeliue vnde sineme sone entruwen gelouet/
vnde vp den heiligen gesworen, see Friedrich Wilchelm and Richard Newald, eds., Corpus
der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300, Vol. 2, 1283–1292, N. 565–1657
(Lahr, 1943), 761, N. 1629.
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92  

from violence against each other. The promise was made to, or given
‘in the hands’ of an authorized official, local or of the central govern-
ment. It is worth noting the continuity, of the ritual formalism adopted
by the third party in this secular procedure, with earlier cases involv-
ing the ‘consecrated hands’ of a prelate. The similarity suggests if
not the direct appropriation, at least the strong influence of early
ecclesiastical ritual on its secular successor. In its high medieval forms,
the asseurement could not be revoked. Breaches of the promise embod-
ied in it entailed prosecution by the authority that had received the
asseurement rather than the other party to the peacemaking act. In
the course of the later medieval period, asseurement underwent a series
of transformations concerning its social agents, its sphere of appli-
cation, and the level of public authority permitted to receive and
enforce it.24 Nonetheless, asseurement retained the substance of a legal
instrument of the peace and the formalism through which it was
executed. It was a public event, could be enforced by royal or com-
munal officials, and was attended by specially appointed officers of
the peace. Unlike osculum interveniente, asseurements were given to ter-
minate a variety of conflicts. There is no discernible pattern in the
diverse types of offense that led to its application.
Being a promise to the other party as much as it was a pledge
to the authorities, asseurement was sometimes staked on giving fides
and in that capacity involved the ritual kiss as well. In this manner
the Livre Rouge of Abbeville recorded the pledge of asseurement in a
case dating from 1304. The parties put their joined hands in the
hands of the mayor, and kissed each other in faith and loyalty.25
Virtually mirroring the ceremony represented in the two-party rit-
ual obligation of firmantia and fides facta, and including the emergence
of a mediating third party as in laudatio, the kiss-asseurement placed
the legal act in a context which entailed a very different interpre-
tation of ritual’s meaning. The emergence of a directly involved third

24
See now Elizabeth Cohen, ‘Violence Control in Late Medieval France. The
Social Transformation of the asseurement,’ Revue d’histoire du droit, Tijdschrift voor
Rechtsgeschiedenis, 51 (1983), 111–22. Cohen surveys the work of French legal posi-
tivists and introduces a dynamic dimension to asseurement by exploring late medieval
shifts in its meaning and application.
25
Et puis apres pais et accors fu fais entre les parties avant dites et par devant justiche, ch’est
assavoir Jakemont Clabaut, maïeur adoncques et plusieurs eskevins et grant plante d’autre bone
gent, et se baisèrent le dites parties en foy et loyauté, Livre Rouge, fol. 40v, quoted after Jean
Boca, La justice criminelle de l’échevinage d’Abbeville au Moyen Age, 1184–1516 (Lille, 1930),
167.
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party with power to coerce transformed the nature of the legal bond
created by the ritual peace. Cessation of conflict was no longer an
issue of freely taken obligation. Peacemaking had acquired a new
dimension.

The Conditions of Ultimate Peace: Thirteenth-Century Pax and Amicitia

As understood by twelfth-century lawyers, the ritual kiss constituted

a legal bond established for a specific case. A century later, the rite
no longer worked as such in that way. The early thirteenth-century
legal thought and practice of peacemaking had solidly anchored it
in the bedrock of the legal pact defined as ‘peace’ ( pax, compositio,
or concordia), which had many of the features of a broadly defined
covenant.
The medieval composite form pax cumcordia appears for the first
time in early Frankish formulae. Compositio was the technical term that
Langobard legal language used for the definitive peace in contrast
to the temporary treuwa.26 There are hints that in Roman practice
compositio had a social component, but neither the classical and late
Roman traditions nor early Langobard legal practice has preserved
any traces of its existence as a written document of a legal covenant.
The formula pax et concordia seems to have turned standard by the
ninth century in the Frankish Empire. It was employed in the con-
text of securitas formulae, and seems to have influenced late Langobard
legal forms after Charlemagne’s conquest of Italy in the eighth cen-
tury. The formula grew out of a synthesis of the Roman pact and
the Germanic compositio. Its purpose was to ensure that the wrong-
doer was not cited before the judicial authority for committing the
crime, and the injured party guaranteed through it that there would
be no feud after the composition at which amends had been made
and the wergeld had been paid.27

26
Pax cumcordia and compositio as types of legal reconciliation were defined in the
first Langobard law code, the edict of Rothari, promulgated in 643, ch. 143. For
a recent Latin-Italian edition with a commentary see Carlo Azzara and Silvio
Casparri, eds., Le Leggi dei Longobardi, storia, memoria e diritto di un popolo germanico
(Milan, 1992). For a complete English translation with introduction see K. Fisher
Drew, The Lombard Laws (Philadelphia, PA, 1973).
27
The Roman pact, pactum, applied also in delictual obligations, being a com-
position between the offender and the person injured by the wrongdoing. See for
a short outline Berger, Dictionary, 614. For a detailed list of applications of the term
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94  

During the high Middle Ages, parallel with the revival of neo-
Roman jurisprudence, a whole roster of legal forms, such as treuga,
amicitia, concordia, remissio, finis, transactio, accrued around compositio and
pax to denote the fine shades of the peace pact.28 Most were guar-
anteed by fides and carried by the oath, the kiss, or other legal devices.
Yet, above all other forms stood the formalism of the handshake.
Some legal theorists derived from the latter the very term ‘pact’
under which the peace contract came to operate. The early thir-
teenth-century Italian legal masters, Roman civilists, and pragmatic
authors of civic law codes most concerned with the feuds among cit-
izens sorted out this chaos, defined the legal ramifications of all oper-
ative concepts, and attributed to each of them its appropriate sollemnia.
The process of distilling distinctive formalism for the instruments of
legal peacemaking was occurring intensively by the first quarter of
the thirteenth century. The 200 years of legal thought and practice
that followed saw the growth of a thicket of commentaries around
the vestments of the primary concepts.
Among the Italian neo-Latinists, foremost in the definition of the
essence of the private pact was the opinion that the term ‘pact’ was
closely linked to peace, deriving from the Latin term ‘giving peace.’
The pact expressed the consensus of two or more parties, their agree-
ment to accept the stipulations of a judicial sentence or arbitration.
Strictly speaking, most of the pacts that gave rise to legal action
were generic obligatory covenants, engaged through fides or wadia,
later involving stipulatio, and guaranteed through a roster of sollem-
nia. Thirteenth-century Italian notarial manuals list scores of such
legal pacts, covenants of peace featuring prominently among them,
sometimes as categories in their own right, on other occasions under
the title of other, more generic agreements.29
For practical reasons having to do with the political and social
constitution of their communities, most active in developing the peace

and its derivatives and cognates as well as further references see P. G. W. Glare,
ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1996), 1314–5 on pax and 390 on Concordia.
28
Masi, Collectio Chartarum, 1–20.
29
A short but instructive discussion of the origins, meanings, and formalism of
the medieval legal pact is included in Rainerio of Perugia’s Ars notariae, see Wahrmund,
Die Ars notariae, 1–3. Rainerio did not bind himself with accepting only one expla-
nation; other authors were more specific. See, for example, Irinerius in Herman
Fitting, ed., Summa codicis des Irnerius. Mit einer Einleitung (Berlin, 1894), 25ff. and Max
Conrad, ed., Die Epitome exactis regibus, herausgegeben mit Anhängen und einer Einleitung
(2nd edition, Aalen, 1965), 98–100.
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       95

pact were the civic worlds of the Italian communes and the urban
centers of the Low Countries. Most local legal traditions in these
two regions consistently used the formalism of the kiss to embody
the core of the peace pact. Both regions were the exclusive provinces
of the contractual peace and shared the essentials of Western peace-
making, but their concepts of pax and concordia, frequently used to
qualify the relationships of peace achieved through reconciliation,
had distinct contents and ramifications. The analysis of the rites of
peacemaking in these two areas highlights the basic traits of Western
peacemaking as reconciliation. Even more important, it reveals dis-
tinct modes of social contract reflected in the ritual peace covenant.
While abounding in references to the ritual kiss of peace, the early
thirteenth-century evidence about the rites of reconciliation in the
northern Italian communes and city states does not specify the role
and meaning of each of the formal gestures in the complex proce-
dure of the legal composition. It is thus difficult to gauge the contents
of the obligation stipulated by the kiss. The sources become more cir-
cumstantial by the second quarter of the thirteenth century, when
the power of the imperial ban devolved to the chief executive and
judicial officers of the communes. This shift of responsibility empowered
urban legislation to begin targeting city violence with a series of judi-
cial measures designed to keep the social peace. Contractual peace
became imperative for feuding parties who wished to retain their
rights in the city and avoid being subjected to exile or heavy fines.
The development of the standard written instrument of peace,
instrumentum pacis or carta pacis, was the direct response to the employ-
ment of the ban to pacify the feuding clans and individuals and an
attempt to end the everyday altercations that troubled the Italian
communes. The cartae pacis were the exclusive prerequisite for the
lifting of the ban or the mitigation of the pecuniary fines imposed
for violent crimes. The communal officials and external peacemakers,
the so-called pacieri or angeli pacis, in theory did not recognize the
legality of the private feud, but were in practice compelled by tra-
dition and circumstances to accept it tacitly or go around it. All they
could do was work on limiting the escalation of violence by diffusing
hostility and bringing already erupted feuds to a speedy end. The
ban was lifted if the injured party offered the offenders peace and
promised not to attack or judicially prosecute them. The obligation
to peace undertaken by the parties to the conflict, however, had to
be absolute, comprehensive, and hereditary. It included not only the
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96  

principals of the feuding clans and the proxies who made peace in
their stead, but also clan members who were covered by the prin-
ciple of customary vengeance and failed to appear and make peace
in person. The purpose of the peace pact was to eliminate all pos-
sibilities of legal and customary vendettas, regardless of how they
were pursued, with a dagger in hand or in the law courts.30 The
authorities were all too well aware of how easily one form of the
feud could spill into another.
In thirteenth-century northern Italian notarial manuals providing
templates for cartae pacis, the formalism of the kiss was reserved exclu-
sively for compositions known as pax and concordia. In the language
of the instrumenta developed in such social and political contexts, set-
tlements of these types meant remittance of all injuries, damages,
and harms, said and done. Through these peace covenants the par-
ties acquitted each other of all attacks on life, limb, property, or
honor perpetrated from the beginning of the conflict. In theory, pax
and concordia agreements differed from contracts with more limited
application designed for specific aims and employed in cases of
conflicts with lower intensity. But the real-life legal practice of rec-
onciliation blurred the strict definitions of the theorists, who were
often unable to tell the difference themselves, and established a
broader understanding of pax.
Two cases a half-century apart illustrate the confusion. In one of
the earliest examples from Prato, in the early 1200s, a Pisan notary,
Cascio, the son of Guido Spelacaste, made peace with Landino, son
of Rainerio of Prato. The parties have ‘made and given between
themselves and mutually, the kiss of peace intervening, end, remis-
sion, freedom, absolution, and perpetual peace of all injuries.’31 Peace
came last, with a host of other conventions ahead of it. More than
fifty years later, on June 14, 1274, at a time when the most influential
summae explicitly linked the kiss only and exclusively to the perpetual,
firm, and indelible pax, a notary of Pistoia recorded the reconcilia-
tion being made between Ficardino and Fiore, and taking place in
the palace of the Captain of the People and before witnesses, with

30
The best short discussion of the instrumentum of peace is Peter Raymond Pazzalini,
The Criminal Ban of the Sienese Commune, 1225–1310 (Milan, 1979), 93–8.
31
Fecerunt and reddiderunt sibi ad invicem, pacis osculo interveniente, finem, remissionem, libe-
rationem, absolutionem, et pacem perpetuam de omnibus et singulis iniuriis. . . ., Masi, Collectio
chartarum, 39, N. 7.
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       97

the formula ‘Ficardo . . . and Fiore . . . kissing each other on the

mouth, made between themselves end and peace and remission of
all injuries.’32 Again, pax was assimilated to finis and remissio in the
formal act that embodied all these concepts.
Be that as it were, in Italian urban compositions enacted by means
of the ritual kiss, the ritual act constituted the obligation that lay at
the heart of the covenant. As the thirteenth century progressed, the
contents of that obligation show a distinct shift in meaning. The
change was caused by the evolving perceptions of the nature of
the civic peace, its social agents, and the tensions it provoked. In
imperial legislation, peace was a personal matter; order was the
supreme aim of the authorities. The ultimate agency was reserved
for the sovereign whose duty it was to maintain and enforce order.
Urban statutory law, on the contrary, asserted that keeping the peace
was the legal duty of the individual citizen and the membership of
the city’s corporate bodies. The implementation of this concept ran
into difficulties for a fundamental reason. Even though keeping the
peace could be understood as a duty of the citizen under the con-
ditions of uncertain legitimacy of the civic bodies which legislated it
as such, once the peace was broken, the individual right to vengeance
and retaliation overrode the generic duty to peace. At this point, no
legal duty justified the making of peace and the perpetual, heredi-
tary acquittal of injuries stipulated by the instruments of peace. It
seems that the rapid spread of the formalism of the kiss demanded
by the urban authorities was part and parcel of their attempt to deal
with this difficulty by using traditional devices to impose an entirely
new concept.
The ritual reconciliation with the kiss in the framework of the
thirteenth-century pax thus gave rise to a qualitatively new type of
obligation. Placing the ritual kiss at the heart of the pact was an
attempt to do away with the concept of peacemaking as a particu-
lar obligation undertaken as a specific liability, and substitute for it
the perception of peace as a generic duty. The solution it provided
was to wrap the peace act into the formalism of the ritual gesture
that implied recognition of a generic peace duty by definition. Those
who kissed and pledged their faith not only were obligating themselves

32
Osculando de ore ad os fecerunt inter se ad invicem finem, pacem, er remissionem perpetuam
de omnibus et singulis iniuriis, ibidem, 106–7, N. 26.
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98  

by taking a specific, freely bestowed and withdrawn legal liability,

but were also acknowledging peace as a moral duty in the manner
of the sacred peace of the Church and the no less respected duty
of household peace with their blood kin. Actively asserting the civic
peace and supporting it with the power of the ban and other legal
instruments, but still lacking the power to coerce, the early com-
munal legislators sought to impose peace and extend its social ter-
ritory by generalizing the duty of peace. In other words, the entry
of the kiss in the composition to embody the peace pact served to
transform the particular liability to keep the peace into the general
moral duty of peace enacted in the ritual covenant.
The novelty in the legal bond formalized by the kiss was its stress
on social consent, to which the ritual obligation now referred by
drawing on the obligatory relations encoded in ritual. The develop-
ment was of paramount importance. Instead of the self-imposed oblig-
ation of the person, who had previously been in a position to define
the limits and parameters of his or her own involvement, the grow-
ing powers of the public authorities tied the ritual obligation to the
already specified large and generic concept of civic duty and the con-
sent to accept it. Perhaps the most impressive testimony to the
changed nature of the ritual bond is to be found in the massive
peace compositions of the leaders of the political parties in Tuscany
in the latter part of the thirteenth century. One example will stand
for them all. When on January 18, 1280, Guelfs and Ghibellines,
fifty on each side, convened in the church of Santa Maria Novella
in Florence to make peace as required by the formal sentence of
the papal legate, Cardinal Latino, and ‘made and guaranteed the
peace,’ the kiss of peace served, above all, to ‘announce’ [declararunt]
the peace. Ritual blended in a single act what had been before two
distinct facets of the legal act of reconciliation: the liability to fulfill
the cardinal’s sentence and the parties’ acknowledgement of its bind-
ing character as a duty of the law-abiding citizen.33 What is significant
is not whether the peace held, nor whether the new discursive frame
increased the efficacy of ritual action. What I am arguing is that the
authorities seized every available device to promote law and order

33
Facta vero pace seu confirmatione pacis; in Isa Lori Sanfilippo, ‘La pace del cardi-
nale Latino a Firenze nel 1280. La sentenza e gli atti complimentari,’ Bolletino dell’
Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo e archivio muratoriano, 89/1 (1980–1981), Documenti,
203–4, 210, 226.
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and stamp out violence. Ritual peace and reconciliation through the
kiss was an important component of that scheme and part of an
ongoing effort to find substitutes for the lack of legitimate and effective
coercion.
Comprehensive, absolute, and hereditary as it was—and when
properly enacted binding even for individuals not personally involved—
the covenant of peace in Italian communes was a generic agreement
and rarely gave rise to positive relationships between the parties by
virtue of the peace act alone. As in the Nordic traditions, even the
acknowledgement of peace duty was for the most part a settlement,
a strictly practical affair. It was a response measured to the exact
amount of pressure applied by the communal authorities. If addi-
tional clauses were attached to it, they had to be specially stipulated.
Renouncing their feud on April 19, 1257, two families from San
Gimignano complemented the peace made with the ritual kiss with
the bond of amicitia by a formal obligation to marry their children.
The latter obligation was separately arranged, as were the liabilities
to fulfill the terms of the peace.34 Thirteenth-century Italian recon-
ciliation was also a synallagmatic contract. The two parties took, in
turn, mutual obligations that mirrored each other and emphasized
their equality before the law and in relation to each other.
By contrast, in the ritual peacemaking of the Dutch and Flemish
communes, as well as in northwestern Germany, the creation of a
positive bond between the parties was an integral element of the
peace act. This manner of peacemaking had a long tradition in the
North. Its formal foundation was the amicitia contract. We have
already seen it in Roudlieb, where ritual was a future-looking device
and structured interpersonal relations without prior conflict. The
same pattern, however, was followed in thirteenth-century peace-
making. As amicitia seeped down to bourgeois quarters, strengthened
the communal bond and provided the foundation for peace among
the city dwellers, it was assimilated into the concept informing the
pax bond. A ‘friendly’ reconciliation from the German town of Wetzlar
is a case in point. Completing an amicabilis compositio on January 13,
1285, the clans of Dridorf and Nuveren terminated the feud caused
by the murder of a certain Ludwig Han, a Dridorf clan member.
The Nuveren paid for 2,000 masses for the soul of the victim, and

34
Masi, Collectio chartarum, 293–8, N. 1.
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100  

arranged for his posthumous association with twelve abbeys. A lamp

was to burn forever in the monastery of the Virgin in Wetzlar, and
a source of an annual income of three marks was transferred in
hereditary possession to Ludwig’s closest relatives. With financial and
spiritual issues settled, the two parties met and had drawn up a writ-
ten instrument following the familiar Italian model, in which they
renounced all injuries, offences, attacks, and grievances through the
kiss of peace. The peace pact enacted, the parties secured it through
fides and the sworn oath. From that day, they were to be mutual
and faithful friends. The composition was then strengthened with the
ban of the commune. If someone dared to break the peace, he would
be proclaimed violator fidei et honoris, would be banned from Wetzlar
and the other imperial cities, would forfeit all his goods, and would
be subject to the imperial ban as well as to ecclesiastical excom-
munication until reconciling again, judicially or through the gratia of
the other party.35 Peace was clearly staked on the amicitia contract
which ritual built. As in most traditions north of the Alps and west
of the Rhine this was a field operated by the kiss. The kiss clearly
did not engage the major obligatory concept of German contract,
Treue [ fides]. Fides had its own sphere and was enacted through the
handshake. The rites of amicitia were then staked on the positive legal
affect borne by the kiss. The document did not specify its formal
contents; contemporary evidence from other regions identifies it with
another cardinal institution of the medieval legal and social obliga-
tory relations, amor.
The implications of the legal condition of amicitia as a feud-resolv-
ing contract derived from the Wetzlar reconciliation throw light on
two related developments that reinforce the conclusion that the kiss
was changing its legal referent. The first is a shift in the meaning
of gratia: a concept we already saw as carrying the binding force of
ritual obligation in the high Middle Ages. Early gratia had been pri-
marily a liability device. In the thirteenth century the distinction
between liability and duty became blurred. The technical language
of legal evidence gives practically no clues for this development. With
due allowance for genre specifics, however, the much more circum-
stantial body of narrative fiction makes up where the law comes up

35
Sed amici erimus ex nunc et in perpetuum in invicem et fideles; in Friedrich Böhmer,
ed., ‘Zwei Mordzühnen vom 1285 und 1288,’ Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum, 6
(1848), 21–3.
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short. In the German courtly classic Kudrun, for example, the princess,
introducing the noble lady Ortrun, exhorted Queen Hilde to kiss
the maiden who had offered her service in times of distress. When
learning that Ortrun belonged to a hostile kin, the queen outright
refused the kiss. Yet the princess was afraid that without the kiss her
relatives would feel free to attack the foreign lady. ‘Consider, my
dear mother, how guilty I would feel were my kinsmen to kill some-
body here,’ insists Kudrun, ‘give the poor [lady your] grace.’36 Only
gratia ensured actual protection and was legally binding for all those
under the ruler. The rite might have expressed personal liability, but
it also embodied the promise for the fulfillment of the duty of pro-
tection inherent in the social position of the lord.
As indicated in the document from Wetzlar, in the thirteenth-cen-
tury urban world gratia seeped down the social hierarchy, since it
was a convenient institution referring to the set of objective qualities
characterizing social relationships restored after grave offenses and
formal enmity. Lex Frisiorum, the collection of fundamental laws of
medieval Frisia, where the lack of acknowledged political authority
left peacemaking at the will of the free Frisians, summed up the con-
tent of the legal reconciliation between private persons in the phrase
in gratiam reverti.37 Once given, gratia was almost irrevocable, had there
been no further offenses against the life and honor of those confer-
ring it. The kiss carrying gratia was often earned after the open
demonstration of submission, humiliation, and expression of regret
and remorse [deditio].38 It guaranteed that the offended side would
quash the quarrel that fueled the justified ‘anger;’ that is, they would
‘put aside’ or ‘forget’ the legally acknowledged right to pursue a
feud. The thirteenth-century Tale of Melibeus, a story in Albertanus

36
Nu küsset, liebiu frouwe, dise maget hêre; Gedenke, liebiu muoter, waz ich des hiete schulde,
swen slüegen mîne mâge. lâz die armen haben <dîne> hulde; in Karl Bartsch, ed., Kudrun
(Wiesbaden, 1965), ll. 1582. The somewhat freely rendered English translation by
Winder McConnel, Kudrun (Drawer, 1992), 163 translates this passage in the fol-
lowing way: ‘Show that you’re favorably disposed towards this poor woman,’ oblit-
erating the meaning of the concept informing hulde.
37
Richthofen, Friesische Rechtsquellen, Document 30, title 2, Ch. 3. The previous
paragraph uses the expression donec quomodo potuerit eorum amiciam adipiscatur. The cases
are discussed in Rudolf His, Das Strafrecht der Friesen, 210ff.
38
The best discussion of deditio in the context of the rites of supplication and rit-
ual construction of political power is Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual
and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992). This is perhaps the subtlest
interpretation of pre-modern ritual as a device for structuring the political order
available today.
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102  

of Brescia’s moralizing work on vendetta and reconciliation, Liber

consolationis et consilii, is a case in point. Melibeus, a rich and pow-
erful citizen, took the acknowledgement of guilt by those who had
wronged him in its customary sense, as a title to legal revenge, and
considered pressing his case for seizure of the property and exile for
the perpetrators. Yielding to the persuasion of his wife, however, he
remitted his anger and received his enemies in his gratia by kissing
them.39 As the text hints on many occasions, the conferral of Melibeus’
gratia was a case of building bonds of friendship and peace between
two feuding clans through reconciliation soaked in religious remi-
niscences; nonetheless, despite the extra-judicial resolution of the case,
the customary peace as a duty of the peacemaker was no less binding.
A second development deserving attention is the impact of the
concept of amicitia on the peace pact as the former became inte-
grated into the latter through the ritual kiss of peace. A conspicu-
ous example is Alfonso the Wise’s provision for ritual peacemaking
as stipulated in Las Siete Partidas. The articles on peace or pax were
composed in the vein of local fueros intended to halt the bloody clan
and faction feuds in the late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Castilian
and Aragonese urban centers. The fueros acknowledged the legal rights
of the citizens to pursue blood feuds [inimicitia, enemistad ] exclusively
in cases of serious offenses, such as physical injury, murder, and
grave verbal attacks on someone’s honor. Custom separated the pre-
rogatives of the public authorities from individual and clan rights to
manage private relationships, allowing the latter the primary role in
the termination of the feud. Making one’s peace with the authori-
ties for breaking the public order and paying the price for that did
not mean that the legal feud, which the injured party had the right
to pursue, had been suppressed. The condition of inimicitia was ter-
minated only and exclusively when the clan of the murdered for-
gave the offender. The wrongdoer had to be accepted in the injured
party’s amor, as the fueros of Escalona and Calatayud put it, a term
clearly related to caritas and gratia of other legal traditions. Until then,
the injured party had all legal rights to attack and kill the offender,

39
Vos in nostram suscipimus gratiam et bonam voluntatem. Et ita, sublevando illos per manus,
recepti sunt in osculum pacis; in Thor Sudby, ed., Albertani Brixiensi Liber Consolationis et
consilii ex quo hausta est fabula de Melibeo et Prudentia (Kopenhagen, 1873), 126–7. An
excellent interpretation of this episode is offered by James M. Powell, Albertanus of
Brescia. The Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1992),
74–86.
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even after he had paid the due fine and indemnity and had made
his peace with the authorities. In most cases the fine only put off
the feud for a set period of time, normally nine days, giving the
wrongdoer a chance to escape from the city.40
Alfonso’s new Code drew on these customary provisions, and in
full accord with them determined that peace after the feud was only
possible when the state of amor was restored between offender and
injured. The Code spoke about making peace after discordia and desamor,
equating them to enemistad, the officially recognized private conflict
caused by murder, injury, and insult. Lesser strife was not the domain
of ritual pacification: the kiss targeted the feud. Forgiveness was the
sign of that crucial change of heart, and its formal expression was
the kiss of peace. The kiss signaled that the enemistad reigning in the
heart of the injured had been quashed and converted into pure and
sincere amor. The heart, as in the German tradition of Roudlieb, was
the source of legal amicitia and inamicitia.41 The ritual kiss of Alfonso’s
Code not only guaranteed that the feud had been renounced, but
converted the feud into peace and concord [ pax, pace]. Codifying
custom within such a discourse was a radical departure from earlier
practice. It was an attempt to modify the nature of the obligation
on which the pact of amicitia rested. The Code amalgamated ancient
custom, psychological analysis, and Roman law, in a splendid illus-
tration of the thirteenth-century understanding of the sources of the
powerful impact of legal ritual. The rites of peace accomplished what
the Spanish monarchy could not legitimately do: define peace as the
duty of the citizen. In the thirteenth century, the most that the royal
advisors could hope to achieve was to carefully preserve, maintain,
and perpetuate the rituals of peace as an efficient device for pacification
of the turbulent civic world. Skillfully managing the formalism of the
available peace instruments, the authorities instinctively grasped and

40
Postquam ad amorem eorum perveniat, homicidium pectet et ad domum suam revertat et
vivat; et qui fuerit homiciero . . . exeat de villa et stet foras usque habeat amorem de parentis mor-
tui, see Eduardo de Hinojosa, ‘Das Germanische Element in spanischen Rechte,’
ZRG, 44 (GA, 31) (1910), 282–359, esp. 300–30. The legal dimension of the for-
mal pardon of the offended party which made the reconciliation possible is stud-
ied in detail by F. Thomas y Valiente, ‘El perdon de la parte offendida en el
derecho penal Càstellano (siglos XVI, XVII, y XVIII),’ Anuario de historia del derecho
espanol, 31 (1961), 55–114.
41
The heart as a device of the political and legal order is a concept recently
discussed by Jean Nagle, La civilisation du coeur: Histoire du sentiment politique en France
du XII e au XIX e siècle (Paris, 1998).
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104  

consistently promoted ritual with age-old obligatory implications to

fortify the interpretative scheme they sought to implement as the law
of the realm.
In Flanders the institutions of the peace were solidly rooted in the
Germanic and Frankish past with its ancient social and legal cus-
toms of association as the most enduring feature of the true peace
and a manifestation of the sincerity of the reconciliation.42 To be
sure, the institution of trève, the local variant of treuga, supported by
the urban public and judicial authorities, the eschevins, the count, or
the duke (in Brabant), was a widespread mechanism to separate the
parties while the feud was still alive. The peace, however, known as
reconciliation [zoene, zoen, zoeve] mediated by urban ‘pacifiers’ [ pacificateurs
jurés, geschworene paysmackers, paiseurs, appaiseurs, paismakers], whose office
was institutionalized around the middle decades of the thirteenth

42
The best comprehensive modern survey of Flemish legal conflict settlement is
still R. C. Van Caenegem, Geschiedenis van het Strafrecht in Vlaanderen van de XI e de
e
XIV eeuw (Brussels, 1954), esp. 290ff. Older works, such as Robert Fruin, ‘Over
zoen en vrede in Holland, Zeeland en Utrecht en over de beteekenis van de
Utrechtsche Keur op de vredebraak van het Jaar 1300 voor de politieke geschiede-
nis der stad,’ in his Verspreide Geschriften, Vol. VI: Studiën over Staats- en Rechtsgeschiedenis,
ed. by P. J. Blok, P. L. Muller, and S. Muller Fz. (’s-Gravenhage, 1902), 274–314,
are still valuable with the insightful analysis of the specifics of the early legal prac-
tice of the Low Countries. See also Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Documents nouveaux sur les
moeurs populaires et le droit de vengeance dans les Pays-Bas au XV e siècle. Lettres de rémission
de Philippe le Bon publiées et commentées (Paris, 1908). For the earlier period, there is
a series of works by Henry Platelle: ‘Moeurs populaires dans la seigneurie de Saint-
Amand d’après les documents judiciaires de la fin du moyen âge,’ Review Mabillon,
48 (1948), 20–39; ‘Vengeance privèe et réconciliation dans l’oeuvre de Thomas de
Cantimpre,’ RHD, 42 (1974), 269–81, and ‘La violence et ses remèdes en Flandre
au XIe siècle,’ Sacris Erudiri, Jaarboek voor Godsdienstwetenschappen, 20 (1971), 101–73.
Modern Dutch scholarship pays more attention to reconciliation and pacification,
but ritual is rarely analyzed. See, for example, Klaas de Vries, Bijdrage tot de kennis
van het strafprocesrecht in de Nederlandse steden benoorden Maas en Schelde (Groningen-Jakarta,
1955); J. W. Marsilje, Bloedwraak, partijstrijd en pacificatie in laat-middeleeuws Holland
(Hilversum, 1990); H. A. Diederiks and H. W. Roodenburg, eds., Misdaad, zoen en
straf: Aspecten van de middeleeuwse strafrechtsgeschiedenis in de Nederlanden (Hilversum, 1991),
especially M. W. Stein-Wilkeshuis, ‘Wraak en verzoening in middeleeuwse Friese
en Scandinavische rechtsbronnen,’ ibidem, 11–25. An exception is the fine short
study of Hans de Waardt, ‘Feud and atonement in Holland and Zeeland: From
Private Vengeance to Reconciliation under State Supervision,’ in Anton Schuurman
and Pieter Spierenburg, eds., Private Domain, Public Inquiry: Families and Life-styles in
the Netherlands and Europe, 1550 to the Present (Hilversum, 1996), 15–38. I would like
to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Willem Frijhoff for bringing de Waardt’s
research to my attention and to Dr. de Waardt himself for providing me with a
copy of his study.
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century, reinstated the condition of the ‘good peace and good love’
[boine pais, boine amor] between the feuding urban families.43
As in Italy, in the Low Countries the ritual kiss was the main
vehicle of the pax-bond. Its formalism, however, reflected a quite dis-
tinct social mechanism. The obligatory relationships mobilized by
the ritual kiss drew on each other to mutually reinforce the legal
bond as a duty of the individual person by building a specific set of
formal social implications into the symbolism of legal ritual. The
type of relationship established in the act of formal peacemaking was
similar to that in the feudal bond. Legal peace restored the normal
everyday relationships in the city, but its most solid foundation was
the ‘homage of peace’ that the wrongdoer and his relatives did to
the clan of the victim. This type of homage was a common institu-
tion in the high and late medieval West. The earliest references to
it appear in the first quarter of the twelfth century. In the thirteenth
century the homage of peace made its way into formal legal collections,
and was used in cases of peacemaking in France, Catalonia, Denmark,
Holland, and the Empire. It was in the legal practice of northeast-
ern France and the Low Countries, however, that it became the cen-
tral feature of the peace pact. In some Flemish communes, notably
Valencienne, Lille, St. Omer, and most probably Douai, the homage
of peace was a judicial requirement. Elsewhere, as in the northern
Dutch provinces and the northwestern Empire, it was frequently
employed but was not indispensable. When performed, the homage
of peace was a legal bond with all the consequences the latter entailed.
In such a way it was defined in later variants of the Sachsenspiegel,
which also definitely linked it to the formalism of the kiss.44 The
obligatory relationships of homage thus found their way into the rec-
onciliatory procedure of urban societies, but, as we shall see, the

43
The institution of peacekeepers is studied in detail for Ghent, see David M.
Nicholas, ‘Crime and Punishment in Fourteenth-Century Ghent,’ Revue belge de philolo-
gie et d’histoire, 43 (1970), 289–334, 1141–76; and his ‘The Governance of Fourteenth-
Century Ghent: The Theory and Practice of Public Administration,’ in Bernard S.
Bachrach and David Nicholas, eds., Law, Custom, and the Social Fabric in Medieval
Europe (Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 28) (Kalamazoo, MI, 1990), 235–60. A
good study of peacekeeping in Valenciennes is Louis Cellier, Recherches sur les insti-
tutions politiques de la ville de Valenciennes (= Mémoires historiques sur l’arrondissement de
Valenciennes, publee par la Société d’ Agriculture, vol. 3) (Brussels, 1886), 125ff.
44
The best survey of the homage of peace is in Rudolf His, ‘Totschlagsühne
und Mannschaft,’ Festgabe für Dr. Karl Güterbock zur achzigsten Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages
(Berlin, 1910), 349–79.
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106  

linkages to the bond of the classic rites of vassalage that homage

established were only part of the implications of the kiss.
The legal traditions in which the homage of peace was the norm
featured the kiss as the third act in a sequence that normally began
with homage, was followed by the kiss, and concluded with the oath
of peace. In Douai, a provision of the tribunal of the paiseurs from
February 18, 1263, issued in the name of the countess of Flanders and
Hainau recorded the peace concluded between Hues Boinebrok and
Gerardin Goulet in the following way. Expressing his deep regret
and repentance Hues, the offender, proposed to become ‘a man’ of
Gerardin and his lineage, ‘if they would accept him.’ To atone for
his crime, Hues promised to go on a pilgrimage. He then swore, on
his fides, the oath of equivalency [Gleicheitseid ], asserting that, had the
same offense been perpetrated against him or any of his kin, he
would have accepted the peace in the same way that he now asked
Gerardin to accept it. The equivalency oath sworn, and amends and
pilgrimage having been promised, Gerardin agreed to the peace and
‘the two kissed between themselves in the name of peace and good
love.’ The last act of the reconciliation was the oath with which the
parties swore to put aside all hatred and injuries, and talk, drink,
and eat together—that is, to restore the conditions of ordinary every-
day civic intercourse.45 The ceremony and the obligations taken were
then meticulously recorded in order to be followed by the parties to
the reconciliation, and their fulfillment was closely monitored.
Similar was the procedure in St. Omer. The peacemaking formula
in the register of municipal bans drawn at the end of the thirteenth
century by Ghis l’Escrinewerkere, who served long years as a paiseur,
prescribed the minute details of the ceremony of reconciliation [zoeve].
The murderer or the proxy elected by his kin [kievetains] gave surety
for the wergeld of the victim: twenty-four Parisian pounds that were
to be paid as indemnity. On the specially appointed day, the wrong-
doer appeared before the kin of the assassinated, carrying a sword
and dressed only in a shirt, barefooted and bareheaded. He then

45
Ke Hues Boine Broke deviegne hons si com de pais a Gerardin Goulet et a ses amis . . .
houmes de sen lignage, se il prendre les veulent . . . et baisent maintenant li un les autres en non
de pais et de boine amour. The document is in Douai, Archives communales, layette 141,
ser. FF, quoted after George Espinas, ‘Les guerres familiales dans la commune de
Douai aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Les trèves et les paix,’ Revue historique du droit français
et étranger, 23 (1899), Pièces justificatives, 457–8, N. 15.
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gave the sword to the head of the opposite clan, kissed the next of
kin of the victim, and declared that he had become their man, i.e.,
did homage. Oaths were sworn on both sides and the terms and
conditions of the payment of wergeld were fixed. After the first install-
ment was delivered, the head of the wrongdoer’s clan, the kievetain,
went to city hall to declare to the échevins that the conditions of the
official reconciliation had been met, and requested a sergeant.
Accompanied by the latter and four arbiters, he then went back to
the kin of the offender to collect the rest of the wergeld and arrange
its payment to the kin of the victim. Ghis’s provisions were still in
force by the end of the fourteenth century.46
These two examples, which stand for a series of other cases of
homage of peace, sum up the essence of the peacemaking pact as
a personal alliance founded on social, legal, and moral obligations.
As Rudolf His has correctly argued, this type of homage was not
fealty or a form of fides facta [Treuversprechen, Treugelöbnis]. Engagement
of fides followed after homage had been done both in vassalage and
the peace rites (in Lille, for example). With the kiss as the form of
the peace pact, fides continued to be embodied in the traditional for-
malism of the hand gesture. Furthermore, the homage of peace was
not a mere formality. It was legally binding. Rudolf His saw in it a
substitution with which the clan of the offender made up for the
loss of life sustained by the kin of the victim. The wrongdoer (or
the kievetain) offered himself as a new member of the injured fam-
ily.47 If this conclusion is correct, and it seems to be, the legal for-
malism of the kiss of peace, in addition to being directly related to
the vassal homage, constituted an act with which the representative
of the offending clan literally joined the blood collective of the clan
of the victim. The ritual kiss was not just a pledge of fides, nor was
it a security device. It gave over the whole person as in the vassalage
feudus of Germanic type. The immediate implication was the inser-
tion of the former perpetrator into the network of kin ties supported
by positive affect and embodying the most basic paradigm of the
ultimate peace.

46
Et si doit chil, quant il l’espeie aroit rendue et aroit baisié, si devroit il dire: Sire, je sui
devenue vos hom; in Arthur Giry, Histoire de la ville de Saint-Omer et de ses institutions
jusqu’au XIV e siècle (Paris, 1877), Pièces justificatives, 576, N. 29, art. 791. The for-
mula varied, see other examples in Oscar Bled, Le Zoene ou la composition pour homi-
cide à St. Omer jusqu’au XVII e siècle (St. Omer, 1884), 93ff. and 185.
47
His, ‘Totschlagsühne,’ 375ff.
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108  

By the end of the thirteenth century the shift in the binding force
of obligation mobilized by legal ritual can be registered in data from
the trend-setting traditions employing the kiss as the main form of
their peace instruments. Over the next century the tendency accel-
erated and was picked up in environments where the kiss of peace
was still a contested form. The staking of the contract on institu-
tions such as amor was matched by developments in other operative
fields of the kiss and was accompanied by the withdrawal and decline
of fides in the legal sphere of peacemaking. Without the benefit of
the comprehensive inquiry advocated by Yannik Carré, this process
can only be sketched. Nonetheless, it is worth tracing its main out-
line, for the evolution of the legal kiss of peace in the later Middle
Ages sheds light on the changing environment of interpersonal peace-
making and points to a new balance of power affecting the rela-
tionship between individual and community.
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109

CHAPTER THREE

WITHDRAWAL: THE DECLINE OF LEGAL RITUAL

IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Even a cursory overview of late medieval legalism would confirm

that by the fourteenth century the kiss began to withdraw from cer-
tain types of contracts. Evidence points both to the decreasing use
of some of the legal institutions whose form it provided and to the
growing hesitancy to employ the kiss as a public legal instrument.
This development took place in legal traditions all over the medieval
West and affected the formal peace pact as well. There are too few
regional studies to see the picture in full detail, but where the for-
malism and the binding forces of the law of obligations have been
better investigated, the broad lines of the retraction can be tenta-
tively sketched.
In line with the postulate that form endures while its contents may
shift, mutate, or disappear, the kiss outlived most of the legal insti-
tutions it had been called to ‘clothe’ in the previous periods. Fides
itself, the main vehicle of the customary obligatory contract had
already been experiencing somewhat of a decline at the time when
the ritual formalism of the kiss reached the peak of its influence. As
the ‘nude’ contract and the stipulatio gained strength, fides was grad-
ually pushed aside during the late Middle Ages. The process was
subject to local vicissitudes and contexts, but the trend was visible
even before the end of the thirteenth century. More importantly, in
the local and regional traditions where fides persevered as an insti-
tution the essence of its obligatory force changed. At the time of its
dominance over the contractual peace in the high Middle Ages, fides’s
quality of a legal concept was its paramount feature within the legal
discourse in which it operated. The rest of the rich social and cul-
tural implications it carried assumed secondary roles. By the four-
teenth century the situation had reversed itself. The law had receded
in importance in the definition of what fides was all about. This
opened the way for the institution to refer to two social spheres that
had been implicit in its functioning throughout the Middle Ages, but
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110  

had been overshadowed by the legal dimension of fides in the field

of obligatory relationships: religious faith and personal honor. Both
concepts had been present in the social workings of fides since the
early Middle Ages as secondary semantic referents. By the end of
the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, the
essence of fides as a force of obligation had for the most part either
been subsumed in the concept of Christian faith or assumed the
qualities of a pledge of honor. This had two consequences. First,
fides was de-secularized. As long as it continued to be employed in
legal matters it was in the domain of canon law and subject to eccle-
siastical rather than secular jurisdiction. Although it remains to be
investigated whether the high medieval synthesis, as Carré argued,
had disintegrated to its constitutive parts, the migration of fides is
amply documented. Second, fides as carrier of honor no longer had
the obligatory force of the former legal institution. The failure to
uphold one’s pledge of honor was not a legal offense. Whatever its
social consequences might have been in different times and places,
no longer did such a failure lead to concomitant or collateral legal
intervention. Defaulting on one’s ritual obligation entailed loss of
face and reputation in certain quarters, but it triggered no punitive
action on the part of the authorities with legitimate claims to the
right to coerce.
The metamorphosis of fides and its retraction from the legal field
went concurrently with the imbuing of the ritual kiss of peace with
new significance. Just as the social transformations in the fourth and
fifth centuries had turned the kiss of early Christian koinonia into a
liturgical device in search of meaning, the later medieval developments
allowed for other social institutions to step in and fill with new con-
tents the ritual kiss. Drawing on the ancient and medieval caritas and
supported by some of the obligatory connections that the kiss had
carried throughout the ages, the late medieval amor and dilectio came
to inform the contents of the kiss with a new set of meanings refer-
ring to legally and socially defined emotions. This shift had lasting
implication for ritual’s subsequent evolution as a social act and will
be explored in more detail in the next part. Parting with the insti-
tutions that relegated it to the strictly legal sphere of application,
however, did not mean that the kiss of peace lost its impact on the
process of legal peacemaking. For a series of reasons going beyond
the traditional assertion about the tenacity of medieval formalism,
the kiss of peace was preserved in the procedure of reconciliation.
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The vestiges of the high medieval synthesis survived not just as exam-
ples of cultural inertia. Behind the pertinacity of form, there was a
functional rationale informing the contents of the ritual interaction.
The following overview is not intended to provide a comprehensive
coverage of the evolution of fides and the kiss of peace in the later
medieval period. Its goal is to demonstrate that the relegation of fides
to a different referential area was parallel to changes in the appli-
cation of its one-time form, the kiss of peace. Although the kiss had
not been exclusively linked to fides and at places remained within a
different operational field, the change in the conditions determining
the vitality of fides as a legal institution seems to have had similar
impact upon ritual form as well. Most conspicuous was the increas-
ing assimilation of both fides and the kiss into the domain of reli-
gious faith.

Late Medieval fides and the Kiss

The conviction that fides had legal implications remained strong, per-
haps strongest, in the German-speaking regions west of the Rhine
and warranted its continuous employment throughout the Middle
Ages. By the end of the thirteenth century there was still a clear
and well-discernible distinction between the judicial obligation taken
through fides and the one guaranteed through simple promise [ promis-
sum simplex].1 The tradition in which fides was rooted did have to
face, however, the neo-Latin influences emanating from northern
Italy. We have already seen them reflected in the reconciliation from
Wetzlar. The same period, the end of the thirteenth and the begin-
ning of the fourteenth centuries saw the gradual but irreversible
acknowledgment of the informal contract as binding legal practice.
The ‘nude’ contract gained ground steadily, although the formal
pledge of faith [Treugelübde] lingered until the end of the sixteenth
century, to disappear rapidly thereafter under the impact of the full-
scale reception of Roman law.

1
To give an example from the legal practice in northern Germany, from the
region of Bremen, in a charter of 1296 recording a sale of land, the sellers, knights
by social status, promised on their fides the buyer’s peaceful entry into possession.
One of them, however, a certain Borchard from Cattania, explicitly refused to give
his fides and insisted on securing the same liability on his word only. See Gierke,
Schuld und Haftung, 222.
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112  

Elsewhere, the transformation of the ritual formalism of peace-

making began as the kiss peaked in influence. In the south of France,
in Toulousan legal practice for example, in a region where Roman
law had been influential all along, by the second quarter of the thir-
teenth century fides became the equivalent of a solemn ‘parole d’hon-
neur.’ This development merits two observations. First, the breach
of the peace pact sealed by the kiss now entailed neither pecuniary
nor any other sanctions of secular law. The reasons for the reduc-
tion of the kiss’s specter of implications were complex, but its long-
time functioning in a specific ritual environment is to be credited
for at least one of the motivations behind it. We have already seen
the inclusion of the kiss in the procedure dominated by the peace-
making oath. Thirteenth-century Toulousan notaries and canon
lawyers assimilated the kiss in the oath; in such cases breach of the
ritual contract entailed ecclesiastical penalties only.2 In contrast, in
the northeast, in the county of Namur, the later years of the thir-
teenth century saw something of a short temporary revival of fides
in peacemaking contracts. Lay folk sought recourse to it in peace-
making as well as in other contracts to avoid subjection to the juris-
diction of ecclesiastical courts, which occurred when the court took
a true judicial oath.3 Second, the Toulousan penchant for consider-
ing the contract with the kiss an affair of honor is corroborated by
contemporary and later evidence from diverse social environments
in other West European areas. The implications of pledging honor
is discussed in more detail in the next part. It suffices to mention
here that in the north Italian practice, as we shall presently see, sec-
ular courts upheld ritually sustained relationships which might not
have been legally binding but engaged institutions of utmost impor-
tance for the functioning of the civic social machinery. The same
concept held good for political societies built on the typologically
similar notion of contractual obligation, or depending exclusively on
the continuous display of the crucial faculties of trustworthiness and
loyalty. A case in point, from the thirteenth-century Empire, is the
reconciliation between the Emperor and one of his high nobles in
the German fiction Duke Ernst.4 Real-life practice undeniably rested

2
Mirelle Castaing-Sicard, Les Contrats dans le très ancien droit toulousan (X e–XIII e
siècle) (Toulouse, 1959), 455–9.
3
Jean Balon, ‘Sur deux garanties coutumières,’ RHD (1953), 567ff.
4
For the concept of honor staked on the ritual kiss in a political society built
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on such foundations. The end of a major late medieval conflict,

which dragged on for centuries and was fought with utmost ferocity
and complete lack of formal inhibitions, the termination of the feud
of the Zamberlani and Strumieri clans on August 30, 1568, illustrates
the role of the kiss as a pledge of honor, elevated to the state of
both legal instrument and fine art in Italy, where commoners and
nobles alike employed it to buttress social as well as legal relationships.5
In northern France, in twelfth-century Normandy fides had been
practically indispensable in a large roster of transactions. A century
later it was no longer a condition for a contract’s validity. As in the
south of France, it seems to have not entailed corporeal obligation.
There were, however, a series of pecuniary, moral, and religious sanc-
tions for breach of fides. Such a context made it an almost exclusive
reference to the divine. Moreover, with the triumph of the consen-
sual pact, fides lost its position as a source of legal action. Fourteenth-
century Norman fides had completely dissolved into Christian faith.
The consequences for its judicial status were serious. When, in 1205
and again in 1208, royal commissions refused to acknowledge the
ecclesiastical courts’ competence in cases of fides, the institution was
set to rapidly loose its last vestiges of practicality. Elsewhere in the
kingdom of France, fides-based cases continued to be valid sources
of action in cases under ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the cen-
tury, in the spirit of Louis VIII’s Constitutions of Melun from 1225.
The tradition was particularly strong in marriage contracts, where
it persisted until the sixteenth century.6
In England, where high- and late-medieval judicial records of rec-
onciliation with the kiss are practically absent, fides was kept alive

on the idea of social contract see Duke Ernst in Cornelia Weber, ed., Untersuchung
und überlieferungskritische Edition des HERZOG ERNST B, mit einem Abdruck der Fragmente
von Fassung A (Göppingen, 1994), 444–5; translation in J. W. Thomas and Carolyn
Dussère, The Legend of Duke Ernst (Lincoln and London, 1979), 124–5.
5
Melibeus renounced his lawful wrath and indignation for the love of God and
his own honor, Deo amore nostroque honore. In the sixteenth century the concept of
pledging honor in legal reconciliation was crucial, witness the sixteenth-century feud
of Zamberlani and Strumieri in Friuli. The document recording their pacification
is published by Ernesto Degani, I partiti in Friuli nel 1500 e la storia di un famoso duello
(Udine, 1900), 170–71. The feud between the clans is discussed in Furio Bianco,
1511: La’Crudel Zobia grassa! Rivolte contadine e faide nobiliari in Friuli tra ’400 e ’500
(Pordenone, 1995), and Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy
(Baltimore and London, 1998).
6
Yver, Les contrats normands, 44–83. For a discussion of French marriage con-
tracts see Chénon, ‘Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux,’ passim.
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114  

throughout the fifteenth century in vassalage and in engagement or

marriage contracts. Even by the end of the fifteenth century, eccle-
siastical courts considered formally or verbally given fides a sufficient
cause of legally sustained obligation. At that time, however, it was
an institution operating almost exclusively in the domain of canon
law.7 In secular cases it could easily be dispensed with. The petition
of the House of Commons to King Henry VI in 1439 to omit the
formal fides, given by the kiss, in feudal contracts because of the
pestilence that was ravaging the country was approved without rais-
ing any legal objections or comments.8
The practice of the thirteenth-century Italian urban centers and
states provides corroborative examples. The statutes of Bologna,
Verona, and Lucca stipulated as a primary measure for breach of
the peace exile for life and demanded a heavy fine for wounding a
person with whom peace had been made. To the mind of the legis-
lator it made no difference, however, how the peace had been secured,
with or without the kiss of peace as a guarantee of good faith [bona
fide factarum, observata bona fide].9 The situation was different in the
Papal States, an ecclesiastical principality where canon law ruled and
the jurisdiction of the supreme pontiff cast its shadow over secular
legal affairs. A series of urban statutes promulgated up until the sec-
ond half of the sixteenth century stipulated that the ritual kiss had
specific, clearly defined implications. In fourteenth-century Rome and
in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century statutes of Camerino and
Tolentino in the march of Ancona, for example, the codification of
customary law testifies to the clear perception of the exclusive role
of the kiss as a formal peace device. The breach of the obligation
taken by the kiss was punished by a scale of monetary fines different
from that obtaining in cases when the kiss was not involved.10 Reneging

7
For a number of cases see the collection on marriage litigation by Robert H.
Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (London, 1974).
8
David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents (Oxford, 1969), vol. 4, 1117–8.
9
For Bologna see Lodovico Frati, ed., Statuti di Bologna dall’anno 1245 all’anno
1267 (Bologna, 1869–77), vol. 1, 267: the peace was the kiss! In Verona, the breach
of peace, whether guaranteed with the kiss or not, was punished with a pecuniary
fine, as it was in cases of treuga, see Gino Sandri, ed., Gli statuti Veronesi del 1276.
Colle correzioni e le aggiunte fino al 1323 (Cod. Campostrini, Bibl. Civica di Verona) (Venice,
1940), vol. 1, 415, N. XL. For Lucca see Salvatore Bongi, ed., Statuto del comune di
Lucca dell’anno MCCCVIII, ora per la prima volta publicato (Lucca, 1867), 169–70, Lib.
III, ch. 51.
10
See Cecchi, ‘Sull’ istituto della pax,’ 127–8 for the sixteenth-century statutes
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on a peace pact made through the kiss resulted in much heavier

fines than defaulting on settlements concluded through any other
ritual means or based on ‘nude’ pacts.
Finally, an area needs to be mentioned where neither local nor
regional authorities managed to legitimize their rule until well into
the late fourteenth century. I have already noted that in medieval
Frisia the kiss was one of the essentials of the legal peace. Frisian
laws had early medieval roots, and the particular social constitution
of the region preserved their archaic features longer than elsewhere.
There were no universally acknowledged secular authorities in Frisia
to punish the breach of private contracts formalized by the ritual
kiss. The law allowed for the demolition of the house of the exiled
but did not specify who was to enforce the measure. The statutes
of Upstalboom, for example, composed around 1323 as the law of
the free Frisians, stipulated that those who committed murder after
reconciliation sealed by oath and the kiss of peace were proscribed
from the country for one year and that only the Pope could absolve
him.11 Two explanations suggest themselves in view of this leniency
of the law. Either the murder ensued in the wake of a new feud,
which shielded the perpetrator from the full force of the law, or the
legal substance of the pledge of the kiss has shifted its referential
field in the eye of the secular legislator. The second possibility seems
more plausible. The injunction that only the Pope could absolve the
murderer suggests not only the magnitude of the misdeed but also
that it was considered primarily a sin and therefore the laws of rec-
onciliation were in the competence of the ecclesiastical courts. Theirs
was the only legitimate coercion, and it was of a spiritual nature. It
must be remembered that in all such cases only contractual peace
[gelobter Friede] was meant, and the punishment seems to have been
only for breaking one’s obligation, not for the murder, which might
not have been considered a crime under the circumstances.12

of Camerino and Tolentino; for Rome, Camillo Re, ed., Statuti della città di Roma
(Rome, 1880), 98–9.
11
Huaso een man daed slacht wr sette sone ende swerren ede ende wr kesten mond, di schil
wt wessa ieer ende dei butta lande, see Richthofen, Friesische Rechtsquellen, 105 for this
provision of the statutes of Upstalboom from 1323, ch. 17: l, 26–8. Another penalty
was the demolition of the house of the wrongdoer.
12
When peacemaking was securely in the hands of the authorities and was
imposed rather than undertaken by the reconciling parties either voluntary or under
pressure [gebotener Friede], its breach was by default a punishable offense that needed
no personal sureties to give rise to a legal action. See Rudolf His, ‘Gelobter und
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116  

The evidence supporting the relegation of the obligations arising

from fides and the kiss to ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the hesitancy
to accord them a privileged status in secular laws does not warrant
a conclusion about the abandonment of ritual in the late medieval
legalism of the peace. Rather, one may speak of ritual as subject to
a ‘double jurisdiction,’ a condition which continued well into the
early modern epoch. The emergence of this two-layered notion of
legal obligation is a feature of the legal genealogy of the ritual instru-
ments of peace. The communal and city-state legislators were always
ready to intervene in case of ‘nude’ pacts of peace, but they acknowl-
edged the binding force of the ritual engagement as well. Although
in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian urban legislation
the ritual act of peace was dissociated even from the pecuniary lia-
bility taken for keeping the peace, as testified by the numerous records
of paci in regions under Florentine and Sienese jurisdiction, the pub-
lic ritual act was still legally respected.13
The reasons for this are rooted in the peculiar nature of the rit-
ual kiss as a device capable of mobilizing obligatory relationships
anchored in distinct, sometimes completely unrelated discourses. The
kiss persevered in civic legislation under papal jurisdiction because
it entailed obligations that had to do with the concept of the duty
of faith, allowing borrowings from canon law. By reserving a special
domain of legal action for the kiss, the ecclesiastics inserted a moral
and ethical dimension in the operation of the law. Honoring the kiss
of peace as the formal vestment of the legal peace under ecclesias-
tical patronage and jurisdiction thus embodied the pre-modern con-
cept of legal morality as an active social institution. The persistence
of formal peace in the legal procedure of the early modern West
testifies to the operation of a discourse that had arisen to overcome
the Germanic concept of subjective law and the procedural rules
flowing from it. For a long while, however, this discourse had to
make use of the workable devices of the time, all embodied in for-
malism. The evolution of the strategies employed to enforce the bind-
ing power of formalism, from corporeal responsibility to banishment,
from pecuniary fines to spiritual punishments, reflects the gradual
shift in the perception of the social importance of the legal agency

gebotener Friede in deutschen Mittelalter,’ ZRG, 66 (GA, 33) (1912), 139–223, esp.
197ff.
13
Checcini, Il Caleffo Vecchio, contains numerous cases.
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allocated to the individual peacemaker. They also reflect the lawmakers’

attempts to transform the subjective law of the free individual gov-
erning the matters of peace and conflict and implemented in prac-
tice as a liability into an objective principle conceptualizing duty.

Peacemaking and Religious Formalism in the Late-Medieval Low Countries

The shrinking area of application of fides and its transformation into

a religious and ethical concept were subject to influences that affected
the use of the formal ‘vestments’ of the legal instruments of the peace
embodied in the kiss as well. The encroachment of the secular author-
ities on the private rights of conflict settlement, on the one hand,
and the spread of neo-Latin legalism, on the other, appear to have
been the two main causes for this evolution in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Socio-cultural developments, the redefinition of
privacy, the new sensitivity to the formal dimensions of the social
hierarchy, which Russel Major has demonstrated, and considerations
resting on issues of gender and decency seem to have been secondary
factors at least until the sixteenth century.
An explanation is therefore needed as to why, in an epoch of
secularized law, the later medieval kiss of peace reverted to an almost
exclusive association with the notion of religious faith while still
functioning as a legal rite in secular reconciliation. The religious had
insisted on this link ever since late Antiquity, but this does not shed
light on the uses of the kiss as a formal legal institution outside the
area of canon law. Even so, one has to bear in mind the Church’s
opposition to allowing formalism, for instance in marriage, to interfere
with the expression of the pure and binding ‘nude’ consent based
on simple verbal exchange alone.14 One possible explanation of the
perseverance of the kiss is that the complete immersion of the form
into the religious discourse reinforced the obligatory relationships
borne by Christianity as a duty of the denizens of the West. Fides,
again, provides a parallel case. Where its obligatory force dissolved
under the pressure of the authorities before the verbal consensual con-
tract took hold of the procedure of peacemaking, its formal vestments

14
See, among other evidence, several cases cited by Francesco Brandileone, Saggi
sulla storia della celebrazione del matrimonio in Italia (Milan, 1906).
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118  

were rapidly filled with the contents flowing from its new obligatory
field of Christian religious ethics.
Peacemaking in northeastern France and the Low Countries pro-
vides some the most indicative case studies emphasizing the religious,
the moral, and the emotive dimensions of the peace act in the late
Middle Ages. Religious symbolism had been part and parcel of the
peace composition all over the medieval West, but nowhere else does
it seem to have subsumed late medieval reconciliation to such an
extent. Although no definite etiological explanation for the emphatically
religious nature of the kiss in the region has been offered, the fact
remains that formal peacemaking sharply distinguished that northern
continental tradition from the manner of the peace pact elsewhere.
In Flemish peacemaking, Christian penance and humbleness were
emphasized above all, although one must not exclude the presence
of some vestiges of ancient Frankish customs, such as charmiscara,
traces of which can be observed until fairly late in the medieval
period.15
The fact that the reconciliatory rites were not a purely secular
practice was highly visible even in contracts in which the secular
homage of peace dominated the scene. The legally required kiss of
peace was routinely framed by a series of features with sacramental
character: the humble demonstration of guilt and repentance, the
promise of pilgrimage, and the penitentiary garb and gestures of the
offender. From this viewpoint, the ritual ‘giving over’ of the offender
operated in a discourse with strongly religious overtones, assimilat-
ing the obligation constituted by the kiss of peace with the sacred
duties of the offender as a Christian. It infused the notion of Christian
morality into the reconciliation as an element backing both the sec-
ular and the religious side of the reconciliatory contract. The bond
between the reconciling families was subsumed into the larger bond
of kinship in Christ and the most fundamental generic bond with
obligatory character which a Christian acknowledged, the duty of
Christian fellowship.
What was, however, the functional side of the religious frame?
There seems to be little doubt that the penitential doctrine of the
Church was the most probable immediate source of these arrangements,

15
See most recently Jessica Hemming, ‘Sellam gestare: Saddle-Bearing Punishments
and the Case of Rhiannon,’ Viator, 28 (1997), 46–64.
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as Frauenstädt argued more than a century ago.16 The ritual spilling

of Christian morality into the domain of secular law and the posi-
tioning of legal formalism within the formal settings of the Christian
religion were no accidental matters. There was an established tradition
of empowering peace relationships through a link to the sacred, but
what were the social and political dimensions of the legal act enveloped
in the religious mantle?
Three approaches sum up the variety of constructs that have been
offered to explicate the interaction of religion and law in the peace-
making pact. For the symbolic interpretationists, the ritual kiss was
the embodied symbol of the cosmic symphony of earthly and heav-
enly orders.17 From a social-psychological point of view, the peni-
tential procedure in which the kiss was included was the expression
of the mutual desire of the parties to impose a face-saving screen
on their reconstituted relationship. The ritual kiss presented the guilty
party as assuming a position of humbled self-abasement in the eyes
of God rather than rendering political satisfaction to the wronged
party alone.18 Finally, for the legal positivists, the ritual kiss of peace
and its accompanying rites were introduced and preserved in the
legally binding reconciliation by the secular authorities and the Church
as a prop, an exclusively sacred guarantee of the secular pledge.19
While these attempts at explanation capture important dimensions
of reconciliatory ritual, there seems to have been more to the ritual
incorporation of the numinous in the workings of the late-medieval
legal machinery. The explanations seem to reduce the political thrust
of the essential link between the legal, secular dimension of the

16
Paul Frauenstädt, Blutrache und Todtschlagsühne im deutschen Mittelalter. Studien zur
Deutschen Kultur- und Rechtsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1881), 110ff. On penance see now Mary
C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca
and London, 1995) and Sarah Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 950–1050 (Woodbridge,
2001).
17
Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 323–36.
18
The explanation of the intervention of the sacred as a smoke-screen that allowed
the parties to forgo revenge and still save face by submitting themselves to the
higher duty of Christian fellowship is formulated best by Peter Brown, ‘Society and
the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,’ Daedalus, 104 (1975), 133–51. For an inter-
pretation of religious penance as an intensely political rite which by no means elim-
inated the dimension of political relations and stressed humiliation without emotional
satisfaction and no equality see Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners, 266.
19
As Frederick Maitland would have it in his definition of the role of fides facta,
see Frederick Polock and Frederick W. Maitland, The History of the English Law before
the Time of Edward I (Cambridge, 1968), vol. 2, 184–233, ch. 5, ‘Contract.’
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120  

procedure—and its sacramental implications, the appropriation of

the divine in the politics of peace—to the relationship between the
parties to the peace only. Some of the detailed records of ritual rec-
onciliation in Flanders underscore this conclusion and suggest a more
complex relationship between sacred and secular.
The city code, or keure, of Aalst, a commune in the province of
Ghent, preserves what is probably one of the finest examples of this
type of application of the ritual kiss in northern reconciliation and
allows us a glimpse into the purpose of the fusion of secular law
and sacred morality. On May 17, 1437, in the convent de Sterre at
Aalst, Wouter Jooris and his sons, Martene and Jooris, made peace
with the kin of Willem Scinckel, whom Martene had assassinated.
The reconciliation had been mediated by commissioned arbiters.
After ironing out all differences, they appointed the day for the for-
mal peacemaking. Six of the town officials, or scepenen, of Aalst were
present, along with eleven knights of the local feudatory Perron
d’Aalst, the bailli of the count of Flanders, then Philip the Good of
Burgundy (1419–1467), and the mayor of Aalst. At the appointed
hour the two parties, accompanied by kith and kin, appeared at the
convent’s church. They were instructed how the reconciliation was
to proceed, and legal guarantees were given. The offenders took off
their upper garments and entered the church. Dressed in white linen
shirts only, barefoot and bareheaded, they were led, each flanked by
two of the attending officials, to the other extreme of the choir, in
the vicinity of the altar. There, the principal (montzoendere: virtually
‘the one who reconciled with the mouth’) of the injured clan stood,
waiting for them with his kin and the rest of the officials. On enter-
ing the choir, the three offenders fell on their knees, their hands
joined (variant: their hands had already been tied together). The
bailli, the senior judicial official, spoke in a loud voice to the principal
of Scinckel’s clan, Henric Ghijsels. He asked Henric, in the name
of Christ, to forgive the wrongdoers for the murder of Willem, his
brother, for they bitterly regretted the misdeed. The montzoendere stood
still. The wrongdoers were led a couple of steps closer, fell on their
knees again, and the bailli repeated the request. There was still no
answer to his appeal. Finally, Wouter and his sons kneeled at the
feet of Henric for the third time, and the bailli again asked for for-
giveness. At this point the offenders stood up and in turn kissed
Henric on the cheeks. After the kiss, the bailli turned to Perron’s
men, addressing them as ‘men of the law,’ and asked whether the
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peace and the legally required reconciliation [wettelic zoendinc] just

made were legal, binding, and done in the proper manner. The
knights confirmed that the peace was legal, and done in the way it
should have been. Then the mayor asked the town scepenen the same
question. After hearing their affirmative answer, the bailli turned back
again to Perron’s vassals and asked them whether there was any-
thing else to be done. The reply was that the representatives of the
two parties had to lay their hands on the ‘sacred objects’ and swear
that they, their kin, and their friends and heirs, present and future,
legitimate and illegitimate, male and female, would keep the peace
and would not pursue vengeance. This having been done, the rec-
onciliation was completed and the parties separated.20
Adding that many a reconciliation had been made in this man-
ner, the keure specified that on one occasion, a certain Gill van
Yedemghen did not kiss the relative of the victim, but put in his
hand a staff [thalmken]. The reference to this variation in the per-
formance of the peace ritual deserves special attention. The object,
in which no doubt the ancient festuca is to be seen, was an alterna-
tive to the kiss, to be employed instead of the kiss but with the same
legal function. The transfer of the festuca embodied the Germanic
concept that the complete person of the offender was in the power
of the injured party. To reciprocate, the injured kin were in the pos-
session of the mercy [bermherticheijt] that originally they and they alone
decided whether to bestow on the offenders.21 As Bayerle has pointed
out, there was little symbolism in this act.22 Festuca, first mentioned
in the edict of Chilperic I as a sign of self-pledge in cases of fides
facta, was routinely marked with a special sign that embodied in a
magical way the personality of the owner. The magic of the sign
transformed the act of transferring the staff from a symbolic gesture
into a fully ‘real’ one.
Although there is little doubt that the beliefs supporting the trans-
fer of the early Germanic festuca, on the one hand, and Gill’s thalmken,

20
Ende dat gedaen doe stonden zy up ende custen den montzoendre an zine wanghen, deen
vooren, dande ende de derde naer, see Theodore de Limburg-Stirum, ed., Coutumes des
Pays et Compté de Flandre. Quartier de Gand. Vol. 13: Coutumes des deux villes et pays d’Alost
(Alost et Grammont) (Brussels, 1878), 469–73.
21
De Longe, Coutumes de la ville d’Anvers, 846.
22
The fundamental study is Karl von Amira, Der Stab in der germanischen Rechtssymbolik
(München, 1909). For a modern re-interpretations see Franz Beyerle in ZRG, GA
58 (1938), 790ff., and Hans Hageman, ‘Fides facta und wadiatio,’ 9–10.
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122  

on the other, were informed by the symbolic systems of different

social worlds, the significance of this long-standing practice as a
meaning-reproducing vehicle should not be underestimated. The
festuca gesture belonged to an ancient, pre-Christian legal tradition
and did not carry the moral and by extension the social implica-
tions of the ritual kiss. The statute recognized it as a valid legal
instrument, but allocated to it the position of an aberration of the
prescribed practice legitimized as custom by the keure. Even though
we cannot determine with any certainty to what extent the recon-
ciliation with the kiss-centered rites had been the rule in Aalst, the
fact remains that the keure prescribed a structure of the legal peace-
making that downplayed the festuca formalism and with it the legal
tradition it stood for. It presented the ceremony with the kiss as stan-
dard, the main canvas of the reconciliation, to which all other cus-
toms appeared as variations, aberrations, or additions rather than
competing practices of the same order.
The keures of Deurne and Antwerp, which followed in the main
the ceremony of Aalst, contribute additional detail to the procedure
of peacemaking with the kiss. The keure of Deurne, in the province
of the duke of Brabant, specified that the attending members of both
clans be dressed in black (to suggest mourning) and that some carry
torches. This statute also stipulated that in Deurne, and in most
other places, as indicated by the very name of the principal of the
injured clan, montsoender, the kiss was on the mouth.23 The keure of
Antwerp says that only after making their peace with the injured
party could the offenders obtain letters of acquittal from the count,
a feature we have already witnessed in those cases of Italian peace-
making which were conducted under the watchful eye of the authorities.
There is, however, another important addition. While in Aalst,
according to the law, the reconciliation was over with the oath, the
two other keures added that after the kiss had been given, the clerk
of the town council was to read the official record of the reconcil-
iation. Then the bearer of the staff or another leutenant of the duke
of Brabant ‘declared’ the peace in the name of the duke and reminded
everyone that there were penalties for violation of the agreement.

23
Ende kust den montsoender aen sijnen mondt, in G. de Longé, ed., Coutumes du pays
et Duché de Brabant. Quartier d’Anvers. Vol. 5: Coutumes du Kiel, de Deurne et de Lierre
(Brussels, 1875), 356.
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Finally, in Antwerp, the city law from 1586, a time when contractual
peace had made significant retreats as a way of peacemaking, stipulated
that after the kiss the official leading the ceremony, the city Amman,
produce the written instrument of the peace and have the parties
swear it.24 The stipulations of these two statutes, just as the presence
of an impressive array of representatives of the legal powers in the
case described in the keure of Aalst, betray the hand of the author-
ities in the construction of the social and political functionality of
the peace act. Despite the differences in the nature of the social
bond constituted by the northern rites of peace, the link between
the private peace covenant and the will of the authorities as we have
seen it in the Italian communities was no less conspicuous.
These short outlines of the procedures followed in the legal rec-
onciliation in the Low Countries confirm that with or without homage
of peace, the peacemaking in the region revolved around the kiss of
peace. The acknowledgment of the custom of the kiss, legally bind-
ing secular act as it was, and yet being thoroughly modeled after
ecclesiastical penitence and played out in sacred space, contributes
one essential point to the explanations summed up above. The pool
of symbolic linkages into which the ritual kiss immersed the recon-
ciling parties constituted the validating feature of the transaction for
two reasons. It assigned agency to the representatives of the politi-
cal powers enforcing and monitoring the execution of the reconcil-
iation. It also allowed the political powers draw the reconciling parties
into a field of obligatory relationships sharing a common denomi-
nator, which the secular authorities had appropriated by virtue of
their right of ultimate legal fiat legitimizing the act. Religious ritual
did not constitute the bond ex opera operando. The efficacy of its inter-
vention had to be validated by those with knowledge of secular law.
The ‘men of the law,’ with their competing jurisdictions, authorized
an essentially religious interaction as legally binding because they
saw it as an artifact on which their respective legal traditions in feu-
dal and urban law could agree. The traditions in which Perron’s
vassals and the city scepenen of Aalst were steeped had appropriated
the religious symbolism of the kiss to build their own modes of social

24
G. de Longe, ed., Coutumes du pays et Duché de Brabant. Quartier d’Anvers. Vol. 4:
Coutumes de la ville d’Anvers (Brussels, 1874), 841–9; see also Leopold August Warnkönig,
Flandrische Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte bis zum Jahr 1305 (Tübingen, 1835–1842), vol. 3,
66–7, Documents, N. 159.
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124  

obligation. Now they projected their constructs of the ritual kiss’s

legal implications back onto the parties in the reconciliation to validate
it as a social bond common to them all through the impressive mech-
anism of orchestrated bodily interaction. The religious dimension of
the bond therefore had been preserved, for it enhanced the grip of
the authorities on the crosscutting links that made the peace oblig-
atory for the parties of the reconciliation. The shared character of
the bond underscored the social efficacy of the ritual peace pact with
the kiss. It made the kiss of peace a recognized means of creating
binding ties drawing on several symbolic discourses with obligatory
character. Ultimately, all of the explanations offered thus far appear
correct: but only because there are a few of them. The lack of con-
sensus in the interpretation of the religious rite provided the background
for the consent to its continuing usage, a situation the authorities
exploited for their own ends.

The Late Medieval Bond: caritas and amor

The withdrawal of fides from secular jurisdiction left a void in the

domain of the forces supporting the peace pact. To fill it, late medieval
traditions summoned two concepts that had been in operation since
classical Antiquity and had been widely used to define early and
high medieval social ties but remained with limited application within
the domain of the law until the thirteenth century: caritas and amor.
The genealogy of caritas leads back to a very complex, although
predominantly ethically loaded, concept. The early Latin caritas had
few affective overtones. In ancient Roman times the term had denoted
scarcity and lack of provisions. Hence high price and preciousness
were meanings that, metaphorically, informed its later understand-
ing, in a concrete manner, as appreciation, benevolence, and ven-
eration. From these roots, during late Antiquity caritas grew to acquire
political connotations, and its personification appeared on imperial
coins. It was intermittently used as a synonym for fides, amor, concor-
dia, and pietas, in their fairly concrete Roman political meanings. Its
evolution as an abstract concept was enhanced by the influx of
Christian thought, which turned it into an expression of the specifically
Christian type of love, the one bestowed by the Holy Spirit and
Christ [Caritas est Deus]. From the second century on, Christian writ-
ers insisted on its close link to peace. ‘Caritas is the bond of brother-
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hood and the fundament of peace,’ in the words of Cyprian of

Alexandria [caritas franternitatis vinculum est, fundamentum pacis].
On such foundations medieval ecclesiastical theorists constructed
their peace concept of caritas, embodying it in gestures with highly
obligatory relationships. Around the middle of the eighth century,
Frankish churchmen stressed caritas as the strongest bond of peace.
The Church’s concern with instilling habits of peaceful relationships
in the hearts of the faithful Christians must have been genuine, but
the ecclesiastics relied no less on the formal binding force of caritas,
regularly expressed by the liturgical kiss of peace. Since the 750s
Gallican church councils, under Roman influence, began insisting on
exchanging the kiss at mass as a duty of the faithful.25 The kiss was
supposed to link them together in the mutual bond of caritas. The
binding force of its formalism depended on the mystery incumbent
in the Christian mass and temple.26 The Carolingian Church, while
trying to sort out the ambiguities of the religious kiss stemming from
its ancient uses as a gesture of veneration and adoration, hold onto
the same assumptions as the Merovingians.27
Although the Christian-communal meanings of caritas appeared in
early Church legislation from the sixth century on, it was the infu-
sion of the Germanic perception of the legal nature of political rela-
tionships into Merovingian Latin that helped construct the secular
functioning of the caritas institution in the early Middle Ages.28 The

25
Ut in sanctae pacis osculo ostendant se unianimes in concordia pacis existere et mutuae cari-
tatis in invicem vinculis conligati, in MGH Leges III. Concilia II, 1st part, 52, N. 7: Concilium
Baiuwaricum, 740–750, title V.
26
Hinkmar of Rheims complained that a relative of his, a fellow-bishop himself,
would not kiss him at mass or indeed at any ceremonial occasion, as was his duty,
because of the grudge between them. See Hincmari Rhemensis archiepiscopi Opera omnia
in PL, 126 (Turnholt, 1985), col. 290. Henry II changed the order of the mass on
an occasion so that he did not have to kiss Thomas Becket, lest the kiss be con-
sidered the formal kiss of reconciliation. Richard Lionheart, for his part, deliber-
ately went over and gave Bishop Hugh of Lincoln the liturgical kiss, and this was
taken as the ultimate sign of their reconciliation.
27
MGH Leges III. Concilia II, 1st part, 171, N. 19: Concilium Francofurtense, 794,
title L; ibidem, 208, N. 24: Concilia Rispacense, Frisingense, Salisburgense, 800, title VIII;
ibidem, 248, N. 34: Concilium Arelatense, 813, introduction; 271 N. 36: Concilium
Moguntinense, 813, title XLIII. See also Freeman, ed., Opus Caroli Regis, 544–50 for
a treatise on the difference between the Christian kiss and the pagan kiss of adoration.
28
Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem, book V, 17, IX; 11 and 20; VII, 29.
English translation in O. M. Dalton, trans., The History of the Franks by Gregory of
Tours (Oxford, 1927), vol. 2, 185–6, 381–92, 305–6. The last two examples are
discussed in detail by Wofgang Fritze, ‘Die fränkische Schwurfreundschaft der
Merowingerzeit,’ ZRG, 84 (GA 71) (1954), 74–125, here 95.
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126  

Merovingian term caritas constituted a social and a legal dimension

in the context of a political alliance and the peace founded on it.
The ritual kiss that provided the formalism of caritas as an ecclesiastical
rite was solidly entrenched by the sixth century. It seems to have
had links to a formal legal field supported by early Germanic prac-
tices as well. In that environment the kiss was the legal form that
created artificial affinity built on the model concept ‘kin equals peace’
informing obligatory relationships between blood relatives. No early
continental sources attest to that usage, but its Germanic character
is perhaps indicated by the Anglo-Saxon translation of the ecclesiastical
‘kiss of peace’ as sibbe cos.29 The Christian influence on the concept
is apparent, but it does not preclude an innate, already existing
affective dimension in the perception of the Germanic kin bond
which would have facilitated the fusion of ideas. In the ninth century
the formal legal bond of the kiss-caritas supplemented and reinforced
the kin-defined relationships of the family of the Carolingian kings.30
It is important to note that in all its variations caritas carried the
notion of a strong, duty-like obligatory relation. The ancient Roman
element of duty adopted and carried on by the ecclesiastical inter-
pretation of caritas into new contexts strengthened the formal impli-
cations of the institution.
Family and Christian faith: this double connection made caritas
and the concepts intimately related to it, amor and dilectio, well posi-
tioned to enter the legal domain vacated by the retraction of fides,
once the latter institution began to lose ground as an independent
secular force of the law of obligations.31 ‘Love’ had had a more or
less technical sense in the feudal bond from the time of its incep-
tion, but the formal switch from fides to amor occurred in the late
Middle Ages. By the late thirteenth century there are signs that in

29
Bosworth and Toller, eds., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 868.
30
For examples see Schneider, Brüdergemeinde und Schwurfreundschaft, 52. For the
survival of caritas-forms in formal agreements between French and German rulers
see Ingrid Vos, Herrschertreffen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zu den
Begegnungen der ostfränkischen und westfränkischen Herrscher im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert sowie
der deutschen und französischen Könige vom 11. bis 13. Jahrhundert (Köln-Vienna, 1987),
182ff.
31
Given that ethical considerations and affection had no place in the Roman
legal rites of marriage, the fact that the Frankish groom transferred property to his
loved one pro amorae dulcidinis vel osculum pacis leaves little doubts as to the strictly
legal meaning of the concept of amor embodied in the kiss, see Zeumer, Formulae
Bituricensis, MGH, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, 175.
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the legal formalism of the kiss, caritas-derivatives were competing with

fides in one of its most important spheres of application, the rites of
vassalage. The shift is manifest in Durand’s Speculum iuris, the for-
mulary which fixed the model for the interpretation of the rite in
the written feudal law of late medieval France. Durand employed
the formalism of the kiss to support the instrument of stipulatio. His
ritual kiss, which was osculum interveniente of the contemporary Italian
civilists, appears at the end of the formal ceremony establishing the
feudal contract ‘as a sign of mutual and perpetual affection and
faith.’ Dilectio in Durand’s formula points toward a changed concept
of the vassalic contract, a shift that stressed the importance of a sec-
ular dilectio as the binding force of obligation on equal footing with
fides.32 Without entering into a discussion of the social and political
transformations of Western societies which necessitated that change,
it suffices for our purposes to mention that, as we shall see, the
development was mirrored in the role of caritas-terminology in the
evolution of the peace contract.
The advance of concepts with strong links to the emotional world
of the parties entering a formal contract through the kiss of peace,
often in a ceremony soaked in religious symbolism, is a pronounced
late medieval phenomenon. It calls for a separate investigation of
the implications of what I have termed ‘legal affect.’ Before I turn
to this task, however, a few concluding notes in reference to legal
ritual are in order.

32
In signum mutuae & perpetuae dilectionis & fidei, pacis osculo interjecto, in Durand,
Speculum Iuris, 314, Spec. IV, lib. 3. On Durand see also Pierre-Marie Guy, ed.,
Guillaume Durand, évêque de Mende (v. 1230–1296): canoniste, liturgiste et homme politique
(Paris, 1992). Individual cases of creation of feudal bonds confirm the ascent of
dilectio and amor, see for one example MGH Leges IV. Constitutiones, vol. 4, 2nd part,
1438, N. 1297: Infeudatio marchionis Salutarium.
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128

CONCLUSIONS TO PART ONE

THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF LEGAL RITUAL

Fragmentary as the evidence is, the discussion of the forms of rec-

onciliation supported by the legal kiss of peace allows us to draw
some conclusions about the evolution of the role, character, and
functions of the rite as the formal ‘vestment’ of the instruments of
the contractual peace.
The evidence analyzed in this part suggests that throughout the
high and late Middle Ages the ritual kiss, although not indispens-
able, was a vestment sui generis, frequently deemed necessary for the
full and legal peaceful composition among feuding parties. The ritual
kiss was no mere form, ‘clothing’ the peace pact to keep it alive. It
was not a legal device on a par with the oral declaration, the object,
the written charter, or the seal. There was a difference in kind be-
tween all other forms and the rites of peace. Neither the develop-
ment of literacy nor the introduction of the seal as a personalizing
tool supplanted the kiss.
This was so because, although used as a substitution for material
objects and definitely as an artifact embodying the essence of the
individual peacemaker, the kiss of peace had a role and functions
that none of the other judicial instruments possessed. It was not by
coincidence that some Frisian sources, the Westerlaufensian recon-
ciliatory formula for example, postulated that the wergeld was the
price for the ritual kiss.1 The mind of the premodern legislator put
the two judicial instruments at the same level, and for good reason.
Whereas the oral and the written instruments served as legal proofs
of the peace, the ritual made the peace by guaranteeing its very
integrity with different facets of what the premoderns considered to
be the most salient faculties of the person. The ritual constituted the
personal commitment to peace, the covenant as a form of obligation
for which no seal and written charter, designed to witness rather

1
Ther efter hat ma mi biada, her N. ti jeldane mit sawentundister haler merk . . . and that
word, that hi mit there fiajefte muge thine ferde bihwerwa, thine kos kapia and tha sone thingia,
see His, Strafrecht der Friesen, 216.
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than create, could act as a substitute. The forms of obligation embod-

ied by ritual served different intents, but in most cases from the high
Middle Ages they had at their end the assumption of some kind of
liability, above all personal, but on rarer occasions real liability as
well. The liability assumed through ritual was the primary principle
that dominated the law of interpersonal obligations in the period
1000–1200. It made the peace act actionable. More importantly,
through a series of features it established the concept of peace as a
legal phenomenon.
First, the ritual liability was an acknowledgment that there existed
an objective law of peace—just formulated, ‘found out,’ or imposed
by the authorities—but always a peace which not only was an abstract
principle, but was also effective and binding from the moment of
taking the obligation. Ritual peacemaking thus stands in the way of
recent assertions, mostly by legal anthropologists, that high medieval
law was all but non-existent as a working institution. Performing the
rite, the individual and the group he or she stood for admitted that
peace existed, not only as a period of nonviolence, spacing the inter-
mittent line of feuds in the premodern societies, but as a legal cat-
egory in its own right. Before, and for a time even after, the authorities
took over the control of peacemaking formalism, ritual liability
objectified the obligation, elevating it to a position that superseded
the obligation to pursue revenge through acts of violence. The rit-
ual was also an acknowledgment of the rights of the ‘other’ party
in the feud to request, receive, and enjoy that peace. Contrary to
expectations, the rite stimulated the development of the concepts of
objectivity and equity in the legal practices of non-Roman origins.
Finally, as the thirteenth century dawned, in many regions of the
West the ritual kiss became an act of recognizing one more ‘other.’
It underlined the right of the authorities to establish, promote, and
maintain the peace as a legal duty of the private person. Before the
public powers of premodern Western Europe established their monop-
oly on violence and their exclusive rights of coercion, without such
an express recognition and willingness for cooperation between the
individual, the collective, and the social, there were no legal guar-
antees that the social peace would be kept. The shift in the con-
tents of the legal obligation that the rites of peace embodied therefore
reflects a hidden dynamic of the relationship between the authori-
ties and the individual. This dimension has not been fully acknowl-
edged as a viable topic of investigation thus far and certainly deserves
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130    

more attention that the preceding pages were able to devote to it.
Second, acknowledging peace as a legal duty established through
the pact of ritual reconciliation with obligatory linkages to the sphere
of the family, the bonds of service and protection between lord and
man, and humankind and the numinous, the ritual kiss buttressed
it with a special type of consent. Through it, the legally actionable
promise to fulfill the terms of the deal was officially expressed [Vertrag-
or Urteilerfüllungsgelöbnis]. The rite gave rise to the contract concluded
after court sentence, arbitration, or freely taken decision to apply
oneself to the conditions of the legal act by embodying, in the legally
acknowledged instruments of fides, gratia, and caritas/amor, the will of
the parties to adhere to its provisions. This was the cardinal func-
tion of the rites of peace regardless of the character of the obliga-
tion they gave rise to. As a special type of legally sustained promise,
qualitatively different from the ‘simple’ (verbal) promise, the ritual
kiss was of utmost importance for the legal background of the process
of peacemaking. Only the obligation taken through it ensured the
breaking of the vicious circle: feud, court decision, refusal to pay or
to accept payment, and new feud. Throughout the premodern period,
the taking of personal liability and, later, the acknowledgment of the
personalized duty to compromise through ceasing hostilities and pay-
ing or accepting indemnity instead of fighting back, created the only
legal guarantee that pacification would succeed.
Third, this promise was deemed capable of building a legal and
workable peace because for most of the period, due to its shifting
contents, the ritual kiss substantiated it with the pledge of the type
of surety that premodern legal practice cherished most. As Paul
Puntschart formulated it more than a century ago, fides facta and its
permutations had but one central goal: to give rise to suretyship
guaranteed with the person of the party to the contract. On the
level of anthropological constants, the kiss of peace appears to have
had precisely that function. This kind of surety was filled with mean-
ing, a real, hardly symbolic meaning at that, the very essence of the
premodern concept of obligation.2
Fourth, the rites of peacemaking were able to fulfill these func-

2
Puntschart, Schuldvertrag und Treugelöbnis, 449: ‘Nach dem bisher Gesagten, ergiebt
sich von selbst, daß das Treugelöbnis in Wirkung und Zweck eine Sicherstellung
ist,’ and 459: ‘Man kan auch sagen: Die Sicherheit durch das Treugelöbnis ist eine
Sicherheit mit der Person der Gelobenden.’
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tions over the course of several centuries, accommodating along the

way a roster of legal instruments, due to the rather specific character
of the legally sustained conditions of peace to which they gave rise.
Throughout the high Middle Ages and to some extent during the
later medieval period, the ritual of peace was not the definitive end
of the feud, as has recently been argued.3 The ritual kiss did indeed
‘dissolve’ or neutralize the anger of the injured party, but it did not
terminate the legally definable feud. In most cases, it just put it off.
To the mind of the modern observer the peace that ensued after
the ritual performance had all the features of the pre-modern treuga.
Routinely, it was an interim, time-limited, and conditional solution.
The time factor was at the heart of the ritual peace and was
informed by the nature of the legal instruments embodied by the
kiss. Fides facta, the most powerful of the ritual tools that structured
the peace pact, normally created a time-limited condition of peace
that allowed one of the parties to seek out helpers to swear the oath
or to collect the sum to be paid as indemnity and gave the other
party the opportunity to demand execution of what was due in case
of outlying obligations. The seven- and forty-day postponements that
the rites of peace allowed the parties in early Germanic legislation
still held good in thirteenth-century Castilian laws and the keures of
the sixteenth-century Flemish communes. Sources evidence the interim,
preliminary character of the ritual solution, too. In St. Omer, the
ritual kiss opened the procedure of collecting the wergeld, but it did
not by itself constitute the peace, which was not forthcoming until
the indemnity was paid in full. This case introduces also the ele-
ment of conditional peace, on which legal sources by definition rarely
dwell. The ritual kiss conferred peace to the wrongdoer, but it was
the peace to fulfill his or her obligations to the quick and the dead
before the feud was terminated—by both of them, one must assume.
Pilgrimages had to be undertaken and alms given for the soul of the
murdered person, and one had to prove in a practical way the ties
that bind him to his new kin.
Narrative evidence is more circumstantial than the laws of rec-
onciliation, and amply supports the conclusions at which the legalists

3
Most forceful is Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-
Century Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233 (Oxford, 1992), 172: ‘It [the kiss—KP] sig-
naled the conclusion of the reconciliation, not its beginning . . . The kiss in public:
that was the definitive, legal end of the feud.’ Thompson’s conclusion differs from
what I believe to have demonstrated.
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132    

only hint. A case in point is the reconciliation between Tristan and

the kin of Morold in Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde. After
his identity is accidentally discovered, Tristan is led before Isolde
and the Queen. Only an immediate deditio, the ritual prostration,
wins him the opportunity to begin negotiating. The noble ladies like
the hero, but the duty to avenge their slain kin remains stronger.
Tristan offers compensation, a rich and famous husband for Isolde.
This turns the tables in his favor and the reconciliation [súoné] is
imminent. The Queen mother is ready to commit to the deal [entriuwen]
and reconcile, but hesitates to do so on the mere words of Tristan.
She demands guarantees. Tristan, who is in no position to support
his word at the moment, promises to do so later, as soon as the
lady gives him her ‘peace’ [ fride], i.e., her protection. Were he not
to stand by his vow, he pleads, after they have reconciled, she could
freely withdraw her protection and leave him to his ruin. The Queen
is convinced, and the ladies kiss Tristan to reconcile. Such is their peace:
a conditional affair that is even more strongly emphasized as such
in the following scene where Tristan meets the king. At the audience
he also receives the kiss as a precondition guaranteeing him Gurmun’s
grace and favor [minne und hulde]; an act of giving temporary peace
and protection to the guest until the reconciliation is completed. It
is dependant on Tristan’s paying satisfaction for the injury to Morold’s
kin with whom the king is related through his womenfolk.4 To these
illuminating episodes Eilhart of Overge adds yet another detail.
Soliciting his father’s grace after kissing Tristan for peace, young
Isolde requests Gurmun’s kiss as a surety that he would not harm
the knight. Much in the manner in which a judicial officer imposed
peace [ gebotener Friede] since the time of the Langobard kings, she
‘accepts’ the pledges of the two parties. She kisses the king to take
the peace from the one party and then gives it to the other party
through another kiss. As the events turn, this pledge saves the hero’s
life, but it does not guarantee the end of the hostilities until much
later. In either case, the kiss does not grant unconditional peace.5

4
This is how Tristan addressed the Queen: Frouwè, sprach aber Tristan, ich gewisse
iuch schíeré dar an: bewaere ich’z iu zehánt níht, sô diu súoné geschiht, sô lât mich ûz dem
fride wesen und lât mich níemér genesen . . ., see Reinhold Bechstein, ed., Gottfried von
Strassburg, Tristan (Leipzig, 1891), 2nd part, 17–21. English translation in Francis G.
Gentry, with a foreword by C. Stephen Jaeger, Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and
Isolde (New York, 1988), 138–41.
5
Danielle Buchschinger and Wofgang Spiewok, eds., Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant
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These characteristics of the ritual kiss, accounting perhaps more

than anything else for its tenacity as a legal norm, define the ritual
peace as a state of being in a sort of legal limbo. The legal kiss cre-
ated a normative, structural liminality, informed by the rules of the
three major discourses on which ritual drew and which determined
the relationship between the parties that were on the verge of ter-
minating the blood feud. The definitive end of the feud was not yet
fully in sight, but open hostilities were suspended for a time, con-
ditions to be fulfilled were carefully negotiated, and vengeance was
held off. The obligation taken in the course of the ritual perfor-
mance, whether active liability or passive duty, either specific or large
and unspecified, was unstable, and a new outbreak of violence could
occur in spite of all ritual guarantees. It was legally actionable in
court however, and although operating in a liminal field, paradoxi-
cally enough, channeled the affair into a more predictable course.
The strength of the ritual peace was that, without leaving the time-
sanctioned ground of the feud, it created a background that could
eventually lead to its negation as a legal condition. ‘Liminality,’ Victor
Turner noted, ‘is pure potency, where anything can happen.’6 The
most important feature of the ritual obligation of the kiss was that
it was a contract open from both ends. On the one hand, time elaps-
ing, it could easily end without any lasting consequences for the
social order. On the other hand, given the proper social environ-
ment, it could turn, as indeed it did in many of the cases discussed
above, into a permanent legal condition. The evolution of the peace
contract from a preliminary and conditional to a permanent and
final solution of the private conflict reflects in a most intimate way
the transition of the legal obligation carried by the kiss from liability
to duty. This internal transformation of the legal process is the most
conspicuous outcome of the erosion of private rights and the suc-
cessful implementation by the authorities of the concept of the duty
of peace by means of ritual.
This is perhaps the most significant achievement of legal ritual.
The peace of the kiss did not always terminate the feud. To a short-
sighted society, however, it did offer a longer view and increased

und Isolde, mittelhochdeutsch/neuhochdeutsch (Greifswald, 1993), 55. English translation in

J. W. Thomas, Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant (Lincoln and London, 1978), 71.
6
Victor W. Turner, The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the
Ndembu of Zambia (Oxford, 1968), 577.
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134    

the predictability of interpersonal interaction. Ritual reconciliation

built on the kiss of peace was a legal condition that could contest
the ground of the feud by leading the fighting parties from violent
feud to law court. By extending the dimensions of the feud beyond
its customary boundaries of violence, the rites of peace facilitated its
radical transformation into judicial strife. Ritual peace undermined
the rights of private violence and nurtured the conviction that, in
the pursuit of justice, the protection of the law was worth more as
a judicial procedure to which one had the duty to submit him- or
herself than as a contested right of aggressive self-defense.
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135

PART TWO

THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF RITUAL

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136

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INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF RITUAL

C’e talvolta, nel volto e nel contegno d’un uomo, un’espressione così
immediata, si direbbe quasi un’effusione dell’animo interno, che, in
una folla di spettatori, il giudizio sopra quell’animo sarà un solo. Il
volto e il contegno di fra Cristoforo disser chiaro agli astanti, che non
s’era fatto frate, nè veniva a quell’umiliazione per timore umano: e
questo cominciò a conciliarglieli tutti. Quando vide l’offeso, affrettò il
passo, gli si pose inginocchioni ai piedi, incrociò le mani sul petto, e,
chinando la testa rasa, disse queste parole: ‘io sono l’omicida di suo
fratello. Sa Iddio se vorrei restituirglielo a costo del mio sangue; ma,
non potendo altro che farle inefficaci e tarde scuse, la supplico
d’accettarle per l’amor di Dio.’ Tutti gli occhi erano immobili sul
novizio, e sul personaggio a cui egli parlava; tutti gli orecchi eran tesi.
Quando fra Cristoforo tacque, s’alzo, per tutta la sala, un mormorìo
di pietà e di rispetto. Il gentiluomo, che stava in atto di degnazione
forzata, e d’ira compressa, fu turbato da quelle parole; e, chinandosi
verso l’inginocchiato, ‘alzatevi,’ disse, con voce alterata: ’l’offesa . . . il
fatto veramente . . . ma l’abito che portate . . . non solo questo, ma
anche per voi . . . S’alzi, padre . . . Mio fratello . . . non lo posso
negare . . . era un cavaliere . . . era un uomo . . . un po’ impetuoso . . .
up po’ vivo. Ma tutto accade per disposizion di Dio. Non se ne parli
più . . . Ma, padre, lei non deve stare in codesta positura.’ E, presolo
per le braccia, lo sollevò. Fra Cristoforo, in piedi, ma col capo chino,
rispose: ‘io posso dunque sperare che lei m’abbia concesso il suo
perdono! E se l’ottengo da lei, da chi non devo sperarlo? Oh! s’io
potessi sentire dalla sua bocca questa parola, perdono!’ ‘Perdono?’ disse
il gentiluomo. ‘Lei non ne ha più bisogno. Ma pure, poichè lo desidera,
certo, certo, io le perdono di cuore, e tutti . . .’ ‘Tutti! tutti!’ gridarono,
a una voce, gli astanti. Il volto del frate s’aprì a una gioia riconoscente,
sotto la quale traspariva però ancora un’umile e profonda compunzione
del male a cui la remissione degli uomini non poteva riparare. Il
gentiluomo, vinto da quell’aspetto, e transportato dalla commozione
generale, gli gettò le braccia al collo, e gli diede e ne ricevette il bacio
di pace. Un ‘bravo! bene!’ scoppiò da tutte le parti della sala; tutti si
mossero, e si strinsero intorno al frate.
Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, iv, ll. 388–426.

For those familiar with the style and imagery of Italian Romanticism
there will be little doubt that this moving, quasi-sacramental scene
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caps the first truly grand page of Manzoni’s masterpiece. With the
insight and subtlety that had earned him the praise of being the
greatest Italian writer since the Renaissance, Manzoni captured
the essence of ritual interaction as an affair of the sentiments.1
Hesitation, embarrassment, and mild shame encounter a mix of pride,
rage, grief, and condescension. Enter ritual. At once, condensed hos-
tility gives way to a spirit of compassion, contempt to respect, revenge
to forgiveness. Quite unexpectedly, humiliating surrender wins for
Cristoforo the Capuchin the kiss of respect for which Lodovico the
merchant’s son has vainly striven. Ritual accomplishes the seemingly
impossible task of bringing about peace without concessions of rank,
honor, and status.
Impressive as the transformation was, in Manzoni’s rendering the
taming of asocial sentiments by means of ritual was not really magic.
Rather, the rites of peace were a mechanism employed by the God-
inspired hero to unlock ingrained goodness. Ritual triggered the
innate moral dispositions defining humanity. It made the feuding
parties act upon the feelings of repentance, benevolence, and con-
ciliation, ‘which God has planted in the hearts of all of us’ in the
interests of the social peace.2

1
For the purposes of this study, I use the terms ‘emotions,’ ‘feelings,’ and ‘sen-
timents,’ interchangeably. I use ‘affect’ in the sense of a primary, impulsive, and
physiological reaction. The expression ‘ritual management of emotions’ is used as
a generic technical term, subsuming the diverse ways in which emotions appeared
in the course of ritual action. My understanding of ‘emotion’ is partially informed
by that of Robert Solomon, ‘Getting Angry: The Jamesian Theory of Emotion in
Anthropology,’ in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory:
Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge, 1984), 238–57: ‘An emotion is a sys-
tem of concepts, beliefs, attitudes, and desires, virtually all of which are context-
bound, historically developed, and culture-specific (which is not to foreclose the
probability that some emotions may be specific to all cultures).’ I accept this definition
and call attention to its latter part, the observation that there are emotions com-
mon to all cultures, because they are, above all, embodied phenomena. Useful sur-
veys of recent work on emotions are Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey M. White, ‘The
Anthropology of Emotions,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 15 (1986), 405–36; Gillian
Bendelow and Simon Williams, eds., Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and
Contemporary Issues (London and New York, 1998); and Michael Lewis and Jeannette
M. Haviland, eds., Handbook of Emotions (New York and London, 1993), esp. 341–53,
511–47, 563–75 on fear, anxiety, anger, and embarrassment. For the Middle Ages
see R. E. V. Stuip and C. Vellekoop, eds., Emoties in de Middeleeuwen (Hilversum,
1998) and Claudia Benthien, Anne Feig, and Ingrid Kasten, eds., Emotionalität: Zur
Geschichte der Gefühle (Cologne, 2000).
2
This is how Manzoni himself defined the meaning of such acts in his Morale
cattolica. See Piero Nardi in Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, con il commento di
Piero Nardi sul testo curato da A. Chiari e F. Ghisalberti (Milan, 1966), 117.
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Such understanding of the emotions and their ritual management

would now appear both desperately outdated and strikingly novel.
In terms of agency, for many the theist view of the divine as the
source of the social and cultural consensus expressed in ritual is a
call from bygone times. Widely shared by a large number of pre-
modern writers across time, genre, estate boundaries, and specifics
of discourse, this convention is tacitly skipped by most modern schol-
ars. In terms of the relationship between society and the individual,
however, Manzoni’s emotional economy of ritual would appeal to
modern theorists of all allegiances. The organismic school would con-
cur that ritual only triggers, stimulates, or expresses emotions.3 It
does not create them, since emotions are natural capacities or sus-
ceptibilities of the person. The structural-functionalists would agree
with the reduction of ritual to a functional symbolic device. The
interactionists, for their part, would allow social factors to elicit emo-
tions, enlarging the scope of the social but placing agency partly out-
side of the individual. The emotional constructionists would push
this line of reasoning to the extreme. The adherents of this trend
argue that the individual is only the site of emotional ‘events,’ which
are generated by the ambient social order, its norms, ideals, and
structures of power and authority.4 In a sense, we have come full
circle. While constructionists would dismiss theism wholesale, so far
as individual agency is concerned, they would find themselves speak-
ing the same language as Manzoni’s characters.
We should pause at this point and consider where this brief over-
view leaves us. For one thing, the trend to substitute society for God
does not seem to be a satisfying approach. True, the external govern-
ance of emotional experiences is of utmost importance for the main-
tenance of the social order whose functioning is embodied in ritual.
If the sentiments are not just natural, preset responses to external
intervention but moral acts as well, they cannot be left to the person’s

3
From Darwin to Freud to William James to Randall Collins, to mention but
the most conspicuous names. See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals (New York, 1955); L. Borge Lofgren, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory of
Affects,’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 ( July 1968), 638–50; William
James and Carl B. Lange, The Emotions (Baltimore, 1922); Randall Collins, Conflict
Sociology (New York, 1975).
4
For a recent survey of constructionism’s approaches and shortcomings see
William M. Reddy, ‘Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology
of Emotions,’ Cultural Anthropology, 14:2 (1999), 256–87.
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140    

own devices and must come under society’s control.5 Yet one should
not completely dispense with individual agency in matters of choice,
volition, and responsibility. Attributing all agency to society, as con-
structionists are prone to do, eliminates these factors and confuses
the role with the person, thereby equating the emotional responses
of the individual self with the phenomenology of the person.6
From the perspective of ritual, the main problem not only with
constructionism but with most of the socially oriented approaches as
well is the tendency to conceive of the individual actor either as a
passive receptor of social and cultural conventions or, at most, as a
manager of behavioral expressions.7 The knowledge of the mechan-
ics of the ritual action thus produced is skin-deep, postulating an
almost atomic individual at the end-point of the inquiry. The attempt
to glean inside this ‘black box’—employing, for example, cultural
anthropology’s theory of the opposition between fleeting personal
moods and stable social motivations—does not seem a feasible heuris-
tic strategy either.8 There are reasons to think that the emotional
response can be reduced neither to the donning of the vestments of
a transitory social role, although this phenomenon does play an
important role, nor to the appropriation of the cultural code of the
group as translated into a set of feeling rules.9 The emotive dimen-

5
See Uni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Chicago,
1990), 138ff.
6
See the criticism of Brian Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory
(New York, 1996), 25–31.
7
The most elaborated sociological account of emotional engagement in social
interaction as a type of ‘acting’ is still that of Erving Goffman, The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY, 1959) and his Frame Analysis (New York,
1974). I borrow the expression ‘black box’ from Arlie R. Hochschild, ‘Emotion
Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,’ American Journal of Sociology, 85:3 (1979),
558.
8
A classical formulation of this concept is Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural
System,’ in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 97–8. Geertz,
and cultural anthropologists as a whole, have long recognized that emotions are
culturally constituted concepts, see an early work of Clifford Geertz, ‘The Vocabulary
of Emotion: A Study of Jawanese Socialization Process,’ Psychiatry, 22 (1959), 225–37;
L. T. Doi, ‘Amae: A Key Concept for Understanding Japanese Personality Structure,’
in R. J. Smith and R. K. Bearolsley, eds., Japanese Culture: Its Development and
Characteristics (Chicago, 1962), 132–9. A good review of anthropological interpreta-
tions of emotion is Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick, eds., Person, Self, and
Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies (Los Angeles, 1984).
9
For transitory social roles see James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression: An Essay in
Emotion (New York, 1982), 6–18. Averill’s work is perhaps the major contribution
in the field of emotional constructionism. For applications of his theory of anger to
medieval material see Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger,’ in Barbara H.
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sion of the relationship between individual and society remains an

open issue.
An alternative to the over-socialized theories is to situate the hub
of the linkages between individual actors, society, and context in the
acts of emotion work consciously performed by embodied agents.10
This perception was not foreign to the premodern frame of mind.
The medieval Christian doctrine saw the individual as the nexus of
interacting forces. Conscious work on one’s sentiments was a major
factor in maintaining the equilibrium between the earthly and heavenly
worlds. Managed feelings constituted the all-important core of the
ontology of repentance and forgiveness in both sacred and secular
context.11 Moreover, on occasion the sentiments were seen as orig-
inating in the person, not merely happening to the person, albeit
influenced by social situations or the intervention of the sacred. Even
in the theist interpretation, in which individual agency is normally
reduced to the minimum, active emotion work on the part of the
ritual actor is absolutely necessary to keep the ritually structured
holistic world from collapsing. The theory of emotion work thus
offers a unique heuristic tool for analyzing the emotional dimensions
of ritual action.
This approach informs the main lines of the exploration of the
emotional economy of ritual reconciliation offered below. I take up
three issues in this part of the study.
In Chapter Four, I discuss a set of basic sentiments, such as anger,
hatred, and grief, displayed in ritual encounters of peacemaking and
attempt to map out the patterns of their management. Emotion work
was by definition the result of emotive dissonance. The need to over-
come it was an act of conforming to social norms, but it also indicates

Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca
and London, 1998), 127–52, and, from a slightly different perspective Robert Bartlett,
Mortal Enemies: The Legal Aspect of Hostility in the Middle Ages, T. Jones Pierce Lecture,
University of Wales, (Aberswyth, 1998) and Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Hatred as a Social
Institution in Late-Medieval Society,’ Speculum, 76:1 (2001), 90–126.
10
The concept of emotion work was authored and developed by Arlie R.
Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work,’ 551–75; see also her book The Managed Heart:
Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, 1983). For application of this concept in
sociology, psychology, and anthropology see Thomas J. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing,
Ritual, and Drama (Berkeley, 1979); and Uni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts.
11
For admirable analyses of emotion work in the social and political context of
late medieval Florence see Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New
York, 1980).
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142    

that there had been a difference between individual perception and

collective norms. The ‘communicative community,’ to use Foucault’s
term for society, had been fragmented. Ritual intervention helped
to synchronize social and collective realities and individual expecta-
tions. Examining how the ritual actors were trying to feel to accom-
modate social and situational standards helps, first, to detect the
obligatory relations between the validating social norms and individual
emotive experiences and, second, to locate the foci of the generation
of agency. The shifts in the basic emotions operating in the frame
of ritual peacemaking chart both the historically evolving types of
integration of the individual in the social structures of the premodern
period and the discrepancies that punctuated the continuum of the
‘communicative community.’
The task of Chapter Five is to chart the contours of the discourses
framing the sentiments playing out in the process of the ritual en-
counter. I track down three distinct moral templates governing the
perception of the medieval sentiments of peace and reconciliation as
moral phenomena within the pre-scholastic, scholastic, and post-
scholastic theories of the emotions. The discourses linked the efficacy
of ritual reconciliation to the social and cultural background of the
normative rules to which feelings were supposed to attune. My focus
is on the discursive rules governing the emotion work that individual
actors were supposed to perform to disclose the precarious nature
of the construction of hegemony built on multi-referential social
practices.
In Chapter Six, I examine the role of the ritual kiss as a strategic
intervention in the emotional world of the individual. The center of
the discussion is on a cluster of five sentiments targeted by the ritual
act, namely, anxiety, catharsis, disgust, contempt, and respect. I argue
that by remolding the emotional canvas of embodied ritual actors,
the rites of peace allowed as much for the emotional liberty of the
individual as for the governance of the social norm.
Before I open the discussion, a word about its technicalities. It
has been argued that the conceptualization of many emotion terms
is a phenomenon of our post-Cartesian minds.12 I concur. The emo-
tions in medieval evidence can be inferred as much from direct ref-

12
This issue was recently taken up and fundamentally re-evaluated by William
Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca
and London, 1993). I adopt Ian Miller’s central insights.
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erences as from the context of the ritual encounter and the descriptions
of bodily conditions. Even when a specific term is lacking, usually
there are enough circumstantial clues clarifying the nature of the
feeling in question. Another issue is the character of the evidence.
Affects and emotions are the stuff of narrative accounts, much of
them pure fiction. So I shift gears radically and plunge into chronicles,
saints’ lives, epics, exempla, moral treatises, religious and romantic
poetry—in short, into the habitat of the literary scholar. This does
not undermine the validity of the inquiry into the emotional efficacy
of ritual. Enough work has been done on literary works, real-life
records, and fiction to warrant the stance that for the purpose of
analyzing sentiments, discourses, and the social codes they convey,
the historicity of the events reported does not really matter.
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144

CHAPTER FOUR

SENTIMENTS AT WORK

Ritual reconciliation with the kiss was meant to re-establish the peace
and ordered relationships that conflict and violent confrontation had
undermined. Insult and injury had led to the collapse of the struc-
tures of everyday social and political intercourse and resulted in a
state of hostility between individuals and groups. For the premod-
erns, interpersonal and intergroup hostility was often a total presta-
tion, an interaction involving thought, act, and sentiment. Which of
the three dominates the account in the extant evidence about the
emotional economy of ritual reconciliation depends in part on chance
and in part on the conventions of the genre being used. Close read-
ing across genre borders reveals that there were patterns in the asso-
ciation of some basic emotions, above all, anger, hate, and grief,
with the societal technology of conflict resolution through ritual.

Anger

A typical reaction to the disruption of the normal flow of high

medieval social affairs was the display of anger and indignation.
Recent research—older studies of medieval politics did not prob-
lematise the sentiments—stresses the conventional and social nature
of such displays. Among lay nobles, anger outbursts were compo-
nents of the technology of power and occurred in stable discourses
of disputing, feuding, and political competition. They were signs of
the disputant’s honor or shame and had normative dimensions. Just
as normative were the procedures of appeasement of anger by con-
ventionalized arguments with which friends, enemies, and third par-
ties appealed for peace. In this interpretation the lay nobles’ anger
has all the features of a transitory social role.1

1
Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger.’ About anger and aggression see
also Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, eds., The Final Argument: The Imprint
of Violence on Society in Medieval and early Modern Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk—Rochester,
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   145

While an indispensable beginning in the investigation of the ritual

emotions at the outset of our period and at the juncture of indi-
vidual feelings and the norms of political interaction, this approach
does not seem to address the issue of the ritual obviation of griev-
ances in all of its complexity. Overstressing role-playing, ‘acting,’ and
‘staging,’ disregarding the nature of the rites of peace as a legal
bond, and being under the influence of emotional constructionism,
the transitory role theory tends to misrecognize the main thrust of
ritual.2 Such a tack either voids the individual of all affect, turning
the individual into a flat, one-dimensional person, or severs the link
between public demand and the ‘inner emotional world.’3 It can be
argued, however, that there were strong links between what was felt
and what was displayed. Beneath the layer of public vents of emo-
tion, one can discern certain fundamental affects that seem to have
been no less important in the ritual reconciliation than the openly
staged displays of anger. These affects were shaped into social roles
subject to the conventions of legalism and the theological modes of
thought in performative acts. The same performative technology,
however, was used to address their affective essence and reach under
the surface of the social role while conforming to its rules, and dis-
sipate the sources of conflict generated therein.
A case study, the reconciliation between Archbishop Heribert of
Cologne and Emperor Henry II, will provide us with a range of
starting points. The event and its early records date from the period
before the scholastic mind had imposed a set of guiding principles
on the way emotive interaction was put down in writing. Sometime
in late 1020, Henry quarreled with the archbishop, who had failed
to provide timely military support during a difficult campaign.4

NY, 1998). For a sociological analysis of early modern social roles see Jorge Arditi,
A Genealogy of Manners: Transformation of Social Relations in France and England from the
Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London, 1998).
2
Gerd Althoff ’s interpretation of ritual encounters as staging, ‘Inszenierung,’ is
perhaps the best illustration of this approach, see Gerd Althoff, ‘Demonstration und
Inszenierung: Spielregeln der Kommunikation in mittelalterlichen Öffentlichkeit,’ in
his Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 229–58, and other essays in the collection.
3
The expression belongs to Stephen White, ‘The Politics of Anger,’ 152, and
suggests the existence of separate emotional worlds—the one public and the other
personal, or ‘inner.’ What was the nature of the inner emotions, however, and how
did they connect to the public emotions, is not discussed.
4
For Henry II’s campaign in 1020 see Siegfried Hirsch, Jahrbücher des Deutschen
Reichs unter Heinrich II, completed by Harry Bresslau (Hanover, 1875), vol. 3, 171–7.
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146  

According to one of the principal sources, Lambert of Deutz, the

emperor did not trust the archbishop. At Henry’s coronation there
were rumors that Heribert preferred to see another person on the
imperial throne. To make matters worse, some of the emperor’s
counselors had their own issues with the archbishop. These periph-
eral matters helped to escalate the quarrel, and the emperor decided
to confront Heribert in person. Lambert hints that Henry had in
mind to accuse Heribert of contumacy and relates that the emperor
was quick to show his anger to formalize his position. His grievance
was therefore a political and a legal issue and was thought of as
most appropriately couched in emotional vestments.
On the eve of the interview, however, the emperor had a dream
in which Heribert’s innocence was divinely proclaimed. Henry real-
ized his mistake and thanked God for illuminating him with the
truth. It appears as quite surprising then that his private conversion
was not translated into a straightforward public act. At the meeting,
without revealing what had happened, Henry received the archbishop
with a grave face and requested a large sum as amends. Knowing
that he had been at no fault, Heribert found himself assaulted by
false accusations from all sides. Suffused in tears, he offered to leave
his see rather than endure such insults. As befits his genre, time,
and character, Lambert stresses Heribert’s emotional commotion,
humility, and modesty, and downplays the fact that the affair had
fully formal legal dimensions as well. It was at this point, after having
witnessed the cleric’s formal submission to the punishment normally
imposed on contumacious vassals, that the emperor immediately
jumped from his throne and embraced him reverently. Declaring
that he had been misled by malicious counselors, Henry asked for
pardon. Heribert easily and magnanimously forgave him. Under the
witness of the Trinity, the two exchanged the kiss of peace three
times. Heribert’s enemies at court, utterly ashamed [erubescentibus],
fled in haste. As a further sign of trust, the emperor seated Heribert
on his throne and discussed with him the affairs of the empire.5
This short scene fits the recently proposed explanations of high
medieval anger. The emotional outburst embodied the emperor’s
legal grievance. The numinous protected its earthly vessel, but the
rules of formal political interaction necessitated the ‘staging’ of the

5
Georg Pertz, ed., Lantberti Vita Heriberti archiepiscopi Coloniensis, MGN SS, vol. 4,
748–9. Lambert’s account was written in the 1050s.
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public confrontation. Supplication with tears embodied innocence

and surrender, legitimizing the grievance of the other party. Roles
concurred, feelings meshed. Having saved face, the emperor could
admit his mistake and submit to the demand of the divine without
loss of honor. The kiss of peace embodied the forgiveness granted
to Henry and induced a wave of public sentiments, identifying the
real source of the conflict. The courtiers’ reddened faces—or shame—
embodied their guilt. It confirmed Henry’s own innocence and igno-
rance of the causes of Heribert’s failure, exonerating him in the eyes
of the prelate and the observers. The affair was settled entirely via
the open clash and exchange of conventional emotions, anger on
the part of the emperor and humility on the part of Heribert. More
importantly, the emotions conformed to the rules of public role-
playing and ritual political discourse.
There are, however, a few telling details that can be gleaned by
looking under the surface of convention. On the one hand, it is quite
clear that the emperor’s anger before the dream had been genuine.
On the other hand, careful as he was not to reveal inappropriate
emotions in his hero’s heart, Lambert hinted that Henry II’s sup-
plication was not accepted automatically by the archbishop. It looks
as if there was an awareness that it required quite an effort on
Heribert’s part to forgive and forget. Not by coincidence Lambert
used the term labor to focus the attention on what was expected from
Heribert. He hastened to add that it was no more difficult for the
prelate to forgive from the bottom of his heart than it had been for
St. Martin. Why such an emphasis on the apparently easy and spon-
taneous grant of forgiveness?
Henry II evidently knew the answer to the question. Late that
night, accompanied only by his sword-bearer, the emperor sought
out the saintly man in private. Taking off his coat to indicate that
he was divested of his official role as a ruler and throwing himself
at Heribert’s feet in an act of supplication, the emperor asked for
forgiveness, exhorting the archbishop to remit the offence from his
memory [erroris memoriam remittat]. Despite Heribert’s protests that no
vestiges of the quarrel lingered in his heart, Henry lay prostrated
until the archbishop lifted him from the ground and the kiss of
peace was exchanged one more time.6 The political act of formal

6
See also the mid-twelfth century account of the event in the anonymous Life
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148  

reconciliation was coupled with an intensely personal emotive encounter.

Both were resolved through the kiss of peace.
Unlike the earlier peace, which had announced publicly the clear-
ing of the archbishop’s name, Henry II’s secret supplication was not
a staged affair. Now the heart of the cleric, the locus of his affective
being, had to be appeased. The crucial importance of this moment
was fully grasped by the artist who, sometime in the 1160s, exe-
cuted the shrine containing Heribert’s relics. Around a medallion
depicting two scenes of Henry’s night visit, the prostration and the
kiss, he wrapped the following commentary: ‘Blood-stained hearts
won’t reconcile/the anger of the bishop is mitigated by [the soft
words of ] the king/and the kiss of peace given three times.’7 Although
by the middle of the twelfth century the discourse on the emotions
was governed by new rules, as we shall see in due course, I am
inclined to believe that this much later injunction captures a fact
that Lambert had glossed over. It suggests an essential continuity in
the emotional technology of ritual that defied discursive strictures
and manipulation. Openly pointing to Heribert’s emotional state
about which Lambert kept silent, this short commentary linked the
verbal and the ritual part of the reconciliation. It staked it entirely
on the emotional exchange enabled by the supplication and the rit-
ual kiss. While the public reconciliation ended the legally sustainable
charges of contumacy, it did not suffice to expunge aversive senti-
ments, cleanse the ‘blood-stained hearts,’ and resolve the conflict.
The archbishop’s deeply felt indignation counted—at least that was
what Henry II evidently thought. There is no reason to doubt his
instinct. If anything, it implies that the public bond was to stand
only if supported by the parties’ meshed sentiments.
Another detail in Lambert’s account allows for a further conjec-
ture. The archbishop was stunned [stupet] by the humility of the
emperor’s conduct. If my reading of Lambert’s rendering of the scene
is correct, the crucial sentiment he wanted to convey to his readers

of Bishop Meinwerk of Padeborn in Franz Tenckhoff, ed., Das Leben des Bischofs
Meinwerk von Padeborn (Hanover, 1921), 90–91.
7
The inscription reads Corda cruenta necat venia/rex dum bene placat iram pontificis/
ter prebens oscula pacis; it is now in St. Heribert’s church in Cologne-Deutz. I quote
after Schreiner, ‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes,’ 116, ill. 10. The
author of the inscription mentions the triple kiss, which was actually exchanged at
the public, legal reconciliation, but the scenes on the medallion clearly take place
in Heribert’s chapel.
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was embarrassment. The humble saint could not tower above the
emperor to regain honor in a secular affair. Heribert’s image as built
by Lambert militated against that. Henry II’s humiliation, while pay-
ing homage to Heribert’s role as an agent of the numinous, inverted
Lambert’s concept of the prelate’s saintly personality informed by
virtue and the prescripts of humbleness. It is important to note that
Heribert’s anger and embarrassment, just like Henry II’s supplica-
tion, were personal, self-centered reactions, not out-going, public sen-
timents. Nonetheless, the same gesture that had rectified the parties’
public relationship, the ritual kiss of peace, served as a device affecting
their private feelings. It embodied Heribert’s willingness to forget his
indignation and confronted the source of embarrassment by revers-
ing the situation of supplication back to an affair of equality. The
kiss fulfilled the task admirably, bridging the crevice opened between
Heribert and the emperor by the ritual inversion of roles. It spanned
the space stretching from public anger and the socially imposed
demand for a ‘staged’ political interaction and face-saving to private
heart-cleansing and management of anger and embarrassment.
It is also worth noting that for Lambert Heribert’s sentiments and
the memory of the emperor’s attack ‘staining his heart with blood’
were causally connected poles. Shifts at one of them triggered changes
at the other end. Henry II chose to work on the heart, considering
the sentiments the integrative axis of Heribert’s personality and the
primary mover of action. Put in modern terms, this observation is
not an argument for the contingent personality of the cleric, built
on a fluid affective foundation. On the contrary, anchored in a rela-
tionship with his mind and memory, the sentiments of the heart
acquired a degree of stability. Operating within the continuum encom-
passing memory, the sentiments transcend the perception of the
emotions as a situational response or a transitory social role. Ritual
management of anger and embarrassment conditioned and was in
its turn affected by extra-contextual factors and dispositions rooted
in individual memory as a long-term facet of personality. As we shall
see, this issue kept surfacing in the emotional economy of high- and
late-medieval peacemaking and by the fourteenth century there is
evidence of attempts to conceptualize it.
This case of high medieval appeasement of anger introduces some
of the main analytical issues I will be examining in the following
pages. Two deserve special attention. The first is the embodied heart-
and-mind core; the second is the manner in which ritual connected
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150  

this core of the individual being to larger society. Both are dynamic
processes, evolving throughout the medieval period. The most con-
spicuous development is that over time both fields experienced clear
linear shifts in the focus of their emotional economy. In the first,
the emotional component of the ritual interaction gradually slid from
the self, to the interaction, to the ‘other’ party in the reconciliation.
In the second, emotions revolved around the relative weight attrib-
uted to the spheres of the numinous, the kin collective, and the
social, with a trend to migrate from the first to the last. These tem-
poral progressions resulted from the historical evolution of ritual rec-
onciliation in the course of the high and late Middle Ages. That
evolution determined the way in which agency was generated in the
course of the ritual interaction. The ritually induced sentiments high-
light the dynamic nature of the individual as a social being and
define the emotive hub of connecting tissues between self and soci-
ety as a historically evolving phenomenon.
Anger, the principal high-medieval emotion of conflict managed
by the rites of peace, is a pertinent illustration of the functioning of
this model. Sources from the period rarely offer such a neat juxta-
posing of public emotion and private affect as in the case of Henry
II’s and Heribert’s reconciliation. Nonetheless, in most of what has
reached us, displays of anger consistently indicate the existence of
not just any grievances but legally definable and defendable griev-
ances. I have termed this phenomenon ‘legal affect,’ and I shall use
it with this meaning throughout the discussion. Indeed, legal affect
seems to have been the strongest characteristic of ritually managed
anger in late eleventh- and twelfth-century evidence of all genres,
and marks the period as a discrete unit in terms of its emotional
economy. Authors revel in describing how injustice made heroes and
villains alike behave like enraged demons. Beneath the emotional
façade, however, of which narrators did not always approve, lay
clearly identifiable reasons. These were already present in Lambert,
who, as we saw, downplayed and conventionalized anger. His twelfth-
century followers, Rupert and the Anonymous of Abingdorf, did not
spare effort to stress the monarch’s fury [ furor, iracundia] at Heribert’s
unjustifiable inaction.8 They were in a large company. To catalogue

8
Tenckhoff, Meinwerk von Padeborn, 88–9 and Rupert in Pertz, Lantberti Vita Heriberti,
749. Both accounts are from the mid-twelfth century, the anonymous most probably
dating from before 1162.
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only cases of anger management in which the rites of peace were

involved would result in a long list.
Here is a sample of some of the most representative twelfth-century
accounts. In Raoul of Cambrai, the customary feud fueled the wrath
of young Gautier during the judicial duel with the knight Bernier,
murderer of his uncle. Bernier’s humble offer of reconciliation and
forgiveness of anger [maltalent] enraged Gautier even more. The color
of his face deepened [la coulor noircie] as he scornfully turned down
Bernier’s proposal.9 In The Song of Aliscans, the face of Count William
of Orange was fired in utmost rage, his gaze was fearsome; he was
red with anger and malice as he attacked his sister. The reason, we
are told by the hero himself, was that she had come between King
Louis’s and William’s legal rights.10 In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Historia Regum Britanniae, Bren was ignited by anger when confronting
his brother whom he held responsible for his banishment from the
kingdom he had the right to rule. That was a great injustice [iniusti-
tia].11 In the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, in a situation that resembles
the quarrel between Heribert and Emperor Henry II, Hugh was
under the customary and legally defined obligation to help his king,
and his noncompliance was a legal offense [iniuria]. Richard gave
vent to his grievances in a colorful range of strong sentiments: the
king’s spirit was unbridled and fierce, he was in the grip of fury,
and his royal wrath was like the roar of a lion. Yet as soon as the
bishop put his case in legal terms—there was nothing the king could
rightfully [iuste] complain about, he claimed, and he could duly
demonstrate it—the king calmed down and reconciliation was under
way.12 The fierce wrath and anger [zorn] of the Emperor in the
German epic Duke Ernst was ignited by the duke’s alleged treason.

9
Sarah Kay, ed. and trans., Raoul de Cambrai (Oxford, 1992), 314, 318.
10
William accusation was that his sister et vers le roi m’aïe desloee; see Erich Wienbeck,
Wilhelm Hartnacke, and Paul Rasch, eds., Aliscans: Kritischer Text (Geneva, 1974),
163, ll. 2797–8.
11
Acton Griscom ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, with
contributions to the study of its place in early British history, together with a lit-
eral translation of the Welsh manuscript No. LXI of Jesus College, Oxford, by
Robert E. Jones (London, 1929), 285.
12
Gerald of Wales’ Life of bishop Hugh is the more colorful, see Richard M.
Loomis, Gerald of Wales, The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln 1186–1200
(New York and London, 1985), 26, 28. The near-contemporary Magna Vita is briefer
on this point, see Decima L. Douie and David H. Farmer, eds., Magna Vita Sancti
Hugonis, The Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln (Oxford, 1985), vol. 2, 101–2.
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152  

To this the slandered duke added insult and a real injury by attack-
ing the monarch in his own castle and killing one of his relatives,
thereby breaking, along with the king’s peace, all customary laws of
protection [Hausfriede].13
In thirteenth-century works, legal anger gradually moved back-
stage but was still a discernible feature of the conflict. Before the
final reconciliation with the kiss of peace in the urban moralistic
work, Albertanus of Brescia’s Liber Consolationis et consilii, Melibeus
stressed the remission of his anger and indignation to indicate that
he had the legal right to decide the fate of the offenders.14 In one
of the miracles of St. Francis, the quarrel between the podestà and
bishop of Assisi over rights of jurisdiction was translated as anger
and indignation [contra ipsus indignatus ille; iracundia].15 In the Little
Flowers, in a description of another episode of the life of the saint,
wrath came as the justified, albeit inappropriate, reaction to theft.16
Legal anger is highly visible in courtly classics as well. Anger [zorn]
organized conduct in Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan, motivating
Gurmun’s attitude toward Tristan, who had killed Morold, kin of
Gurmun’s wife. ‘Get up, lord Tristan, and kiss me,’ said Gurmun,
‘I am unwilling to forgive you, but I will remit my anger, since the
women have done it already,’ that is, the legal precondition of the
direct kin’s acceptance of the settlement had been fulfilled.17 Note
the fine distinction between Gurmun’s private feelings and the emo-
tion structuring public relationships. Similarly, in Kudrun, another
work that continued to inspire chivalrous hearts well into the six-
teenth century, the kiss of peace was the formal device with which
Sigeband appeased his legitimate anger against the men of Garadie
who had plundered his land.18 In Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Willehalm,
Count William’s cool reception at King Louis’ court turned the hero
into a ‘wrathful guest’ [zornebaere gast]; he almost cut off his sister’s

13
Weber, Untersuchung und überlieferungskritische Edition des HERZOG ERNST B, 445.
14
Sunday, Albertani Brixiensis Liber Consolationis et consilii, 127.
15
Rosalind B. Brooke, ed. and trans., Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli sociorum S.
Francisci. The writings of Leo, Rufino, and Angelo companions of St. Francis (Oxford, 1990),
166–9.
16
Damian J. Blaher, O.F.M., ed., The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Mirror of
Perfection, The Life of St. Francis by St. Bonaventure (New York, 1951), 176–7.
17
‘Stêt ûf, hêr Tristan, und gêt her,’ sprach Gurmûn, ‘unde küsset mich: ungerne sô verkiuse
ich: iedoch verkiuse ich disen zorn, sît in die frouwen hânt verkorn, see Bechstein, ed., Gottfried’s
von Strassburg Tristan, 21.
18
Stackmann, ed., Kudrun, 37.
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head.19 However, the loosened linkages of anger to justice, or the

lack thereof, in Wolfram’s other major work, Parzival, are a noticeable
retraction from the former norm. In the mature courtly discourse,
the meanings of anger as ‘being torn apart,’ emotionally, spiritually,
mentally, and in sense of social propriety, began to gain priority over
legal affect.20
Accounting for the diversification of meaning and the fact that
anger remained positively linked to the legal sphere in fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century sources, late-medieval evidence shows four major
differences from the previous period. First, the thinning evidence
about anger in legal frameworks suggests that the connection was
weakened. Second, the legal frame appeared mainly in works car-
rying over twelfth- and thirteenth-century traditions. The evolution
of the popular motif of the noble in revolt against his lord illustrates
the trend best. Legality was the dominant theme in what appears
to be the earliest variant of this theme, the twelfth-century Duke Ernst.
The plot was developed, in the thirteenth century, in the immensely
popular English romance Guy of Warwick, and was present in another
work of the same genre, the fourteenth-century romance The Earl of
Toulouse. Both departed visibly from the early versions: the role of
anger was either minimized, or its legal meaning was expunged.21
Third, as witnessed by Wolfram, anger became less structurally deter-
mined and a more situationally defined phenomenon. And fourth,

19
Joachim Heinzle, ed., Wofram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, nach der Handschrift 857
der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 254.
20
Michael Swisher, ‘Zorn in Wolfram’s Parzival,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol.
93, 3:4 (1992), 401–4. The only episode of ritual appeasement of legal anger is
Cundrie’s supplication of Parzival. Although the knight forsakes his anger, he does
not kiss Cundrie, perhaps because her appearance differs so much from the courtly
ideal, but also because Parzival retains his inner aversion [haz]. See Wolfram von
Eschenbach, Parzival. Nach der Ausgabe Karl Lachmanns revidiert und commentiert
von Eberhard Nellmann. Übertragen von Dieter Kühn (Frankfurt a. M., 1994),
vol. 2, 331. For the basics see Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century
Romance (New Haven, 1978).
21
For different versions of Guy see D. J. Conlon, Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik
et de Herolt D’ Ardenne (Chapel Hill, 1971); Alfred Ewert ed., Gui de Warewic, roman
du XIII e siècle (Paris, 1932); Julius Zupitza, ed., The Romance of Guy of Warwick. The
Second or 15th-century Version, Edited from the Paper Ms. Ff. 2. 38. in the University Library,
Cambridge (London, 1875–6); and William B. Told, ed., Guy of Warwick, A Knight of
Britain (Austin and London, 1968). There is a useful discussion of Guy as a liter-
ary character in Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knight: A Study of Middle English Penitential
Romance (Oxford, 1990). Surprisingly, the author does not consider penitence in rit-
ual reconciliation. I use The Earl of Toulose in Walter H. French and Charles B.
Hale, eds., Middle English Metrical Romances (New York, 1930).
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154  

anger was increasingly reported alongside of, or replaced entirely by,

a set of other sentiments. This evolution of the ritual dissolution of
anger leads to two conclusions.
First, the cardinal fact is the versatility of ritual in appeasing legal
anger as a social institution of high- and late-medieval conflict. As
pointed out above, in early medieval evidence anger still encom-
passed the totality of the conflict clothed in emotion. Meaning and
function, social and cultural consensus about displays of anger as the
embodiment of public grievance and its justification, continued to
overlap until the late Middle Ages. Second, from around the mid-
dle of the twelfth century, this paradigm began slowly to fall apart.
Before considering the new paradigms that grew out of it, the cases
of ritually appeased legal anger ought to be scrutinized to identify
the pressures for change and the responses generated.
The progressive dissolution of the tie between anger and the law
opened the door for an increasingly powerful outside intervention
issuing forth in a more complex emotional palette. When, by the
late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries, the legal frame relaxed
its grip on the discourse explaining individual feelings, the meanings
of anger diversified, and the uniformity of its interpretation dimin-
ished. In terms of practice, the predictability of the action founded
on anger decreased. Such anger was spontaneous, unpredictable, and
impossible to suppress. There were no legal rules for it. It was at
the discretion of the self to react or to forego a response. This shift
had an important consequence. No longer grafted exclusively onto
the legal bond emanating from the social norm as bearer of its mean-
ing, individual anger appeared in need of moderation, restriction,
and suppression. Social consensus and individual sentiments parted
ways. Where there was no effective coercive pressure directly applied
or internalized as inhibition to natural anger, one of the ways to
deal with anger was to confront it with overriding, socially con-
structed, and therefore manageable and predictable emotions. The
social norm was embodied in a series of negative sentiments, such
as embarrassment, shame, contempt, and disgust, all generated to
force the individual into compliance.
In such conditions, the rites of peace provided a major strategy
to deal with societal pressures embodied in emotions that otherwise
would have been unbearable, threatening the individual with destruc-
tion. Maintaining in part its legal links, the thrust of the ritual action
slowly shifted from constructing the frame for public, formal legal-
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ity to managing the emotional economy of interpersonal relation-

ships in each of the confrontations with the evolving feeling rules of
social governance.
In Raoul, the epic paradigm, customarily validated persistence in
anger was qualified as madness by the other party to the conflict,
the agent of the numinous, and the social norm expressed by the
barons, and ended up being dissolved with the kiss of peace. ‘I beg
you, my lord, put folly aside; this [foolhardiness] should not last for-
ever,’ exclaimed Bernier, and the court concurred: ‘Sir Guerri, you
are foolhardy to imply that his strength has failed him!’ The abbot
of St. Germain tuned in, addressing one of the guardians of the old
tradition and instigators of the feud, Gautier’s uncle: ‘My lord Guerri,
your hair is all gray and you cannot tell what day you will be called
to account. If you don’t make peace, so help me St. Denis, your
soul will never win paradise!’22 To this end, ritual, the tool of the
social and the sacred, intervened. ‘God,’ said Gautier, ‘how it grieves
me to do it!’ Nevertheless, he bent down, raised up his adversaries
from the ground and exchanged kisses with them [s’entrebaisent], as
it befitted true friends and relatives.23 What grieved the knight so
much and why was the ritual kiss necessary? Two reasons suggest
themselves.
First, although Gautier’s anger was still the expression of the norms
of the clan feud, it was not its mechanical customary expression.
The emotion took a life of its own as the social and the collective
norms diverged with the new arrangement of power and the noble
clans’ need to unite against the king. New feeling rules were being
forged and they confronted the prescripts internalized by Gautier.
The confrontation issued forth in a clash of norms and played itself
out in the emotional reaction of the young knight, who now had to
construct a new hierarchy of social priorities. The self embodied by
the heart militated against the new social consensus and the pres-
sures the latter generated through the dictate to rationalize conduct
along new lines. The ‘heart’ was still in the grip of the now-obso-
lete old norm. To comply with the new social requirements, the
actor had to consciously attune his feelings, that is, perform emo-
tion work, which would align his feelings with the changed group

22
Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 314, 316, 318.
23
Sarah Kay translates s’entrebaisent as ‘they exchanged embraces,’ see Kay, Raoul
de Cambrai, 318–9.
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156  

expectations. The bodily confrontation in ritual fulfilled this task, for

it forced Gautier to overcome his overwhelming anger. The grief he
experienced resulted from the painful parting with the old norm.
Second, at the beginning of the supplication scene Gautier refused
to kill Bernier outright, instead proposing hanging or banishment.
He thus contested his opponent’s social status on the grounds of his
‘unlawful’ killing of Bernier’s lord, Raoul. The argument rested on
a customary norm, the inviolability of the vassalic bond. Put in emo-
tion terms, we can characterize Gautier’s recoiling from action as
an example of disgust. I will address disgust in due course. In this
context it suffices to mention that Bernier allegedly lay so low socially
that even personally applying the talion law to him was considered
inappropriate. The barons countered with another normative per-
ception, arguing that if Bernier had the support of ‘1000 men,’ he
still commanded the respect of his vassals and measured up to the
standards of the collective. The barons thus insisted that however
grave Bernier’s misdeed might have been, in essence the two knights
were on the same social level. The conflict between them was dan-
gerous, since it threatened the coherency of the collective self that
permeated the social personae of the knights and was now called
into action against the king.
Thus the ‘grief ’ that the ritual kiss caused Gautier was the expres-
sion of the painful struggle to overcome the sentiments originally
generated according to the norms of clan membership. Presented as
a reaction to a legal transgression lowering the rank and status of
the opponent, it was thoroughly internalized as an individual affect
and resisted outside pressure caused by shifts in the social norm.
The emotive world of the knight was structured by the collective
perception of ‘correct’ feelings, yet it was not the passive shadow-
image of the collective construct. The individual was endowed with
sufficient agency to shape his or her own emotional sphere, and the
affects it generated could be in dissonance with the emotion norm
of the collective. One could argue that the difference was one of
pace, not of kind, and that the emotive divergence embodied in grief
was the result of the collective norm outpacing individual emotional
evolution. I would suggest that this is a perfect example of the dis-
tinction between affect, as a facet of uncontrollable individual agency,
and emotion, as the expression of social normativity. All the same,
there was a difference. It produced tensions, and this was the back-
ground against which the kiss functioned. The visceral asocial affects
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of the ‘heart’ were logically translated to the level of bodily con-

frontation in the reconciliation that followed. The ritual kiss was the
acknowledgement of ontological equality and an embodiment itself
of the obligatory relationships defining kin membership. The emo-
tion work necessary to kiss overcame individual disgust and sup-
pressed loathing. These sentiments had lost their meaning in the new
social context. The kiss brought individual feelings in accord with
the feeling rules of the new, larger social group encompassing the
warring clans in a noble estate that patterned its structure on the
model of clan relations.
The world of the epic heroes was a world of gutsy feelings indeed.
The strong affective potential borne by the rites of peace was employed
in concord with the all out, crude and direct peer pressure, to quash
individual affect generated as a byproduct of the operation of the
clan norms. By the late twelfth century this referential field was
becoming outdated. With the epic ethos of feudal strife giving way
to the courtly ethos, subtler feeling rules came into play. Again, the
rites of peace proved an invaluable device coordinating the integra-
tion of individual emotive reaction into the framework of the nor-
mative social governance of conflict.
Composed in the 1180s, Aliscans pinpoints a transitional stage in
the transformation of the emotional management of anger through
ritual. Throughout the work, Count William’s outbursts of anger are
an example of correct, legal, and socially acceptable conduct, a tran-
sitory social role with a strongly functional character. At the scene
in which William kisses his sister to reconcile, the author thought it
necessary to specify that ‘All this has William’s burst of temper man-
aged; And this is how a man must counter arrogance: It will not
stop until it is forced backwards.’24 And yet the count himself admits
to Blanchefleur that ‘men are thus when overwrought with anger,
and in a trice they say and do some madness.’25 Such anger was
partly detached from the stable legal frame and depended on con-
text. It required the validation of the observers and participants in
the encounter; they had their say in the definition of its meaning.26
Thus, at his niece’s supplication for reconciliation, the norms of the

24
Ibidem, 86.
25
Wienbeck et al., Aliscans, 172. Translation in Michael A. Newth, The Song of
Aliscans (New York and London, 1992), 85.
26
Definition in Averill, Anger and Aggression, 9–10.
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158  

courtly ethos and the heroic rage maintain an uneasy balance cen-
tered on the hero’s ‘heart.’ The count remains open as much to the
young lady’s plea as to the king’s halfhearted submission to his
demands. His heart ‘softened’ at hearing King Louis acknowledging
his rights, ‘Yes, yes, indeed; whatever he wants he has it.’ In the
same vein, to appease her uncle’s wrath Aelis has to qualify her
mother’s anger as ‘madness.’ Furthermore, William’s rage is met with
his mother’s reproach, who entreats the count to ‘draw back from
fighting with the king in his own palace,’ referring to the legal norm
of the king’s peace. Nonetheless, Ermengardt introduces a new point
by insisting that William forgave his anger ‘for your niece’s sake, the
noble damsel; she is the brightest jewel in all your family.’ The last
reference was a call to respect the courtly ideal and turned decisive
for the resolution of the conflict over rights that nearly caused
Blanchefleur’s death.
The two arguments’ relative weight can be gauged by the senti-
ments they generated in confronting legal anger. On the one hand,
the king’s peace was a legal norm that William could or could not
respect, for he had an equally legitimate legal grievance. Accordingly,
he had the emotional liberty to accept it—‘soften his heart’—or con-
test it through anger, depending on the response he received at any
stage of the conflict. Respecting the king’s legal norm was not an
internalized duty suppressing individual rights. It could not annul
William’s legal grievance, and hence his sentiment of anger could
be switched off and on at will. The count brushes his wrath aside
at Louis’s promise to help, but at the first sign of hesitation his
whiskers began trembling with anger, and a new ‘rage burns like
flaming coals in William’s cheeks.’ Heroic rage did indeed have the
dimension of a transitional social role. On the other hand, Aelis’s
supplication has a different effect. The count’s reaction to it is not
dependent on his will. It produces an almost automatic emotional
response. ‘The fairest maid . . . the noble damsel . . . the jewel of a
most powerful family’ clutching at his foot is most embarrassing for
the count. Embarrassment reflected the inversion of the courtly stan-
dard and forced William to adjust his feelings and actions. While he
was at liberty to define his position on the plane of the legal norm,
William was in the grip of the courtly ethos. “May Jesus bless you,
my beautiful Aelis,” he utters in a warm, tender manner, “Get to
your feet; you use yourself too badly” [Levés vos ent, trop estes travel-
lie! ]. Fair ladies were not supposed to endure [travail ], at least not
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in such a manner. Supplicating a lady’s grace was the knight’s task;

he was supposed to be tormented to win favor. This was precisely
the moment on which Aelis capitalized. William’s embarrassment is
of such a magnitude, that he forsakes his vow not to touch any one’s
lips and obligingly kisses the lovely maid as a proxy for her mother,
Blanchefleur. There is nothing now that can stop the reconciliation,
and when the repentant sister appears, the siblings exchange apolo-
gies and seal the peace with four kisses.27 Ritually elicited embar-
rassment was the sign of the dissonance in the relationship between
the self and the courtly norm and confronted the parties to the
conflict with the social demand to correct the discrepancy. The form
in which the latter was vested allowed the actors to cope with it
with the ritual kiss of peace.
Embarrassment seems to have been the major target of the ritual
kiss in the courtly discourse, while the legal norm still lingered in
the guise of emotional vestment. The management of embarrassment
through peacemaking allows us to observe the penetration of the
courtly norm in the high-medieval value systems and the destabi-
lization of the link between law and anger. By the late twelfth cen-
tury, it appears that in the courtly discourse the two main fields
generating conflict, the obligation to one’s kin and the obligation
stemming from the feudal bond, were susceptible to emotion man-
agement, for both were open to the impact of embarrassment.
Remarkably enough, the kiss that came to formalize the act of peace-
making was also the act characterizing the formal manifestation of
the existence or creation of obligatory relationships in both fields.
The possibility of a direct link seems too obvious to miss.
Countering the anger that embodied kin-based obligation with rit-
ually elicited and managed embarrassment points to a major devel-
opment in the emotional economy of interpersonal interaction. In
Gottfried’s Tristan, for example, the Queen mother’s heart is ‘not so
that I could be his [Tristan’s—KP] friend.’ The sentiment mattered,
for it embodied the Queen’s customary legal obligation to avenge

27
Wienbeck et al., Aliscans, 170, 171, 173. The reading ‘kissed,’ baisie, is preserved
in the oldest version of the poem, variant ‘a’ preserved in Paris, Arsenalbibliotheque,
and dating from c. 1225, and in three of the earliest copies from the first half of
the thirteenth century, ‘e,’ ‘A,’ and ‘B.’ Later copies substituted apaïe and drecie,
most probably to correct the inconsistency with William’s vow not to kiss. Wolfram
does the same substitution in Willehalm.
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160  

her slain kin Morold. The exit from the situation was to elicit sen-
timents confronting that anger. The ‘well-born, well-bred, intelligent,
and lacking in no fine qualities’ knight throws himself at the feet of
the ladies asking for mercy. As might have been expected, suppli-
cation did not work automatically, for the duty to exact revenge
remained. Yet Tristan persists. And so they stand, and so he lie—
for hours—until Brandane, that epitome of the courtly ethos, remarks
‘My lady, the knight has lain there too long!’28 The situation is
becoming embarrassing. The way out is to grant Tristan a hearing,
and after he has played his trump card, the arrangement of Isolde’s
marriage to King Mark, and thus paid his ‘amends,’ the spirits set-
tle and the kiss is exchanged in reconciliation, for the former ene-
mies are now future kin.
Ritually generated embarrassment was thus a major strategy for
successful management of conflict with the ritual kiss. The encounter
could be staged, or result from an unpremeditated act as in Tristan’s
case, but its main lines followed a similar course. In Cantar del mio
Cid, El Cid carefully prepares himself—that is, engages in emotion
work—for the interview at which he was to be readmitted into the
king’s favor. At the meeting, he kneels down on all fours and pulls
up a mouthful of grass in a demonstration of submission, refusing
to get up until the king gives him pardon ‘from his soul and his
heart.’ King Alfonso is most distressed and complies. The Campeador
rises, kisses his hands and then kisses him on the mouth [e en la
bócal’ saludó ] to complete the pardon and the reconciliation.29 The
key to this scene and the actors’ motives is the inversion of social
ranking by ritual excess. El Cid, who had been Alfonso’s vassal, is
now a mighty lord entrenched in respectability. The peacemaking
scene was at the same time a ritual restitution of their former feu-
dal bond. Social rank, class connections, and collective identification,
rather than pity, informed the king’s emotional reaction. The embar-
rassment elicited by El Cid’s show of extreme deference left no doubt

28
Bechstein, Gottfried’s von Strassburg, Tristan, 16; translation in Gentry, Gottfried von
Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde, 138. The translator renders the Middle High German
herze with ‘feelings.’ I prefer to retain the literal translation. For Brangane and the
courtly ethos see Hugo Bekker, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan: Journey through the Realm
of Eros (Columbia, S.C., 1987), 180–88.
29
‘Pardon’ is conveyed with the feudal vuestra amor. The king’s condition is
described with tan grand pesar ovo el rrey don Alfonso, see Rita Hamilton and Janet
Perry, trans., The Poem of the Cid (New York, 1984), 128.
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that El Cid’s humiliation was something the king did not approve
of. He clearly did not like it and felt uneasy. His embarrassment
was alleviated by the only gesture that embodied the rectified formal
social and legal bond and which established peace at the same time.
Supplication was not the only way to elicit embarrassment in order
to overcome ‘annoying’ sentiments and trigger the peace act. St.
Hugh of Lincoln, the Holy Man of the Angevin kings, generated it
by delivering a ‘salutary shock’ to Richard I. Meeting with the king,
he at once asks for the kiss of peace. At the answer, ‘You deserve
no kiss from me,’ the prelate grasps the king’s cloak, shakes it violently,
and repeats: ‘I have every right to one. Kiss me!’ Richard, shocked
at the affront, could not but smile and kiss him.30 Hugh’s ‘triumph’
over the king, as his biographer put it, consisted in extracting the
ritual warrant that his opponent’s sentiments did not support the legal
quarrel between them. Confident in his rights, he chose a strategy
quite different from supplication, but the end result was the same.
In the cases discussed above, embarrassment restrained legally
defined anger, spontaneous or conventionalized, by a temporary inver-
sion of the normative rules of conduct in a roster of ‘communica-
tive communities.’ The restraint reaction generated by embarrassment,
however, was of low intensity and situationally determined efficacy.
It did not call for a thorough shake-up of the individual, nor did it
exercise control beyond the immediate context of the encounter. To
refer to Aliscans one more time, Count William’s benign response to
his niece’s supplication did not prevent a new outburst of anger
immediately after the reconciliation.31
The solution to the problem of how to keep the emotive world
of the increasingly independent self within the governance of the
social was found in enlarging the scope of ritual efficiency by link-
ing it to the norms of the community through another, much stronger
sentiment: shame. As a strategic, deeply working sentiment, shame
ensured the stability of the ritual bond in two ways. On the one
hand, its anticipation forced the parties to the conflict to apperceive
and change not just their relation to the norms with which the
collective they belonged to structured conflict, but their total personality

30
Hugh insisted, da michi osculum, domine rex. See Douie and Farmer, Magna vita
sancti Hugonis, vol. 1, 101.
31
Wienbeck et al., Aliscans, 174.
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162  

as well. On the other hand, shame was the punishment unleashed

at the infringement of the ritual contract.
The generation of shame to apperceive one’s role in society in
order to bring about reconciliation depended on the manner in which
honor and peace were linked. In the value system of the epic world,
the legal frame was a major way to mediate the connection. The
formal dimension of the kiss of peace as the carrier of obligation-
producing legal instruments provided the background to the envi-
ronment in which shame was induced. In Duke Ernst, the pacification
succeeded only when the nobles managed to trick the emperor into
kissing the disguised Duke Ernst during a general amnesty on Christmas
Eve. From the legal point of view the emperor had committed him-
self, since the ritual kiss was a liability. It did not matter how the
parties had arrived at the closure. All the same, the legal bond would
not work by itself. Appropriate emotionality had to ensure the sta-
bility of the reconciliation. In the act of dispensing the kiss, the
monarch recognized Ernst. Hurt by the ruse, he would not speak.
His anger [zorn] persisted and threatened to annul the forgiveness
he had just granted. Yet when reminded that going back on the rit-
ual obligation taken in front of God and the nobles would be a great
shame, the emperor had to put his anger away.32
This episode highlights the link between the legitimacy of one’s
role in the political system and the emotional world of the individ-
ual. The real confrontation was about control over the emotions. To
impose its rules and ensure compliance, peer pressure worked not
just by invoking the legal dimension of the emperor’s role as the
upholder and guarantor of the law of the realm. The nobles were
aware that the agreement would stand only if anger was remitted.
They were also aware that, although arising from a common source,
legal anger was one thing, anger as a personal affect another mat-
ter altogether. The former could be dealt with by locating the kiss
at the cross-section of the religious and the legal discourse to assim-
ilate duty and liability. Secular liability could be withdrawn; the reli-
gious duty was independent of individual will and active all the time.
There was no dodging such an obligation. Religious duty, for its
part, demanded emotion work. To enforce it as social practice, the
princes included the legal peace within the honor-and-shame para-

32
Weber, HERZOG ERNST, 445; translation in Thomas and Dussère, The Legend
of Duke Ernst, 125.
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digm. The invocation of shame, stemming from the unfulfilled oblig-

ation, accomplished the task of quashing individual affect that did
not have the validation of the group. The community was not con-
tent with formal role-playing, however binding it might have been.
Not complying with the demand for emotion work jeopardized one’s
social standing as much as the formal breach of obligation.
Shame nonetheless was not exclusively an internalized emotional
reaction to social pressure. What it could entail is illustrated in the
peace between Duke Segum and the emperor in Guy of Warwick,
where the nobles threaten their sovereign with withdrawal of loyalty
and revolt, should he fail to bestow his grace on the penitent vas-
sal.33 Shame was an active social force, which could destabilize one’s
social position and open possibilities for direct political contestation
through all means available to one’s enemies. It was not a feeling
that could confront and overwhelm personalized anger; it only pro-
vided the conditions under which emotion work could be performed.
Shame confronting legal anger was thus as positional a construct as
anger itself.
A subtler manner of invoking shame of quite a different nature
developed with the introduction of the courtly norm. We have already
seen that some of the dimensions of anger in courtly settings sug-
gested the loosening of its exclusive ties to the legal definition of
grievance. Accordingly, shame was employed to confront individu-
alized anger, which the legal frame could not manage. To address
this problem, anger was conventionalized within the courtly rules of
conduct and shame seeped down in the emotional world of the indi-
vidual. Perhaps the best early illustration of the new manner of deal-
ing with anger is Wolfram’s Willehalm. The reconciliatory scene
between William and Blanchefleur completely eschews legality. The
count’s anger is caused by the disrespect of Louis’s court. William
is not after his rights; his is a reaction against a society treating him
with indifference and contempt. How to counter the courtiers’ inso-
lence is the count’s main problem, but he is aware that the court
had its rules. While in Aliscans William speaks about rights and Aelis
stresses the legal dimensions of her mother’s guilt, Wolfram’s Alice
does not mince her words pointing out how William’s violent outburst

33
Conlon, Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik, 150–1; Ewert, Gui de Warewic, 81–3;
Zupitza, The Romance of Guy of Warwick, 72–5; and Told, Guy of Warwick, 64–5.
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164  

of anger infringe on the ethical rules of courtly society. “I am sorry

about your honor [werdekeit],” she said, “Where are your courtly
manners? Uncle, you have changed yourself greatly!” Alice’s reproach
makes William conscious of his courtly self and the need to moderate
his anger. There is no need to provide legal satisfaction. Tears come
to his eyes and he asks Alice to raise and not to shame him.34 Anger
caused not only disgrace in the eyes of others, but a deeply felt
shame as well. Shame had been interiorized to such an extent that
a reference to it brought about the immediate emotion embodied in
tears. The embarrassment inferred from Aliscans’s context was trans-
formed by Wolfram into shame [spot] for one’s aggressive, unbridled
rupture of social relationships. We are left without a clue as to
whether any free vent of negative emotions would have been met
with the same reproach or whether anger was a reserved case. Either
way, shame confronted and overrode anger as a higher-ranking
demand. It called for an action to reform the self—Alice was explicit
about that, judging from the term Wolfram used, gemüete—and forced
William to adjust his conduct to comply to the official norm he has
interiorized. The reformation of the individual to fit the courtly ethos
logically led to peace. The effort has been to transform him and it
succeeded.
This episode suggests more than the enfolding of the ‘civilizing
process’ of refinement of manners postulated by Norbert Elias and
the accompanying perception of the inappropriateness of the expres-
sion of aggressive emotions in public. It implies a deeper political
current: the diminishing legality of settling scores and pursuing jus-
tice on one’s own. This observation is directly related to the con-
clusion inferred from Heribert’s and Henry II’s reconciliation nearly
two centuries earlier. Those who follow the over-socialized theories
of emotionality stress the conventionalizing of anger as an accept-
able embodiment of legal grievances but do not ask the question
why shame had to be interiorized. This is perhaps because the answer
would lead them to concede that anger was, above all, an affect, a
natural emotional reaction to injury and insult rooted in the bio-

34
Aelis refers to kiuscheclîche zuht and accuses the count, oeheim, dîn gemüete hât sich
ze gar verkêret. The count’s answer: ob dû mich niht spottes wesrt, sô stant ûf ! See Heinzle,
Wofram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, 270. For the larger context see Joachim Bumke,
Wolframs Willehalm: Studien zur Epenstruktur und zum Heiligkeitsbegriff der ausgehenden Blütezeit
(Heidelberg, 1959).
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logical instinct for self-preservation. As soon as anger lost the con-

ventional social justification that sublimated it to the position of an
emotion, a device had to be worked out to confront it on its own
existential level.
The ambivalent nature of high-medieval anger has not been prop-
erly accounted for in most theoretical schemes, from the organismic
school to social constructionism. It was crucial for the functioning
of ritual. The discourses depicting anger as a sentiment developed
to indicate the individual acceptance of the collective norm of the
feud do not change its peculiar character. From its pristine form of
affect, anger was sublimated as an emotion in the legal discourse
that dominated the early and partly the high-medieval period because
it expressed best the sovereign right to pursue justice on one’s own.
The possession of the rights of violence was socialized and validated
through the rights of anger. The link between the ‘inner world’ of
the individual and the social conventions of legalism is thus no mys-
tery. The taming of anger by recourse to manners introduced by
the courtly era was a discursive reflection of the suppression of the
private rights to violence then occurring, with more or less success,
simultaneously in all social spheres and on all levels of individual
actualization. Its central postulate, that anger was an inappropriate
sentiment, in public or private, was an attempt to strip the private
rights of violence of the legitimacy steeped in the naturalness of the
biological imperatives for self-preservation. Anger’s affective dimen-
sion was a serious obstacle in the way of the successful implemen-
tation of this social project. Those who constructed the discourse
appropriated by the authorities had to proceed by increments. A
major step forward was to demote anger to pure affect. Wrath, rage,
and anger had to be dissociated from the honor conferred by cus-
tomary legality and explained away.
The above-mentioned episode about the conflict between the podestà
and the bishop of Assisi, composed around 1318, illustrates this
process outside the sphere of the courtly norm. From the context it
can be inferred that the episode was a conflict over judicial powers.
Both the official and the prelate acted in anger [indignatio, iracundia].
Once St. Francis’s hymn to the Sun miraculously worked peace, the
podestà, tears in his eyes, threw himself at the feet of the bishop,
acknowledged him as his lord, and offered satisfaction. The bishop
raised him from the ground, kissed him, and asked for indulgence
himself, adding that by virtue of his office he was required to be
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166  

humble, but by nature he was prone to anger and should be for-

given for that.35 It is worth noting that the acknowledgment of polit-
ical subordination by the podestà came after intensive emotion work,
but the position of the bishop highlights even better the conditions
that caused the reevaluation of anger. There was an inherent con-
tradiction in his social stance. His office demanded that he be hum-
ble and reconcile the guilty ones to God. Being a political personage
he had power, privileges, and rights to exercise and defend. The
authors of the story, however, did not think of anger as an appro-
priate embodiment of the bishop’s public personality. Anger caused
scandal, rupture of the harmonious functioning of the community,
and brought shame [magna verecundia] to the religious. Already Peter
Damian, in his rendition of the popular story of St. Giovanni
Gualberto’s reconciliation with his enemy, insisted that anger and
hatred concealed in the heart of the pastor were polluting and
disqualified him as a mediator between the divine and the lay folk
entrusted to his care.36 The religious were supposed to lead the flock
to peace, not to cause dissent. Peacemaking, on the contrary, con-
ferred prestige and honor to the clerics.37
The authors’ reproach seems to result from the disparity between
the types of socially acceptable anger displays and the political role
of the bishop. The tension was resolved by relegating anger to the
sphere of the self. The inappropriate sentiment was explained away
as belonging to the bishop’s ‘nature’ as opposed to his ‘office.’ Anger
was not a socially induced fact of life. It was an affect, a matter of
temperament and of bodily humors. It was, in other words, an onto-
logical fact. Its expression in public produced disapproval, internal-
ized as shame by the group to which the actor belonged. The means
to rectify the hierarchy of public and private, secular and sacred,
that informed the personality of the bishop but was disrupted by his
ontological dispositions was the ritual reconciliation. The kiss, besides
restoring the peace, lifted the ban of excommunication and confirmed
the bishop in his position of a pastor and a spiritual leader of the
community. It reinstated him into the role that the intrusion of his

35
Brooke, Scripta Leonis, 166–9.
36
Peter Damian, De frenanda ira, ch. 5, in his Opera Omnia, PL, vol. 145, coll.
655C–656A.
37
See Giovanni Villani’s account of cardinal Latino’s pacification of Tuscany in
the late 1270s in Croniche di Giovanni, Mateo e Filippo Villani secondo le migliori stampe e
corredate di note filologiche e storiche (Milan, 1889), vol. 1, 135.
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self had damaged and made transparent that his ‘inner being’ was
pure and free of polluting negative affect. The ambiguity of anger,
an affect and an emotion at the same time, allowed for successful
ritual intervention that brought about resolution of the conflict with-
out social concessions.
This story, an early fourteenth-century representation, concurs with
developments in courtly ethics. It brings to a new stage the trans-
formation of anger as a link between the self and the social. It is a
modification of the relationship between emotionality, legality, and
personality, as represented in the early-eleventh century clash between
Heribert and Henry II. Back then, the emperor’s and the archbishop’s
anger had been a socially validated phenomenon integrating their
‘hearts’ and their public personae to order the totality of their rela-
tionships. In the story of Assisi, anger still served that purpose, but
its position as a social institution was delegitimized. It was more inti-
mately connected to the internal ‘nature’ of men, to their hearts, in
stark opposition to their public personae. In Henry’s and Heribert’s
days, anger confirmed people in their social roles. In Assissi’s story,
it was ritual peacemaking that did so. Anger’s valence had changed.
It was generated in the self and emerged as a disruptive force because
the authorities had monopolized the rights of violence and consid-
ered anger outbursts illegitimate forms of social action.
This perception stripped the individual of the facet of sovereignty
conferred by legal affect, but it also transformed anger into an excuse.
If anger was generated independently of the legal, ecclesiastical, and
courtly structures, its outbursts could be employed to explain conflict
with the destructive forays of the antisocial self into the public sphere.
The late-medieval practice of peacemaking stressed the conciliatory
function of the statement that the misdeed was done in a state of
anger, or was due to the ‘hot temper’ of the offender. This clause
was a staple feature in reconciliatory documents. A mid-fifteenth cen-
tury Frisian reconciliatory formula from a case involving the ritual
kiss summed it perhaps best. The murderer had to swear, with twelve
oath-helpers, loud and clear, following the exact wording of the for-
mula, that he killed the victim in a fit of anger, without premedi-
tation and preparation.38 Late-medieval and early modern petitions

38
Bi redena rede ner bi leider lega ner bi ernithe; published in His, Das Strafrecht der
Friesen, 365–7, Appendix 5.
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168  

for remission of court sentences abound in details of how the anger

of the convicted got the better of the person.39
As the emotive translation of a legal condition external to the indi-
vidual, or as a natural disposition rooted in the ‘heart,’ anger was
the main target of emotion management in the high Middle Ages.
This picture began to change as the twelfth century wore on. As
the legitimacy of private vengeance came under increasing pressure
in the three official discourses of law, religion, and man-to-man rela-
tionships, anger slowly pulled back from the center stage of the emo-
tional world of ritual reconciliation. Two new sentiments strengthened
their presence in its stead, hatred and grief. Both had been present
in the emotional economy of private conflict since the early Middle
Ages but for a long while had been overshadowed by anger. Moving
center stage to embody the emotional state of the injured or insulted
person, they now displaced anger as the prime mover of action. The
target of the rites of peace changed accordingly. Tackling a com-
plex emotional palette necessitated the reorganization of the emo-
tional economy of ritual.

Hatred

Recent research, promoting hatred to the rank of social institution,

argues that in the medieval period it was more important as a posi-
tional sentiment than as an individual affect.40 Indeed, hatred rou-
tinely resulted from conflicts over power, prestige, and privileges and
informed anger. It was the standard response to injury and insult.
Its aim was to inflict harm on the adversary in order to restore the
lowered social status of the injured or insulted person or group. In
the habitual vocabulary of customary justice, hatred was the emo-
tion term for feud. The sentiment subsumed social action, confirming

39
See for examples Petit-Dutaillis, Ducuments nouveaux, and Claude Gauvard, ‘De
Grace Especial’ Crime, Etat, et Société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1991),
705–52. About the argument of anger in the letters of remission of the Burgundian
dukes see Marc Boone, ‘Want remitteren is princelijck: Vorstelijk genaderecht en
sociale realiteiten in de Borgondische periode,’ in Liber Amicorum Achiel de Vos (Evergem,
1989), 53–9, and Monique Pineau, ‘Les lettres de rémission lilloises fin du XVe
début du XVIe siècle,’ Revue du Nord, 55 (1973), 236–7. On remission in France in
general see La faute, la répression et le pardon: Actes du 107e. Congrès national des Sociétés
Savantes, Brest 1982 (Paris, 1984).
40
Smail, ‘Hatred as a Social Institution,’ passim.
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the argument for positionality. But did hatred invariably reflect indi-
vidual dependence on society? By stressing the social character of
premodern hatred and tacitly juxtaposing it to the modern sentiment
which appears to be highly individualized, are we not oversimplify-
ing the linkages between individual, group, and society in the entire
medieval period? Let us consider some of hatred’s modalities in the
settings of ritual peacemaking.
Early in our period, hatred’s manifestations almost fully conform
to the ‘social institution’ and ‘positional sentiment’ postulate. In the
epic tradition, it was a socially sustained, conditional, easily hidden,
often derivative, and certainly a most violent emotion. A few exam-
ples will illustrate that nature of high medieval hatred.
In Raoul of Cambrai, hatred determined young Gautier’s worth in
the eyes of his clan. ‘My dear nephew,’ said his uncle Guerri approv-
ingly, ‘you really are a man of great worth, to hate all your ene-
mies so heartily!’41 Note the emphasis on the heart and the collective
target of hatred. The corporate solidarity of the clan informed
Gautier’s rage and was perceived as hatred of the ‘other,’ the enemy-
clan. Hatred was the scale to measure the degree to which the cor-
porate individual was subsumed in the collective. It was also a primary
mover of action, generating anger. Sedimented in the heart of the
knight, it rendered the action-motivating emotive world of the indi-
vidual a collective construct. Hatred could be removed under direct
pressures from the collective; yet, as we have seen, this was not with-
out consequences for the individual’s emotional balance and required
the intervention of ritual. In the Nibelungenlied, hatred [haz] stood for
the irreconcilable grudge motivating Kriemhild’s feelings against those
who caused the death of Siegfried. Unlike Raoul, however, it was not
a primary sentiment. Hatred derived from grief, which had seized
Kriemhild’s heart. We will see the meaning of such grief in due
course. Moreover, hatred had a visible legal dimension. Germanic
law considered guilty all those who knew about but did not prevent
a crime, or tacitly consented to it, as Kriemhild’s brother Gunther
had done. Her hatred therefore targeted not just Hagen, but all of
Gunther’s household. Such hatred was legally manageable. When
Giselher succeeded in bringing a formal reconciliation through the
kiss of peace [kuste suone], Kriemhild gave up hatred and anger,

41
As Guerri put it, molt par ies de haut pris—bien hez de cuer trestoz tes anemis; see
Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 316.
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170  

although grief, the source of the former sentiments, remained.42

Kriemhild’s epic hatred was thus a situational construct. Hatred was
also frequently a sentiment played out in the most violent manner.
In the conflict between Magnus, the son of the Danish king Niels,
and his cousin Cnut in late 1130, the latter’s aspirations to a royal
title ‘drew on Cnut’s deadly hatred’ [letale odium], which gave rise to
an incredible rage.43 On January 7, 1131, in a wood near Haralstadt,
Magnus tricked Cnut into an ambush. After kissing his cousin and
sitting down to talk, Magnus had his concealed henchmen suddenly
appear and murder Cnut. The enraged party then dismembered the
victim’s body, ‘passionately thirsting to satisfy their ferocity even on
his corpse.’44
The courtly and religious frameworks that developed following the
end of the twelfth century were organized and rationalized along a
different matrix, strongly influenced by the scholastic theory of the
emotional background of vice and sin. Hatred in such context was
just as effective in embodying conflict as it was in the epic discourse.
The major innovation of the scholastic interpretation was in the
recognition of the capability of the sentiment to seep down to the
individual affective level.
Hatred was the prime mover of action and of a disposition con-
structed in and by the individual in most of the situations resolved
through ritual reconciliation in Wolfram’s Parzival. The heart of
Gawain’s sister, Itonje, was full with love [minne] for king Gramoflanz,
and hatred [haz] for those who hated him. Countess Orgeluze was
one of those who hated the king because he killed her husband.
Gramoflanz, for his part, hated Lot of Norway and Gawain his son
and fought the latter because the knight stole his precious wreath.
Sir Keye earned lady Cunneware’s hatred [haz] because of his attempt
to teach her courtly manners in a quite inappropriate way. Wolfram’s
hatred was thus the overwhelming sentiment of enmity, being neatly
distinguished from anger [zorn]. It seems that as anger lost its exclu-

42
Karl Bartsch, ed., Das Nibelungenlied, edited by Helmut de Boor with notes by
Roswitha Wiesniewski (Wiesbaden, 1979), 182.
43
For a complete discussion of the sources see Wilhelm Bernhardi, Lothar von
Supplinburg (Leipzig, 1879), 398–404. The role of the mother is stressed in Helmold;
northern sources mention that Niels himself was not comfortable with Cnut’s advances
and knew of his son’s plot, but refused to get involved in it.
44
Helmold von Bosau, ch. 5, 190. Translation in Francis J. Chan, ed., The
Chronicle of the Slavs by Helmold, Priest of Bosau (New York, 1935), 154–5.
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sive relations with the legal discourse and diversified its meanings,
hatred came to embody some of its functions. A major field of
hatred’s workings was one of anger’s former connotations, the official
state of feud sanctioned by customary law. Arthur’s mistreatment
[manec laster] by Clamidé’s people filled him with ill will. Clamidé
understood that his offense had led to a state of formal hostility [haz]
and asked for forgiveness. When Gawain killed a foreign king, one
of his vassals came all the way to Arthur’s court to officially declare
a state of open hostility [haz] and challenge Gawain to a duel.45
Finally, in Wolfram’s courtly paradigm, hatred was explicitly and
directly linked to honor and the crucial quality of truiwe, the con-
cept paramount to his characters’ personalities. The epic world had
mediated that relationship. There, the infringement of honor issued
forth in anger and rage. These sentiments embodied the legal frame
within which the restoration of honor was negotiated. To Wolfram
the link was direct. Triuwe as a social quality involved, among other
things, deep and selfless emotions. Hatred was the strongest of these.46
Experiencing hatred was already a display of triuwe.
The religious paradigm conformed to a similar pattern of direct
connection between hatred and action. The author(s) of the story of
Assisi, directly and through a speech attributed to St. Francis, defined
the relationship between bishop and podestà as mutual hatred [et ita
nimis oderant se ad invicem]. Hatred was the primary emotion of the
conflict, but, as in the epic and courtly paradigms, hatred could be
socially controlled. Once hatred was remitted through ritual, the ‘nat-
ural’ anger that hatred had generated could easily be indulged. As
in the courtly norm, the notion of hatred as the sentiment of the
feud, susceptible to management by society and the collective, clearly
informed the religious discourse.
Hatred worked in a similar way in the legal arena. The remis-
sion of injury and insult in thirteen-century Italian reconciliatory for-
mulas was an act of the will capable of dissolving hatred caused by
the offense. A Florentine notarial manual from the second quarter
of the thirteenth century, predating the manuals of Rolandino Passageri

45
Lachmann and Nellman, Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival, vol. 1, 278–9, 366–7,
516–7, 522–3; vol. 2, 93–5, 192–3, 246.
46
On triuwe in Wolfram see Hildegard Emmel, Das Verhältnis von ere und triuwe im
Nibelungenlied und bei Hartmann und Wolfram (Frankfurt a. M., 1936); and Gisela Spiess,
Die Bedeutung des Wortes ‘triuwe’ in den mittelhochdeutschen Epen Parzival, das Nibelungenlied
und Tristan (Diss., Heidelberg, 1957).
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172  

and Durand, used the subtitle ‘Truce between those who hate each
other’ [treuga facta inter hodiales], that is, those who were in a state of
formal hostility. It explained that the pact was used to establish peace
after ‘murder or hate’ [de homicidio sive odio], stressing clearly the tech-
nical meaning of hatred as feud or enduring, socialized personal
enmity.47 As late as the first quarter of the eighteenth century in
Corsica, this synallagmatic statement was the core of the ritual rec-
onciliation with the kiss.48
To sum up: in a number of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century
works controlled by discourses operative in all genres, hatred sub-
sumed and supplanted anger as the sentiment of conventionalized
enmity. It was closely related to social respect and referred to qual-
ities constructed to reflect the honor and public esteem conferred on
the individual. The thirteenth century witnessed one major devel-
opment, the recognition of the possibility of individuation of hatred.
Together with its other main features, this composite character of
hatred was carried over in the late-medieval period. Where hatred
was a derivative sentiment, our authors identified its social source
with insult and injury. Hatred’s evolution in the official discourses
thus followed a progression comparable to that of anger. Hatred
began as an emotion and ended as an affect and a dispositional
quality of the self. Consequently, late-medieval thought on conflict
management focused on the process of generation of individualized
hatred and on the manners of its transformation and/or dissolution.
Late-medieval moralists and legal theorists had no doubts that
hatred arising from social conditions motivated individual anger and
lay at the root of conflict. They advocated prompt and fair legal
resolution to prevent the stabilization of socially conditioned resent-
ment into personalized hatred as a long-term disposition. The author
of Love God and Drede, an English moral poem composed c. 1400,
was attentive to the grave consequences of hatred and sought its ori-
gins in the injustice done to one of the parties to the conflict. The
solution was timely amends and ritual reconciliation. ‘If a man do
a-nother mys,’ advised the poet, ‘Neighbores shuld them auyse/The
trespasour amende and kys/Do bothe parties euene assise.’ Otherwise,
he warned, ‘Old horded hate maketh wratthe to rise/And ofte gilte-

47
Masi, ed., Formularium fiorentinum artis notariae, 44–5.
48
Busquet, Le droit de la vendetta et les paci corses, 604, Appendix, xxvii: peace pact
from September 16, 1733.
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les blod to blede/fle fro fooles, and folwe wise.’49 If no justice was
done, hatred remained, ‘horded’ in the heart. The poem illustrates
the mechanism by which hatred as an external, positional phenom-
enon could be stabilized by unjust treatment, internalized, and indi-
vidualized in anger. Asocial sentiments arising from a situational
encounter grew roots in one’s personality, spanning the space between
self and person, and person and social role. If there was no positive
legal intervention on the part of the group or society, or personal
amends on the part of the offender to restore the equilibrium in
social relations, the negative sentiment triggered by the misdeed
became an affective disposition of the individual. On the contrary,
timely action coordinating equal dispensation of justice and personal
satisfaction could lead to reconciliation embodied in the ritual kiss,
which dissipated hatred.
Authors were also aware that, because of its capability of seeping
down into affect and of being transformed into an emotion of the
‘heart,’ hatred was an easily individualized sentiment. Individualized
hatred was not necessarily directly expressed. Once conceived it was
hard to manage it by social pressure, since it could be concealed
and even temporarily suspended. John Gower’s allegorical female
‘Hatred’ drew attention to the inner self, heart-and-mind, as the
locus of the mortal emotion that ‘keeps the heart in flames.’ If hatred
achieved no quick revenge, she ‘pretends to bear no rancor, but
swallows the transgression very close to her heart in her thoughts;
so despite the prayers of people, whether friends or relatives, no rec-
onciliation will be made until the time comes when she can take
her revenge, undoing the person forever.’ Hatred was thus also lodged
in the mind and was sustained by the memory of injustice. Hatred
won’t cease even after confession; ‘she tells the chaplain she will give
up her ill will forever, but right after Easter she returns to it as dogs
to their vomit.’ The outward calmness and the lack of signs of anger
did nor guarantee the extinction of hatred. She ‘sets down anger on
Easter Day and leaves it at the door of the holy church, and when
she comes back later from the altar, she runs off again spreading
anger.’50

49
James Kail, ed., Twenty-Six Political and other Poems (Including ‘Petty Job) from the
Oxford MSS Digby 102 and Douce 322 (London, 1904), 6.
50
William B. Wilson, trans., John Gower, Mirour de l’Omme (The Mirror of Mankind)
(East Lansing, 1992), 64–5.
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174  

Likewise, in what is perhaps the most original and influential late-

medieval legal treatise on ritual reconciliation and its individual,
social, and emotional dimensions, the papal lawyer Rainaldo Corso
focused exclusively on hatred as a disposition of the individual, but
for him individuation had different consequences. Making a distinc-
tion between the domain of the public and that of the private, and
retaining the pragmatism that had characterized north Italian rec-
onciliation all along, Corso reduced reconciliation to ‘remission’ and
remission in general to ‘remission of hatred.’ ‘[In reconciliation],’ he
argued in Delle private rappacificazioni, published in 1555 under the aus-
pices of the papal Curia, ‘we are required to remit hatred; but we
are not required to remit injury to life or limb, still less injury of
honor.’51 Corso’s comments came as the natural result of the evo-
lution of the views on the sentiments of conflict and their separation
from the legal frame. Building on the practical wisdom of genera-
tions of lawyers, he insisted that the definition of injury issuing forth
in hatred depended on the will and intellect of the parties to the
conflict and did not proceed mechanically from structural pressures.
Corso identified hatred as the sentiment of the feud and grave per-
sonal conflict, as it has been since the early twelfth century. He dele-
gitimized hatred, however, distinguishing between Fehdegang and
Rechtsgang. Hatred might have devolved to the status of individual
character trait, but it was not to be indulged in the way anger was.
We should remit the feud and quash individual conflict with the rit-
ual kiss, Corso stated, but we can still pursue satisfaction through
venues that lead to lawful amends for injuries suffered in the course
of the conflict. In the eyes of the legal theorists, the animosity char-
acterizing feud and individual conflict had become an affair of per-
sonal sentiments, uncoupled from legal discourse.
How did embodied ritual confront such a formidable enemy of
the peace? At first glance, the constructionists’ point of view explains
it all. If hatred were exclusively the emotion term for feud and for-
mal hostility, giving these up through a legally framed reconciliation
would mean giving up hatred. Being the emotional vestment of a
collective practice, hatred would cease to exist with the change of
the social conditions that constructed it in the first place. If there
was residual affect, the bodily interaction with the kiss, with its highly

51
Rainaldo Corso, Delle private rappacificazioni (Cologne, 1698), 9.
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affective potential, forced the individual actors to rearrange their

emotional world in accordance with the demand of the social. The
tenor of the theory seems right. What eludes us, however, is the
mechanism through which the ritual dissipation of asocial affects
could work. The problem with this explanation is that it neglects
the question of what made the kiss enter the legal sphere dominated
by hatred in the first place. As seen in Raoul, and explained in Love
God and Drede, socially constructed hatred could loosen its link with
the collective and endow the individual with agency. Once gener-
ated, the emotions of conflict could not be confined to the domain
of the collective. Their extended habitat was the emotional world of
the individual outside the control of the social. If hatred could be
put aside in order to participate in that most consuming of rituals,
the divine service, and then the quarrel could be picked up again,
ritual was no match for hatred. Remission of hatred through the
kiss worked in an emotional environment closed to social pressures.
There is an analytical device, however, that allows us to penetrate
under the seemingly sealed surface in which ritual operated and to
shed light into the ‘black box’ of hatred: the emotional phenomena
embodied in tears. Thus, in Raoul, the first thought of Alice, Raoul’s
widow, in catching sight of the wounded Bernier was to finish him
off with a crowbar. Yet when he humbly kissed her shoes, she was
so moved that ‘tears began to fall—she could not have prevented
them if she were to be cut limb from limb, when she sees Bernier
abase himself so utterly.’52 Such tears were not the standardized
response to ritual deditio, and were shed by a woman, but there seems
to be more to them than pure convention. Tears filled the eyes of
Kriemhild at the reconciliation following the murder of Siegfried.
‘Never with more tears was peace regained/among old friends,’
exclaimed the poet, meaning the kisses exchanged between Kriemhild
and her kin, ‘and still her sorrow pained’ [ir tet ir schade wê].53 In
Parzival, the ritual kiss through which hatred was remitted, especially
on the part of ladies, was accompanied by copious tears. Their
source, again, were the sorrow and acute pain following the mur-
der of the husband, lover, or favorite. Tears were not reserved for
ladies alone. El Cid shed tears while chewing grass at the feet of

52
Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, 313.
53
Bartsch, Das Nibelungenlied, 182 and the note to ll. 1114.
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176  

King Alfonso. As a rule in epic and romance, the person remitting

hatred wept as he or she was about to kiss his or her adversary.
Analyses of the meanings of tears shed in contexts of power con-
tests argue that in the bulk of the accounts tears embody helpless-
ness. Torn between conflicting demands on honor, rank, status, kin
and family ties, individuality, or corporate identity, the individual
was in a state of misery. Characters wept despite themselves, unable
to untangle the knots of obligations wrapping them from all sides.54
Accepting this explanation, I would suggest a somewhat different
emphasis in the context of ritual peacemaking, accounting for tears
as a heuristic link between the positional, socially constructed senti-
ment of hatred and its internalized embodiment in the characters’
heart. The question is: What do tears tell us about ritual efficacy?
It has been observed that medieval tears are a notoriously ambigu-
ous source of information.55 Indeed, there are infinite numbers of
contexts explaining the meaning and function of tears shed at rec-
onciliation. Nonetheless, tears seem to refer to an overarching emo-
tional mechanism borne by ritual and operating regardless of the
immediate context. The ritual kiss was meant to overpower the emo-
tions existing within the individual and constituting its core. The
anticipation of intimate bodily interaction with the hated one triggered
an intense emotional response. Tears or painful sensations experi-
enced and expressed during ritual action witnessed precisely the inter-
nal struggle to overcome personal, ontological, and individualized
affect. Ritual tears fulfilled admirably the task of expressing and
confirming the existence of the values that constructed the self and
gave it social worth. They stressed the self-sacrificial, excruciating
emotion work of subjecting these values to the dictate of the social

54
General observations in Harold Scholler, Studien im semantischen Bereich des Schmerzes.
Darstellung des semantischen Situation altfranzösischen Wörter für ‘Schmerz’—doeul, meschief,
torment, descomfort—im Roman de Renart le Counterfait, (1328–1342) (Paris, 1954) and
Ernhard Lommatzsch, ‘Darstellung von Träner und Schmerz in der altfranzösischen
Literatur,’ ZRPh, 43 (1923), 20–67.
55
Günther Blaicher, Das Weinen in Mittelenglischer Zeit: Studien zur Gebärde des Weinens
in historischen Quellen und literarischen Texten (Diss., Universität des Saarlandes, 1966);
Sandra J. McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewiston,
NY, 1990); Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York,
1999); Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France
(Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991); and Marjory E. Lance, Telling Tears in the English
Renaissance (Leiden, 1996). To the best of my knowledge, medieval tears have not
been a subject of a detailed, systematic, and comprehensive study.
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and embodied the transformation of the affective vestments of indi-

vidualism that opposed social demand into socially validated emotions.
The intensity of the process would not have been of such a magnitude
had there been no conflict over agency.

Grief

An emotional response to injury to life and honor, grief had entered

the field of ritual before the beginning of the second millennium. In
a number of cases it occupied the foreground of the discourse on
reconciliation and appeared consistently as the source of anger and
hate.
Since Friedrich Maurer, in his now classic Leid, systematically
overviewed the meanings of grief in high-medieval German fiction,
there has been much research and theorizing on this fundamental
sentiment.56 Despite criticism, there is a broad consensus among
scholars that Maurer’s central findings hold true. Unlike the modern
sentiment, high- and late-medieval grief was undeniably a socially
inspired feeling, related to revenge and honor. Often, especially in
epics and courtly fiction (the stuff of Maurer’s inquiry), grief resulted
from the conflict between pressures for making peace and the desire
for revenge.57 In narratives more narrowly inspired by religious ethics,
the sources of grief were guilt and contrition for sins committed in
the pursuit of vengeance.
The relationship between the individual and the social embodied
in grief varied according to context, but the trend for a transition
from anger and hatred to grief in the later medieval centuries points
to a shift in the social pressures managed by ritual. An episode from
the eleventh century, in the Miracles of St. Ursmar, will set the stage
for the discussion of grief.58 In the spring of 1060 the monks of

56
Friedrich Maurer, Leid. Studien zur Bedeutungs- und Problemgeschichte, besonders in den
grossen Epen der Staufischen Zeit (Bern-Munich, 1951). See also the review of Dietrich
Kralik in Wissenschaft und Weltbild, Monatschrift für alle Gebiete der Forschung, 6:1 (1953),
35ff.
57
See Miller, Humiliation, 106ff.
58
It has been used in the discussion of the Peace of God movement, and I will
limit myself to its emotional ramifications, which have not been investigated. See
Henry Platelle, ‘La violence et ses remèdes;’ and Geoffrey Koziol, ‘Monks, Feuds,
and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders’ in Head and Landes, eds.,
The Peace of God, 239–58.
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178  

Lourdes took on a reconciliatory circuit throughout northwestern

France and the Low Countries. The relics brought to peace long-
warring parties who now kissed to reconcile and poured alms to
thank the saint. In the village of Lissewege, however, in the county
of Flanders, the monks met up with a knight who refused to rec-
oncile with his adversary. Neither the saint’s presence, nor the pros-
tration of the offender begging for mercy and invoking Christ, helped
convince the knight.59 Motivated by stubbornness [ prae stupore], a
technical term for the monks’ reproach, and grief [ prae dolore], the
knight argued for his right to revenge. Encircled by his peers, who
wept silently, he changed colors growing now pale, now red, weep-
ing and stressing his grief as an argument against reconciling. Countered
by the offender’s own wailing and the mystical power emanating
from the relics, the knight gnashed his teeth, bewailed his misery,
and threw himself on the ground, biting the earth in grief [mordebat
terram prae dolore]. This scene of intense emotional struggle lasted three
hours. At last, a miraculous sign of God’s judgment, a column of
smoke, terrified the knight. All in tears, he begged forgiveness from
the saint. Forgiveness had to be merited though, and he duly kissed
his enemy and confirmed the peace with an oath.60
This short narrative, designed to praise the saint-peacemaker, allows
a number of observations. First, feud and reconciliation were per-
ceived as encapsulated by, derived from, and dependent on the emo-
tions. Second, grief was the expression of the inability of the offended
knight to pursue his legal grievance. Anger was the appropriate sen-
timent in such cases, but it is important to note that the account
does not refer to secular hierarchy in the contestation of rights as it
was normally in cases of anger. It is also possible that anger was
not mentioned since the knight was denied the right to anger—his
grievance was not justified in the eyes of the author. Third, grief
was expressed through the signs and features of anger. The senti-
ment itself and the technique it was dealt with were totally embod-
ied in corporeal action and condition. Change of colors, tears, gnashing
teeth, and biting the dust are all bodily actions, inward and out-
ward, indicating emotion work stemming from and aimed at deal-
ing with grief. Fourth, grief was the only sentiment mentioned,

59
The complete text is in AASS, April, II, coll. 571.
60
Miracula S. Ursmari in itinere per Flandriam facta, MGH SS, vol. 15:2, 840–41.
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embodying the knight’s legal grievance and his helplessness. Finally,

there is little that tells us how grief about the slain kin was trans-
lated into a source of social action; the account is too thin for mak-
ing a conjecture.
Most important for the inquiry into the ritual management of such
grief is that the meaning of the kiss of peace conferred on the offender
was constructed in the context of the relations between the ‘stub-
born’ knight and the numinous. The rites of peace had no inherent
value as an emotion tool dealing with grief. The meaning of the
episode derived from the quasi-legal frame stretching from the for-
giving knight, to the begging offender, to the saint, and to the divine
itself. The fear of present and future retribution spontaneously gen-
erated at the sight of the miracle overrode the grief of the injured.
Moreover, the subordination of individual agency to the dictate of
the numinous was supported by the emotions of the spectators. The
stubborn knight’s fellows sobbed, cried in suppressed voices, and were
overwhelmed by dread in lockstep with the main actors as the dra-
matic encounter enfolded. The implications of weeping and beating
their breasts are murky—a century later the scholastic theory of the
theological emotions would call such gestures compunction and con-
trition, although the Miracles do not offer even a hint in this direc-
tion—but the meaning of the involvement is clear. It gave social
legitimacy to God’s judgment and rendered the ‘stubborn’ knight’s
grief illegitimate.
Whether this account was an idiosyncratic example of grief or
reflected an occurrence typical for that time, place, or type of dis-
course is hard to judge. It does offer some beginnings, though, whose
evolution can be traced in later times. The heroic world of the
Germanic epic, the courtly code, and the civic ethos of high medieval
urban life all accommodated components of this model to elaborate
their own interpretations of the meanings of grief elicited in the out-
come of violent conflict and the ways it was dealt with by ritual.
The Nibelungenlied offers what is perhaps one of the most conspic-
uous cases of high medieval grief as a socially constructed sentiment
detached from the meaning of ‘individual suffering, sorrow of the
self,’ which it took on in modern times.61 It makes clear the issues
on which the Miracles came up short, the origins of grief and its

61
I follow Maurer, Leid, 13–38, who offers an apt analysis of leid in the epic.
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180  

essence. The murder of Siegfried and the fraud with the dowry were
perceived above all as affronts to Kriemhild’s social status, the lat-
ter depending on the esteem she enjoyed. As Kriemhild’s primary
motif for action, grief reflected a more fluid and therefore much
more contested social construct than anger. Anger had a codified,
structured field of reference, pointing to customary or written law.
Yet leid was not a quality of the character’s heart. It was an emo-
tion imposed on her, something done to her. As Maurer argued,
grief in this setting was the interiorized shame inflicted on the indi-
vidual. It reflected lowered social standing. Social phenomenon as it
was, its dissipation necessitated a correction in social perceptions, not
forgiveness that would seal the imposed low status. Recognition and
restitution of former rank and prestige were the only way to wipe
clean the shame of injury. The ritual kiss embodying forgiveness
clearly did not constitute an appropriate strategy for coping with
such grief. The impossibility to deal with it through any means but
force informed Hagen’s decision to deprive Kriemhield of her trea-
sure and so neutralize her. His action only added to Kriemhield’s
grief, but that did not matter. For Kriemhield, shame could not be
remitted through vengeance as long as the wealth—read honor and
power—to which she was entitled was not in her hands.62 She had
kissed her treacherous kin to ‘forgive and forget,’ but as long as there
was no positive social action to make up for the loss of Siegfried,
grief remained a powerful conflict-generating stimulus. Indeed, we
are told that Kriemhild only remitted her hate [haz] and anger [zorn],
not her grief [leid ]. The unfortunate decision to marry her off to
Atila gave her a weapon for revenge and a means to deal with the
grief caused by the double shame that Hagen inflicted on her.
The early courtly world inherited this imagery of grief as a reac-
tion to shaming and set about enriching it with new connections. I
will not repeat the literary scholars’ discussions of the ennobling func-
tions and meanings of individualized grief. Their endeavors have
been of crucial importance, but they mostly built on the theological
paradigm of the sentiments. My task is to sketch instead the shifts
in the social perception of grief in cases of ritual reconciliation. Two
trends are clearly visible. They highlight the transition to a new,

62
Bartsch, ed., Das Nibelungenlied, 184ff., translation in Francis G. Gentry and
James K. Walter, eds., German Epic Poetry (New York, 1995), 134ff.; see also Maurer,
Leid, 21–2.
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complex, two-tiered paradigm of grief, making the sentiment more

susceptible to ritual management.
On the one hand, there was the traditionally supported positional
meaning of grief. Leid as the urge to defend honor was the motiva-
tion of Duke Ernst, who had been slandered before the emperor.63
Kudrun’s grief broke her heart [herzen leid], but its source was the
shame she had suffered by being abducted, brought by force to
Sigeband’s court, and forced to live the life of a servant girl. This
had brought grief [herzenleit] to her mother too. The queen had wept
after Kudrun, but what hurt her was the thought that her sufferings
were a delight for Ortrun’s relatives.64 The murder of Morold caused
much grief [leide] to the queen in Gottfried’s Tristan. It was her heart
[mîn herze] that would not let her make peace and accept Tristan
among her ‘friends.’ In the end, however, it turned out that fitting
amends were sufficient to fully alleviate her grief.65 Grief after honor
lost in the struggle with the Saracens was the chief emotion fueling
Willehalm’s anger, as he stood alone in the midst of King Louis’s
court, laughed at by queen and courtiers. Grief was only alleviated
after the count avenged himself on the Saracens, restoring his honor.66
The language of practical morality and the emotional repercussions
of the feud continued to carry these meanings of grief well into the
late medieval centuries.67
On the other hand, the mature courtly tradition of the thirteenth
century tended to either individualize grief or make it an abstract
moral concept and thus divorce it from social esteem. Leid was the
central theme of Wolfram’s Parzival, as it was in Willehalm, but its
metaphysical meaning distanced it from the context of reconcilia-
tion. The death of his nephew, Saduc, grieved the emperor in Guy
of Warwick and yet at the reconciliation with Duke Segum he remit-
ted only his anger. Personal grief remained in a guise much like the

63
Weber, ed., HERZOG ERNST, 249; see also 239 and 245.
64
Bartsch, ed., Kudrun, 312–3; translation in Connell, ed., Kudrun, 104, 162–3.
65
Bechstein, ed., Tristan, 16.
66
Heinzle, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbachs Willehalm, 250–51; translation in Charles
Passage, The Middle High German Poem of Willehalm by Wolfram of Eschenbach (New
York, 1977), 93.
67
See for example the case discussed by Daniel Waley, ‘A Blood-Feud with a
Happy Ending: Siena, 1285–1304,’ Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham, eds., City
and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Essays presented to Philip Jones
(London, 1990), 51, Appendix. The term is dolor.
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182  

modern concept of sadness and anguish, since the peace was final.68
What came with the courtly ethos, therefore, was the changed valence
of the link between the ‘heart’ and society embodied by grief. Grief,
formerly an exclusive and almost automated emotional embodiment
of injured honor, was now a link to the heart and mind of the self,
which generated an individuated emotional response to social pressures.
In this environment the meaning of grief became two-pronged. As
noted above, the standard emotion term for the sentiment of dis-
cord in Wofram’s Parzival was haz. The emotive commotion seizing
Wofram’s heroes in anticipation of ritual reconciliation was riuwe.
Riuwe was a concept related to the idea of grief and remorse in its
modern understanding. For Wolfram, riuwe bore a strong connection
to pain [wê] and sorrow [ jâmer]. Drawing on this pool of shared
meanings, grief pointed to the inner self, but also to the already
mentioned and absolutely essential concept of triuwe, which was its
source and field of action.69 Triuwe was to God and men, and a phe-
nomenon only effective in socializing. Its highest, most distinguished
form was faith as culmination of all virtue. Failing of triuwe con-
signed a hero to a spiritual wilderness and utter desolation. The
courtly character without triuwe was not truly human. Through the
concept of triuwe, a new paradigm of grief emerged, drawing on the
theological emotions of high scholasticism and the knightly ethos and
linking the inner being to society in a thoroughly reconstituted man-
ner. Theological intricacies aside, the new paradigm eschewed some
of the dimensions of grief as a positional social construct operating
exclusively within the framework of shame and honor. Invoking tri-
uwe and the divine as its standards, it built the implications of guilt
and sin into grief. If sorrow and guilt could be linked to the honor
paradigm and the bitter chagrin of shame, and induced in the self
as the interiorization of moral trespass, they could be generated
within and by the self for the purposes of social cooperation.
These twists in the nature of grief rendered it more accommo-
dating to ritual management. Three variations in the new paradigm
are worth discussing, all having their origins in the thirteenth-century
environment of grief. Whether they developed concurrently and rep-
resented a complex stage in the evolution of the emotional technol-
ogy of ritual or constituted outgrowths of earlier traditions is an open

68
Conlon, ed., Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik, 151.
69
Parzival, vol. 1, 516, 532; vol. 2, 248.
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question. They had common features, however, and were shared in

a number of discourses.
First, grief was associated with default on the ritually taken oblig-
ation to guarantee that the peace contract would stand or there
would be punishment in the form of a severely negative emotional
experience. Such grief was mixed with guilt and shame, not a sur-
prising development in view of the formal obligatory dimensions of
the kiss. The point is illustrated in the episode of Guy of Warwick
where a treacherous peace was made in the name of a senior knight,
Duke Loher of Lorraine. After the peace pact was sealed with the
kiss, Guy’s party was caught in an ambush. Guy, who had accepted
the peace but refused to kiss, got away unharmed and happened
across the duke. Great was his indignation. ‘Wherefore have you
imagined this treason!’ he confronted him, ‘I considered you a loyal
knight! Certes, evil will ensue to you for having taken the advice of
the false Duke of Pavia, and you will be forever dishonored by it,
inasmuch as, after having kissed us, you betray us so vilely!’ At these
words, the duke was seized by such a grief, affecting his heart [si
grand deul au ceur; te duel en ad le duc; grete dole], that he could not
answer a word. Tears came into his eyes and he rode away.70 The
desire to run, disappear, and hide oneself is the primary indication
of shame. Guy’s heavy words challenged the essence of the duke’s
social persona, his quality of a ‘loyal knight.’ The pain generated by
the mixture of negative feelings was the price to pay for the tres-
pass of the ritually invoked norm. In the confluence of sentiments
leading to emotional distress, guilt seems to be the leading princi-
ple, governing the conduct externalized as shame and conceptual-
ized as grief. The feelings of guilt and shame transformed the legal
liability of ritual into a moral category. To default on the ritually
taken obligation was subject to social disapprobation, the response
of which was internalized as an acutely negative emotional sensa-
tion. The rigid governance of the legal frame controlling through

70
The modern English version is after Told, ed., Guy of Warwick, 102. The Anglo-
Norman original specifies that the Duke suffered si grand deul au ceur, see Conlon,
ed., Le Rommant de Guy de Warwik, 209. The fifteenth-century version uses a thor-
oughly legal language, ‘Were we not kyste and made at oon,’ but spares the Duke
the honor approach; nevertheless, he was afflicted by ‘grete dole.’ See Zupitza, ed.,
The Romance of Guy of Warwick, 156. The French version does not mention tears,
but the rendering of duel in the grip of which the Duke finds himself is impressive
enough, see Ewert, ed., Gui de Warewic, 177.
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184  

anger was replaced by the more flexible social pressure of shaming.

And yet, in this model, grief at dishonor was not an external con-
dition imposed on the individual. It was produced in the self and
resulted from the awareness of moral transgression. The transfor-
mation occurring with the incorporation of guilt and shame in grief ’s
referential field had thus an important consequence. That intense
grief could be felt justifies the actor somewhat, pointing out that he
was, after all, a moral being.
The incident in Guy of Warwick relays the ways in which the dis-
course on moral grief represented ritual as a device incorporating
the moral standards of the community into the emotional world of
the individual. The moral agent was in the grip of structural and
legal norms. Embodied in ritual, these norms constituted a field of
internalized ‘feeling rules.’ There was no need for coercion to cre-
ate restraints to immoral action. Once the duke became aware of
the nature of his action, the norm he had interiorized triggered neg-
ative emotional pressure. The immoral agent—impersonated by the
Duke of Pavia in Guy—could not feel grief because he had not inter-
nalized the norms that constituted belonging to the group. He was
in the grip of asocial personal sentiments, which were attached to
his inner self and were managed neither by interpersonal interaction
through ritual nor by social or collective disapproval.
Second, grief was the result of emotion work constituting the pos-
itive moral act of overcoming asocial sentiments so that ritual peace
could take place. Such grief announced the actor’s moral and emo-
tional cleansing constituting the readiness to reconcile.
We have already seen in Gautier’s grief in Raoul a demonstration
of emotion work performed under peer pressure. In Eilhart of Oberge’s
Tristrant, characters willfully generated intense grief to prepare for
reconciliation. The remorseful ladies, Isolde and Brangane, lay at
each other’s feet seized by great grief [ grovssem laid ] stemming from
the realization of their misdeeds, real and imagined, until they found
mercy [gnade] in their hearts and kissed in reconciliation.71 The scene
of intense emotion work marks the full swing of an important shift
in the ritual economy of grief. From obstacle on the path of social
cooperation, as it was in the heroic world, in Elhart’s thirteenth-
century romance personally experienced grief turned into the foundation

71
Buschinger and Spiewok, eds., Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant und Isolde, 83.
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of positive social interaction. Eilhart’s language was heavily influenced

by the contemporary theological discourse on reconciliation and com-
punction. This was the core of the ennobling grief through which
the morally troubled hero attained a higher standard of ethics. The
concept was central to Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan, the proto-
type upon which Eilhart built his own work, and was a staple fea-
ture of the thirteenth-century romance. Eilhart, however, simplified
the original for his audience’s sake. For the knightly public, betray-
ing one’s loyal friend was a step with legal consequences. Forgiving
one’s lord for such an offense projected the feelings generated in rit-
ual onto the feudal covenant and derived from the premise that if
the bond stood, it stood because it was stabilized by appropriate
emotions. Negative feelings had to be overcome and expunged by
means of emotion work. Eilhart identified the sentiment generated
by the emotion work as grief, equaling his emotional technology of
peace to the norms governing feudal custom and fitting these two
into the precepts of moral theology.
In the third place, grief was employed not only to reform one’s
own emotive world, but to reach out to the victim of insult and
injury as well. Late-medieval ritual reconciliation demanded open
demonstration of grief, regardless of what was the inner emotional
state of the wrongdoer. Actual emotions did not matter, for such
grief and its social role were fully positional. Concurring with the
theory of ‘staging,’ in this model grief articulated in preparation for
the ritual kiss communicated remorse, linking the parties through the
referential frame of the moral discourse. Such grief implied pertur-
bation and distress over the act of insult and injury, but its main
function was to constitute a formal acknowledgment of guilt. This
justified the demand for restitution put forth by the wronged party.
The forgiveness of the other party alleviated that grief.
In the medieval Frisian tradition, establishing such a positional
emotional connection with the injured party was a legal require-
ment.72 It preceded the oath of reciprocal forgiveness [Gleichheitseid ],
taken by the offender to give legal shape to his or her willingness
to forgo revenge in case similar injury had been inflicted on him or
her. Before kissing the kin of the victim, the offender had to swear,

72
For the circumstances of the codification, at Upstalboom, of the Frisian law
codex of the Seven Sea provinces in 1323 see Karl Freiherr von Richthofen,
Untersuchungen über Friesische Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin, 1880), 425ff. and 480ff.
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186  

with twelve oath-helpers, that the misdeed grieved him, and would
grieve him forever.73 In a more realistic tone, in the already dis-
cussed keure of Aalst, the guilty ones had to declare that they were
‘bitterly grieving the death [of Guillaume] and will be [grieving] for-
ever, until they render satisfaction to God and to you.’ The condi-
tion of grief was to be terminated by the forgiveness of the other
party.74 Grief in this scheme was not an internal disposition; it was
a condition constructed and deconstructed in socializing. As in the
honor and shame paradigm, grief here was a positional sentiment,
but its source was different. Grief emanated from a moral template
and served a legal condition.
The keure of Aalst gives us the source of grief. It appears to be
perceived as originating in the sense of guilt felt by the wrongdoer.
More importantly, it allows us to understand the role of the ritual
kiss as the rationalized instrument of dealing with grief and the func-
tion of forgiveness. The murder induced a material and moral debt
to the community, God, and the other party. Until the debt was
repaid, the transgressors remained in a state of insecurity sustained
by the disapprobation of the authorities and the legal frame defining
murder as a wrong deed. The demonstrative guilt and grief of the
Wooters involved them in the social judgment defining the norm,
whatever its internalized form might have been. The kiss was an
extension of the involvement aiming to neutralize the negative judg-
ment both morally and socially. By virtue of being a legal device,
grief embodied the wrongdoer’s formal commitment to repay the
moral and social debt incurred through the transgression. The kiss
constituted the liability that the injured or insulted kin undertook to
accept the emotionally coached ‘satisfaction.’ The kiss thus straddled
internal affect and legal sociability in a condensed emotive hub that
defies neat definition, but which recognized the normativity and
morality of the social order as a product of the interaction between
embodied agents.
The social script within which the kiss and its supporting rites
functioned did require even more direct proof that the requisite emo-
tions really existed. It demanded emotion work, and the testimony

73
That hit him tha leth was and nu leth is and emmer mer leth bliwa scel, so lange so hine
riuchte kan bithenzia; see His, Strafrecht der Friesen, 365.
74
Want hemlieden de zelve doot bitterlike leet es, ende eeuwelic wesen zal, tot dies zij Gode
ende u daeraf genouch ghedaen zullen hebben; see Limburg-Stirum, Coutumes d’Alost, 470.
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was the shedding of tears. Whereas in most of the medieval West

there was no prescribed judicial formula as in Frisia, in reconcilia-
tory practice following the model of penance, of which more later,
the wrongdoer was expected to cry bitterly when offering the kiss of
peace to the kin of the victim. This is what Guilhem Bascul, a car-
penter of Marseille, was required to do on April 10, 1349, Good
Friday, in order to receive the pardon of the kinsmen of Guilhem
Turel, whom he had killed in a drunken mêlée.75 Bascul’s ritual pos-
ture of grief was an admission of guilt and remorse, from which the
other party’s rights stemmed, but tears went beyond what the keure
of Aalst had required. The sentiments generated in the process of
inducing tears meshed with the feelings of the injured and focused
on the deed, and in admitting the effect it had on others reconsti-
tuted the injured party’s honor.76
From the inquiry thus far, it would appear that there is little guid-
ance as to what extent and in what form the norms of reconcilia-
tion, be they social, legal, or theological, were internalized as feeling
rules. I have discussed only isolated fragments of the major discourses
within which these norms were constructed. To understand the work-
ings of ritual in the context of the social norms, two things remain
to be done. First, the normative fragments have to be reinserted into
the broad areas of intentionality that generated their referential fields.
Second, there is the problem of the efficacy of ritual as an emo-
tional device. The latter is the derivative product of the interaction
between normative discourse and actual practice. I presently turn to
the first problem.

75
Quoted after Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Common Violence: Vengeance and Inquisition
in Fourteenth-Century Marseille,’ Past & Present, 151 (May 1996), 50. For more
examples from mid-fourteenth century Marseille see also his ‘Hatred as a social
institution,’ 90–93.
76
For a discussion of remorse see Gabrielle Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions
of Self-Assessment (Oxford, 1985), 101ff.
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188

CHAPTER FIVE

DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES

By far the most visible of the discursive environments of the ritual

kiss of peace was the religious paradigm. In this cultural frame,
human existence was an intensely emotional metaphenomenon, an
extension of the love between God and humankind. The rituals of
Christian reconciliation, the main practice embodying that cosmic
mystery, were a powerful tool for moral education. Through the
mobilization of a range of sentiments, ritual played a crucial role in
the integration of the lofty values of Christian morality into the every-
day life of ordinary lay folk. The stress on positive affect in the link
between the heavenly forgiver and the earthly creature was a major
trend in the new type of spirituality developed in the high Middle
Ages. Most important in the process were, on the one hand, the
sentiments of guilt, remorse, and repentance and, on the other hand,
the sentiments of pity, mercy, and love. These normative emotions
entered the theological discourses attempting to govern the relation-
ship among humans as well. The discursive representations of the
rites of peace highlight some of the strategies by which the norms of
affective interaction were projected into practice, reaching out to the
lay faithful to structure their feelings through the embodied action of
the ritual kiss.
Implementing moral paradigms and positive emotionality into rit-
ual peace was a project that was at its beginnings when the new
millennium dawned. The few early narratives on reconciliation dat-
ing from the eleventh century eschewed interpretation of embodied
emotions. The monk of Lourdes who recorded the peace circuit of
his brethren did not employ the language of moral theology to render
his account meaningful to the reader. To him bodily language spoke
for itself, as did the concepts of retributive justice and do ut des moral-
ity. Similar was the position of Lambert of Deutz in the Life of
Heribert. Writing in the 1050s, he did not frame his account into
an overarching, emotionally oriented interpretative scheme. The pri-
mary affects of fear of God’s retribution and the wrath of His earthly
vessel were enough of a motivation to sustain the reconciliation.
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This plain talk went out of fashion in the early decades of the
twelfth century. The trend was not limited to the output of monas-
tic scriptoria. Tales of reconciliation condensed in short exempla, the
staple diet of popular preachers, wove theoretical constructs into the
texture of their sermons on peacemaking. Fashioned to suit the taste
of a diversified public, by the late twelfth century the exempla became
a very influential and wide-reaching genre, which endured until the
Reformation. So did the representations of ritual peacemaking fash-
ioned by their authors.

The Tale of the Forgiving Knight

The backbone of the inquiry that follows is the exploration of the

evolution and appropriations of a typical exemplum, the Tale of the
Forgiving Knight. The Tale was the most widespread short medieval
narrative on ritual peacemaking. Originating in the late eleventh-
century story of Giovanni Gualberto’s conversion to religious life, it
initially targeted the major issue of medieval peacemaking, the feud,
and its most likely perpetrators, the knightly class, but was gradu-
ally adjusted to address a variety of audiences.1 Its numerous ren-
ditions, not yet investigated as a corpus, combine elements of lay
and religious understanding of ritual, morality, emotions, peace, and
reconciliation, and would repay a closer scrutiny.2 The variants of
the Tale revolve around a central motif. A relative of a knight (next
of kin, son, or father) is slain by another knight. Bent on revenge
and catching his enemy by surprise, the vengeful knight raises his
hand to strike. At this the wrongdoer prostrates himself and implores
the avenger to take pity on him, for the sake of Christ. The reveng-
ing knight stays his hand, changes his mind, and reconciles with the
offender by kissing and/or embracing him. They go to church together
to thank God, and in a gesture of divine approval the crucifix bows
his head to the forgiver, or leans over to kiss and embrace him.

1
The story of Giovanni Gualberto is in AASS, vol. 3, July 12. See coll. 298–9,
and 328 for the First Life, and 349 for the Second Life.
2
For references to most variants of the Tale see Frederic C. Tubach, Index
Exemplorum. A Handbook of Medieval Tales (Helsinki, 1964), N. 1375, and the Addenda
et Corrigenda in Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Les Exempla médié-
vaux. Introduction à la recherche, suivie des tables critiques de l’Index exemplorum de Frederic C.
Tubach (Carcassone, 1992).
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190  

The goal of my inquiry is to capture the mechanisms of the Tale’s

social appropriations. I follow a twofold strategy. First, I will chart
the development of the normative accounts of the emotions encoded
in the exempla. Second, I will examine some of the points of inter-
section of the theological emotion norms and the value systems of
the lay societies they targeted. My approach is morphological rather
than chronological as I seek to highlight the modes in which the
high- and late-medieval variants of the Tale addressed the needs of
various audiences. Although there seem to be enough versions of the
Tale to attempt to do more than outlining its broad contours in time,
this is something that goes beyond the task of this enquiry.

Pity and Honor: Caesarius of Heisterbach

Composed by the end of the eleventh century as an integral part of

a larger work, Giovanni Gualberto’s first Life, the Tale soon took on a
life of its own. Deviations from the original story, in which the role of
ritual was downplayed and emotions were almost nonexistent, were
already visible in Gualberto’s second Life, an early twelfth-century work.
The Tale was already a popular account by the end of the century,
when moralists began to integrate it into the exempla tradition.
The gist of the story in practically all traditions from the early
thirteenth century on derived from Caesarius of Heisterbach. A
prolific writer, he put together its most influential version in one of
his major works, the Dialogue on Miracles. This is the first account in
the Tale’s tradition where there is an explicit mention of the kiss of
peace as the embodiment of pity presented as the primary sentiment
of reconciliation. In Caesarius’s rendition, the prostrated offender
implored the knight to take pity on him ‘for the honor of the most
holy cross.’ ‘Touched to the heart by these words,’ the injured knight
deliberated what to do, when pity suddenly overcame him, and, ‘for
the honor of the holy cross,’ he pardoned the offender and gave
him the kiss of peace. Not long thereafter, while on crusade, in the
church of the Holy Sepulchre, the image of Christ bowed to him
from the cross. This was, Caesarius intimated, a great honor.3

3
Text in Joseph Strange, ed., Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis Cisterienses Dialogus
miraculorum (Cologne, 1851, reprint Ridgewood, 1966), vol. 2, 99, N. 21; translated in
Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C.
Swinton Bland, with an Introduction by G. C. Coulton (London, 1929), 23, N. 21.
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The most significant feature of Caesarius’s short story is his assess-

ment of what constituted the motivation for the peace act and how
was it rewarded. Honor cropped up continuously in his account.
Caesarius evidently acknowledged it as the central preoccupation of
his readers. To accommodate their value system, he incorporated
honor in the hierarchy of the feelings stemming from a normative
structure which made them all hinge on pity, the sentiment encoded
in the religious paradigm of reconciliation. The construct was finely
tuned to the sentiments informing the emotional world of Caesarius’s
targeted public, the knightly class. The emotional technology con-
structed by Caesarius was not designed to confront the pressures of
secular honor. Rather, the author adopted honor as the organizational
principle of the account. Pity, the sentiment of forgiveness and the cate-
gory of paramount importance in Caesarius’s moral discourse, was
in this case a political sentiment as well. Founded on benevolence, it
presupposed the superiority of the pitying subject and the inferiority
of the object of pity. The act of pitying constructed a political hier-
archy between the reconciling parties, which made up for the imbalance
produced by the offense. Pity was not backed by respect to the pitied
object. Respect was reserved for the divine. The forgiving knight’s
pity was the recognition accorded to the position of submission
adopted by the trespasser and the religious model invoked in the
performance. The trespasser himself was granted little, if any, agency.
Caesarius’s pity was thus more of an emotional shield protecting
the injured person as he chose to forsake honor restored through
revenge and embrace the notion of honor embodied by forgiveness.
Pity was also the link between honor as a secular construct and the
threat of divine retribution awaiting the avenger at the end of his
days. The sentimental palette of the encounter elevated the knight
above the trespasser. It legitimized the incorporation of the emo-
tional response of pity into the normative scheme identified with the
demands of the knightly code of conduct. Once this had been achieved,
the ritual kiss entered the scene to fulfill the double task of legal rec-
onciliation and identification with the divine on which the link estab-
lished by pity depended.4

4
See for example a thirteenth-century Spanish rendition of the exemplum in El
Libro de los Examplos, in Pascual de Gayangos, ed., Biblioteca de autores espanoles desde
la formacion del lenguaje hasta nuestros dias. Escritores en prosa anteriores al siglo XV (Madrid,
1952), 453, N. 23.
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192  

Pity and the Law: Peter Idley and John Mirk

Molded to serve the taste of a specific audience while preserving its

value as a theological virtue linking the ritual act of peace with the
numinous, pity appears as an ubiquitous concept capable of address-
ing diverse mindsets.
Practical law was much on the mind of Peter Idley, the knight,
royal officer, and self-styled moralist of Oxfordshire in the middle
decades of the fifteenth century. So was the late-medieval theology
of morality. In the Instructions he wrote for the edification of his son,
the section about the disastrous consequences of anger—‘wrathe’—
conjoined legality and pity in an overarching frame of guilt linking
the secular world with the law of the numinous. Idley’s account flows
smoothly between the banks of law and religion. The concepts of
offense, trespass, purchase, sentence, grace, and mercy (in legal con-
text), were matched and contrasted by devotion, contrition, bitter
sorrow of the heart, penance, pity, love, charity, absolution, and bliss.
Both offender and injured thought of their respective cases and their
relationship with each other and the divine as a judicial procedure
at the court of the Judge ‘aboue,’ after whose laws human justice
was modeled but for whom charity reigned supreme. The moment
of forgiveness came when the avenger beheld ‘this knyght praieng
so peteuslie’ and chose God’s justice through mercy over talion law
and secular justice of the customary kind.5
Legal terminology rendered the case comprehensible for Idley’s
fellow country squires, as did the emphasis on ‘noble charity,’ but
the message that was being sent out was one of cooperation and
forgiveness triggered by pity. Pity canceled the legal grudge. It was
the sentiment opening up the knight for the divine grace, capped
by the bliss that the crucifix bestowed on him with the kiss. Not
only did love win against the law. As it had been with honor for
Caesarius, for Idley law itself was subsumed in Christian charity
through pity and the final act of recognition embodied in the kiss
of the deity.
Applying a similar idea of a causal connection between human
and supernatural reconciliation, John Mirk’s influential Festial brought
up the issue of ecclesiastical protection as no less a powerful and

5
Charlotte D’Evelyn, ed., Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son (London, 1935), 166–7.
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obligating norm. Awareness of this imperative prompted Mirk’s knight

to stay his revenge on the offender whom he had followed to the
altar, naked sword in hand. The offender’s acknowledgment of his
‘trespast’ and his ‘lowly prayde of mercy for Cristys sake’ make the
avenger realize what ‘horrybull a dede’ it would be to do harm in
church. His own conscience of guilt and legal trespass awakened, for
the love of Christ he kissed the offender in forgiveness, for which
he was himself forgiven with the kiss of the crucifix.6 John Mirk
ended his Tale on a more universal note, recommending that ‘ ∏us
shull ye foryeue oπyr for Cristis loue, and klip, and kys, and be fren-
des; and πen woll Crist clyppe and kys you, and yeue you πe joy
πat euer schall last.’ The awareness elicited in the ritual act of dedi-
tio affected the higher-level relationship with the divine and prompted
it to display and embody, in its turn, the sentiments that structured
the relationships between men in the ritual kiss.

Pity and Do ut Des Morality: Jacob’s Well

Pity was considered both a gift from the divine, which shared with
humans one of its major faculties, the capacity to forgive, and a sen-
timent generated in the individual when proper ritual conduct set
the stage in a way conducive to reconciliation. The noble classes
were taught to adopt it to address their central preoccupations with
honor, hierarchy, loyalty, and legality through the matrix of the the-
ological scheme. For less sophisticated audiences it sufficed to lay
out a simple scenario in which pity represented the link between the
erring humankind and the all-forgiving God, and was the condition
which brought about the absolution of one’s sins.
The anonymous author of Jacob’s Well, a fifteenth-century English
moral treatise, staked his theology of reconciliation exclusively on rit-
ually induced pity as the point of intersection between two basic
relationships, between Christ and man, on the one hand, and man
and man, on the other hand. Asked to forgive for the love of Christ,
the avenging knight was ‘steryd to mercy, & in πat mercy sprang πe
watyr of grace, πat is, πe gifte of pyte.’ In that pity and mercy he

6
Theodor Erbe, ed., Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus ( John
Mirk) (London, 1905), 123–4.
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194  

lifted the offender from the ground and told him that ‘for πat mercy
& for πat pyte πat Ihesu hadde in vs, I wil haue mercy & pity on
πe,’ forgiving him the death of his father and kissing him in token
of love. His pity was repaid on the following Good Friday. Leaning
over to kiss the crucifix, the crucifix ‘halsyd hym abowtyn his necke,
& seyde: πou forgyve πis knygt πi faderis deth for my loue, & kyssed
hym; πer-fore I forgeue πe alle πi synnes & kysse πe.’ ‘Lo,’ concluded
the author, ‘so do ye mercy, πat grace of pyte sprynge in you,
whereby youre synne may be forgouyn.’7

Pity, Joy, and the Social Dynamics of the Ritual Sentiments:

Guy of Warwick

The normative account on the sentiments in which pity organized

legality, honor, social ranking, and reciprocal morality with a slant
toward imitative magic embodied in ritual is captured in another
episode of Guy of Warwick, where the Tale of the Forgiving Knight fused
with the motif of the rebel noble. The scene in question is the one
in which Duke Segum reconciled with the emperor and gained for-
giveness for the murder of his nephew.
All renditions of the romance narrate how, stripping himself down
to his shirt, with a naked sword in the one hand, and an olive branch
in the other hand, the duke made his way to the church where the
emperor was to hear mass. Once there, his humble submission won
him the kiss of peace and forgiveness. There is, however, a dis-
agreement in the rendition of the observers’ reaction. The early, thir-
teenth-century versions at this point either forwent the emotions or
relayed the great joy of the barons at the humility demonstrated by
the duke.8 By contrast, the later, fifteenth-century versions portrayed
those attending as greatly pitying the duke and weeping for him.9
The switch from joy to pity and tears is not startling. The appear-
ance of tears conforms to the evolution of the Tale in all traditions.
Tears do not feature in variants before the fourteenth century; there-

7
Arthur Brandeis, ed., Jacob’s Well. An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s
Conscience (London, 1900), 252–3.
8
Ewert, ed., Gui de Warewic, 82–3.
9
Told, ed., Guy of Warwick, 65; Zupitza, ed., The Romance of Guy of Warwick, 72–3.
See also Hopkins, The Sinful Knights, 94 and note 39.
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after they are a standard occurrence.10 Also, both pity and joy have
participatory character and express the audience’s validation of the
legitimacy of reconciliatory ritual. In their essence, however, the two
sentiments betray radically different value systems. The attitude of
the earlier authors was structurally informed. They focused on the
restoration of the political relationship that sustained the social order.
The barons’ joy indicated their approval of the reconciliation as a
restoration of the peace. Joy and tears for joy were reactions of sat-
isfaction with the mending of the broken social bonds. The onlook-
ers were concerned with the restorative effects of ritual. The social
bonds and the person of the duke mattered for them as far as they
fitted the ritual actors in a prearranged political scheme. According
to the logic of relatedness that equaled hatred with the feud, joy was
the emotion term for loyalty. Ritual submission was conceived of as
an expression of the politically normative humility supporting the
distribution of power. Morality was evaluated from a political stand-
point. The duke’s humbleness legitimized the order of society. On
the contrary, the pity of the observers who wept for the duke in the
later accounts was agency-oriented. The duke was pitied, in his per-
son, for what was perceived as humiliation. The act of submission
had changed its meaning. The barons’ sentiments gave precedence
to individual worth and the collective bond—the duke was a mem-
ber of their class and had treated them with honor—over the order-
ing of the social and political systems. The duke’s ritual submission
was not perceived as manifestation of political conformism. Rather,
it was considered an infringement of his social rank and status.
The shift from joy to pity and the different thrust of the two emo-
tions link the meaning of pity in reconciliation to the transition from
humility to humiliation. Humility and the joy it produced stabilized
emotionally the early ritual contract, for they referred to an all-
including, universal social order linking society and the numinous.
Humiliation was a limited construct and the pity it generated des-
ignated the noble class as a separate moral community. The dignified
upper-class sufferer and his self-controlled humiliation provoked tears
of pity legitimizing not so much the social order as the position of
the individual actor, the respected member of a restricted social

10
One of the earliest examples is Jean Gobi’s work; see Marie-Anne Polo de
Beaulieu, ed., La Scala Coeli de Jean Gobi (Paris, 1991), 473–4, ch. 717.
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196  

group. Not only does this episode demonstrate that Adam Smith’s
theory of the moral sentiments had long roots indeed, but it also
manifests the tensions arising in the paradigmatic late-medieval inter-
pretations of the meanings of the emotions of peace and reconcili-
ation.11 With time, these tensions were to collapse the very foundation
of the dominating theological discourse. In the meantime, those con-
structing it switched to yet another register of interpretation.

Love: Robert Mannyng

The political complications of the projection of the concept of pity

into the late-medieval social theory of the peace might have escaped
some moralists, but they had a spectrum of sentiments to draw on
to make up for pity’s shortcomings. John Mirk had already induced
pity from the love of Christ; later moralists focused entirely on love.
Love guaranteed the mystic ritual union with the divine that rewarded
the forgiver, but it also eliminated the tension between forgiveness
and the implications of hierarchy in the ritual bond. It was the ideal
relation of peacemaking; moreover, it was the result of emotion work.
John Mirk’s call for love echoed through numerous versions of
the Tale in which love of Christ reigned supreme as the sentiment
of reconciliation. In such environment, honor disappeared; legality
proved more resilient but ultimately followed suit. Instead, the emo-
tional texture of the Tale was presented as supported exclusively by
love. A popular French variant, preserved in numerous collections
of exempla, said only that the offender requested pardon ‘for the love
of the merciful Christ’ [ pour l’amour dou debonnaire Jesucrist].12 The Tale
in the widely copied compendium of the French Dominican Stephen
of Bourbon stressed that the forgiver was ‘moved by piety.’13 Even
more telling are the exempla that used Caesarius’s model but substi-
tuted love for honor as the prime mover of action. The Anglo-
Norman Manuel des Pechiez of William of Wadington, the Liber

11
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. I. Macfie
(1759, reprint, Indianopolis, 1982), 10–13, 306–14.
12
See one of the most widely represented versions in Gérard Blangez, ed., Ci nous
dit. Recueil d’exemples moraux (Paris, 1986), vol. 2, 12, ch. 418.
13
A. Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues, tirés du recueil
inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIII e siècle (Paris, 1877), 433, ch. 503: ‘motus
pietate.’
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Exemplorum of an anonymous thirteenth-century English Franciscan

friar, and the Alphabet of Tales, a Middle English version of Caesarius,
all followed that tradition, substituting mercy for pity and piety and
love for honor and identifying the knight’s sudden conversion with
compunction of heart.14
From these modest beginnings, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s
Handlyng Synne, perhaps the most influential of the fourteenth-cen-
tury English collections, erected a grand narrative of affective ritual
encompassing the injured, the offender, and the divine. In this ren-
dition the offender, besieged by the revengeful knight whose father
he had slain, was aware that his misdeed was a sin and suffered
greatly at the impossibility to attend church and ask forgiveness from
God. At last, on Good Friday he set out for church, clad in a pen-
itential garb. Surprised by his enemy, he implored the avenger to
imitate Christ and forgive him, if he wanted to be forgiven himself.
The knight, hearing such a remorseful prayer, became ‘meke &
myld,’ and ‘for Ihu loue πat dere vs boghte/and for hys moder loue
so dere’ granted him peace, and ‘yn gode loue keste πat knyght.’
In this account love transcended all other considerations, includ-
ing honor, legality, and hierarchy, and elicited the reward of the
numinous. When the forgiving knight entered church ‘in gode loue
and parfyt charyte’ and kneeled down before the cross, ‘∏e crucy-
fyx πat πere was leyde/Hys arme fro πe cros vpbreyde/And clypte
πe chyld hym betwyx/And aftyr keste hym πat crucyfyx.’ The human
and the divine worlds met at the point of the kiss of peace. The rit-
ual was the gateway transcending the boundaries of the sacred and
the secular with the powerful concept of love. The parish wondered
at the great miracle that had sanctioned the peace, confirmed the
worthiness of the knight, and filled his heart with bliss. Mannyng
stressed the collective approbation by adding that the knight who
had ‘mekede hys herte so’ was indeed ‘dygne.’15
It is worth expanding on the last point. Mannyng’s attention to
social validation reflects his keen insight into the social psychology
of love as a sentiment incapable of creating a community. He seems

14
Mary Macleod Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, Early English Text Society,
vols. 126 & 127 (London, 1904–196, reprint Millwood, N.Y., 1987), 337, N. 495;
E. J. Arnould, Le Manuel des Péchés. Étude de littérature religieuse Anglo-Normande (XIII ème
siècle) (Paris, 1940), 143.
15
Idelle Sullens, ed., Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne (Binghampton, N.Y.,
1983), 97–9.
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198  

to have doubted that the act of forgiveness will be approved spon-

taneously. Love was an intimate feeling shared with the loved object
alone. Hence the need for the miracle of Christ on the crucifix, lean-
ing over to kiss the forgiver in a tangible expression of the emo-
tional bond. There are no reasons to doubt that for those to whom
the Tale was preached the two kisses were causally linked. And yet,
the feelings induced in the observers were not the same as those of
the parties to the reconciliation. People marveled, awed, and were
struck by the miracle. The sentiments of the audience were not an
extension of the affects supporting the ritual arrangement as told by
the moralists. Love to the other, embodied in the ritual kiss, mirrored
and sanctioned by the ritual kiss of the numinous, appeared as an
affect and an intimate personal experience. It could not be emotionally
parceled out and distributed to the members of the collective. Love
operated through the embodied action of ritual, but it could not
break through the boundaries of the body without mediation.
As long as the divine was directly involved—and it had to be for
ritual to work its magic—all positive affect remained centered on it.
This erected a barrier that broke off the continuity of emotive expe-
rience that was supposed to link the ritual actors to the observers
as a ‘chain of love.’ Love was lost in the transition from individual
affect to social sentiment. This jeopardized the preachers’ and moralists’
main task: to fashion a model of collective emotionality built on the
emotional economy of interpersonal interaction that they expounded
in the exempla of ritual peace. With love at the focus of the example,
there was a discrepancy between the feelings of the actors, on the
one hand, and those of the public, on the other. The dangers of
this emotive dissonance were considerable. It eroded the efficacy of
the moral lesson and allowed the observers to qualify their position
by accepting or contesting the norm.16 There was no sure grip on
the feelings induced by the Tale. The theological discourse operated
on the assumption that the message sent out would prompt emotion
work in step with what was presented as being experienced by the
ritual actors. To create a coherent emotional continuum stretching
from the individual actors to the audience, the preachers needed a
stronger affective leverage against the corroding force of discord.

16
As Dante did by pitying Paolo and Francesca, whose moral transgressions com-
pelled him to place them in Hell; see Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy (New York,
1995), 77–81.
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Embodied Hatred: Thomas of Cantimpré

To achieve this task, the body, the sensual locus of the self, was
brought to the fore. The strategy was not a new one. Fear, a pow-
erful core affect transcending individual interaction and capable of
creating emotive communities, was crucial for the relationship with
the numinous throughout the early Middle Ages. To respond to the
affective world of the high- and late-medieval centuries, it was inter-
twined with other affects and emotions.17 Teamed with disgust, fear
elicited vicariously experienced sentiments linked to the feelings that
sprung out of the interpersonal interaction and encompassed the
community in the grip of the moral norm propagated in the ser-
mons on peace. Two examples will shed light on the contextual
appropriations of this strategy and its flexibility as an approach adapt-
able to diverse audiences and situations.
In the eyes of the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré, a distinguished
moralist and prolific writer on all aspects of moral edification, the
combination of horror and disgust served the purpose admirably. In
his main work on religion and practical morality, Bonum universale de
apibus, composed c. 1258–1261, Thomas constructed a version of the
Tale designed to embattle hatred, the emotional embodiment of the
knightly feud. Under the title ‘An Example of a Terrible Punishment
of Intestinal Hate’ [Exemplum de odio intestino terribiliter punito], this
model worked through the presentation of embodied emotions.
Thomas’s feuding knight, so went the exemplum, turned down all
pleas for reconciliation, even though they were made on behalf of
the wrongdoer by no less a figure than Jacques of Vitry, who hap-
pened to be preaching the crusade in Brabant. Despairing at the
knight’s obstinacy, the preacher implored the public to pray for a
sign against the knight, who, by persevering in his hatred, had turned
against God Himself. Prayer not yet finished, the judgment fell down
on the bullheaded knight. With his eyes inverted, the knight was
trice hurled on the ground for the horror of all present. Blood and
pus streamed from his mouth. Having brought the people to tears
with this dramatic spectacle, the preacher prayed anew and lifted
the knight from the earth. Instantly healed, he ran to embrace and
kiss his former enemy, proposing reconciliation, asking for forgiveness,

17
See the forceful synthesis by Jean Delumeu, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western
Guilt Culture, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York, 1990).
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200  

crying and praising Christ. All this stirred a new commotion in the
hearts of those attending the reconciliation.18
The account makes it clear that Thomas saw hatred as the founda-
tion of conflict and the sentiment that embodied the feud. As we
have seen, this was a common notion in thirteenth-century envi-
ronments. Hatred was engendered by obstinacy in the pursuit of
revenge. In the way Thomas structured his account, the audience
was led to understand that once the reconciliatory plea was issued,
the misdeed that had initiated the feud was of no consequence.
Obstinacy was guilt, produced by the sin of hatred. Hatred was a
revolt not just against the authorities who had launched a major
campaign against private feuding, but a sin against God as well.
Private conflict rooted in hatred was therefore immoral and in need
of suppression. Supporting the secular powers’ attempts to cut off
the lifeline of the feud and tame the feelings sustaining it, the moral-
ist operated within the doctrine that God paid no less attention to
sentiments and thoughts than to actual deeds. His bid was staked
on the fearful intervention of the divine.
Yet Thomas’s horrible spectacle was not entirely dependent on
fear. He took to its limits the popular motif of painful expiation and
applied it to reinforce the emotional canvas of reconciliation. In ear-
lier traditions, those who spurned the efforts to make peace have
been thrown on the ground (as in the Life of St. Wulfstan), were turned
mute, or were immobilized until compliant (as in cases during the
Great Devotion of 1233 and the Bianchi movement in 1399).19 Cases
of forced or suspended bodily action as an efficient means to mold
asocial emotions could easily be multiplied.

18
On Thomas of Cantimpré see Anton Kaufmann, Thomas Cantimpratanus (Cologne,
1899). I quote the Bonum after George Colvener, ed., Thomae Cantipratani S. theol.
doctoris Ordinis Praedicatorum et episcopi svffraganei Cameracensis, Bonum vniversale de apibus
(Douai, 1627), 221–2, Book II, ch. 18. The only discussion of this episode known
to me is in Henry Platelle, ‘Vengeance privée et réconciliation dans l’oeuvre de
Thomas de Cantimpré,’ 275–7. Platelle does not address the issue of emotions.
19
Reginald R. Darlington, ed., The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, to which
are added the extant abridgements of this work and the miracles and translation of St. Wulfstan
(London, 1928), 39; Benedict M. Reichert, ed., Fratris Gerardi de Fracheto, O.P., Vitae
Fratrum Ordinis Predicatorum necnon Cronica Ordinis ab anno MCCIII usque ad MCCLIV
(Louvain, 1896), 226. The case is discussed in Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachers
and Politics, 158. See also Salvatore Bongi, ed., Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi Lucchese
(Rome, 1902), vol. 2, 308–9.
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Thomas, however, was not satisfied with intervention on the exter-

nals of the body. In his account, it is as if the knight’s hatred and
obstinacy were embodied in the disgusting substances emitted under
the torment of the divine punishment. Thomas made no reference
to demons or evil spirits, the standard explanation of emitted bod-
ily matter in exorcist practice. Jacques of Vitry’s exorcism and God’s
intervention were not confined to chasing out the spirits of discord,
nor did the divine action have the sole purpose of convincing the
offender to submit to the judgement from on high. The punishment
of Thomas’s knight targeted hatred alone. It revealed that hatred
was part and parcel of his body and that if one were to free him-
self from asocial sentiments, they had to be physically expelled. Hatred
was not external to the individual; it was an integral part of his
physical husk. Put in modern terms, for Thomas hatred was not just
a social institution; it was an incarnated phenomenon. Its dissipation
involved the body not only through its regimentation or through the
skin-deep management of behavioral expressions, gestures, or con-
duct. Hatred integrated the individual in a much more intimate way.
It linked the soul, corrupted by sin, to its bodily container. The
process of parting with it therefore was a thorough reformation of
the entire person, seen from a corporeal perspective. In this dis-
course ritual peace was an aesthetic counterpart to hatred. The som-
atization of the feud was matched by an equally corporeal manifestation
of the forgiveness embodied in the kiss of peace.
The advantage of such a representation of the emotions, which
captured a major facet of their thirteen-century perception, was that
the audience experienced a shock of their own. Their sentiments
were an extension of the emotion work on the ritual stage. The
observers were first seized with horror; then the knight’s tears soft-
ened their hearts. The fearful sight of the repulsive mix gushing forth
from the knight’s mouth elicited aversion to hatred, while a new tide
of tears restored the purified knight in the position of a member of
the moral community. Ritual actor and observers experienced in an
emotional lockstep, moving from horror and disgust to relief, sym-
pathy, and thankfulness. A short but impressive commentary on the
Gospels’ maxim ‘Hate sin but not the sinner,’ Thomas’s tale tar-
geted the production of emotional solidarity via a graphic account
of the sentiments and the powerful sensations engendering them.
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Somatic Compassion: Bernardino of Siena

Thomas’s case rested on a keen psychological insight into the nature

of the solidarity created by fear and aversion, but the strategy of
projecting incorporated images onto the audience could employ pos-
itive feelings as well. Corporeal emotionality was a beloved tool of
San Bernardino of Siena, the charismatic preacher, stern moralist,
and sworn enemy of the vendetta that was leaving bloody stains on
the fabric of the fifteenth-century Italian urban societies.20
A master of dramatic representations exiting the emotions, Bernardino
populated his sermons on reconciliation with miracles manifesting
the divine punishment meted out to those who would not forgive.
The grieving maid afflicted in the fashion of Thomas’s knight with
a nose profusely bleeding until she agreed to reconcile is but one of
the numerous occurrences in which he turned to the body and its
substances as the locus of the emotions mobilized in service of peace-
making.21 Unlike Thomas’s account, however, San Bernardino’s dis-
course was informed by late-medieval spirituality, rich with implications
of love and piety and focused on the body of Christ. Well-aware of
the emotive impact of his verbal images, Bernardino knew how to
combine stern castigation with a flow of soothing, vivid pictures
meant to inflame compassion and contrition at the same time. This
type of imagery, building a model representation of the type of bonds
between humans that he advocated was the nexus along which he
structured his message.
All of his versions of the Tale of the Forgiving Knight had as a keynote
conformity to the divine will and example, and carried the stamp
of love as a primary if indirect motivation for reconciliation. Yet
Bernardino’s image of love was quite different from that of Robert
Mannyng. It was a socially flexible concept, adaptable to the taste
of the audience and the preacher’s target. In one of Bernardino’s
Tales, for example, the offender left his castle and surrendered to
the avenger, driven by love and pity for his people who were suffering

20
The two most recent studies of Bernardino as a preacher, Franco Mormando,
The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance
Italy (Chicago, 1999), and Cynthia Policritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino
of Siena and his Audience (Washington, DC, 2000), 176–77 do not conceptualize the
role of the ritual imagery in Bernardino’s technology of peace preaching.
21
Ciro Cannarrozzi, San Bernardino da Siena, Le Prediche Volgari (Pistoia, 1934),
vol. 2, 241, sermon XLII: ‘Del Perdonare.’
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deprivations on his behalf during the siege.22 The ‘love’ of the lord
was not really an individual emotion; it stood for the reciprocal loy-
alty stabilizing the feudal bond and legitimizing the offender’s posi-
tion as an ideal ruler.
Bernardino’s most moving case expounded the familiar theme of
Christ kissing the forgiver. It is a striking example of how repre-
sentation based on embodied sentiments send out an emotional wave
encompassing forgiver and public. The preacher made Christ descend
from the crucifix, make his way through the crowd, and cling to the
forgiver, embracing and kissing him three times before returning to
his place. It was not so much the dramatic gesture of the deity that
departed from earlier models. It was Bernardino’s graphic descrip-
tion of incorporated love and suffering that made all the difference.
It was the sensation of physical proximity with the wounded, bleed-
ing, suffering, tortured body, with His pierced hands and feet, the
crown of thorns on His head, His face soiled by blood and spittle.
The scene was so vividly portrayed in the sermon that aimed at cre-
ating a collective sentiment that it caused the audience to fall on
their knees, weeping loudly in compassion and shouting ‘Mercy!’23
The figure of the forgiver disappeared in the general commotion
and individual emotions were subsumed in the collective experience
surging from the representation of embodied affect that arose in the
individual interaction. The record of the account leaves no doubt
that the emotions that Bernardino mobilized in his sermons did not
fail to seize the hearts of his audience.

Affect and Theological Norm: Compunction and Contrition

In the minds of authors like Thomas of Cantimpré and San Bernardino,

the ritual act of reconciliation was subsumed in a lofty, overarching
structure. Making peace with the neighbor was part and parcel of
making peace with the divine in an act of penitential submission
through which the sins of anger and hatred were expiated.
In these discourses, images of the cosmic model of reconciliation
and the normative feelings of guilt, sin, and compunction, initially

22
Ibidem, 242–3.
23
Ibidem, 245–6. The issue of moving crucifixes is explored by William Christian,
Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain (Princeton, N.J., 1992), but none of his examples is
as vivid as Bernardino’s.
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the domain of the religious, were projected out onto lay societies. Trans-
gressions of the peace in deed, thought, or sentiment were constructed
as a sin and called for the internal reformation of the transgressor,
visibly expressed in compunction.24 The paradigm was as old as the
ministry of Christ, but it was not adopted in the practical instru-
mentarium of preachers and moralists of the peace until the high
Middle Ages.
The manuscript tradition of Vita Heriberti exemplifies the process
by which this conceptual frame took hold of the representations of
reconciliation. Commissioning a new Life of the saint in the second
decade of the twelfth century, Abbot Markward of Deutz gave as a
reason his dissatisfaction with the ‘style’ of Lambert’s early Vita.25
Complying with the request, Rupert, the author of the new Life,
embellished Lambert’s work with two innovations. First, he height-
ened the tension of the ritual encounter by using strong adjectives
that amplified its affective dimension. Second, he incorporated rit-
ual peacemaking into the discourse of sin, repentance, compunction,
contrition, satisfaction, and absolution. The reconciliatory scene was
now couched in a heavy theological language, packed with quota-
tions from the Psalms and the liturgical Ordos.26 Lambert’s unosten-
tatious narrative suddenly acquired meanings within the universal
economy of salvation. His two-stage peacemaking, with its transition
from legal to personal reconciliation, was transformed into a moral
progression, from ‘attrition’ to a proper, ennobling ‘contrition.’
Rupert’s model was a reflection of the discursive practice adopted
as normative in the late Middle Ages. A sample of thirteenth- to
fifteenth-century variants of the Tale will illustrate this development.
The heart of the offender in Peter Idley’s story was deeply troubled
and his mind contrite as he saw the people going to ask mercy from
God on Good Friday. Seized by pious devotion, he undressed him-
self and headed for church, ‘and ther to desire penauns lowely and
absolution ffor his misdedis and outrageous offence; this was of hym-
silf the inwarde sentence.’ Thus he went, ‘with sobre chiere and
24
It is telling that around the beginning of the twelfth century we can observe
the attribution of feelings of sin and compunction to lay people in their dealings with
monastic houses. See for example a charter of St. Julian of Tours from 1129 in
L.-J. Denis, Chartes de Saint-Julien de Tours (1002–1300), (Le Mans, 1913), 96, N. 75.
25
MGH SS, vol. 4, 740. Rupert was asked to re-write Lambert’s work ut styli
rubigine subobscurum novo stylo rescribered.
26
See Ruperti Vita Heriberti in AASS, 16 March, 475ff. and Tenckhoff, Das Leben
des Bischofs Meinwerk, 90–91.
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countenauns sadde,’ until surprised by his revengeful enemy.27 His

sincere contrition, as expected, induced the grace with which the
heart of the avenger was placated. ‘Have I,’ says the offender in a
variant of the Tale in a north English homily collection, ‘no lyfe bot
one.’28 In one of Jean Gobi’s stories, the murderer, clad in peni-
tential garb, suffused in tears, hands joined, fell at the feet of the
father of the slain in the church where the latter was himself doing
penance, and asked for forgiveness. Granting the request, the father
was then kissed by the crucifix.29 In Albertanus of Brescia’s Tale of
Melibeus, the offenders were gradually led to a transformation of heart
involving acknowledgment of guilt, sin, and bitter contrition with
tears and grief [dolor].30 Giovanni Sercambi related stories of mirac-
ulous peacemaking in the wake of the Bianchi movement in which
the offender, carried away by the spirit of devotion, performed gen-
uine penance of peace [ pacis iniungeretur penitentia]. The injured gladly
indulged him, and with tears the two men kissed to reconcile and
wandered about town as true friends and relatives.31
The moralizing of the emotional world of ritual and the trend to
attribute to trespasser and forgiver alike sentiments that were nor-
mative requirements of scholastic moral theology established a dis-
cursive connection with the concept of penance. In theory, the physical
and emotional labors of high- and late-medieval penance were meant
to purify the trespasser and win him, along with forgiveness and sal-
vation, reintegration into the community.32 In the ritual practice of

27
D’Evelyn, ed., Peter Idley’s Instructions, 167.
28
Gordon H. Gerould, The North-English Homily Collection. A Study of the Manuscript
Relations and of the Sources of the Tales (Oxford, 1902), 84.
29
Polo de Beaulieu, ed., La Scala Coeli de Jean Gobi, 473–4, ch. 717.
30
Sundby, ed., Liber consolationis et consilii, 113–4.
31
Bongi, ed., Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, 306.
32
That penance was the framework of peacemaking is a commonplace in schol-
arly discourse; yet there are few works examining the issue in any depth. Two of
those that do bear closely on my subject are Henri Platelle, ‘La violence et ses
remèdes,’ 139ff. and Jean-Marie Moeglin, ‘Pénitence publique et amende honorable
au Moyen Age,’ Revue Historique, 604 (October-December 1997), 225–69. The basic
work belongs to Cyril Vogel, Le pécheur et la pénitence au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1969). See
also Jean-Charles Payen, Le motif de repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (des orig-
ines a 1230) (Geneva, 1967), 1–80; Paul Anciaux, La théologie du sacrement de pénitence
au XII e siècle (Louvain, 1949). An old but useful inquiry from a linguistic point of
view is Leo Charles Yedlicka, Expressions of the Linguistic Area of Repentance and Remorse
in Old French (Diss., Washington, DC, 1945). Some medieval treatises on penance
that bear on the issue of social reconciliation are collected in John T. McNeill and
Helena M. Gamer, eds., Medieval Handbooks of Penance. A Translation of the Principal
libri poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents (New York, 1938) and Jean
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secular reconciliation, those who were in control of peacemaking had

considerations only remotely relevant to moral theology. The dis-
course on ritual peace reflected a specter of social concerns that
made the penance of peace a living social joint.
In meshing the emotionality of penance with the emotive vest-
ments of social contestation, the language of penance in the twelfth-
century discourse on reconciliation addressed a major development
of high medieval morality. Its central element was the expansion of
the field of individual agency. Rather than obeying the dictate of
external authority, the ritual actors were now represented as sub-
jected to the internalized regulation of moral norms. Ritual peace
presented them with opportunities to exercise that agency by apply-
ing consciously and deliberately the option of undergoing the emo-
tion work of penance. Accepting the norms of penance was a testimony
that the concept of peace was sustained by more than the reactive
response to the pressures of external authorities. Through the emo-
tion work embodied in ritual, a major tool of peacemaking, the
empirical and universal affect of fear of the divine, was socialized
into the Western Christian emotion of guilt as an active force moti-
vating the actors’ conduct.
The moral transformation witnessed in the emotion work propa-
gated by the theological discourse was an integral component of the
transition from peace as a liability to the concept of peace as an
internalized demand and a duty in its own right. We have already
seen it enfolding in the judicial sphere where it developed in con-
cert with and as a reaction to the growing coercive powers of the
authorities. Attempting the ethical integration of Western societies
through the inculcation of interpretative schemes that depended on
internal authority in the fashion of the accounts quoted above was
a tremendously difficult task. The analyzed cases testify that high-
and late-medieval moralists and preachers seem to have realized that
the theological discourse would work better if grafted onto the con-
cept of interdependence of external and internal authorities, that is,
as a structure bridging over a number of meaning-producing fields.33

Pierre Renard, ed., Trois sommes de pénitence de la premiere moitié du XIII e siècle. La
Summa Magistri Conradi; Le sommes Quia non pigris et Decime dande sunt, 2 vols.
(Louvain-sur-Neuve, 1991). Recently there has been a major contribution from a
social point of view, Mansfield’s The Humiliation of Sinners.
33
I use the conceptual frame of Agnes Heller, ‘The Power of Shame,’ in The
Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective (London, 1985), 1–56.
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It stands to reason, therefore, that in the theological discourse the

primary affects were not so much obliterated as subtly integrated
within the interpretative frame commanded by the theological emo-
tions. An emotive hierarchy developed within which the affects lost
their status of immediate movers of action and mediated it only
through the generation of theologically controlled emotions. The
recognition of external norms was now being presented as the choice
of the moral agent and his or her emotive transformation was of
paramount importance. If turned into practice, the theological emo-
tions could be an effective means for combating the enduring aso-
cial emotions of discord, enmity, and feud. As we have seen, moralists
and legal theorists were aware that hatred, insult, and injury could
be put aside but not easily dissipated or forgotten. The public penance
of peace and the honorable amends were two embodied strategies
deemed capable of triggering the process. Through them the ritual
actors not only acknowledged the validity of the external norm. The
ritual peacemaking indicated that they were in its grip and were act-
ing with integrity. The ritual act was a means to an end, however,
and the social conditions in which the theological discourse func-
tioned allowed for a range of appropriations. Two of the contexts
in which the latter occurred are worth considering in more detail.
The events on the eve of the battle of Montaperti, September 4,
1260, in which the Sienese Ghibellines routed the Guelfs of Florence
and their allies are a fine example of the projection of the discourse
on religious morality into the practical politics of the Italian civic
communities. According to one of the most extensive versions of the
story, as soon as the Sienese government rejected the humiliating
demands of the Florentine envoys, the commune staged a grandiose
ceremony of collective penance. It began with the barefoot religious
traversing the city in a procession led by Tommaso Balzetti, the
bishop of Siena. The Sienese lay folk followed suit. Attending a ser-
mon at which the bishop implored God and the Virgin to protect
the commune from its enemies, a huge crowd gathered in and around
the Duomo, shouting loudly, with piety and grief, ‘Mercy, Mercy!’
Messer Buonaguida, the leader of the Sienese military forces, undressed
to his shirt, barefoot and bareheaded, sword hanging from his neck,
fell at the feet of the bishop in an act of collective penance by proxy.
Balzetti elevated him, kissed him on the mouth, and led him to the
church, where they prostrated themselves with bitter tears, com-
mending the city to the Virgin. The bishop then arose and before
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leading the people to a new procession implored the citizenry ‘to

embrace and forgive all injuries, confess and take communion, for
we are all friends and this city should be commended to godly peo-
ple only.’ The third procession completed, the people gathered anew
in the square of the Duomo and began to make peace, and ‘those
who have received a grave injury sought out their enemies to make
peace and forgive them and kiss them.’ The impression of the pub-
lic peacemaking was so captivating that the author could not help
but repeat, once again, that enemies confessed their sins and kissed
each other on the mouth.34
This moving account illustrates one of the principal ways in which
the theological sentiments of the individual penance of peace and the
involvement of the deity invoked through them were inserted in the
discursive governance of communal politics. Three public processions,
penitential garbs, purifying sermons, prayer, ritual prostration and
absolution through the kiss of peace, loud cries for mercy: all these
rituals were performed ahead of the countless acts of individual
penance of peace undertaken by the private citizens. In the ritual
in the Duomo, Buonaguida stood before the bishop as the city before
God and received absolution, as an emanation of the collective, for
the sins of his fellow citizens. In the streets and on the squares, the
injured and insulted Sienese, prepared by sermons and processions,
forgave their enemies and dispensed with hatred and anger to emerge
clean and pure in the eyes of the Virgin. Giving up asocial senti-
ments was their penance, the price to pay for the divine protection
of their lives and body politic.
Managing individual sentiments of discord was the central part of
the grand project launched by the commune. Its penitential nature
sets it apart from the normal occasions of civic peacemaking where
the ritual act of reconciliation glossed over personal emotions, often-
times deliberately leaving them out of the arrangement for the sake
of obliterating painful memories. The pressing need for solidarity
pushed to the surface individual emotion work as the only way to
ensure the protection of the divine and the cohesion of the commune.
As in the moralists’ schemes, dealing with feelings of discord was

34
Antonio Ceruti, ‘La battaglia di Mont’ Aperto,’ Il Propugnatore, vol. 6, part 1
(1904), 39–41; see the basic work of Cesare Paoli, ‘La battaglia di Montaperti,’
Bollettino della Società senese di Storia patria municipale, 2 (1869), 3–92, and most recently
Riccardo Marchionni, I senesi a Montaperti (Siena, 1992).
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what mattered, not the real injuries to life, limb, or honor. The dis-
ruptive sentiments of revenge were not easy to deal with; the peni-
tential frame tackled this task quite successfully. By incorporating the
discourse of penance into its program, the commune achieved the
critical task of forcing individual peacemakers into performing gen-
uine emotion work of reconciliation and through it ensured the sta-
bility and integrity of its political structure.
In the Flemish and Dutch communes of the late Middle Ages, the
fusing of the penance of peace with the ‘honorable amend’ in the
practice and representation of less exalted occasions is witnessed in
all major traditions of peacemaking. The penitential garb and the
taking of an obligation to go on pilgrimage were standard parts of
the mandatory voitval ceremony (ritual kneeling of the offender at the
feet of the injured or his kin) before receiving the kiss of peace.35 The
minute regulation of the penance of peace in urban legislation framed
it into the legal texture of civic relationships. The exemplary cases
of reconciliation recorded in the keures of the northern cities, discussed
in the previous chapter, describe the ritual of reconciliation as penance
from beginning to end.
In the world of feudal politics, too, the element of saving face
shared the stage with the hierarchical dimension of penance. The
penitential scheme of the reconciliation exalted ritual humiliation in
order to reconstitute the rank and status of the injured party, who
was in a position to dictate the terms of penance. Like the pros-
trated Bernier in Raoul, Aelis in Aliscans (and her counterpart, Alice
in Wolfram’s Willehalm), proposed to go on pilgrimage for their
mother’s sake in order to restore the injured honor of the count.
Blanchefleur herself repented of her rashness and was ready to go
in exile as a penance for her offence: ‘From all of France I rather
would be banished; I am prepared to go, if you would have me,

35
The voitval, possibly accompanied by the kiss but not necessarily so, was stan-
dard element of the reconciliation in one of the earliest, largest, and systematic col-
lections from the Low Countries, the so-called Register Guidonis of 1301–1320, see
P. W. A. Immink and A. Johanna Maris, eds., Registrum Guidonis. Het zogenaamde reg-
ister van Guy van Avesnes Vorst-Bisschop van Utrecht (1301–1317). Mit aansluitende stukken
tot 1320 (Utrecht, 1969). An example of reconciliation with the kiss, explicitly men-
tioned within the ceremony of voitval, is recorded in Antwerp’s Register vanden dachvaer-
den under April 12, 1475, see Antwerp Archief. Antwerpsch Archievenblad, 21 (1925), 1–4.
A good study of penitential pilgrimage in the region, including expiatory pilgrim-
age of peace, is Eduard Cauwenbergh, Les pèlegrinages expiatoires et judiciaires dans le
droit commun de Belgique au Moyen Age (Louvain, 1922).
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210  

naked and penniless from Louis’ palace; to sanctuary inside St.

Vincent’s abbey.’36 A late-thirteenth century manuscript of Willehalm
portrays the Queen in a penitential garb, undressed to her short
white shirt, her legs naked, rope on her neck, standing behind her
brother while he bows down to lift Alice from the ground and kiss
her.37 Penance did not allow for gender discrimination.
Where trespass on customary rights and feudal jurisdiction was
involved, penance could take extreme forms, as in the case of the
honorable amend of the royal prévôt of Château-Thierry to the bishop
of Soissons in 1411. The prévôt had put to death Jean Morneau, a
clerk who had been under the jurisdiction of the bishop. To make
his amends to the prelate, on May 9, 1411, he undressed to his
shirt, took a candle worth four livres, and made his way to the church
of Château-Thierry, where a large crowd had gathered. The corpse
of the victim was brought in. The penitent kissed it on the mouth
and loudly proclaimed that because of his avarice and in infringe-
ment of justice he had tortured Morneau and put him to death, for
which act he now asked forgiveness.38
The case is an illustration of how the appropriation of the hier-
archical dimension of the theological discourse for secular purposes
brought about a shift in the meaning of the emotions elicited in the
course of the ritual reconciliation. Humbleness was enmeshed with
humiliation; the knowledge that the latter was felt was the satisfac-
tion of the injured and the bitter chagrin of the trespasser’s friends,
as we have seen it in some of the late versions of Guy of Warwick.
In the later medieval centuries, compunction and contrition embod-
ied by ritual were no longer means to dissolve asocial emotions and
did not link to the divine. They had been thoroughly mastered by
the authorities to ensure an emotional structure matching the social
order, but in the process had lost their capacity to embody the duty
to peace or to confront contestation of that same order. If the tears
of the observers in Guy are any proof, the stability of the ritual peace
had to be staked on a different emotional economy.

36
Wienbeck et al., eds., Aliscans, 172; translation in Newth, The Song of Aliscans, 82.
37
Quoted after Heinzle, ed., Willehalm, Wolfenbütteler Handschrift, fol. 125r.
38
The case is briefly discussed in Gauvard, ‘De Grace especial,’ 745–8.
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211

CHAPTER SIX

EMOTIONS AND RITUAL EFFICACY

In the model of ritual action I outlined in the beginning of this part,

I proposed a system of management of the emotions spanning the
space between individual and society. This space was inhabited not
only by the primary asocial sentiments of anger, hatred, and grief.
The intervention of embodied ritual did not just aim at stabilizing
the emotional state achieved after emotion work had quelled these
sentiments. More often than not the ritual kiss was a efficacious prac-
tice in its own right, transforming the emotions of conflict into other
emotive forms. Bodily intervention under the pressure of the society
and the collective forcefully sublimated individual emotional experi-
ences onto a level facilitating peacemaking. In the following pages I
will address the efficacy of the ritual kiss by exploring two sets of
emotions: the self-oriented team of anxiety and catharsis and the
other-oriented feelings of disgust and respect. These two sets by no
means exhaust the applications of the ritual kiss as an efficacious
social practice. They do, however, offer a representative sample of
the role of ritual in the management of interpersonal relationships
at the points of intersection of affect and emotion, individual desires
and collective demand, and social change and structural homeostasis.

Anxiety

At first glance, anxiety may hardly seem an emotional condition

capable of contributing to the smooth and enduring outcome of the
ritual encounter. Anxiety is credited for creating a state of nervous-
ness, instability, depression, and indecision. Precisely these characteristics
turned it into a powerful agent of peacemaking. In this context anx-
iety suspended impulsive aggressive action, giving the parties a respite
during which they could search for an alternative resolution of the
conflict. Produced by the clash of contradictory claims on the ritual
actors’ personalities and often translated in the social language of
honor, the induction of anxiety succeeded in stabilizing the ritual
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arrangement of peace. Let us consider some examples of its workings.

In the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, Adam of Eynsham narrates how
in 1199, harassed by royal emissaries, the bishop decided to seek
redress of his grievances directly from the king. On his way to the
continent he stopped for a brief visit at the Exchequer and asked
the barons to refrain from action until the issue was sorted out. His
manner was friendly [amicabiliter], and the barons promised [ polli-
centes] to grant him [obtemperanter] the request, trying, all the same,
to vindicate themselves by a trick. The bishop was politely invited
to sit down to rest. Then, at the sight of the saintly man ‘sitting’ at
the king’s Exchequer the barons burst in laughter. Having frequently
denounced the institution as sinful and wicked, Hugh was caught off
guard, but managed to save face and turn the tables in his favor.
He flushed, jumped up, and at once kissed the unsuspecting barons,
declaring that the triumph would be all his if after the kiss of peace
they did his church any harm whatsoever. The kiss saved Hugh from
embarrassment and left the barons stunned. They said that ‘he
[Hugh—KP] has made it impossible for us to injure him in any
way, even by the order of the king, without its redounding greatly
to our dishonor.’ Hugh was left in peace.1
This episode highlights a few intriguing points. In the first place,
Adam’s account is strewn with technical legal terms. Second, the
barons felt free to joke with the bishop and promise him their peace
verbally, but after Hugh kissed them their hands were tied. Third,
and most important, the encounter was a highly emotionally charged
affair. Hugh was perplexed, shamed, and anxious to free himself
from the embarrassment of the unexpected gaffe. The barons’ joy
quickly changed into embarrassment and anxiety. At the juncture of
all these emotional transformations was ritual. The kiss of peace
transported anxiety from one ritual actor to another, shifting agency
in the process. Unexpected as the kiss was, it was an efficacious act
that carried its own implications by definition, inducing obligatory
relationships without the support of a situational discursive frame.
Important as these observations are for the character of the rit-
ual kiss as an extra-situational practice, Hugh’s act was a finely tuned
emotional strategy. My contention is that generating anxiety was pre-

1
Douie and Farmer, eds., Magna Vita, II, 129; see also Leyser, ‘The Angevin
Kings,’ 69.
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cisely Hugh’s intent in employing the kiss to escape embarrassment.

The kiss, a gesture which the barons could not refuse from some-
one with Hugh’s reputation of a holy man, gave rise to an obliga-
tion to keep the peace, whereas their position as royal agents, and
perhaps their personal preferences as well, demanded that action be
taken against the bishop. It is worth noting that in spite of Hugh’s
repute, the conflict was played on a secular plane. Adam did not
mention heavenly retribution. It was the thought about their worldly
honor that paralyzed the barons. Even if stressing honor masked the
fear of divine intervention, for Adam the issue was socially validated.
Creating a liability irreconcilable with positional duties, the ritual
kiss elicited anxiety. The tension was pushed to the surface through
the issue of honor, here understood as the necessity to adhere to the
ritually taken obligation.
The mechanism through which ritual operated in Adam’s short
but instructive account closely connects two of the major spheres of
ritual efficacy, legality and the emotions. Its principal components
keep appearing in high- and late-medieval reconciliation and con-
stitute a stable feature of the emotional economy of the ritual kiss.
Honor and the phenomena through which it was constructed in
ritual—such as law, power, prestige, allegiance, duties, and loyalties—
were the generic obligatory field of the kiss all the way down to the
sixteenth century. The engineering of a conflict of values in which
the hierarchy of these social factors was clarified and rearranged
in the interest of the peace was the main achievement of the ritual
kiss. The process was intensely emotional, and its success depended
heavily on inducing anxiety over honor.
Generating anxiety was a preventive action, which forced the rit-
ual actors to halt aggression and apperceive their principal motivations.
Anxiety suppressed the immediate, instinctive impulse for retributive
action. Without the intervention of the sentiment elicited by ritual,
the course of the events could be expected to have led to a violent
reaction. Anxiety sounded an ‘early warning’ of an impeding puni-
tive emotional involvement on the part of society, normally associ-
ated with shaming. Last but not least, anxiety mapped out the rules
according to which agency was distributed and appropriated.
The temporary lull of activity during which the ritual actors were
forced to suspend action and anxiously deliberate on their conduct
and priorities is beautifully captured in Silence, arguably the most
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214  

conspicuous thirteenth-century French romance built around inverted

gender roles.2 Composed around the beginning of the Hundred Years
War, the romance explores the question of whether women had the
right to inherit and, given its provenance, answers it positively. It
has been studied intensively in recent decades and is a rich source
of literary tropes on gender-related issues. It is no less valuable a
source for the uses and abuses of ritual in the later thirteenth cen-
tury. The scene relevant to this inquiry is the dramatic episode in
which Silence, disguised as a young page at the court of the king
of England, was sent to France as a messenger carrying a sealed let-
ter demanding her death sentence. The letter put the French king
in a state of emotional turmoil, in which peace and protection, honor,
shame, legality, and morality were all staked on the intense anxiety
generated by the ritual kiss.
The problem was that the king was so impressed by the beauty
and bearing of the messenger that he spontaneously embraced and
kissed Silence as soon as the ‘page’ was introduced. Then, as the
chancellor read the letter, the king was seized by a deep anguish
[ grant anguissce] that paralyzed his will. He ‘bowed his head, feeling
such grief he could not utter a word; he had never felt such pain
in his life.’ His dilemma was that he could neither turn down the
request of his ally, the king of England, nor have the messenger put
to death after he had kissed him. The kiss, so innocently and casu-
ally given in the beginning of the scene, had produced a conundrum
from which the king could not extricate himself.
As it turned out, the kiss was a formal and binding act of peace.
The king himself admitted, ‘That is the kiss of peace. I cannot undo it
or disregard it without bringing terrible dishonor upon myself . . . if
I kill the youth for him [the king of England] I will be guilty of a
terrible crime. Everyone will have reason to hate me if I betray him
[Silence—KP] now.’ The concept of betrayal was technically charged.
The king’s ally’s demand and the certainty that ‘he will always be
able to say that I am the most dishonorable man in the world because
I would not help him either as a favor or from a sense of obliga-
tion’ did not constitute such a technically binding obligation but was
no less exacting. The clash of obligations, both highly demanding
although of unequal value, not only immobilized the king, but threw

2
Sarah Roche-Mahdi, ed. and trans., Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance
(East Lansing, 1992). The episode I discuss is on pages 207–27.
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him into virtual despair. Seeing no solution, he called on his coun-

selors. He was in a quandary, he explained, for ‘one cannot kiss a
man and betray him’ [Ne doit trahir li hom qui baize], after having
given his faith with the kiss. Yet, nonetheless, he felt he was obliged
to the king of England. It is worth noting that although Silence was
not technically the king’s ‘man,’ that is, his vassal, the monarch used
the thoroughly technical, legal idiom of the feudal bond. The barons
withdrew for a discussion. After a long deliberation, their conclusion
was that the obligation of peace and protection embodied in the kiss
was to be honored above all other obligations. The king accepted
the advice. A tactful way to deal with the king of England’s request
was devised. The anxiety over the kiss saved Silence’s life.
The arguments put forth by the king’s counselors to defend the
conflicting obligations brought to light by the kiss are most intrigu-
ing. The person of the messenger was of no importance for them.
The king’s obligations did not stem from internalized, moral imper-
atives. The pressures upon him were both positional and contextual.
He would not have hesitated to put the youth to death were it not
for the kiss. Also, the king was aware that the kiss was legally bind-
ing, but this did not seem to have been his chief concern, although
it was an important one.
The main problem was that once formally given, in full sight of the
court, the kiss translated the act of personal sympathy into the lan-
guage of honor and power. The translation was straightforward, non-
negotiable, and not subject to interpretation. It triggered an automatic
social norm. The king’s power rested on the upholding of the reci-
procal, mutually obligating bonds constructing society. Addressing
the barons, the king stressed the kiss’s legal formalism, but in the
speech to himself he made clear that his major concern was the
reaction of his vassals. To put Silence to death was not just a breach
of the formal legal obligation carried by ritual. The king understood
it primarily as treason, betrayal in political context. The ritual kiss
was a component of the cultural system providing the binding inter-
pretative context on which the social hierarchy informing the position
of the king rested. The kiss embodied mutual trust and loyalty. ‘Who
would ever trust me again?’ the king asked in despair, unable to
undertake action that would undermine the very foundation of his
power. The legality of the kiss and its moral implications had mean-
ing as liabilities only as far as they represented the ruler as a trust-
worthy person commanding loyalty. He could not act if the obligation
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stemming from the cardinal virtue of loyalty to the system’s values

had been formalized as restraint. The king’s dilemma identified in
a perfect way the paradigm of contractual society and the symbolic
capital upon which it rested as the sum of the individual bonds tying
its members to one another. And yet, there was the opposite pull
of the king’s feeling of personal obligation to his friend.
The arguments of the barons addressed the king’s major concern.
The count of Blois stood for the letter of the law but above all for
the ‘friendship’ of the two kings. The king of England was his lord’s
friend, who had been shamed by Silence. ‘Friendship’ extended the
shame to the French king. Avenging the injury would wipe the shame
clean and uphold the French king’s own honor. As for the kiss, the
legal reprieve it accorded Silence was forty days, after which the
king could safely have him (actually her) executed.
The elderly count of Blois’s rigid legalism and stress on the king’s
right to act according to his personal obligations sounded the alarm for
the count of Clermont. While Blois stressed ties of reciprocity bind-
ing the rulers, gift for gift, honor for honor, and shame for shame,
Clermont spoke in terms of a social hierarchy and moral sentiments.
His system of duties, obligations, and legal bonds between men inter-
acting within a tightly knit social group differed in kind from the
bonds and freedoms prioritized by Blois. Within this ‘communicative
community,’ the symbols of relatedness were signs of its virtual exist-
ence. Clermont reduced the social meaning of ‘friendship’ to personal
preference and juxtaposed it to the proper judicial norm and its
social implications. ‘Our king has given the youth the kiss of peace,
my lords,’ he reminded his peers. ‘Even if King Evan were our father,
and even if the youth had killed our brother, we should not advise
our king to have him killed. The first duty of any subject is to safe-
guard his lord’s honor, just as it is the lord’s duty to see that he
fulfills his obligation to his men’—whatever the king’s desires. The kiss
had constituted such an obligation. The king’s honor, that is, his
position in the group, now depended on abiding by its implications.
Rebuked by the count of Nevers, who supported Blois, Clermont
was forced to explain his point further. Submitting to England’s
request would mean that his lord should sully his reputation to pre-
serve someone else’s. The obligation to England could be bought
out with money. Obliging a personal preference conferred no honor,
whereas honor lost in breaking the ritual promise could not be
retrieved. Royal ‘friendship’ was based on personal favors and mate-
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rial rewards exchanged between kings as individuals, not as persons

through their social roles of rulers. It was legally and morally bind-
ing on an individual level, but it was not a reason of state. The king
of England was no liege lord of the king of France and would there-
fore not incur shame as his part of the responsibility for the vile act
of murdering Silence. It was all about the French king’s decision,
and it was immoral, outright ‘vile,’ to act out of one’s personal pref-
erences and disregard the formal bond that structured the commu-
nity to which the king belonged. Clermont concluded his argument
by adding that it was the barons’ sworn duty to advise the king to
spare the messenger’s life even if he had set his heart on something
else [se vostre cuers le vos conselle]. It was also the correct legal way,
since ‘one does not kill a man before all the facts are in.’ Finally,
it was the moral way to handle the affair, for ‘to consent to a vile
deed, Sire, is shameful; to reject it is honorable.’ He himself, Clermont
declared, would leave the service of the lord who asked him to ‘do
a deed for which God and man would despise me.’
Having lodged honor in formalized ritual interaction, social cohe-
sion, due process, a neat distinction between formal and informal
ties of loyalty, tangible obligations, and an acute moral sense of right
and wrong judged in the eyes of God and men, Clermont summed
up the issue troubling the king in favor of Silence. His arguments
demonstrate the extent to which the rules of formal ritual impinged
upon social cohesion and the value system of the communicative
community it organized. The anxiety that ritual had generated was
alleviated and a peaceful resolution was found, but not before expos-
ing the foundations of one’s existence as a social person. The con-
texts in which the meanings of honor and royal power were constructed
consisted of a multiplicity of facets. They drew on the contractual
features of the feudal bond, the courtly culture, a new concept of
statism, the opposition to absolutist tendencies, a new definition of
legality, and, perhaps, a measure of territorial particularism. Above
all, it drew on the same subjection of individual desires to the for-
malized rules of the collective. Any and all of these could explain
the position of a major French noble at the time and place Silence
was composed. What matters for our investigation is that these con-
siderations were structural norms and pressures constructed in for-
mal ritual interaction and that the attempt to break free from the
implications of ritual generated intense anxiety, highlighting the dimen-
sions of one’s social position.
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218  

In this mini-treatise on the links between bonds of ritual obliga-

tion, community, power, honor, and the law, anxiety operated as a
device of the peace by preventing actors from intervening without
fully apperceiving the contextual and larger social implications of
their action. Ritually elicited emotions, generated in situations over
which the characters had no control, were a roadblock to impulsive
emotive action and cleared the path to a cognitive approach to the
issues of peace and conflict.

Catharsis

On other occasions ritual is represented as a powerful means that

could lead to emotive resolution that forced actors to undergo a
purely moral catharsis. Take Itonje in Wolfram’s Parzival, whose heart
was affected profoundly by having to kiss for peace some of Gawain’s
companions. ‘My lord,’ she complained, ‘you asked me that I should
receive their kiss [of the two knights who fought with her beloved—
KP], still not forgiven [unverkorn], on my mouth. Of this my heart
is ill’ [des ist mîn herze ungesunt]. Her kiss, she made it plain, was like
Judas’s treacherous greeting. It caused all triuwe to vanish from her.3
One can argue that the images of broken heart and vanished loy-
alty reflect a deeply felt anxiety. Itonje’s hatred for the knights was
sustained by her love for Gramoflanz, a sentiment of the heart but
also the main component of triuwe. Love in Wolfram was a personal
affair but it too had wider implications. The social worth of a noble
lady rested squarely on her loyalty to her knightly hero. Dispensing
with that loyalty to fulfill the new social expectations for which
Gawain stood integrated Itonje into her class, but produced an inter-
nal conflict that could lead to destruction or suspension of her triuwe.
In the kiss that Gawain demanded, the social ethics of peace was
supported by sacred morality, but the purpose of the clash was not
only to reassert the superiority of the sacred paradigm. Peace on
Gawain’s terms had a substantial degree of self-sufficiency and inde-
pendence from the sacred. Going against the grain of morality as
postulated by divine law and kissing in the fashion of the greatest
sin helped suspend the social conflict until accommodation between

3
Lachmann and Nellman, eds., Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival, 2, 94. Translation
in Lefevere, Parzival, 169.
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the self and the moral standard of the divine was reached. The
identification with the negative image of Judas sublimated the conflict
of loyalties to the highest possible level in order to unleash emotions
attacking the very notion of triuwe organizing the self. Ritual meshed
the feelings embodying social experiences and cultural symbolism to
suspend the operation of triuwe as an integrative disposition of the
ritual agent’s habitus. The anxiety produced in the process blocked
its workings. We have already seen that in Wolfram’s portrayal of
the knightly value system the loss of triuwe had devastating consequences.
What was the purpose of the thus orchestrated conflict? I tend to
see it primarily from a functional perspective. For the ritual actor
who found herself in such a state of anxiety, there was only one
way to preserve integrity and the critically important triuwe: forgive-
ness. Wolfram’s character was explicit on that point. Itonje’s anxi-
ety was caused not because she had to kiss, but because she kissed
without reconciliation, before having forgiven. Forgiveness in the
fashion of Christ, the positive pole in the sacred dichotomy of loy-
alty and betrayal, constituted the moral cleansing through which
Itonje would have to go to alleviate the painful anxiety over her
integrity. The anxiety of the ritual peace forced her into emotion
work that would expel hatred without jeopardizing triuwe.4
In such contexts, ritually elicited anxiety is what we see on the
surface of the emotional encounter. How the individual dealt with
it remained hidden. All we can surmise is that some kind of cathar-
tic experience must have followed in the wake of anxiety to dissi-
pate it and ensure the perpetuation of the social person. Catharsis,
the emotion of cleansing, did the actual work of expunging asocial
emotions. Unlike anxiety, which we dimly perceive behind the ver-
bally articulated corporeal images, catharsis was clearly and visibly
embodied in the shedding of tears. We have already seen it in action.

Disgust and Contempt

Even though it was openly vented in tears, catharsis was a private,

inward-oriented sensation. It did not represent the emotional dimen-
sion of the perception of the rank and status of the other party.
Crucial for the working of ritual, catharsis fell outside of the range

4
On triuwe as an organizer of social integrity see Kraft, Iweins Triuwe, 57ff.
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220  

of the sentiments constituting the feeling world of the competition

for power, prestige, and public esteem. Moreover, traces of catharsis
and anxiety are emotional devices we reach to through a double filter:
the conventions of the account that has preserved them and the
functional aims of the ‘events’ in which they unfolded. The emotional
texture of the process of ordering persons and social groups in a hier-
archical environment was best reflected in disgust and respect. These
were the primary political sentiments confronted in ritual reconciliation.
Although they often have to be inferred rather than directly regis-
tered in the evidence, unlike other sentiments both have clear con-
ceptual expressions in the late-medieval period. Disgust, in particular,
being at once an embodied affect and an emotion of social hierarchy
was especially susceptible to the intervention of the ritual kiss.
One has to distinguish disgust from its close relation contempt,
although they seem to be typological equivalents. There are differences
in the manner in which the two sentiments ordered the relationships
between society and the parties to the reconciliation. It has been
argued, most forcefully by William Ian Miller, that disgust is more
structurally oriented and relates to the other person through the indi-
vidual’s perception of the larger social order. In a hierarchical com-
munity, disgust reflects the construction of social boundaries as moral
categories and their experience as corporeal realities. Disgust solidifies
social hierarchy, for as a bodily sensation permitting no compromise
it confronts social mobility with an extremely negative corporeal reac-
tion connected to the reflex of organic self-preservation. Disgust sus-
tains conflict by denying any possibility for assimilation to one’s
opponent. The body militates against this with a reaction outside of
the conscious control of the individual actor. Contempt, for its part,
seems to be more individual-oriented, less corporeal, and more sus-
ceptible to compromise. It is the moral sentiment that assigns to the
other party a lower-ranking status in reference to the individual first
and foremost. It seeks to establish and/or contest rankings regard-
less of the legitimacy with which social structure endows them. The
rise of contempt is an indicator of social shifts and an answer to
claims transcending the established order.5 This makes contempt a
dynamic phenomenon, especially useful in an inquiry into the trans-
formative function of ritual.

5
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 216ff. See
also Winfried Menninghous, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt
a. M., 1999).
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Let us ponder disgust and contempt by using as a case study the

best-known vendetta in the history of duecento Florence. On June 24,
1295, St. John’s Day, four nobles of the Velluti clan assassinated
Lippo di Simone di Mannelli to avenge the death of Ghino Velluti,
killed by a Mannelli eighteen years earlier, in September 1267, during
the reprisals following the victory of the Guelf party. The incident
caused fears that the old enmity between the Guelf and Ghibelline
families might spark a new tide of political violence. The Signoria
reacted immediately. After promptly banning the culprits, in the first
week of July the consultative arm of the commune tried to work out
a peaceful resolution between the clans. Yet the attempt at recon-
ciliation by proxy failed. Then, under pressure from the government,
on July 17 the parties convened in the church of San Pietro Scheragio,
kissed each other on the mouth, and concluded a pact of private
peace under the watchful eye of Capitano del Popolo and other high
officials. The Velluti had already paid the usual fines and personal
amends to have the ban of the commune lifted. With this the case
was officially put to rest.6
Apart from the records of the official provisions of the commune,
demanding peace, concord, and remission of all ‘hatred, enmity,
injuries, and insults,’ the main narrative source of the affair is the
Chronicle of Donato Velluti, the son of Lamberto, one of the partic-
ipants in the vendetta.7 From his account it would seem that the
emotions of conflict were the highest priority of the authorities. The
Signoria enforced ritual peace because of ‘the rancor and bad feel-
ings’ [rimasa la gozzaia loro e mal fiele] conserved by the Mannelli even
after they had promised to restrain from retaliation. Even more
revealing is Donato’s description of the parties’ sentiments after the
ritual reconciliation. The ritual kiss, he contended, had forced the
Mannelli to moderate their ‘bad feelings.’
As hostility ceased, it appeared that the ritual encounter had worked,
but with some important side effects. Donato’s father was threatened
in Genoa and feared for his life; the writer himself had to swallow
the insult of having his greeting not returned by members of the

6
The best discussion remains Isidoro Del Lungo, ‘Una vendetta in Firenze il
giorno di San Giovanni del 1295,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, 4th series, 18 (1886),
355–402, esp. 366–74.
7
Isidoro del Lungo and Guglielmo Volpi, eds., La Cronica domestica di Messer Donato
Velluti, scritta fra 1367 e il 1370, con le addizioni di Paolo Velluti, scritte fra il 1555 e il
1560 (Florence, 1914), 9–19. The provisions for the peace between the Mannelli
and the Velluti are in Del Lungo, ‘Una vendetta,’ 398–9, Appendix, section D.
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222  

Mannelli clan. What actually happened was that even after the peace
the Mannelli treated the Velluti rudely in public and openly demon-
strated their disgust with them. Donato knew the reason. Being noble
and powerful, the Mannelli were outraged that the Velluti had had
the guts to open a vendetta.8
Donato Velluti may seem hypersensitive to the feelings of the war-
ring families, but his attitude is well-founded. The parties to the
conflict and the authorities had been aware that without proper sen-
timents the peace arrangement would not stand. As Donato made
clear, the feelings of the Mannelli were not exactly fueled by grief
over the murdered Lippo. Only a certain Gamaretto appeared to
justify his animosity with the affective bond to his assassinated cousin.
The rest of the clan had a different motivation. Some even risked
the wrath of the commune and did not turn up to make peace in
person, although the contract was nonetheless binding on the whole
clan. The reasons were their feeling of superiority over the enemy
clan. The absentees were not freed from the responsibility to keep
the peace, but foregoing the ceremony was a demonstration of dis-
gust with the other, socially inferior clan, which threatened their sta-
tus, and whom they considered base upstarts. The ritual peace
confronted all these tensions and resolved them through the poten-
tial of the direct and intimate bodily interaction onto a new level.
The murder of Ghino Velluti in 1267 and the ensuing vendetta
had been over the honor of social ranking. The Mannelli had sought
to reassert their prestige in the city, severely diminished after the fall
of parte Ghibellina. Correspondingly, the assassination of Lippo eight-
een years later had been more of an insult than injury. The Mannelli
were grandi, an older, noble clan, and were rich, populous, and promi-
nent in the Oltranto. The Velluti were one of the newer mercantile
families. Commercial wealth and Guelf connections had propelled
them up the social scale. To submit to the Signoria’s order for peace
and to abide by the demand for civil social interaction thereafter
was a double challenge to the Mannelli’s status [ grandezza] in Florentine
society. The kiss of peace meant equality; equality that negated their

8
E doppo della detta pace è vero che sempre stettono grossi con noi, però che per loro grandezza
ci avevano a schifo, però che alla detta pace furono sforzati per lo Comune, ibidem, 15–19.
For contempt see also a well-informed later commentator, Juan Luis Vives, The
Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. by Carlos Morena
(Lewiston, 1990), 64–6: ‘We don’t want to hurt the people we despise but only to
deride them and to show them how despicable and insignificant they really are.’
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exalted rank by putting them on equal footing with the ‘upstart’

Velluti. Enforcing the peace and the norm of equal standing before
the law, the new political system deprived them from their superior
position. The Mannelli’s demonstration of disgust was an attempt to
maintain the social distance and reerect the boundaries around their
social territory demolished by the ritual reconciliation.
For Donato and his relatives, it was just the opposite. The achieve-
ment of social and legal equality embodied in the vendetta and the
kiss offered them the opportunity to aspire to the rank that the
Mannelli had denied them so far. Donato’s peaceful greeting was
hardly motivated by sincere desire to socialize with his uncle’s mur-
derers, just like the rude answer he received was more than a mere
transgression of the norms of elementary civility. To the Velluti, all
ways of mingling with their social superior, through vendetta or
through the kiss of peace, were acceptable. They won them respectabil-
ity and social esteem.
For the commune, which took notice of the emotions of conflict
harbored by the Mannelli, the bodily interaction of the parties was
no less crucial than the legal peace to which it gave rise. Enforcing
the ritual peace was a device to open breaches in the wall of asocial
sentiments, to break through the moral barrier of disgust that set the
parties apart along the vertical pole of social life and impeded civic
social interaction. The commune could not control men’s minds, but
it could well control their bodies and, through them, their feelings.
Its response to dissent and conflict was curt and imperative: mingle!
The legal kiss was one of the very few devices enforcing some sort
of acknowledged equality, imperfect and limited as it was in this
highly stratified society. However fleeting it might have been, it had
one great advantage: it was tangible and left memories imprinted on
the body. To the commune, the bodies of the feuding men were the
most efficient means to transcend and demolish the socially con-
structed disgust that set them apart, giving rise, in the encounter, to
feelings that sustained a new emotional economy of the social order.
The Mannelli’s disgust and the threats to the life of Lamberto Velluti
could be attributed to the urge to wipe ‘clean’ the Mannelli name
and stop the contagion of equality creeping from down below. The
legal order of the day was strong enough to prevent this from hap-
pening. The formalism in which it was clothed, the enforced kiss of
peace, was an extension of its attempt to mold social relationships
that took over where coercion left off. The kiss was a device that
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224  

sought to demolish the social sources of conflict petrified in corpo-

real disgust. The Mannelli had to console themselves with the only
means reconciliation left them: to defend their rank and status with
the sentiment of contempt.
In this context, the confrontation of disgust with ritual and the
contempt it elicited in its stead fulfilled important social functions.
A significantly weaker elicitor of violent response than disgust, con-
tempt ordered anew rather than just stabilized the social distance
between the feuding clans and did not contest the standard before
which they were equal. The ritual kiss on the demand of the com-
mune transformed disgust—the sentiment of absolute separation in
a society of men defending their status with dagger in hand—into
contempt, the sentiment of contestation among men equal before
the law. Before the law took the upper hand through the ritual rec-
onciliation, there had been disgust, resulting in hatred and urging
the annihilation of the enemy. After that, the emotive dimension of
social superiority could not be based on disgust alone. There are
reasons to believe that Donato only narrowly missed the point when
using the familiar term for disgust to denote the sentiment perse-
vering after the peace. Forced to ‘cohabit’ the Mannelli could still
protect themselves through contempt. Both hatred and contempt
meant disrespect to the ‘other,’ but reflected a different arrangement
of the relationship between social and moral order, on the one hand,
and the individual, the ‘other,’ and the authorities, on the other.
Establishing a benchmark of equality, contempt accorded to the par-
ties a measure of protection lacking in disgust. It still provided emo-
tional satisfaction for the Mannelli, who were deprived of other licit
means to defend their status, and brought in the rudimentary notion
of respect to an outside phenomenon, the commune, which engaged
both agents and structured their relationship in a new manner.

Respect

Respect appears as a moral sentiment organically connected to two

other feelings, regret and remorse, but is a phenomenon of a qual-
itatively different order.
The genealogy of respect begins with remorse. In Christian con-
text, remorse was the emotion of salvation. The focus on the misdeed
and the taking into account what people did to others made remorse
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a strongly positive moral emotion. Remorse expressed in the ritual

encounter acknowledged to the other party the wrongfulness of the
act of insult or injury and one’s complacency. Who was the other,
however, in a ritual reconciliation enacted in the context involving
self, society, and the supernatural? What made the reconciling feel
that what they did was not right just because it injured others?
In most of the cases dating from the early part of our period,
remorse was based on God-oriented guilt. God- and self-centered,
such guilt did not allow agency, hence respect, to the other party
in the ritual agreement. The discourse of love, pity, forgiveness, and
penance induced by the divine and experienced by wrongdoer and
forgiver alike supported the major thrust of the idea of remorse until
far into the fifteenth century. In this team of discourse and practice,
the concept of remorse was inextricably attached to the divine. The
human party in the reconciliation with which peace was made was
the means through which guilt was expiated and expressed openly,
for all to see, just like pilgrimage, flagellation, profuse tears, and
ascetic life testified to remorse experienced and expiated on occa-
sions other than peacemaking.
In such contexts, ritual connected the parties to the peace indi-
rectly, through the intermediary of the divine, which guaranteed and
stabilized the agreement. Furthermore, remorse was self-centered,
since both parties expected the reward or mercy of the divine.
Nonetheless, translating legally definable guilt in human interaction
and in supernatural contexts, remorse had two major functions in
peacemaking. It placated human anger and secured protection to
the wrongdoer by referring the crime to the court of the Highest
Judge, who alone had the right to licit vengeance. In ritual, remorse
demonstrated the parties’ respect to the outside agency through the
positional roles each of them adopted.
The arrival of the courtly ethos undermined the primacy of God-
oriented remorse as one of the dominant sentiments in ritual rec-
onciliation. Two developments seem important: the detachment of
remorse from the divine, and the appearance of regret. While the
apperception of the offense remained deed-oriented, these were
significant shifts.
The reorientation of the emotional economy of reconciliation to
the human other was the central issue. Neither Count William’s for-
giveness nor Blanchefleur’s repentance in Aliscans’ episode in which
the queen only narrowly escaped with her life referred to the divine.
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226  

After his anger cooled down, the count’s feelings about his angry
outburst were mixed. He sought to explain away his anger, and was
ready to make amends. In spite of the strong wording [ forment me
poise, ke vos ai laidengie], the author’s remark that ‘this is the way to
deal with arrogance!’ suggests that he did not expect the readers to
think of the character as remorseful. Count William was represented
as someone who acted in the right way. On the premise that it is
impossible to feel remorse and yet believe that one was right to act
as one did, the count’s feelings can be characterized as regret. The
queen’s response was also quite cautious. ‘My lord,’ she said, ‘I am
not angry at it/ Nor was there shame or baseness in your action/
You’re my brother/ I too repent the rashness/ Of any word of mine
that earned your malice.’ If there had been any shadow of remorse
in William’s apology, the negation of injury reinforced the meaning
of the count’s repentance as regret.
In Aliscans the courtly norm was not yet fully developed, but sim-
ilar concerns informed the sentiments of Erec and Guivreiz in Hartman
von Aue’s courtly classic Erec. The two heroes fought each other in
a chance encounter that did not give them the opportunity to
announce their identity. Luckily, Guivreiz recognized his friend just
before plunging the dagger in his throat, and the combat ended with
the kiss of triuwe that renewed their peace and friendship. Realizing
how close he had been to making a fatal mistake, Guivreiz was
seized by a feeling that can be characterized as remorse [riuwe].
When he spoke about it, however, Erec hastily answered, ‘Say no
more and don’t be concerned about it. You didn’t treat me wrongly’
[ir enhabet an mir niht missetân].9 The courtly paradigm halted the
attempt to reach out to the other with the sentiment of remorse.
Erec did not hold Guivreiz responsible for his sorry state; the norms
of the courtly ethos did not allow him to do so. The importance of
the king’s sympathy was diminished by Erec’s emphasizing his own
‘foolishness’ rather than acknowledging that there had been a wrong-
ful deed on the part of his courtly opponent. As in Aliscans, remorse
was only a potentiality, an impulse that the power of the courtly
discourse transformed into regret.
While a major departure from the religious paradigm, courtly emo-
tionality bore close resemblance to it in one important aspect. As

9
Albert Leitzmann, ed., Erec von Hartmann von Aue (Tübingen, 1967), 182; trans-
lation in Thomas, Erec by Hartmann von Aue, 110.
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with God-oriented remorse, the remorse-turned-regret embodied

respect for a structural code. It was inappropriate to admit insult or
injury if that entailed blaming the other for uncivil conduct. This
was the argument that Alice in Willehalm used to counter her uncle’s
anger; it was tantamount to a new insult to remind him of his for-
mer rage at the act of reconciliation. Detaching the sentiments of
reconciliation from the divine, the courtly ethos allowed more space
for human agency, but in it the actors remained isolated in their
perfectly correct but somewhat cool and detached feeling worlds,
without direct emotive interaction to mesh positive emotions.
Nonetheless, the transition from the divine, a relatively stable cul-
tural template during the later Middle Ages, to the more flexible
social code made by men transformed the emotional world of rec-
onciliation. A further stage in this progression was to reorient feel-
ings from the deed to human actors even though these were not
always the reconciling parties. This mode of interaction operated on
the basis of demonstration of respect to individuals in their own
right, without reference to contextual or positional factors and their
import for the parties to the reconciliation.
A case in point is the private reconciliation between two citizens
of Rome, Paluccio ‘Cole Guatarii’ and Amator Porcari, recorded by
notary Antonio Stefanelli on September 16, 1364. Paluccio and
Amator had quarreled gravely and only the intervention of intermedia-
ries prevented the bloodshed. The arbiters arranged a compromise,
on the condition that it was to be sealed by ritual reconciliation
according to the customs of the city of Rome. On the appointed
day, Amator stood accompanied by twelve friends [socii ] in the square
before the house of Buccio Romano in Trastevere (Paluccio’s neigh-
borhood). Paluccio appeared and greeted him with the following
words: ‘Amator, you’re welcome [bene si trovato]. What happened
between us did not have to happen; here I am to make my amends.
Take them as you please.’ Amator drew his sword, and with the
words ‘If it weren’t for the love I have for Lello and Pietro [the
arbiters—KP], I would have given you with this sword what you
deserve,’ struck Paluccio without drawing blood. Once this ritual
exchange was completed, the two parties kissed and agreed, within
a specified time, to arrange for the definite reconciliation to take
place as stipulated in the statutes of the city.10

10
Si non esset quod ego dimitto amore Lelli et Petri Pauli, ego darem tibi de ista spata in
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228  

The ritual encounter enacted in this scene was a complex affair

bundling together the concepts of injury, honor, revenge, satisfac-
tion, regret, and respect. Paluccio was clearly the offending party.
He made his honorable amends in his own neighborhood so that
his kith and kin could witness that he had been in the wrong. The
ritual took place in a public area, but it was a secular, not a sacred
space. Paluccio took responsibility for the act but only as far as
acknowledging that there had been a conflict, without emphasizing
all too much his own guilt—and that was that. The dry Latin of
the record cuts out much of the vivacity of the scene, but it does
not seem that Paluccio was overly remorseful. He was only willing
to go as far as restoring the balance that his misdeed had ruined.
To him, the affair had the cold, carefully calculated benefit of an
exchange of honor. The stress of his apology was on the misdeed.
There was a shadow of regret to it, but it seems disembodied and
impersonalized. In spite of the warm welcome that the notary thought
significant enough to put down in the vernacular, Paluccio’s respect
was for ritual as a legal custom. His respect forced the other side
to respect the same rules, and with them the protection they accorded
to Paluccio, who did not, indeed, depend exclusively on the benev-
olence of the injured or insulted party.
Amator, for his part, brought along his socii to witness the other
party’s admission of Amator’s superiority, deriving emotional satis-
faction and symbolic capital from the ritual restoration of his honor.
The sword-blow he dealt to Paluccio was the sign of disrespect after
Paluccio’s act had undermined the public esteem due to Amator.
The blow was a humiliation, restoring the equality of their relationship
before the ritual kiss took place. The ramifications of the ritual act
went beyond the immediate situation, however. Amator’s position
was that Paluccio did not deserve respect in his own person. In word
and deed he expressed regret that he was unable to reciprocate in
kind for the insult he had received earlier.
The context in which the two counterparts of the ritual peace
enfolded necessitated respect to a human factor, which overrode the
parties’ sentiments and allowed the reconciliation to take place. The

capite talioni. Record from the archive of San Angelo in Pescheria, protocol of notary
Antonio Stefanelli, year 1364, p. 119; published by Pietro Fedele, ‘Una compo-
sizione di pace fra privati,’ Archivio della Societa romana di storia patria, 26 (1903), 470–1.
The statutes of Rome required the ritual kiss in reconciliation, see Re, Statuti della
città di Roma, 97–9.
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ceremony leveling the ground for the reconciliation was not an exclu-
sively local custom. From fragmentary data corroborating the Roman
case, it would appear that by the fourteenth century this condition
was a pan-European phenomenon. In a Frisian reconciliatory for-
mula, for example, the representative of the injured clan grabbed
the offender by the hair and put a naked sword on his neck. In
Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland, there were cases where the offender
would lay his head on the grave of the victim and the other party
would put the sword on his head.11 In Flanders, as we have seen,
the offender or his kin would present a naked sword to the injured
party. Handing over the person of the offender to the injured party
was therefore a common custom predating our period, and we have
seen it frequently employed throughout high- and late-medieval rec-
onciliation. Nothing compels us to argue that it accorded respect to
the ‘other.’ On the contrary, in the Roman case Paluccio conformed
to the postulate that respect in the ritual submission was due to the
overarching frame of custom sanctioned by the community, which
alone guaranteed his protection.
Amator, whose willingness to forgo revenge was crucial for the
reconciliation, identified a qualitatively distinct object of respect, the
arbiters Lello and Pietro. Nothing is known about the relationships
between Paluccio, Amator, and these two gentlemen. The concept
of ‘love’ [amor] as an expression of respect was, as we have seen, a
common convention of the time. I was not able to ascertain whether
it had any structural implications beyond the personal bond created
by amor. The statutes of Rome to which the instrumentum referred did
not provide special legal status to the figure of the arbiter, and the
document itself is silent about the nature of the man-to-man bonds that
warranted Amator’s obligation to the arbiters. Whatever the case, their
personal relationships were sustained by mutual respect, structural
or personal. It was this that restrained Amator from retaliation.
Apart from the reference to the arbiters, the motives behind Amator’s
decision are unclear. We will probably never know them. What is
clear is that in this case the human actors external to the encounter
were paid due respect in the reconciliation and from a functional

11
His, Strafrecht der Friesen, 366; Johannes Grim, Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer (4th edi-
tion, Leipzig, 1899), vol. 2, 307; and Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz, Ethnologische Studien
zur ersten Entwicklung der Strafe, nebst einer psychologischen Abhandlung über Grausamkeit und
Rachsucht (Groningen, 1928), vol. 1, 444ff.
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230  

perspective substituted for the deity of other accounts. Reference to

‘friends and relatives,’ and honorable persons as mediators and arbiters
were common occurrence throughout the period. Yet neither the
high medieval religious paradigm, nor the heroic ethos, nor the
courtly norm accorded them the exclusive respect that we saw in
the Roman ritual scene and which Amator’s words made explicit.
The sentiment of respect attached to the arbiters increased the
significance of human agency, but as long as the ritual encounter
focused on the misdeed, the reconciliation remained positional and
socially constructed. The factors stabilizing it were outside of the rit-
ual actors’ control and exposed them to external pressures that could
cause, and often did cause, the reversal of the peace contract. In
ritual encounters of this kind, the parties remained ontologically
‘other’ and potentially hostile. This is why additional arrangements—
above all, marriages, or the transfer of control over the case to the
public authorities—were frequently employed to stabilize the con-
tract. Genuine forgiveness, the essence of the emotional economy of
the ritual reconciliation did not thrive on such soil. All that the
pacificators could count on was the legal remission of insult and
injury. Remission restored honor but was not a satisfactory emotive
stabilizer of the peace arrangement. By the end of the period there
was a widespread awareness of the dangers of this approach. The
legal theorists felt uneasy at the practitioners’ exhortations to ‘remit’
injuries. ‘Remission,’ admitted Rainaldo Corso, in the middle of the
sixteenth century, ‘is necessitated by the requirement for equality,
and maintains that what has happened has not happened at all. But
this is a fiction, for what has been done cannot be undone.’12
The situation changed radically with the development of respect
toward the other party to the reconciliation. This shift shielded the
participants in the ritual encounter from the volatility inherent in the
dependence on external factors, contextual or social, structural or agent-
constructed, contingent or enduring. Concentrating on the individual,
it allowed for maximum efficacy of ritual in which the concept of
equality with and acceptance of the ‘other’ was embodied. This free-
dom from the contextual conditioning of the encounter came at a
price. Other-oriented respect was no longer a public concern; with its
adoption, the ritual kiss of peace faded into the sphere of the private.

12
Corso, Delle private rappacificationi, 169.
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The ritual peacemaking between two noble families of Recanati,

in the papal march of Ancona, is an excellent case in point and a
fitting end to the inquiry into ritual respect. The reconciliation took
place on July 6, 1550, in the town of Macerata, in the palace of
the papal vice-legate, Rainuzio Farnese, cardinal of San Angelo. The
record, made in the vernacular, is worth close attention for its vivid
rendition of the ritual act and the abundance of detail about the
context of the reconciliation.
The speakers and ritual actors for the parties, Lamanno and de
Antici, were surrounded by their fathers, brothers, and close kin.
The deal was mediated by the vice-legate and witnessed by some of
the highest officials in the province. The procedure began with the
principals for both sides declaring that they entered the contract on
their own free will and in full understanding of its implications. They
did not intend to benefit from it and were not manipulated or coerced
into reconciliation; nor did they reconcile by mistake or out of rev-
erence and obedience to the legate’s wish. The cardinal himself
declared that he had divested himself of all powers as a papal official
for the occasion, attended the reconciliation as a private person, and
invited the parties to speak and act in complete freedom. All these
carefully worded qualifiers were an integral part of the contract: they
saved the honor of the parties and ensured the legality of the act.
The preliminaries completed, Lorenzo de Antici, the representa-
tive of the party that began the conflict stepped forward ‘in a hum-
ble and reverent manner,’ and addressed Leonardo Lamanno, the
speaker for the opposing clan, as follows: ‘Messer Leonardo,’ he
began, ‘I acknowledge that it was a mistake and I did an evil thing;
if I had to do it again, I would not do it. Therefore I freely give
myself into you to do with me whatever pleases you.’ At this Leonardo
Lamanno responded ‘What are you talking about?’ De Antici began
anew. ‘I stand here in front of you and tell you that I acknowledge
that I have hurt you, and that I was wrong [havervi fatto torto], and
I did an evil deed, and that if I had to do it now, I won’t do it.
For this I am giving myself into you and in your hands, so that you
can do with me whatever you like.’ Messer Leonardo evidently wanted
to hear the confession one more time and asked yet again, ‘Are you
telling me that you are giving yourself into me and in my hands?’
De Antici uttered his piece for the third time. As soon as he was
finished, Leonardo Lamanno began in his turn. ‘Although your deed
is not such as to merit forgiveness,’ he said, ‘since you put yourself
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232  

in my hands, by your own free will, I forgive you freely, remit all
injuries, and take you for a relative and a brother [ parente et fratello]’.
With these words he took Lorenzo’s hand, embraced him, and kissed
him on the mouth. Then each and every one of the two parties
embraced and kissed each other on the mouth in sign of a sincere,
true, pure, and perpetual peace.13
This fascinating scene is full of reminiscences harking back to high
medieval peacemaking, but it departs from what we have encoun-
tered so far in a significant way. First, the formal shell of the recon-
ciliatory ritual followed loosely the ecclesiastical model of penitential
peace. The mediator was a person in close touch with the sacred,
a high-ranking priest who stripped himself of his public office to
retain only that faculty of his public persona that bore the inextri-
cable presence of the divine. The ceremony itself adhered to the
sequel of three confessions required at penance. The humbleness of
the supplicant was exacerbated by his having to repeat three times
the admission of guilt and his complete, unconditional surrender
in the hands of his adversary. The form of the ceremony thus bore
the features of the order and custom that the parties respected and
through which they tried to accommodate each other to the imper-
ative of peacemaking by invoking its protection. Second, while the
formal procedure of the religious peace was preserved, its contents
had been carried over into a new order. We are told little about
the physical environment of the scene, except that it took place in
the residence of the vice-legate, ‘in the chamber of the residence . . .,
overlooking the public square.’ This was a secluded, private, and
secular space, made official with the presence of a notary and wit-
nesses, and the proximity of the square. The date selected, July 6,
did not fall on any religious feast connected to peacemaking. Messer
Lorenzo approached the Lamanno party in a humble and reverent
manner, but he did not perform any ritual gesture. He spoke by
himself and for himself, and as proxy for his family but without
referring to any overarching frame, secular or sacred. The inter-
action was simplified. The encounter depended predominantly on ver-
bal exchange. The ritual moment was preserved for the culmination
of the ceremony, a position that stressed its unique meaning in the

13
Record from Archivio di stato di Macerata, fond Archivio della Curia generale della marca
di Ancona, series Paci, quoted after Dante Cecchi, ‘Sull’ istituto della pax,’ 145–7.
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act and that redefined the dimensions of its social application and
significance at the end of our period.
The truly novel element was in the contents of the verbal exchange
preceding the ritual kiss and determining its meaning. In its central
part Lorenzo de Antici and Leonardo Lamanno focused exclusively
on their own persons. Lorenzo demonstrated awareness of the other-
oriented aspect of the misdeed and the harm it had caused to the
other party. His approach was as far as one could go in reaching
out to the ‘other.’ In the manner he acknowledged the wrongfulness
of his action, he expressed sincere man-oriented remorse. The lat-
ter confirmed not only that the act in itself was evil, but that he
should not have done it in the first place and would not do it in
the future as well [se l’havesse a fare io nol farria]. The last words dis-
sociated the wrongdoer, as a person, from his misdeed. Finally, by
freely putting himself in the hands of his injured or insulted oppo-
nent, de Antici expressed confidence in his being a worthy individ-
ual and counted unreservedly on the protection awarded by Lamanno’s
equally freely bestowed benevolence. His attitude was qualified by a
sense of utmost respect to the personality of the other party.14
This type of respect was reciprocated in a thorough manner.
Leonardo Lamanno reached out to bestow to the offender the acknowl-
edgment of individual worth he had just received himself. He made
sure the arrangement about the misdeed stood: what Lorenzo had
done was outrageous, but it was something that qualified neither his
person nor his inner self. The offender’s remorse implied that he
was ontologically distinct from the evilness inherent in the offense.
The proposal was accepted, and he was accorded the personal worth
he was striving for. The expression of respect to and recognition of
such a worthy individual, fallible but capable of realizing his mis-
takes and connecting to the injured on the level of worthiness, was
finally embodied in the act of forgiveness with the kiss of peace.

14
For this kind of respect see Stephen A. Darwall, ‘Two Kinds of Respect,’
Ethics, 88 (1977), 36–49; Darwall defines it as ‘appraisal respect.’
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234

CONCLUSIONS TO PART TWO

The reconciliation of Macerata captured a momentous development

in the evolution of the emotional economy of the rites of peace that
seems to have been a prevailing practice by the end of our period.
Despite assertions to the contrary, ritual did not lose its relevance
in the resolution of interpersonal conflict. Arguing about the disap-
pearance of the ritual kiss, scholars seem to confuse its vanishing
from public record with its demise as an effective tool of the peace.
Ritual formalism and the emotions it embodied continued to play
an important role in the alleviation of grievances in the beginning
of the early modern era. The kiss of peace remained the central
emotive device of ritual peacemaking.1
The perseverance of ritual was due to a significant extent to its
emotive potential and its capability to embody the emotion work
accompanying peacemaking. This function of ritual obtained regard-
less of the strength of the legal frame and the pressure applied when
the rite was performed in public. The efficacy of ritual emotionality
throughout the period can be said to posses two dimensions, a stable
and a dynamic one.
From the first perspective, ritual reconciliation with the kiss appeared
as a way to guarantee the social agreement, minimizing the prospect
of conflict by providing for the parties’ emotional satisfaction. Smooth
progress to this outcome depended on establishing common expec-
tations about the terms of the interaction as a type of cooperative
activity, including the demand for restraint and redistribution of social
valuables, such as salvation, honor, or respect, on both sides. Unless
supporting factors were involved, these expectations were by no means
stable. Coercion in its premodern forms, from peer pressure to col-
lective enforcement of the bonds of custom and the law, to direct
intervention of the authorities, did not always fulfill the task of an

1
De Waardt, ‘Feud and Atonement in Holland and Zeeland,’ 37, argues that
by the beginning of the early modern period ritual in peacemaking had all but
disappeared. The cases from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Holland
he quotes, however, all contain ritual elements. True, ritual changed both its form
and meaning, but remained conspicuous as late as the beginning of the seventeenth
century.
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    235

efficient stabilizer of social arrangements. Even when a certain amount

of coercion was exercised, expectations were thought of as more
properly stabilized by the sentiments.
As a kind of social joint putting the diverse aspects of social life
and individual experiences together, sentiments needed to attach to
the same arrangement. They had to be generated and attuned to
mesh, in order to stabilize expectations efficiently.2 Ritual fulfilled
that task. To refer one last time to Manzoni, while in his account
audience and injured alike were overwhelmed by the natural good-
ness in their hearts, without Fra Christoforo’s trepidation and emo-
tion work to consciously generate appropriate feelings, there would
have been no reconciliation. And without ritual, which moderated
feelings to mesh, there would have been no peace.
The dynamic part of the efficacy of ritual emotionality has to do
with the nature of the feelings elicited in the ritual encounter, the
social link embodied in the sentiments managed through ritual, and
the target of the emotional economy of reconciliation. The discus-
sion of the gradual changes in all three spheres highlights a major
shift in the role of the sentiments, above all the moral emotions, in
interpersonal interaction. Throughout the period, the primary moral
authority of the medieval West, the church, consistently promoted,
independently and with the support of the secular authorities, the
policy of integrating the social emotions as dispositions of the indi-
vidual person. The ritual kiss, with its multiplicity of obligatory con-
nections, with its capacity to embody sociability, and with its affective
potential, was at the spearhead of this social project. It is only logical
that at the moment when respect for the other party in the reconcilia-
tion appears to have become the essence of the ritual action, the
ritual tool began its withdrawal from the public sphere. Its ‘privatiza-
tion,’ which is usually explained in the contexts of the civilizing pro-
cess, religious decency, and the rise of bourgeois morality, can also
be interpreted as the sign of the first, if rudimentary, success in the
accomplishment of the task of merging emotionality and morality in
the premodern individual. Once mutual respect sank into the person-
alities of the ritual actors, and the social morality determining the
valence of interpersonal conflict penetrated their affective worlds, the

2
On meshed emotions as a crucial factor for stabilizing agreements see Allan
Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. A Theory of Normative Judgement (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990), 262.
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236    

kiss switched its operation into the sphere governed by individual

dispositions. For a number of reasons that lie outside the scope of this
inquiry, the new field of operation of the kiss was now the domain
of the private.
The transformative effects of the kiss were not limited to the emo-
tional worlds of the ritual actors. With the kiss, Leonardo Lamanno
and former foes turned into fratelli et parenti. During the premodern
period, this concept had more than an empty ring to it, legally and
socially considered. It kept reappearing in ritual peacemaking with
the kiss in diverse contexts and situations. It was, after all, one of
the factors undergirding the efficacy of the ritual kiss. The ritual kiss
seems to have been able to effect a proper transformation of iden-
tity on a certain level, a crucial characteristic of the ritual interaction
and a development to which I turn in the next part.
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237

PART THREE

BUILDING IDENTITIES
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238

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239

INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE

BUILDING IDENTITIES

Atant vit une aumaire ouvrir/et une wivre fors issir

Qui jetoit une tel clarté/[con] un cierge bien enbrasé.
Tot le palais enluminoit, une si grant clarté jetoit.
Hom ne vit onques sa parelle, que la bouce ot tote vermelle,
Par mi jetoit le feu ardant. Molt par estoit hidosse et grant;
Par mi le pis plus grosse estoit/que un vaissaus d’un mui ne soit.
Les iols avoit gros et luissans/come deus esclarbocles grans.
Contreval l’aumaire descent/et vint par mi le pavement.
Quatre toisses de lonc duroit/et la keue trois neus avoit,
C’onques nus hom ne vit grinnor. Ains Dius ne fist cele color/
Qu’en li ne soit entremellee; desous sanbloit estre doree.
Vers le chevalier s’en venoit; cil se saine quant il le voit.
Apoiés estoit sor le table/et quant il vit si fait dyable/
Vers soi aproimier et venir, isnelement por soi garnir/
A misse la main a l’espee. Ancois qu’il l’eüst fors jetee,
Et la grans wivre li encline/del cief dusqu’a la poitrine:
Sanblant d’umelité li fait/et cil s’espee plus ne trait.
‘Jo ne le doi,’ fait il, ‘tocier/puis que le voi humelïer.’
La quivre adés ver lui venoit/et plus et plus s’en aproimoit,
Et cil adonc se porpensa/que s’espee adonques traira/
Por icel fier serpent ferir/que il veoit lui venir.
Et il serpens le renclina/et sanblant d’[a]misté mostra.
Il se retint, ne le trait pas; et li serpens eneslespas/
Desi es dens li est alee. Et [cil] trait del fuere l’espee;
Ferir le vaut par la potrine. La guivre autre fois le rencline,
Vers lui doucement s’umelie. Il se retint, ne le fiert mie/
Il l’esgarde, pas ne s’oublie/ne de rie[n] nule ne fercele,
Et si a molt grant [se] mervele/de la bouce qu’a si vermelle/
Tant s’enten[t] en li regarder/que d’autre part ne pot garder.
La quivre vers lui se lança/et en la bouce le baissa.
Quant l’ot baissié, si se retorne. Et li Descouneüs s’atorne,
Por li ferir a trait l’espee. Et la guivre s’est arestee,
Sanblant d’umelité li fait. Encliné l’a puis si s’en vait,
Et cil a soi son cop reti[e]nt. De molt grant francisse li vient
Que il ferir ne le valt mie/por ce que vers lui s’umelie.
Ensi s’en est la guivre alee; en l’armaire s’en est rentree/
Et l’aumaires aprés reclot.
Renaut de Bâgé, Li Biaus Descouneüs, ll. 3127–3199
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240    

A popular motif in high- and late-medieval fiction, the episode with

the kiss between the serpent-woman and the knight in Renaut de
Bâgé’s thirteenth-century romance, differs from the established pat-
tern in the genre. The encounter in the enchanted city was decisive
for the characters’ identity. The kiss that the beautiful Esmerée, here
in the guise of a hideous serpent, stole from the Fair Unknown’s
lips set the noble maiden free from the spell of her malicious suit-
ors. She regained her body and with it her social rank and status.
In spite of the continuous allegiance of her vassals she was able to
fully assume her role as a queen only after her ritual rebirth through
the kiss. As for the Fair Unknown, the kiss led to the revelation of
his name, Guinglain, and the names of his parents. The acquisition
of kin affiliation dispelled the shadow of illegitimacy from the royal
status he was destined for. The ritual act integrated the characters
through the bodily transformation of the maiden and through the
discovery of a genealogy, a place in history, and thence a distinct
personality of the knight.1
Not a faithful slave of literary authorities, Renaut might have taken
delight in playing with the genre’s conventions, but he was less free
to play with the social conventions of his day. His account was
embedded in a specific socio-cultural environment, the ritual prac-
tices of early thirteenth-century French society. For him the kiss was
primarily a rite of identity building, just as it was in a roster of rites
of transition, from baptism and vassalage to ordination, liturgy, and
royal coronation. A later version of the romance, Thomas Chestre’s

1
Renaut de Bâgé, Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Descouneüs; The Fair Unknown), ed. with
an introduction by Karen Fresco, trans. by Colleen P. Donagher (New York and
London, 1992), 184–90. For a thorough discussion of the implications of this type
of kiss according to several interpretations see Philippe Walter, Le Bel Inconnu de
Renaut de Beaujeu: Rite, mythe et roman (Paris, 1994), 267–94, and the older studies of
Walter H. Schofield, ‘Studies on Libeaus Desconus: Disenchantment by Means of a
Kiss,’ Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 4 (1895), 199–208 and Richard
Loomis, ‘The Fier Baiser,’ Studi Medievali, 17 (1941), 104–13. See also, most recently,
Beatrice Amidei, ‘Il tema del fiero bacio nel Bel Inconnu e la sua permanenza nella
tradizione canterina,’ Quaderni di Acme, 23 (1995), 9–38. Schofield identifies some 34
variants of the tale of the kiss with the monster. The traveling motif of the kiss of
the serpent-woman is systematically studied as a literary phenomenon by Emma
Frank, Der Schlangenkuss. Die Geschichte eines Erlösungsmotivs in deutscher Volksdichtung
(Leipzig, 1928), which, despite its name, covers a broad sample of Western liter-
ary and folk-tale versions. The most recent discussion of Guinglain’s identity, by
Donald Maddox, Fictions of Identity in Medieval France (Cambridge, 2000), 99–109 is
a strongly literary endeavor and despite its professed aims contributes little to the
issue as I approach it.
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Lybeaus Desconus, is perhaps the best confirmation of the travelling

motif ’s contextual dependence. Writing about two centuries later,
Thomas, or his model, rendered in a different way the original from
which both he and Renaut borrowed. The serpent’s humble coun-
tenance, the signs of respect and friendship, and the triple attempt
to kiss disappeared in Thomas’s narrative. The monster’s human
head, its instantaneous change into a naked maiden after the kiss,
and Lybeaus’s startled reaction to the outcome of the metamorpho-
sis were facets of a changed vision of ritual’s capability to enact iden-
tity transformation and the essence of identity itself.2 Renaut and
Thomas clearly had different social and cultural frames of reference.
From a modern standpoint the ritual actors in the scene with the
kiss were loci of decision making, maintaining equilibrium between
individual agency and social context. The outcome of the ritual
encounter was in part predetermined and in part a consequence of
their own choices. Continuity and change of personality in the process
of acquisition of identity complemented each other. Continuity was
supported to a significant extent by the characters’ bodies, here inte-
gral parts of their selves, and by their adherence to the prescriptions
of an external social code. The serpent mesmerized the knight with
its red mouth of a courtly lady. The rules of chivalry—do not harm
someone who shows you deference—had the knight in their grip.
Corporeality and respect, coded within the same discourse, carried
over core elements of the actors’ personalities into new identities.
Change, for its part, was a function of embodiment, too, depending
on the corporeal transformation of the maiden and the embodied
mechanism of the kiss.
There are further similarities with Renaut’s characters’ achieve-
ment of the predicament of the person as a self clad in a condition.
There are further differences from the way Chestre saw the rela-
tionship between ritual and identity building. Esmerée, aware of her
true self, restored her identity not just by reacquiring her human
body but by socializing it by means of dressing appropriately. In
Renaut’s world, the ‘social skin’ mattered. Two centuries later,
Chestre’s maid, even accounting for the shock that her nakedness
delivered to the stunned hero, did not need such trappings. She was
what she was as she was: an accomplished person defined within the

2
M. Mills, ed., Lybeaus Desconus (London, 1969), 197–99. For the date of the
English version see ibidem, 66–8.
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242    

boundaries of her physical husk. She did not need the validation of
status conferred by clothes. Clothes were attributes and not an inte-
gral part of her social person as it had been the case in Renaut’s
narrative. While Renaut’s maiden was identified through her social
skin, for Chestre social and physical skin coincided. Moreover, Chestre’s
knight felt it was socially inappropriate to ‘connect’ to another indi-
vidual by catching a glimpse of the maid’s naked body. Renaut’s
knight, in the grip of other types of social convention, easily let him-
self get involved in a gesture with an even more intimate character
than the bashful gaze of Chestre’s knight. Moreover, Guinglain, who
just learned who he was, had years of knightly toil ahead to realize
himself. For Renaut, therefore, much more than for Chestre, ritual
produced a new personality only in conjunction with social valida-
tion. The thirteenth-century selves who became conscious of their
place in society and history needed society’s confirmation of the
significance of that identity before they could exercise the autonomy
that went along with it and acquired their social roles. In the early
thirteenth-century version of the scene, the discovery and/or awak-
ening of the self, achieved in the ritual interaction with another self,
was only part of the acquisition of identity. Social approbation con-
ditioned its fulfillment. By the fifteenth century the grip of the social
over the self had been relaxed.
In light of these observations it is worth noting that the episode
with the kiss bears close resemblance to the rites of peace. After all,
the encounter between Guinglain and the serpent-woman was a
peacemaking scene. The sentiments of the knight, uneasiness, anxi-
ety, and fear of betrayal, and the serpent’s humility and signs of
friendship, make the typical palette of reconciliation. In terms of
attachment to the rules of the ritual encounter, the serpent’s sub-
mission [umelité ] forced the knight to spare it, for ‘one did not strike
those who humiliated themselves.’ In terms of form, before kissing,
the serpent approached the knight three times, according to the pat-
tern of penitential peace adopted in secular reconciliation. There was
a structural analogy between the kiss of the serpent-woman and the
ritual kiss of peace.
The resemblance was not coincidental. The building of identity
appears to be a common ground of the various rites in which the
kiss was involved. Part of the task of peacemaking was to recon-
struct enduring identities for the ritual actors who redesigned their
relationship in the interest of the social peace. Several dimensions
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  243

of the identity building process can be detected in the working of

the rites of peace. As an action, the rites of peace integrated self
and person into a new identity by unifying diverse substantive and
relational visions in a single practice. The multiple obligatory con-
nections borne by the kiss gathered different strands of personality
and selfhood from a variety of domains. Subjected to constant rein-
terpretation, the kiss retained a stable function as a matrix ordering
the relationships in which continuity and differentiation, the two basic
processes of identity building, were being reproduced. Last but not
least, as a representation, the kiss bridged the space between human
agency and social structures by supplying symbolic referents for the
loose network of associations within which the integration of the
social person was achieved.
The kiss of peace thus allows us a glimpse into the ritual con-
struction of identity in the context of peacemaking. The premodern
identity of peace, as I see it, was a two-tiered construct, conform-
ing to the model of inscribed and acquired features. As with most
models it was an evolving, historically contingent structure affected
by three sets of factors. It was controlled by a series of discourses
that, in their turn, were sustained by a set of society- and epoch-
specific institutions, and was constituted in the actors’ relations to
enduring and relatively stable, though not immobile, external referents.
The discourses, grounded in law, religion, courtesy, civility etc.,
charted the normative parameters within which ritual interaction was
to be understood in accordance with the dominant model of identity
construction. The institutions embodied by various ecclesiastical and
lay authorities acting from within the church, the city, and the feudal
structures anchored individual identity in time and space. They instan-
tiated the discourses and reified the symbolic referents that in ritual
action appeared as presentations and representations. The core of
the ritual production of identity, however, were the links which the
rites of peace established between individual actors and the referential
fields on which they drew for their personality. The most universal
of these was the numinous itself. Less lofty, but not less influential,
were the ritual representations of the family, the clan, and the social
collectives identified with corporate groups of different orders.
Chapter Seven comprises an exploration of the modes in which
the rites of peace constructed the links between the ritual actors and
the paradigmatic referents to which the reconciling individuals and
groups related to organize their personality. What I am searching
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244    

for is not so much diverse identifications as the logic of relatedness—

that is, the patterns of accommodation to the symbolically (re)pre-
sented social paradigms and the techniques of their ritual appropriation
by individuals and groups. The chapter is structured around three
basic mechanisms of relatedness, namely, exchange, presentation, and
representation, and examines the shifts in the sociocultural environ-
ments causing them to morph into each other. Chapter Eight focuses
on another dimension of relatedness, the relationship of the actors
to themselves. This relationship can be thought of as the ritual inte-
gration of self and person through the body. The discussion of the
phenomena of sincerity and integrity and the ritual arrangement of
the individual’s motivational structure are the central preoccupation
of this chapter. My task in Chapter Nine is to dissect the relation
to particular ‘others’ as an identity-building device. Here I attempt
to disclose some of the rules governing identification through roles,
and the construction of ‘others’ as ends in light of the ritual actors’
own aims and purposes. In the concluding section I briefly review
the findings of this part as manifestations of a set of processes in the
course of which ritual identity was constructed, defined, resolved,
and stabilized.
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245

CHAPTER SEVEN

IDENTITY FROM WITHOUT

‘Man,’ Ernst Troeltsch wrote once, ‘is an individual-in-relation-

to-God.’1 This definition contains the fundamental conception of
humankind flowing from the teaching of Christ. In many ways, it
sums up the medieval understanding of man. For the medieval mind,
man was in essence an otherworldly being facing the deity on his
or her own, stripped of the protection of corporate structures.2 While
an indispensable starting point, in reference to the subject matter of
this inquiry this postulate is somewhat reductionist. Moreover, it has
been expounded almost exclusively in terms of substance. For my
purposes the heuristic value of Troeltsch’s definition lies in the dynamic
nature of the concept, in its ‘in-relation-to’ part, on three counts.
First, it helps explain the accommodation of premodern practices
to the discursive frames within which people sought to explain iden-
tity. In the traditional view of the medieval self, the core of the per-
son was perceived as lodged in an immutable, immortal soul. The
early modern era transplanted this core onto the mind and constructed
it in a less tangible way, seeing in it the awareness of the unique
identity bounding the whole together. Both discourses leave open the
problem of the building-blocks of the individual. Meanwhile, in
accounts controlled by them the transcendental self frequently appears
as only a part of the person, the rest being constituted by the body
and the complex relationships with the outside world that supplied
the conditions of social existence.3 The links to the body and soci-
ety emphasize the importance of relatedness in both discourses. The
body was of particular importance, for, as Paul Connerton has con-
vincingly argued, it was the locus of compressed sociality sedimented

1
This is the fundamental premise of Troeltsch’s major work, Die Soziallehren der
christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, in his Gesammte Schriften, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 1922).
2
See Louis Dumont, ‘A Modified View of our Origins: the Christian Beginnings
of Modern Individualism,’ in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes,
eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge, 1996), 93–122.
3
For the concept of the medieval person and the unity of body and soul see
most recently Caroline Walker Bynum, The Ressurection of the Body in Western Christianity,
200–1336 (New York, 1995).
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246  

on it by the dominant structures of the communicative community

encompassing the individual.4
Second, there are reasons to challenge the static, substance-ori-
ented notion of the carrier of the self as a thing [res] coterminous
with the soul, the body, or the mind in medieval practice and adopt
a more complex, dynamic, and relationally oriented concept of iden-
tity. In the context of ritual, a process by definition, the notion of
the self as the hub of the bodily and socially sustained physical and
psychological relations among different temporal stages of the per-
son’s evolution deserves more attention. Hence, if the concepts of
the person’s soul, spirit, and emotive dispositions were not constants,
but products of the medium of the interacting body, the relational
perspective begins to make more sense than the medieval theorists
were inclined to allow for.5
Third, when the premoderns ‘discovered’ the self as a focal point
of identity, self-awareness was very often a mediated phenomenon,
not an inner experience arising from within.6 Even more importantly,
as we shall see, the sociality for which ritual relatedness stood was
only rarely grounded in immediate contexts and was by and large
informed by long-term, abstract, and extra-contextual structures.
Among the most influential of these was the deity to which Troeltsch’s
definition referred, but there were other, no less important referents
as well.
These considerations point to the significance of relatedness and
the ritual process as a means of mediation in the construction of
medieval identity. Not a new subject, this analytical field has been
over-examined insofar as man’s identity in relation to God is con-
cerned. It has been, however, much less explored in the context of
the ritually built linkages between man, the ‘other,’ and society, which
lay at the heart of identity construction as an ongoing process.7

4
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember.
5
For two examples see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious
Practice in the Later Middle Ages,’ in Michael Feher, Ramona Haddaff, and Nadia
Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One (New York, 1989),
160–220, and René Nelli, ‘Love’s Rewards,’ ibidem, Part Two, 218–230.
6
On the twelfth-century ‘discovery’’ of the self, rather than the ‘individual’ see
Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’ in her
Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), 82–109.
7
For a discussion of modern developments see Raymond Martin and John Barresi,
Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteen Century (London and
New York, 2000). I am discussing self-identity of course, not social identity or per-
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The Transactional Self

I would argue that from the point of view of ritual relatedness, the
self and the person were transactionally constituted through embod-
ied social relationships and through corporeal coalescence with the
spiritual force of the divine.8 The soul of the medieval Christian, as
it appeared in acts of ritual peacemaking, was not a monad but a
complex hub of interacting forces. This postulate was supported by
theory and enacted in practice. The reigning Aristotelian and post-
Aristotelian concept of the soul maintained that the latter was not
so much a ‘thing’ as a principle of relatedness, organizing the func-
tioning of ordered matter. To give but one demonstration of the
practical embodiments of this concept, in legal ritual, as we have
seen, the soul appeared as a compound of moral responsibilities and
juridical rights and obligations.
The rites of peace embodied the transaction in which the com-
pound self was constituted and enacted as a totality. They articu-
lated sameness and similarity, binding like to like, regardless of
whether the likes were annihilated in the ensuing totality or a degree
of discreteness and distinctiveness was preserved.
The ritual construction of the transactional self followed formal-
ized patterns. Since the times of Durkheim and Mauss, sociological
discourse considers the primary ones under the categories of ‘exchange’
and ‘representation.’ Later theory modified the second concept to
extract from it another variety, presentation. As Samuel Kinser put
it succinctly, from performative point of view, which was never lost
in ritual, presentation was participation, while representation was a
spectacle; presentation was deductive and categorically abstract, based
on types, while representation was rooted in the inductive and cat-
egorically concrete.9 The boundary between the main forms was

sonality, which has long been seen as defined in terms of relation. For a forceful
argument see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago,
1980), who places all emphasis on power and authority. In literary theory two works
stand out: Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth Century Romance and Maggie Kilgour,
From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, 1990).
8
The category of transactional self is analyzed by Bruce Knauft, ‘Bodily Images
in Melanesia: Cultural Substance and Natural Metaphors,’ in Feher et al., Fragments
for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, 190–280. I use the term ‘coalescing’ as
opposed to ‘attachment’ and ‘commitment,’ after Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners.
9
Samuel Kinser, ‘Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nurenberg, 1450–
1550,’ Representations, 13 (Winter 1986), 1–41.
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248  

murky and the latter two were frequently amalgamated into a sin-
gle practice, but they will serve as working concepts in the discus-
sion that follows.10

Exchange

In ritual exchange, the individual became part of the ‘other’ and lost
parts of itself, acquiring a new composite identity. The simplest model
of this type were the rites of reconciliation with the kiss of peace
enacted between religious and lay people. By the beginning of the
eleventh century, ritual peacemaking that fits the definition of exchange
appears frequently in monastic cartularies. I have already discussed
its legal formalism. The law, however, was only part of the act.
The origins of these rites were in the ritual affiliation of lay folk
with the religious communities. The practice stretched back at least
to the fifth century, at a time when monasticism began its long his-
tory in the Western tradition.11 The kiss of peace was the central
element of the ceremony of affiliation. It was performed as a rite of
initiation and transition at the time of entry into the relationship
and frequently thereafter. Throughout the Carolingian period it was
indispensable at the regular caritas ceremonies celebrated in common
by lay and religious ‘brothers’ to renew their mutual bond.12 If any-
thing, the need to repeat the rite regularly confirms the observation
that early medieval identity and the rank and status it was staked
on were thought of as a fluid and dynamic construct subject to con-
stant, unpredictable substance changes.
By the late tenth century and especially in the aftermath of the
monastic and Gregorian reforms, some of these practices were grad-
ually suppressed. Shared ritual life was restricted to areas where the
presence of laymen did not threaten the ecclesiastical control of the
sacred and the pollution caused by intimate contact with the world
did not contaminate the domain of the divine. In such conditions,
10
For the principal forms of enactment of totality see William Ramp, ‘Effervescence,
Differentiation, and Representation in The Elementary Forms,’ in N. J. Allen, W. S. F.
Pickering and W. Watts Miller, eds., On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(London and New York, 1998), 141ff.
11
Adalbert Ebner, Die klösterlichen Gebets-Verbrüderungen bis zum Ausgange des karolingi-
schen Zeitalters. Eine kirchengeschichtliche Studie (Regensburg, 1890).
12
For the shared ritual life of lay folk and monks see also Bernhard Bischoff,
‘Caritas-Lieder,’ in his Mittelalterliche Studien. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und
Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1967), vol. 2, 56–74.
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ritual affiliation with the religious corporations was transformed into

an exclusive reward for lay people. Reconciliation with the kiss, one
of the ways to enact such relationships, was most common in ter-
minating conflicts with lay folk belonging to the emerging knightly
class. The new meaning of the affiliation resulted from the devel-
opment of a new functionality of the rites of peace. They were linked
to the termination of conflicts over property rights, which prolifer-
ated as the church began its withdrawal from the system of cus-
tomary gift exchange with lay society. In return for ending a calumnia,
the knights received the ‘benefit’ of the religious society, with all the
privileges of prayer, burial, and masses for their souls it entailed.
This is a well-known practice; yet the implications of its ritual form
have not been properly explored.
A typical example from the house of St. Julian of Tours sheds
light on the major features of the transaction. Sometime in the
eleventh century, a certain Wimundus of Magny-le-Désert donated
to the monks of St. Julian the decima of Habloville, for the good of
his and his relatives’ souls [ pro anime sue parentumque remedio]. After
his death, his son Adam inherited his father’s possessions [honor].
Seduced by his greed and influenced by the advice of ‘malicious
people,’ he contested the deal and seized [saisivit] the property. The
monks held their own, having the legal title on their side. The conflict
dragged on until Adam, inspired by God, let himself be persuaded
by his amici to quit the claim and officially reinvest [resaisivit] the
monks. At the settlement, the abbey was represented by Wido, prior
of St. Julian’s house at Ferté-Macé. To him Adam made his ‘gift’
[donum] of investiture, for the salvation of his soul and the souls of
his family. Through Adam’s kiss of peace, they all received the benefit
of the religious society. For their part, the monks were to possess
the property in ‘brotherly peace.’13 The agreement was confirmed
by Adam’s wife and two sons and duly witnessed. To secure the
transaction, the monks gave Adam six solidi and added smaller
amounts for his wife and sons. Although full descriptions of that type
are rare, this seems to have been the standard procedure in eleventh
and twelfth-century resolutions of calumniae.14

13
Per pacis osculum beneficium abbacie et societatem loci sibi et suis accepit, sique decimam
a Sancto Juliano et monachis ejus jure possidendam in fraterna pace confirmavit, see Denis, ed.,
Chartes de Saint-Julien de Tours, 29–30, n. 19
14
See another typical gift case from 1136–1140 in Martine Garrigues, ed., Le pre-
mier cartulaire de l’abbaye Cistercienne de Pontigny (XII e–XIII e siècles) (Paris, 1981), 133–4,
N. 61.
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250  

What went on here under the legal cover of firmantia was more
than a simple business transaction. The ‘benefit’ of affiliation with
the monks was a special type of symbolic capital that can be best de-
scribed as a kind of grace. Lay people had no access to it on their
own nor was it doled out indiscriminately to corporate groups.
Wimundus had secured a fraction of it by virtue of his ‘gift.’ Apparently,
Adam, who might or might not have been included in the agreement,
sought to extend his grip on it. He and his eleventh- and twelfth-
centuries fellow-heirs, although entitled to some rights pertaining to
alienation of property as clan members, had limited access to the grace
that the principal benefactor obtained with his gift. The grace was the
counterpart to the legal liability taken at the moment of the trans-
action and was therefore attached to those liable to keep their end
of the agreement. The contract was a perfectly balanced total exchange
between the monastic community and the individual benefactor.
More important, in this context the transaction was an instance
of rudimentary individuation. The affiliation enacted through the rit-
ual act differentiated the clan member from the rest of his kin.15
From now on, he or she was, in a tangible sense, more of an ‘indi-
vidual-in-relation-to-God’ than his or her relations. Differentiation
was possible because the affiliation drew on the concept of individ-
ualized liability of the soul and was enacted corporeally, through the
body and the ‘gift’ as a material extension of corporeality. Although
opinions about their exact nature differed, in the high medieval reli-
gious discourse both soul and body were understood as somewhat
discrete substances capable of sustaining coherence and distinctive-
ness through time. Integration through grace acquired in ritual rein-
forced discreteness. With the enactment of the ritual obligation, the
engagement of the body and the soul represented the corporate clan
member as a partly individualized sole being that had lost some of
the corporate kin features sustaining its identity in exchange for grace.
Through the same ritual that made him or her ‘brother’ or ‘sister’
of the religious, the lay individual separated from his or her primary
blood collective.

15
On the kiss as a device of differentiation see Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Kiss Sacred
and Profane,’ 210–36.
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The Corporate Self

Given that grace concerned primarily the soul, the separation, the
loss it entailed, and the new integration into a different collective
were played out on the level of the self and were on this account
highly problematic. This statement may seem too theoretical and
Augustinian, but there is enough evidence that in the high medieval
kin group the self and the identity it perpetuated were not an indi-
vidual possession. Long under discussion, this issue has only recently
been conceptualized. In John Bossy’s expression, the self was subsumed
in the corporate whole; Caroline Bynum termed this condition of
existence ‘seeking incorporation in groups.’16 From the standpoint of
the ritual practice of peace, both statements need to be qualified. The
position they share seems to allow for a self already possessing a
degree of distinctiveness and discreteness betrayed in the capability
to ‘seek’ incorporation, that is, act. Action bounds. I would there-
fore adopt this stance with the qualification that the self was the cor-
poreal whole in action. As in the theologically constructed concept
of the tripartite and yet unified divine, the corporate human self was
thought of as present in any embodied sole ‘persona’—in full.
Although practice evidenced it at an early time, this concept was
not put forth explicitly in the poetic and theological discourses before
the end of the twelfth century. It gained wide currency around the
time of the Fourth Lateran Council. Wolfram of Eschenbach cap-
tured it perhaps best in Willehalm; his injunction could well have
defined the situation back in the eleventh century. ‘What marvels
God sends me!’ exclaimed Willehalm at recognizing, in the midst of
combat, his brother Arnalt, who drew him on the grass and reached
to kiss him. ‘Here I had to defend myself against myself, and when
I rode this joust against you, I was fighting against my very self !’
[hie muos ich mich mîn selbes wern . . . mit mir selbem ich dâ streit]. ‘That
is the truth,’ responded Arnalt, ‘My self has unwittingly waylaid my
self. . . . Our separate selves may well be reckoned one, and anyone
looking for two hearts here would find only one, for my heart was
your heart ever, and your heart must be mine.’ [mîn lîp mîn selbes
lîbe vâr . . .].17 The reference to the body (lîp —translated ‘heart’ by

16
John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution,’ 29–61, esp. 35; Bynum, ‘Did
the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’ 82–109.
17
Heinzle, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, 29; translation in Passage, The
Middle High German Poem of Willehalm by Wolfram of Eschenbach, 81.
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252  

Passage) and the ways it was engaged is telling. The gesture to end
the fight and confirm shared kin identification was to reach out and
kiss. In Willehalm as in its prototype, Aliscans, the kiss defined the
essence of the family bond as a corporeal and a metaphysical total-
ity understood as a ‘sameness’ informing the identity of individual
kin members.
Wolfram’s image was one of total identification, body and soul.
Although a poetic exaggeration, it draws our attention to the ritual
enactment of the sameness which, being coterminous with kin cor-
poreality, sustained medieval collective identity. Disentangling the
complexities of the discourses controlling the ritual life of the fam-
ily as the medieval corporation and collective of peace par exellence
goes beyond the task of this work. It suffices to mention here that
it fed, on the one hand, on ancient Roman and Germanic concepts
of peace and protection as the equivalent of blood relationship and,
on the other hand, on the notion of the Christian community of
believers as unity in Christ-as-Prince-of-Peace.18
By the beginning of our period the basic premise enabling incor-
poration was still the idea of a shared substance. The ritual kiss was
a component in a sequence activating a kind of sensory, corporeal
memory borne out by that substance. Through it the awareness of
identification with the collective was actualized. In Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s rendering of reconciliation between kin members, Bren’s
mother Tonwein tried to convince her son to restore the peace with
his brother Beli by embracing and kissing him, shedding tears and
pleading on Beli’s behalf. When that did not help, she bared her
breasts and implored him to ‘remember’ [memento fili memento] the
milk he sucked, the pains she suffered to deliver him, and the womb
in which he was conceived and from which he exited.19
The purpose of this injunction was to activate the awareness of a
shared substance lodged in the body. The baring of the breast as a
tangible reminder of filial duty is commonplace in medieval litera-

18
For early Germanic concepts of the family as a unit of peace and protection,
defining the very meaning of peace as ‘blood relationship,’ see the undeservedly
forgotten work of Horst Kusch, Caritas und Pax im religionskirchlichen Bereich des
Althochdeutschen (Diss., Leipzig, 1947), esp. 192–236. There is a lucid summary of
the most recent scholarship in the field in D. H. Green, Language and History in the
Early Germanic World (Cambridge, 1998), 12–20. The best survey is William Jervis
Jones, German Kinship Terms (750–1500) (Berlin and New York, 1990), 80–106.
19
Griscom, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, 284–6.
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ture. Geoffrey’s rendition, however, went beyond the topos. Tonwein

was trying to awaken the ‘memory’ of a corporeal identity that was
an organic feature of Bren’s self-as-whole. It went back to the time
before he had acquired consciousness and self-awareness, back to
when he was not, in any case, was not anything separate from his
mother. He was called to ‘remember’ through her body, her milk,
and the pain she suffered. The pain that gave rise to remembrance
of wholeness was a reference to corporeality as the bearer of the
identity that was supposed to be borne by Bren’s body and the mem-
ory it supported. Such identity was corporate, innate, embodied, and
not erasable. It could be obliterated or ‘forgotten’ on a cognitive
level if conscious stirring of sensory memory did not keep it awake
through the mediation of ritual, but it never left the individual.
Geoffrey’s account recalls Lambert’s version of Heribert’s and Henry
II’s reconciliation, in which the ‘blood-stained heart’ retained the
‘memory’ of the offence, and Wolfram’s ritual union in which the
body/heart carried the corporate sameness. It is intriguing to note
the connection which this interpretation of the functionality of ritual
practice had to the contemporary theory of memory. Resting on the
post-Aristotelian tradition, the latter treated memory as a physiologi-
cal problem. According to a widely shared postulate, the heart, and
by extension the body of which it was a corporeal part, could
remember just as well as the brain, by receiving external impres-
sions, ‘emotionalizing’ them, and relaying them to the brain to store
and ‘rationalize’ them.20 Against this background, ritual remember-
ing was an essential part of the communicative process that inte-
grated the individual.
Though often discussed under ‘memory,’ the phenomenon of sen-
sory integration could be more aptly described as ‘remembrance,’
rather than ‘memory’ in its modern perception. Remembrance was
intimately connected to ritual; of other differences between the two
forms of memory there will be word later. What matters at this point
is that, led by such ritually awakened ‘memories,’ Bren mitigated his
anger and reconciled with his brother through the kiss that turned
them into friends [amici ].
The building of identity through artificial ‘blood relationship’ was
inscribed in the social code governing the political uses of the kiss

20
See a short survey in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory
in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 48ff.
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254  

throughout the Middle Ages. Such was the ‘brotherhood by adop-

tion,’ which Canute, beginning to quail, proposed to Edmund Ironside
in the heat of their single combat. It was enacted by a kiss of peace.21
In Raoul de Cambrai the ritual kiss of peace turned the feuding clans
into ‘brothers’ and ‘close relatives.’22 Significantly, it was Jacques Le
Goff, who otherwise dismissed borrowings between the referential
fields of the kiss, who formulated most explicitly the theory that
blood relationships were the paradigmatic form on which the bond
of vassalage, also partly staked on the ritual kiss, was patterned.23

The Dynamics of Ritual Identity

In this referential mode the ritual exchange of peace involving the

self-as-whole entailed two major consequences. They cannot be ade-
quately explained in terms of the anthropological constants I have
been working with thus far. The products of the ritual interaction
were dynamic phenomena and stemmed from the individual’s link-
ages to the evolving social networks in which ritual operated.
First, embedded in the discourse of ‘brotherhood’ as it was, the
ritual kiss functioned as a semantic code bridging two qualitatively
different social paradigms at whose juncture the new identity was
born. The blood family was a natural body reproduced tradition-
ally. The incorporation of the family into the clan and the larger,
not exclusively blood-related, familia, did not change the referential
thrust of the ritually constructed ‘brotherhood.’ Affiliation with the
family was an act of aggregation within a traditionally stratified social
unit stable through time. The religious communities, for their part,
were artificial, functionally determined and reproduced entities. The
transition from one form to the other was consequential for the per-
son as a relational entity, even though, or perhaps because, most of
the ties with the primary group were preserved.
The central part of the period during which ritual affiliation through
exchange dominated the framework of peacemaking, the late eleventh

21
Thomas Forester, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of Henry of Huntington, comprising
the History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry II; Also,
the Acts of Stephen, King of England and Duke of Normandy (London, 1853), 196.
22
Ami et parent; frere; serons comme prochain parent; see Kay, ed. and trans., Raoul de
Cambrai, 319–21.
23
Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rites of Vassalage.’
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and the early twelfth centuries, was a time when Western societies
were switching from a traditionally stratified to a functional mode
of differentiation. In such conditions a stand-alone relationship with
legitimating external structures led to a partial identity loss. With the
adoption of functional differentiation, individual persons loosened
their links with their primary social totality. From identity’s point of
view, they became displaced. The possibilities for social actualization
became too complex for interaction to be based on identification
through a single totality that gave meaning to all relationships. The
shift forced the social person to affirm identity by interacting on an
individual level as a sole being.24 Through ritual affiliation with
another type of collective, the individual developed features of agency,
freeing themselves from the hegemony of the kin group as the ulti-
mate meaning-producing social structure. Under such circumstances,
agency generated in the ritual act of peace meant a wider scope for
acquisition of identity.
This entailed a new perception of the manner in which social con-
flict was resolved. Actualization in the traditional, family-dominated
system meant self-affirmation through the norms of kin values, rank,
and status. With the transition to a functional, multi-systems world,
self-actualization bred opposition to some of these traditional norms.
In the context of this study, the crucial social norm that came under
pressure was the blood feud or the violent reaction to any threat to
property, life, limb, or honor pertaining to the domain of the family.
Second, even within the multi-options world, the self-as-whole
could not exist as an internally integrated sole being. It lacked the
discrete identity that would allow it to enter into independent rela-
tionships with other individuals. Options there were, but choice was
limited. The limitations were imposed by the necessity to affiliate
through familiar categories in order to maintain or increase the level

24
There are some thoughts in this vein in Otto Langer, ‘TELEIA FILIA und
amicitia spiritualis,’ in Georg Wieland, ed., Aufbruch—Wandel—Erneuerung. Beitrage zur
‘Renaissance des 12. Jahrhunderts’ (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1995), 46. The theory is in
Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines
and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 5ff. and 14–17. Luhmann applies his
theoretical framework to explain the transition from traditional to modern society,
which in his case meant mostly the eighteenth century. I would suggest, in line
with Langer’s hints, that the concept is applicable whenever one deals with the dis-
solution of traditionally stratified social subsystems under the pressures of function-
ality. A conceptual overview of the period in terms close to my inquiry is R. I.
Moore, ‘Family, Community, and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform,’ in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 30 (1980), 49–70.
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256  

of predictability. A complete break, a plunge into an unfamiliar and

thence a less predictable world would have simply been too radical,
threatening the vulnerable being with destruction. The world of the
social person had to be familiar to shield the individual from the
chaos of social contingency. Hence the longing of the self for coa-
lescence with other selves and the pain of separation from the tra-
ditional collective.
The process of ritual coalescence engineered to satisfy that need
and repair the partial loss of identity followed in principle the trajec-
tory of the rites of passage. It was sustained by a notion of corpo-
reality that, just like the self, extended beyond the boundaries of the
individual body. It included the person’s and the clan’s bodies and
the material possessions linked to the individual. Yet the soul was an
individual possession, one for which each and every one of the fam-
ily members was individually responsible. The linked ‘others’ in the
collective had duties and obligations towards each other’s souls, but
did not have shared possession over the ‘inner being.’ With the gift
for the benefit of one’s own soul, differentiation occurred, presented
as a tangible division of the up to then collective, indivisible self.
Ritual re-identification thus began with separation. The principal
theorists of transition via rites of passage, Van Gennep and Turner,
have termed it separation from society and/or the group.25 I would
rather see it, following Maurice Bloch, as an act entailing dichotomiza-
tion of the corporate self-as-whole within the person of the bene-
factor.26 Relational construction of identity within the framework of
more than one sub-system caused the fragmentation of the collec-
tive social person. The individual self, or the soul, until that time
undistinguishable in the pool of the kin collective, stood apart by
virtue of the bond with the divine, which it and only it now pos-
sessed. Lacking discreteness, however, it suffered from incomplete-
ness and sought to anchor itself into another corporate body. The
process of incorporation was not a simple switch and did not elim-
inate liminality. Rather, liminality was redefined as an extended
process of rearranging priorities to fit the affiliation with new social
bodies. In Adam of Magny-le-Désert’s case, that body was the saintly,

25
A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London, 1960), Victor Turner, The Ritual
Process (London, 1969). Both authors work within the framework of functional
anthropology.
26
The phase of separation as dichotomization has been explained by Maurice
Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge, 1992), 6.
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corporate body of the holy men. Adam entered their artificial ‘broth-
erhood’ with the kiss of peace, which facilitated the process by mobi-
lizing the familiar kin definition of the meaning of the rites of
incorporation. At the end of the process, Adam was a new person,
for the kiss initiated him into the brotherhood of those possessing
grace and imparted in him the transcendental identity which his soul
was to carry to the end of his life and beyond.
The two-step sequence of peacemaking and aggregation through
which Adam’s reconciliation within the monastic community was
enacted was not a universal phenomenon.27 Far more common were
simple donations. They obligated God but did not entail the ‘benefit’
of the monastic society or, in my rendition, the acquisition of new
identity traits. Part of the explanation of this hierarchy of affiliation
lies in the specifics of the third functional stage in the passage into
a new identity. Incorporation into the religious community was a
transcendental counter gift. It obligated the benefactors to support,
defend, and promote the well-being of their new corporate ‘brothers.’
This was of crucial importance not only for the security of the trans-
action, but also for the identity of the new warrior class, the landed
estate of the knights who were the most likely to benefit from the
kiss of incorporation in peacemaking with the monks. The act of
incorporation transcended the boundaries of the self and affected the
social person. It legitimized the knights as milites Christiani rather than
simple raptores. The new knight, the defender of peace, was consecrated
by contact by his ritual entry into the monastic ‘brotherhood.’28
Artificial brotherhood on such terms was the earliest model of rit-
ual identity building during our period. It was constructed through
an exchange leading to organic integration of the institutions of the
family and the monastic community. Through the ritual kiss, the
device carrying the implications of the organic link, the discourses
controlling the relations between individuals misrepresented the monas-
tic community as part of a continuum stretching between the blood
family and the transcendental.

27
Even the heads of secular society, kings and princes, were treated in a different
manner by the end of this period. See Peter Willmes, Der Herrscher- ‘Adventus’ im
Kloster des Frühmittelalters (Munich, 1976), and Joachim Wollasch, ‘Kaiser und Könige
als Brüder der Mönche. Zum Herrscherbild in liturgischen Handschriften des 9.
Bis 11. Jahrhunderts,’ Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 11 (1984), 1–20.
28
For the mechanisms of this particular manner of acquiring grace see Michel
Andrieu, Immixio et consecratio: La consécration par contact dans les documents liturgiques du
Moyen Âge (Paris, 1924).
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This model, constructed in the framework of lay-religious rela-

tionships, fitted the social structures of the beginning high Middle
Ages and was transported to address conflicts between lay persons
as well. The religious discourse, institutionalized by the church, main-
tained that the social bonds between lay neighbors were sacred. If
a breach occurred, it was the individual’s duty to repair them. A
breach was trespass against the divine and necessitated compensa-
tion and satisfaction. Satisfaction fitted into another dimension of the
religious discourse: sacrifice. Within the framework of sacrifice, rit-
ual reconciliation opened another gateway through which the indi-
vidual, by means of ritual exchange of gifts, absorbed and was
absorbed into the sacred.
Such was the case of Geoffrey (Gaufredus), a miles residing in the
vicinity of the abbey of Noyers. During a private war between two
clans of the region in 1104, Geoffrey killed a certain Phillip (Phillipicus),
a juvenus of an important local family. The young knight’s kinsmen,
greatly saddened and grieving [dolor magnus . . . valde contristati ], con-
ceived a deadly hatred towards Geoffrey and burned in desire to
avenge their slain relative: that is, they declared a state of formal
feud. Geoffrey, feeling threatened, sought to make peace. After sev-
eral unsuccessful attempts, he enlisted the abbot of Noyers to help
him. With presents, entreaties, and reminding the raging nobles of
Phillip’s soul, the abbot managed to secure reconciliation. To fulfill
its conditions, Geoffrey ritually affiliated himself with Phillip, by now
in the otherworld, and his living kin. The means were a gift of land
to the abbey of Noyers, which was to support a monk who would
pray for the deceased’s soul, and the ritual kiss.
The manner of the affiliation is highly instructive. Geoffrey first
exchanged some rights he had in the vicinity of Noyers for a plot
of land. He then donated the land, in the presence of the mother
of the victim and his kin, to the abbey for Phillip’s soul; at this they
all kissed and forgave [ignovit] him.29 With the gift, Geoffrey fulfilled
an obligation to the deceased that was his kin’s responsibility. With
the kiss, he assimilated himself to them and gained access to the
divine through the ‘person’ of Phillip. Even more important was the

29
Chevalier, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Noyers, 345–7, N. 320. The episode is
discussed in detail, from a legal anthropological perspective, by Stephen D. White,
‘Feuding and Peace Making in the Tourraine around the Year 1100,’ Traditio 45,
(1986), 195–263, but without analysis of the ritual reconciliation.
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nature of the ‘gift.’ There were tangible reasons for the preliminary
exchange of rights for land, other than the monks’ interest in acquir-
ing yet another piece of real estate. The gift had to be objectifiable
and corporeal, an extension of Geoffrey’s corporeal self, to enable
the affiliation with the kin of the victim.
This assumption seems plausible if we think of Geoffrey’s ‘gift’ as
a sacrificial expiation. As the person bearing the expenses of the cer-
emony, he was a ‘sacrifier.’ The act of giving a part of himself that
associated him with the victim endowed Geoffrey with sacred fea-
tures.30 The religious discourse transformed Phillip’s wergeld into some-
thing more than economic compensation. As a sacrifier Geoffrey was
closer to the religious community, Phillip, and God himself than any
of Phillip’s relatives. This made him a necessary, but perhaps also
a desired, addition to the family to which the ritual kiss affiliated
him, in addition to the social dimension, the making up for depleted
manpower, and the economic reason, having Geoffrey bear the
expenses of the services for the salvation of Phillip’s soul.31
Such a scheme was a workable solution within the religious dis-
course dominating the high Middle Ages. In cases such as that of
Geoffrey, the kiss was an economical rite, concentrating in one act
sacrificial affiliation, legal settlement, and counter-gift. The knight
made his gift to the divine mediator; in exchange, he received the
counter-gift of the injured clan’s forgiveness. The concept of ‘gifts,’
circulating with or without mediation between the parties to the
conflict made the system operational regardless of the nature and
context of the exchange. In Geoffrey’s case the gift had to be a
thing, an extension of his self, reciprocated with the counter-gift of

30
None of the numerous definitions of sacrifice, as controversial and mutually
exclusive as they are, does undermine the structural features of the act which I
employ here. The most stimulating discussion remains that of Henri Hubert and
Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. by W. D. Halls (Chicago, 1967),
9, 53, 62. The literature on medieval gift, in all of its incarnations, is quite large;
for an excellent recent survey see Arnould-Jan A. Bijsterveld, ‘The Medieval Gift
as Agent of Social Bonding and Political Power: A Comparative Approach,’ in
Cohen and de Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations, 123–56.
31
Peace transactions had a doubly transformative effect, due to the fact that the
dead were involved, and because one of the central aims of the conflict manage-
ment procedure was to transform the social conditions that have caused the conflict
in the first place. See the excellent analysis of Patrick Geary, ‘Exchange and inter-
action with the dead in early medieval society’ in his Living with the Dead in the Middle
Ages (Ithaca and London, 1994), 77–94, and 125–62 esp. 159. Transformation, of
course, would have the greatest impact when involving the person.
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giving up the no less tangible revenge, also a demonstration of col-

lective selfhood. The gift concept informed the exchange process of
identity building throughout the high and late Middle Ages. The
injured knight in the eleventh-century Flemish story of St. Ursmar
made his ‘gift’ to God by giving up the sentiments of revenge, and
reconciling with his enemy, the whole sequence being condensed in
the ritual kiss. At the other end of the period, in a story of Boccaccio’s,
Aldobrandino (the injured) made the ‘gift’ [ picciol dono] of his for-
giveness, that is, his right to exact revenge, to Tedaldo, the friar-
mediator and representative of the divine [a reverenza a Dio].32
Through the familiar concept of sacrifice, the religious discourse
governed the meanings of the traditional system of ‘gift’ exchange
involving divine mediators, but the multidimensional referential field
of the ritual kiss bore on the legal discourse as well. From very early
in the period, the transactional construction of identity within the
gift tradition supported by religion was buttressed with the concept
of legal obligation inherent in the kiss. It seems that in high medieval
peacemaking none of the three discourses, the traditional, the reli-
gious, and the legal, could function independently. The peace act
was staked on the kiss to mobilize all of them in a hub of inter-
connected obligatory relations structured by the discourse of exchange.
It took time, however, for this construct to encompass the meanings
of the ritual act.
The complexity of the situation is illustrated in the reconciliation,
some time in the last quarter of the eleventh century, of the knight
Richard, the son of Geoffrey Belin, with the monks of St. Serge and
St. Bach. Richard had sold the church of Rablay to the abbey, but
later changed his mind and seized it back. The monks obtained a
mandate from the local bishop to suspend the divine service in the
church. Seeing his income rapidly disappearing along with whatever
spiritual benefits there had been from the possession of the church,
Richard repented, appeared at St. Serge, and handed his wadium to
abbot Daibert to reinvest him with the property. The abbot granted
him the benefit of the community, kissed him ‘with the customary
kiss,’ and had all of the attending monks kiss him as well. Unlike
the case of Adam discussed above, however, the incorporation within
the monastic ‘family’ and the link with the divine enacted with the
ritual kiss of religious brotherhood were not sufficient to close the

32
Boccaccio, Decameron, Third Day, Seventh Story ed. Branca, 396.
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deal. The monks had already had trouble with Richard, and secur-
ing the investiture in perpetuity without further complications was a
must. They wanted the strongest guarantee available, and to make
Richard liable to keep his end of the deal asked him to pledge his
fides. The knight apparently agreed, and to receive his fides abbot
Daibert kissed him again.33 The ritual affiliation could not by itself
support the peace contract; only putting the rite into legal context
would ensure its proper working. Acquiring a degree of transcen-
dental identity did not guarantee the legal transaction. The two acts
stood apart, embedded in two separate narratives, subjected to inter-
pretative schemes substantiated through one and the same formal
embodiment, the ritual kiss.
All the same, the separation of the kiss of ‘brotherhood’ from the
ritual kiss constituting the legal act of security signified a shift in the
position of the discourses controlling the interpretation of the kiss as
a peace ritual between blood kin. The traditional family frame embod-
ied in concepts such as ‘relative’ and ‘brother’ was now comple-
mented by the bonds constituted within the legal discourse. Having
a long pedigree by the eleventh century, this development gained
speed as the high Middle Ages wore on. It testified to the increasing
trend to replace the traditional blood ties with the artificial bonds
of ‘friendship.’ Although habitually referred to as interchangeable
terms, the ritual ‘brothers’ and ‘friends’ reflected two levels of affiliation,
a traditional and a functional one. The kiss of friendship [amicitia]
added a contractual dimension to the traditional bond of kinship,
which of itself did not always guarantee the peace even between
blood relations. Two examples will suffice to make the point. The
ritual reconciliation with the kiss of the Burgundian royal family in
the Nibelungenlied was presented in terms of reunited friends.34 Blan-
chefleur in Aliscans was William’s ‘relative,’ but the count referred to
her as ami only after she repented and the siblings were about to
exchange the kiss of peace.35
By the late twelfth century, the evolution of the legal discourse em-
ploying the concept of amicitia and its related constructs reflected a
redefinition of the fundamental bond informing the idea of the family

33
Iterum ob conservatione fidei adversus monachos veraeque fraternitatis abbatem reosculatus
est; see Chauvin, ed., Cartulaires de l’abbaye Saint-Serge et Saint-Bach, 85, N. 101.
34
Bartsch and De Boor, eds., Das Nibelungenlied, 182.
35
Rasch, ed., Aliscans, 172.
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as basic institution of the peace. The shift from ‘relative’ to ‘friend’ did
not mean negation of the family/clan paradigm. In a definitive way,
however, it marked the rise and the increasing significance of two
other powerful ritual mechanisms, presentation and representation.

Presentation and Representation

In the context of reconciliation, presentation and representation shared

one signal feature: both allowed for establishing a bond with the
‘other’ based on the totality ritually made in the persons of both
parties, that is, it rested on the concept of self-as-whole.
Ritual practice operating on the principle of representation trans-
formed the triadic relationship of offender-divinity-victim, which we
saw functioning through the mechanism of exchange. Representation
promoted the idea of the existence of a shared substance made
efficacious through ritual recognition. In the exchange model, the
links with the numinous and the other party were construed in two
separate acts. People made their peace with the divine and then
entered into quasi-kin relationship with the other party, or vice-versa.
One act mediated for another. In the (re)presentation model, ritual
operated shared codes, which produced similarities binding like to
like without mediation. Their templates were ritually extracted and
appropriated in a single act.
Ritual reference to the divine and the family through the concept
of (re)presentation had broad implications for identity building in
peacemaking. While perpetuating the high medieval construct of the
referential totalities as poles of a continuum, it did redefine their
relationship. In reconciliation following the monastic model, the con-
cept of sameness (in the family resulting from blood ties) was abstracted
from the traditional frame as a device facilitating identification with
the divine. With the substitution of presentation for exchange, the
idea of the divine as embedded in the human soul promoted the
actors’ identification with each other to portray them as members
of an extended artificial family. Freed from the strictures of exchange,
which limited the scope of the ritual transaction, presentation enlarged
the concept of family to cover humanity. Through presentation, men
could be true brothers in Christ, realities of rank and status notwith-
standing. Both presentation and representation enhanced the role of
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equality in the ritual bond of peace and the larger frame of human
relations.
The idea of personhood in Christ is primordial in Christianity—
it is present in the Gospels—but it did not enter the practice of sec-
ular peacemaking until after the adoption of (re)presentation allowed
the religious and legal discourses not so much to extend or com-
plement as to overlap with the traditional, family-based model of
social relatedness and identity. The reconciliatory practices during
the Peace of God at the beginning of our period were the first
instances when we see these concepts as the exclusive instruments
informing social identity. Thereafter, outbursts of ritual peacemak-
ing in the wake of major religious movements chart the evolution
of (re)presentational practices.
In Ademar of Chabannes’ account of the peace council of Limoges
in November 994, for example, the ritual kiss of peace followed the
sermons of the bishops who kissed between themselves. Then, in an
act mirroring the performance of the high clergy, the lay people
indicated their participation by kissing one another. On another occa-
sion, Ademar specified that ‘the bishop began to give the peace, and
they all offered the kiss of peace to each other as if at mass [sicut ad
missam] so that they might remain in the peace of Christ and in har-
mony, and that peace might be upon them and upon all the people.’36
Ademar’s narrative, perhaps the most vivid of contemporary records,
relates a manner of (re)presentation almost undistinguishable from
the one used in the liturgy, the central rite of Christian identity
building. As in the mass of Ademar’s time, on both occasions pas-
tors and flock stood ritually apart. The benediction and farewell kiss,
in timore et amore Dei, was a standard feature in the conclusion of
tenth- and eleventh-century synods attended by ecclesiastics only.
The kiss at the peace councils was apparently exchanged in the same

36
Leopold Delisle, ‘Notices sur le manuscrits originaux d’Adémar de Chabannes,’
in Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et des autres bibliothèques, vol.
35 (1895), 267–8 and 271–2. The cases are mentioned without discussion by Cawdrey,
‘The Peace of God,’ in Past & Present, 46 (1970), 50. About Ademar and his writ-
ings on the Peace of God see Richard Landes, ‘Between Aristocracy and Heresy,’
in Head and Landes, eds., The Peace of God, 184–218. On Ademar’s central work
see also Pierre Bourgain, ed., Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon (Turnholt, 1999) and
Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes,
989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
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264  

manner as the kiss at mass.37 Did that mean that the obligatory rela-
tionship with the deity entered through the kiss at mass was trans-
planted in secular relations to sanctify the latter?
The setting of the final act of the peace council had overtones
that had been preserved in the meaning of the liturgical kiss in the
half millennium since the time of Pope Innocent I’s (401–417) early
emphasis on uniformity in Roman liturgy as a means to papal supre-
macy. The crowd had gathered to hear the constitutions of the peace
and legalize them, that is, give them customary validity by obligat-
ing themselves before the Highest Judge to keep to their stipulations.
If we add the do ut des reconciliation to the picture the reference to
the divine in that model appears qualified by a set of conditions that
differed from the strictly ecclesiastical mode of representation.
The difference implies structural instability in the workings of the
(re)presented social peace as a ‘mirror’ image of the ecclesiastical
construct, to use Don Handelman’s terminology.38 Indeed, peace rela-
tionships by (re)presentation were precarious. Judging from Rigord’s
account of the religious movement of the White Hoods in the region
of Puy around the year 1183, there was a popular disapproval of
reconciliation and forgiveness for no better reason than common
humanity in Christ. It was a marvel that someone could really count
on this premise to quell violence and to override the drive for revenge.
‘It was a great marvel,’ wrote Rigord, ‘that the people carrying the
hood with the sign felt secure, so secure that if someone met the
murderer of his own brother, he would promptly forgive him the death
of his brother, receiving him with tears in the kiss of peace, and
would take him home to dine with him.’39 Rigord put his finger on
the main issue that undermined the efficacy of representation in the
individual appropriation of the religious discourse. His injunction is
that without the support of the law and social validation, reconcili-
ation staked on the religious discourse alone would hardly stand.

37
See Herbert Schneider, ed., Die Konzilsordines des Früh- und Hochmittelalters (Hanover,
1996), 315, Ordo 7. The phrase and the kiss appear regularly from that moment,
c. 800 to Ordo 12, dating from the late eleventh century. Afterwards it can only be
seen in Ordo 23, a reflection itself of an earlier model.
38
Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Toward an Anthropology of Public Events
(Cambridge, 1990).
39
Quoted after the excerpt in Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden
und Landfrieden, 464–6. Huberti provides a translation of the Chronicles of Saint Denis
and samples of related sources, ibidem, 462–7. The event is dated differently, from
1180 to 1183.
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Moreover, residing outside of the security provided by the structures

of traditional governance, feud and coercion, it was dangerous, unpre-
dictable, and destructive.
And yet, the people under the sign of Agnus Dei felt so secure that
they relied on the relationship built on representation and, perhaps,
on the emotion work betrayed by tears to inform their total social
personae. They remitted the personal sentiments of revenge, regard-
less of the pressures of tradition. The emotional disturbance surfac-
ing in tears testified to the integration of the forgivers’ personalities
around the represented reality. They could afford to disregard the
social validation of acts of peacemaking by the discourses controlled
by the community. They could forgo the protection afforded by the
traditional, institutionalized mechanisms of legal settlement. The rit-
ual identification through presentation was strong enough to over-
come the vagaries of contingency and the pressures of structure and
endow the individual with sufficient agency—until one realizes that
it was viable only because it was entrenched in the validation of the
shifting, fluid, and unstable group that stood as the embodiment of
the (re)presented totality.
There are reasons to believe that the detached individual would
not have been capable to cross the collective judgment of the tra-
ditional community on that matter. Those who did, like Giovanni
Gualberto, became saints but theirs were feats of exceptionality. The
common folk followed a different pattern. Security came because the
individual acted in a neatly defined and coherent although tempo-
rary group. The White Hoods were a pacis confoederatio, a semi-insti-
tutionalized extension of the Peace of God movements of earlier
centuries. Clothed in white, with a metal image of the Virgin on
their chests, they wrapped themselves with the tangible vestments of
a corporate identity that provided an external referent for their social
personae. The identification buttressed the dissociation from the
norms of the traditional community, guarded and enforced, although
for different reasons, by the clan collective and the authorities.
To the traditional mind, as for the authorities, there was a dan-
ger lurking beneath the pristine white garments and the kiss of for-
giveness constructing the new collective identification. The peace
group from which it stemmed was a collective that did not rest on
traditional foundations. It fed on functionality foreign to the tradi-
tional mindset, steeped in the customarily sanctioned procedures of
the feud and conflict resolution through settlement as it was. The
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266  

disapproval voiced in the ‘great marvel’ remark of Rigord’s was a

common response to ritual reconciliation lacking the validation of
traditional norms. It kept reappearing time and again, in narratives
on the Alleluia movement, during thirteenth-century Franciscan pacifi-
cations, and in the Bianchi movement of 1399. This disapprobation
created a clash on a larger scale than the one sustained by the sep-
aration based on exchange. The functional groups organized on the
principle of presentation supplied a role shield for the individuals
and protection that transcended the strictures of the social environ-
ment. Despite its beneficial effects, it undermined the positions of
both the traditional community and the authorities.
The short life span of such collectives before the thirteenth cen-
tury testifies to the power of the traditional social referents of ritual
that countered, quite successively, the attempts of the practitioners
of the religious discourse to secure the hegemonic role of function-
ally (re)presentational communities in peacemaking. The thirteenth
century appears to be the turning point in the redefinition of the
relationship between the ritual referents. Although haltingly, peace
practices validated by functional (re)presentation acquired sufficient
social approval. So did the individual identities to which such prac-
tices gave rise. Discourses followed suit. Perhaps the best example
of this development is the entry, by end of the twelfth and the begin-
ning of the thirteenth centuries, of the ritual kiss of peace in the
Tale of the Forgiving Knight.
A crucial development accompanying the change was the trans-
formation of the concept of organic memory as the link sustaining
the practice of interaction through exchange between actors and
totalities into another kind of incorporated memory, the phenome-
non of remembrance as an instance of ritually controlled practice of
(re)presentation. The causal relationship between these shifts merits
consideration.

Memory and Remembrance: A Discursive Overview

In the Tale of the Forgiving Knight the recollection of past action was
the point at which embodied ritual ‘flipped’ the organizing princi-
ple of personality. The ‘memory,’ or rather the remembrance, that
switched the matrix of identity from one to another of the para-
digms appropriated by the ritual agents appeared already in Ceasarius
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of Heisterbach’s early thirteenth-century blueprint of the tale. In his

version, in a casual way, ritual remembrance [memoria] redefined the
forgiving knight as a moral being.
Two features characterize Caesarius’s remembrance. First, it was
a process triggered by the sensorial perception of another action,
Christ’s bowing of His head; beholding Him, the knight wondered
why he deserved such a honor and, searching his memory, arrived
at the recollection of the act of forgiveness he had performed long
years ago.40 The gesture of the numinous, an act of recognition with
ritual dimensions, mobilized the knight’s awareness of himself as an
agent in history, thereby conferring a distinct personality on him.
Second, beholding the gesture of Christ and ‘remembering,’ the
knight reintegrated himself around the only instantiation of moral
agency constructed within the religious narrative on peace and rec-
onciliation present in his past. The act of forgiveness had been for-
gotten, for the knight had existed continuously with the identity
sustained by the traditional culture of his class, based on the insti-
tutionalized feud. Now the principles encoded in forgiveness became
the foundation of his personality.
The recollection of forgiveness, just like the ritual act itself, was
a point of discontinuity at which the environment of the feud ceased
to inform identity. It is worth noting that the act of forgiveness had
been a transient moment. The act of its remembrance, however, was
presented as having lasting effects upon the knight’s personality.41
Connecting to the one instance of moral actualization we know about,
the knight dissociated himself from the worldly values of revenge
organizing his personality and embraced the moral values of peace
and forgiveness. Remembrance integrated him around a new iden-
tity. Continuity, that basic identity trait, was reconstructed within
the discourse interpreting the ritual gesture of the divine as an act
of social approval saturated with the morals the numinous stood for.
In the motivational structure of the being organized by such a mor-
alized remembrance, the identity of homo faidosis dissipated to enable
a new construct to take over.

40
Strange, ed., Caesarii Heisterbacensis Dialogus Miraculorum, 99.
41
On memory as active restructuring of the past, although in a different context
see Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First
Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994). The same work contains an excellent overview of
modern approaches to medieval memory, ibid., 9–22.
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The type of remembrance displayed in Caesarius’s account became

a staple feature in later medieval religious discourses, where the dis-
tinction between memory and remembrance was gradually worked
out and the dignified bow of the head was replaced by an affectionate
kiss. Unlike the theory of memory, practical remembrance triggered
by the kiss was not a widely popular theme and the manner of its
construction in ritual action has to be inferred from casual references.
A work of practical mysticism that dealt with the issue of remem-
brance as a corporeal action and linked it indirectly to ritual peace-
making was Duke Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines.
Composed in 1354 as a devotional treatise aiming to relieve the author’s
anxieties over having lived an immoral life and now seeking a mys-
tic reunion with Christ, the Livre offered a few paragraphs on the
subject of memory. The best excerpt is in a digression on occasion
of the Holy Week, the time to remember the Lord and grieve for
His passion and death. This intriguing passage contains an impor-
tant terminological distinction within the duke’s conceptualization of
the notion of memory. This overlooked subtlety played an impor-
tant role in the late-medieval religious discourse on reconciliation.
During Holy Week, intimated Duke Henry, we ought to remem-
ber [souvenir] the sufferings of Christ for humankind, especially in
church, where sermons and chants remind us of the tortures that
His sweet and tender body endured for us. To connect to Christ at
the culmination of his sufferings, however, at the moment when His
blood gushed forth from His pierced heart, the duke wished for a
different kind of remembrance [remenbrance]. ‘Alas!’ he lamented, ‘Let
our evil and prideful hearts be pierced by that same lance that passed
right through Your heart oh Lord, in remembrance of the precious
blood that issued from Your humble and meek heart. . . .’ He asked
for the gift of tears, to shed them for Christ as Christ’s blood had
been shed for humankind.42
The use of two different terms for memory, souvenir and remen-
brance, was not a mere stylistic twist. The phenomenon that today
we call ‘remembering,’ Henry’s souvenir, was an act happening in the
mind. It was stimulated by talks, chants, and sermons but was a pas-

42
Alas! Bien deverons de parfond coer plorer et lesser entrer en nostre malveis et orgoillous coer
un poi de celle lance qe passa per mye vostre coer, siqe, en remenbrance de preciouse sanke qe de
vostre humble et debonair coer a grande foison issi; see E. J. Arnould, ed., Le Livre de Seyntz
Medicines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster (Oxford, 1940), 95–6.
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sive internal reaction to external sensation. The memory identified

with remenbrance had a more pronounced quality of practice, affected
the heart, and was born from and within the embodied and emo-
tionally saturated actions of wounding and tear shedding. Souvenir
was an internal cognitive reaction to sensorial experience; remenbrance
was an emotion and an action in one, a kinetic phenomenon unit-
ing interior and exterior in a single moment of ritual self-identification.
The difference between the two was in kind. They complemented
and opposed each other at the same time as distinct modes of
efficacious representation.
The idea of remembrance as opposed to memory in the manner
Duke Henry used it had long roots in the theoretical explications of
the mass where its appeared ever more often, albeit not always con-
ceptualized, as the fifteenth century progressed.43 To mention but
one of the earlier cases, John Lydgate, commenting on the ritual
kissing of the pax in the 1430s, observed that the kiss was a spur to
remember Christ’s passion.44 The incorporation of the mature notion
of remembrance as a fusion of action and emotion into the dis-
courses of peace, however, was a complicated affair, since its pri-
mary component, embodied action, ran counter to the evolution of
the ritual moment.
As a fully developed concept, presenting peace as an appropria-
tion of the divine paradigm, remembrance appeared in Peter Idley’s
mid fifteenth-century account, where it stirred the trespasser to repen-
tance. Idley’s interpretation of ritual efficacy squared well with the
current of late-medieval piety witnessed in Henry’s mystical treatise,
as well as with a series of contemporary representations of the rites
of reconciliation at mass. Idley’s remembrance supported the con-
cept of a mediated, sensory action, the reflection on which impinged
on individual self-awareness. The besieged knight saw pious folk
headed for the church on Good Friday, and ‘remembered it was
longe gon/ sithe he herde onythyng of Goddis seruice/ ffor matyns
ne messe herde hee noon,/ Wherof his herte dide soore gryse;/ And
in his minde ’gan to contryve and deuyse’ to go and do penance.45

43
See Charles Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions, and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred
in Fifteenth-Century Germany,’ Past & Present, 118 (1988), 25–64.
44
See his poem ‘On kissing at Verbum caro factum est,’ in Lydgate’s Minor Poems,
117, ll. 30–2, quoted after Rubin, Corpus Christi, 106.
45
D’Evelyn, ed., Peter Idley’s Instructions, 166.
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270  

The message is cryptic and gives away few clues about the nature
of the sentiment of bad conscience, which was born in the heart
of the trespasser and from there was passed onto his mind, to sug-
gest that we are dealing with an ontological phenomenon. Yet Idley,
just as Gower for whom ‘the heart devises wicked thoughts,’ kept
the mind into the body. I will venture a conjecture and suggest that
the motivation to repent was a representation of the moral action
spurred on by the visual impact of acts of ritual penance. It was
inspired by the influential theory of memory defined around the mid-
dle of the thirteenth century by scholastic theologians. As an exter-
nally derived impression, Idley’s ‘remembrance’ was a reflection of
the scholastic model. In it, memory was a disposition, a proclivity
of the actor’s habitus. It was the key concept linking conceiving of
goodness with the practice of doing it. Memory was the fundamen-
tal factor in the preservation, formation, and exercise of moral virtues.46
The sensory ‘remembrance’ to which it was assimilated by Idley
fulfilled the same task.
In Idley’s practical ethics, remembrance was not the decisive moral
factor in conflict resolution. The do ut des element was strong, and
in the vein of the fourteenth-century versions of the Tale the act of
the forgiver was motivated not so much by remembrance as by love.
The ritual union with the kiss of love and peace first between the
human actors and following that between the forgiver and Christ
dominated the scene. Although remembrance and love were both
elicited by sensory perception of pious action, for Idley love, ‘Cherite’
and the unity it created remained the factor that made possible the
extraction and appropriation of the divine substance through pre-
sentation. Still, it was in the act of remembrance that the transcen-
dental goodness lodged in the God-like self penetrated the person of
the ritual actor and helped actualize his identity in the frequent, per-
sistent doing of charity, concluded Idley, for ‘he that in Cherite daily
doith dwelle,/ He abideth in God and God in hym/ In soule and
body, lyffe and lym.’47

46
I am following the findings of Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 64ff., 156. This
study, the best inquiry into the learned concepts of medieval memory to date, does
not go into the nature of late medieval ‘remembrance.’ A larger section in Carruther’s
newer work, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images (New
York, 1998), deals with remembrance but not in the context of practice.
47
Ibidem, 167.
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Peter Idley’s Instructions poured new wine in old casks, but during
the following half-century remembrance seems to have established
itself as the concept informing the meaning and function of the ritual
sequence of reconciliation in spite of the gradual disappearance of
the kiss between the reconciling parties. A conspicuous example of
this development is one of Johannes Pauli’s highly popular chapbooks.
Pauli was a prolific moralist who switched camps in the beginning
of the religious debate of the Reformation. His renditions of the Tale
of the Forgiving Knight are worth a closer look, for, among other things,
they present us with instructive cases from the early stages of the
evangelical rethinking of the late-medieval discourse on ritual efficacy.
Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst, one of the influential late-medieval col-
lections of exempla, was first printed in 1519. It contains two versions
of the Tale. The first is a variant of Giovanni Gualberto’s story.
Unlike the medieval tradition that had its beginnings in Caesarius
of Heisterbach, Pauli’s anecdote rendered the episode of reconcilia-
tion in the vein of the first Life of Gualberto, where the kiss of peace
had not been mentioned at all. Corporeal action in Pauli was reduced
to the offender’s falling on the ground. There was no bodily inter-
action between forgiver and forgiven or between God and the human
actors. The intervention of the divine was limited to a bow of the
head, as in the original story. The second exemplum is a story of a
ritual reconciliation orchestrated by one of the greatest Franciscan
preachers of the fifteenth century, Giovanni Capistrano, and took
place in Germany. In this version, a woman whose brother had been
slain was so moved by Capistrano’s peace sermon that she forgave
the murderer, took his hands, and kissed them for the sake of the
hands that had been crucified for her (Christ’s hands).48
Given Pauli’s ingenuity as a writer and the long medieval tradi-
tion of the Tale, the faithful rendition of the story in the manner it
had been told in the early twelfth century was hardly accidental.
Perhaps a clue for the explanation of this return to the origins is
the offender’s plea to be spared ‘in remembrance of the suffering of
Christ that is dear to us.’ Unlike the high medieval tradition that
had in its grip Peter Idley, in Pauli’s narrative remembrance [ gedecht-
nis], not love or charity, provided the texture of the reconciliation.

48
Hermann Österley, ed., Johannes Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst (Amsterdam, 1967),
386–7, Ns. 692 and 693.
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An attempt to glimpse its possible meanings would lead us to the

conceptual background of the idea as elaborated in Luther’s theory
of the sacrament. Pauli seems to have rested his vision of the efficacy
of ritual on premises either derived from or very similar to Luther’s
teaching. As David Sabean put it, the emphasis of Luther’s Gedächtnis
lay on remembrance as a holistic exercise that integrated the per-
son into a unity in faith and good works—forgiveness being, of
course, a major constituent of the latter.
Thus, from a functional perspective, remembrance shared some
features with memory. In terms of the constitution of the person,
however, and its role in organizing personality, late-medieval remem-
brance was quite different from the organic, ontological high-medieval
memory and from memory in the modern sense of the word. It was
lodged in the body like organic memory, but drew its meanings from
a domain outside of the person. It was a mediated experience insep-
arable from corporeal interaction. The integration achieved through
it depended on repeated engagement in the ritual act that created
it by a participatory presentation of Christ’s life and death.49
For the purposes of this analysis, this is a concept of cardinal
importance. Remembrance of the divine sufferings integrated the
person by linking self and sociality, provided stability and consistency
to the person’s motivational structure, and thus mediated the rela-
tionship of the parties of the reconciliation. It depended on pre-
senting ritual action as a sacrament and was the central factor in
building ritual identity.
The shift from identity rooted in organic memory, stimulated and
awakened by action, to kinetic remembrance coterminous with action
and emotion was a reflection of the changed perception of the mode
of the relationship between individual and society. It was a critical
transformation. It expanded the area for realization of the individ-
ual, for it was a move from substance to agency. In Andrew Strathern’s
metaphor, it was a reorientation of the individual from a ‘horizon-
tal’ perspective of identity in which the self as substance was sub-
merged in the collective of embodied beings to a ‘vertical’ mode in
which identity emerged in the agent’s links to God and society pre-
sented as embodied chronotopes.50

49
David W. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early
Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1986), 48–9.
50
Andrew Strathern, ‘Keeping the Body in Mind,’ Social Anthropology, 2:1 (1994),
43–53.
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Identity and Urban Peace: The New Brotherhoods

One of the most dynamic premodern ritual environments, that of

the highly developed urban centers of northern Italy, furnishes instruc-
tive material corroborating the conclusions derived from the analy-
sis of the discursive constructs of ritual peacemaking.
The middle decades of the thirteenth century witnessed the build-
ing of pressures in the Italian cities. From the functional-social view-
point of ritual, these resemble the restructuring of French feudal
societies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The maturing of the
communes in their transition to city-states was the impetus for a
reorientation of ritual as a cultural interface. Yet another adjustment
of the ritual practice of identity building in the environment of the
evolving urban worlds became visible by the sixteenth century, with
the emergence of the precursors of the modern state system. From
a ritual point of view, three thirteenth-century developments deserve
closer scrutiny.
First, the reconciliatory records of the Italian communes and city-
states document a clear shift in the perception of the constitution of
the ritual bond. The ‘quasi-relative’ status resulting from eleventh-
and twelfth-century reconciliation all but disappeared. The phrase
‘brother and friend’ remained as a trope exclusively in nonlegal evi-
dence. It kept reappearing, for obvious reasons, in times of high reli-
gious fervor, such as the 1233 Alleluia or the Bianchi peace movements
in 1399. In everyday practice, however, the ‘brotherhoods’ recorded
in notarial documents were explicitly and separately negotiated. The
perception of the bond established by ritual cannot therefore be
explained as a straightforward progression in which the concept of
‘friend’ supplanted that of ‘brother.’ Rather, one may speak of lay-
ers of social uses according to the intensity of the notion of related-
ness connoted by the two terms.
Thirteenth-century ‘brotherhoods’ were characterized by a lower
intensity of the connotation ‘blood family.’ The intensity diminished
with the horizontal spread of the concept, which by that time char-
acterized a substantially wider social referent. Nonetheless, in the
context of peace and reconciliation, the ritual brotherhoods of ‘friends
and brothers’ were sustained by contractual bonds grounded on cor-
poreality. Such notion of ‘brotherhood’ entailed liability by proxy,
obligating the members of the group to comply with the terms of
the peace pact concluded by the individual representatives of the
clan. Also, whereas the older, more intense concept of brotherhood
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274  

was organically carried inside the body, the new brotherhood was
as easily lost as it was acquired through membership in the group
that transcended traditional loyalties. These shifts are important
enough to merit further scrutiny.
The diminishing intensity of relatedness might not seem such a
radical change until one realizes that it developed against the back-
ground of amicitia as a socially constructed and legally defined con-
tractual bond. As the Florentine Statutes of 1281 had it, interpersonal
peace was a real contract, not only in form but in substance.51 The
feud continued to be a tacitly recognized playground of traditional
loyalties and identities, but the reformulation of the peace bond was
part of the authorities’ strategy for incorporation of the body politic
within the new power structures. If amicitia was statutorily defined
as a specific type of contract, it exited the domain regulated by the
customary law of the blood collective and was subjected to urban
legislation. The law could dissolve it and lessen the backup of the
collective to individual violence. This development is seconded by
data from the Low Countries.52 The statutory regulation of the degree
to which ‘friends’ constituted a part of the clan was a function of
the authorities’ involvement in the regulation of the feud. The advance
of the communal legislation gradually curtailed and by the end of
the period almost eliminated the participation of ‘friends’ in vendet-
tas, but during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were still
active in the frequent and violent family conflicts.53
Second, ritual peace was a crucial feature of the new urban insti-
tutions, the lay religious confraternities structured as ritual ‘brother-
hoods.’ The ritual life of this new form of association widened the
scope of individual relatedness through representation. Confraternities
have been studied extensively in recent decades, and the referent of
their ritual life is quite clear.54 Beginning to take shape around the

51
Ana Maria Enriques, ‘La vendetta nella vita e nella legislatione fiorentina,’
Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. VII, 19 (1933), 201.
52
Espinas, ‘Le guerres familiales à Douai au XIIIe et XIVe siècles,’ 415–73.
53
In 1268, Ghino Velluti was assassinated because his consorteria were ‘friends’ of
the Rossi. Cino Dietisalvi, who masterminded the attack that took the life of Lipo
Mannelli eighteenth years later, and revived the vendetta was related to, but was
also known as ‘friend’ of the Velluti; see Chapter Two.
54
The basic work is Gilles Gerard Meersseman, Ordo Fraternitatis. Confraternite e
pieta dei laici nel medioevo, 3 vols. (Rome, 1977–79). For a fine recent overview see
Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in
Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2000).
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middle of the thirteenth century, they embodied formal networks of

citizens exercising in self-discipline of conduct through prayer and
penitence. Organizing the popular devotional impulse, the confrater-
nities became a tangible expression of the Italian urban centers’ fun-
damentally religious character. Their professed function was to achieve
pacification of the cities, so that ‘all who have hatred revert to peace
and harmony.’ Their major political activity, in the beginning at
least, was to mobilize resistance to the quasi-institutionalized factions
which tore asunder the civil fabric of the communes, and help achieve
some sort of social reconciliation. The confraternities achieved this
task by constructing corporate bodies that drew on membership from
across the cities’ professional, social, and residential divisions. The
flagellants, in particular, saw peace as the central task of their ritual
program. To quote Ronald Weissman, Florentine flagellants, through
their ritual celebration of peace, safeguarded the spiritual peace of
the larger community. By the fifteenth century, or at some places
by the sixteenth century, lay confraternities were educating their
membership in the practice of civic government and culture.55
The incorporation in confraternities was a socially approved prac-
tice consistent with the ideal of the larger corporate body of the city
within which they developed. As Nicholas Terpstra has demonstrated,
the Bolognese ‘Compagnie Spirituali’ were the only organized lay
groups dedicated solely to expressing the local conviction that theirs
was a holy city, loved and sometimes chastised by God. This was a
widespread perception throughout the Italian urban world. Confraternal
piety, in particular that of the flagellants, encouraged corporate iden-
tification with Christ’s disciples, lay friends of the Signore.56 Establish-
ing a ‘friendship’ with God, enjoying his patronage, individually or
as a member of the group, was the highly desired goal of fourteenth-
century Florentines as indeed of all urban lay ‘brothers.’57
The bonds between the confraternity brothers, on the one hand,
and the corporate body of the confraternity and the city, on the other
hand, were validated and embodied in confraternal ritual. It is telling
55
Both Weissman and Terpstra emphasize this point in different contexts; see
Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1978), 43–105,
for the republican orientation of the confraternities.
56
Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna
(Cambridge, 1995), Prologue. See also Mario Fanti, ‘Gli inizi del Movimento dei
Disciplinati a Bologna e la Confraternita di Santa Maria della Vita,’ Bolletino della
Deputazione di storia patria per Umbria, 66 (1969), 181–232.
57
Ibidem, 71ff.
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276  

that the affiliation with the group, the affirmation of corporate iden-
tity, and the daily existence of the individual as an incorporated per-
son all hinged on the rites of peace. To temporary suspend differences
of rank, status, class, estate, wealth, and power, was the ultimate
example of the appropriation of the paradigm of communality.
It has been argued that the identification with the divine emerges
most clearly in the two rituals of foot washing and flagellation.58 I
would suggest that the ritual life of the flagellants revolved in no
lesser degree around the kiss of peace. The brotherhood of the apos-
tles united in the peace that Christ ‘breathed’ into them constituted
the body to which the flagellant ‘brothers’ assimilated themselves
through the kiss. This was a common feature of confraternal life,
reappearing in the statutes of the ‘brotherhoods’ ever since the first
processions of the disciplinati in 1260, which sparked the movement.
The waves of public penance rolling through the Italian cities through-
out the late Middle Ages kept it alive and left vivid imprints on the
memory of the contemporaries.

Ritual Representation and Visual Imagery

The confraternal statutes expounding the centrality of the kiss of

peace in confraternal identity building are complemented by a series
of images, reflections of the observers’ reaction to the ritual repre-
sentation of peace. The visual imagery of the rites of peace captured
what struck the public as really important.
In a contemporary version of Giovanni Villani’s short account of
the movement of the disciplinati in 1310, there is a miniature illus-
tration dominated by two ritual activities, flagellation and the kiss of
peace. The flagellants are naked above the waist; their vestments,
bodies, and faces are depicted in a uniform fashion, as multiplied
mirror images of a single prototype.59 Conventions of space, type of
representation, and artistic talent notwithstanding, the imagery of
collective identification and the focus of the artist on the rites of peace
is striking. Dispensing with all signs of inequality, rank, and status

58
Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 61ff.
59
Luigi Magnani, La Cronaca figurata di Giovanni Villani, ricerche sulla miniatura del
trecento (Città del Vaticano, 1936), Table 1; Giovanni Villani, Istorie fiorentine di Giovanni
Villani cittadino fiorentino, fino all’ anno MCCCXLVIII (Milan, 1802–3), vol. 4, 216.
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conveyed by clothes, nakedness put the disciplinati outside of the nor-

mal social intercourse. They were equal to the extent they were
embodied. The body and the ritual kiss carried the identity of any
single brother as an integral part of the corporate whole, but this
type of uniform identification situated the group outside of society.
The concept informing the author’s vision was shared by another
artist, the anonymous author of a late thirteenth-century fresco in
the cemetery church at Terni. There, a pair of youths kneel in front
of a heavily armed archangel, having cast their weapons on the
ground, embracing and kissing each other. The avatar of the divine,
towering high above them, lifts the folds of his long white robe and
lays it on the heads of the reconciling men, uniting them in the bliss
of heavenly grace. The pair is dressed in a similar fashion and their
faces look alike, resembling that of the heavenly mediator.60
By contrast, in a variant of the reconciliatory scene in a mid-four-
teenth century Sienese painting on the predela of a panel dominated
by the mystic marriage of St. Catherine, the ritual actors are pro-
nouncedly individualistic in style and attributes. Their clothes, head-
dresses, and colors set the reconciling humans apart. Only the kiss
under the patronage of the angel brings them together. The impres-
sion of separation, discreteness, and distinct individuality is not an
isolated feature of the predela. It is supported by the imagery of the
rest of the panel. The victory over evil, as Lois Drewer aptly pointed
out, represented either in reconciliation under the enveloping wings
of the archangel or in the defeat of the ugly creatures from Hell,
was aesthetically linked to the dominating theme, the drama of indi-
vidual salvation represented by the mystic marriage of the saint.61
These three images, a small sample of the rich imagery of ritual
reconciliation, are as different as they are alike. The latter two take
us away from the issue of confraternal life but not from the con-
cepts it stood for. They exemplify the late-medieval evolution of the
appropriation of the divine paradigm through its representation in
the rites of peace. The first two pictures are a reflection of the thir-
teenth-century imagery of a collective, corporate identification with
the sacred paradigm described above, whether directly or through

60
Copy in Lois Drewer, ‘Margaret of Antioch the Demon-Slayer, East and West:
The Iconography of the Predella of the Boston Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine,’ Gesta,
32:1, (1993), 17. I would like to express my gratitude to Ms. Drewer for directing
my attention to her study.
61
Drewer, ‘Margaret of Antioch,’ 12.
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278  

its avatars, the angels and apostles. Their symbolism is subsuming

and typological. They derive meaning deductively, from a partici-
patory representation of identity staked on the generic type of peace-
making. The third image points towards a social environment in
which the confraternities grouped together in one relatively loose
structure a number of discrete individuals creating personal networks
of linkages to one another and God.62
In contrast to thirteenth-century corporate piety, the peace ritu-
als of late-medieval and Renaissance confraternities were a reflection
of a changed mode of social representation. Descending from twelfth-
century structures and perpetuating thirteenth-century models, as a
social institution the fourteenth-century confraternity provided a rit-
ual space for suspension of the conflicting and competitive person-
alities and obligations ensuing from the intensely individuated character
of its members’ connection to the divine. The peacemakers might
have still been ‘one person in Christ,’ but in relation to each other
they exhibited the discrete features of high-profile individuality. In
other words, person and individual were no longer coterminous. The
evolution of individualism necessitated a stronger emphasis on per-
sonality, which entailed a new level of equality to ensure the coher-
ence of the civic body. Individuals acquired equality as persons in
Christ; a feat they achieved in the act of ritual peacemaking.

Peace Ritual, Civitas, and Conjuratio Reiterata

This observation leads us to the third development, the dynamic polit-

ical dimension of the phenomena I have traced thus far. In modern
terms the ritual imagery of the reality represented in the peace rites
of collective identification with Christ’s disciples reflected a stage in
the transition of the commune as a sworn association of individuals
to civitas, the corporate body of the city-state. Given that the early
commune was commonly referred to as pax and concordia, it is hardly
surprising that peace rites played an important role in the physical
enactment of the concept of sworn community in the first place.
In the extant traditions of the northern Italian cities, the consti-
tution of the communes of Piacenza and Milan was presented as
resulting from a mass ritual reconciliation between the urban nobil-

62
Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 74–82.
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ity and the popolo. According to the anonymous source informing

Giovanni Codagnello’s account of the origins of the commune of
Piacenza in 1090, in the heat of an armed conflict between com-
moners and milites, Christ intervened to instill mercy and piety in
the two camps. The warring parties suddenly became aware of their
foolishness, worthlessness, and insanity. Weeping and beating their
chests, shouting aloud ‘Peace! Peace!’ knights and commoners rushed
toward each other to embrace and exchange the kiss of peace. The
‘universal peace and concord,’ which ensued from that miraculous
intervention of the divine and the mass of individual reconciliations
following in its wake, laid the foundation of the commune.63 A four-
teenth-century authority, Codagnello is well-known for his imagina-
tive approach to his sources.64 His account betrays a perception of
ritual reconciliation later than the events recorded. All the same,
there are reasons to believe that Codagnello’s rendition preserved
traces of the early history of the commune.
In the account of another fourteenth-century author, Galvaneo
Fiamma, the series of private reconciliations on the eve of the First
Crusade, most probably in 1095, enacted through ritual kisses ‘in
the streets and on the squares’ of the city, were the foundation of
the commune of Milan.65 The ‘universal peace and tranquility’ fol-
lowing the reconciliation between the feuding parties spanned the
transitional period of the constitution of the commune, from about
1090 to the 1130s, when the communal systems in Lombardy were
more or less institutionalized with the appearance of the consulate.66
On both occasions our sources conceived of the commune as a
political body and a legal structure. In view of the legal implications

63
Giovanni Codagnello, Annales Placentini Guelfi, MGH SS, vol. 18, 411–2. On the
political and religious situation in Piacenza at the time see Domenico Ponzoni,
‘Situazione della chiesa Piacentina al tempo del concilio di Piacenza,’ in Il Concilio
di Piacenza e le Crociate (Piacenza, 1996), 121–53. Ponzoni sums up the arguments
of Pierre Racine, Plaisance du X e à la fin du XIII e siècle (Paris-Lille, 1980), 68–9 and
Luigi Canetti, Gloriosa Civitatis. Culto dei Santi e società cittadina nel Medioevo (Bologna,
1993), vol. 1, 138.
64
See Holder-Egger in Neues Archiv, 16 (1891), 253ff.
65
RISS, vol. 11, coll. 627, ch. 153. Galvaneo’s account was written in the first
quarter of the fourteenth century but preserves traces of an earlier source like
Codagnello’s chronicle.
66
For a discussion of both cases from a legal point of view see Gerhard Dilcher,
Die Entstehung der lombardischen Stadtkommune. Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Aalen,
1967), 135–41. See also the criticism of Hagen Keller, ‘Die sociale und politische
Verfassung Mailands in den Anfängen des kommunalen Lebens,’ Historische Zeitschrift,
211 (1970), 34–64.
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280  

of the ritual kiss and its accompanying rites, this is hardly coinci-
dental. The sources on which Codagnello and Fiamma drew derived
the emergence of the commune from the juridico-political implica-
tions of private reconciliation under divine patronage enacted in rit-
ual. I suggest that this type of presentation was among the most
archaic features in our authors’ accounts and testifies to the authen-
ticity of their renditions. The legal dimension of the peace rites, the
kiss featuring prominently among them, established a temporary city-
wide peace during which the urban parties and factions worked out
a functioning mechanism of government and civic representation.
The ritual act of peace triggered the community-building process
with the self-obligation through oath, validated in the liability-pro-
ducing kiss of peace and guaranteed by the divine. The enactment
of large-scale peacemaking created a commonwealth ex nihilo. The
ritual actors pooled their resources to erect a collective agency built
on the dissipation of private conflict and held together by the only
institution available, the liability of self-obligation. The kiss of peace,
as Codagnello’s and Fiamma’s sources would have it, was the gate-
way to communal life by virtue of the liminal but obligatory asso-
ciation it created and the validating paradigms it evoked.
The ritual moment was thus a quasi-institution and a surrogate
for later formal structures for one more reason. It has been stated that
the ritual peacemaking in the two Lombard communes was a coniuratio,
a peace oath sworn by the entire population. What has not been
noticed is that through the peace ritual the city dwellers linked the
idea and practice of the city as an association of individuals to the
concept and reality of the divinely inspired civitas as a super-personal
corporation. While this seemingly self-contradicting assertion is not
a new one in modern scholarship, the role of the rites of peace in
its practical workings remains unnoticed or undervalued.67
Let us take the example of Milan. The peace of the association
in 1095 was unique in the sense that it was a general peace and
did not stem from a particular division preceding the event, thereby
marking a new type of relationship. It was the culmination of a series
of previous particular juramenta, enacted in 1045, 1067, and 1074.68

67
See for a review of the relevant literature Dilchert, Die Entstehung, 42ff. Italian
historiography follows the conjectures of German legal scholarship, see the synthe-
sis of Giovanni Tabacco, Egemonie sociali e strutture del potere nel medioevo italiano (Rome,
1979), 226ff. for the origins of Milan and Racine, Plaisance, vol. 1, 60ff. for Piacenza.
68
See Keller, ‘Die Verfassung,’ 61ff.
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It is remarkable that the highest level of legal and political com-

mitment was reached through the ritual peace. The political prod-
uct of the reconciliation with the kiss was an aggregate phenomenon
transcending the sum of all acts of private peacemaking of the citi-
zens. Individual interaction defined the peace act as an extension of
the traditional practices of private peace, the house-peace of cus-
tomary law, and the Langobard treuga. Its enactment in the social
environment of the emerging commune, however, was a qualitatively
new development. In Piacenza, according to Codagnelo, all began
with a shared emotion, an upheaval which one ‘had to be made of
stone’ to shy away from. Despite their social roles, ranks, and sta-
tuses, burghers, nobles, and clergy engaged in a single ritual act that
by virtue of its legal and referential polisemy redefined their iden-
tity. The ambiguity of the ritual obligation sustained the coexistence
of two forms, association and incorporation, in an ongoing trans-
formation of civic identity.
The rites of peace embodied the new identity and ensured the
continuation of the commune by being the composite form of a coni-
uratio reiterata. As a corporate entity, the high medieval city depended
for its existence on the legal linkages between its members and the
social whole they constituted. An important feature of these bonds
was their temporary and conditional character. As a consequence,
for the city to exist as such it had to continuously and formally
renew itself as a coniuratio. The initial act of ritual ‘creation’ was not
sufficient to keep it going. The renewal of the contract therefore was
not just a festive commemoration of the inception of the city. It was
a legal and political affair with tangible implications for the urban
dwellers’ status as citizens. Wilhelm Ebel reminded us that the oblig-
ations and responsibilities of civic life had to be enacted over and
over again, for the legal bonds that wove together the fabric of urban
society were thought of as subject to expiration.69 The reenactment
continued long after the citizens had established and internalized the
concept of the city’s corporate identity. In terms of customary law,
the city for a long time remained a coniuratio reiterata rooted in the
arbitrariness of Willkür and in the principle of the socially canonized
sic volo, sic jubeo.70

69
Wilhelm Ebel, Der Bürgereid als Geltungsgrund und Gestaltungsprinzip des deutschen
Mittelalterlichen Stadtrechts (Weimar, 1958).
70
Or, as Ebel put it, ‘eine selbst stets erneuerte Willkür,’ ibidem, 4.
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282  

Although Ebel’s observations were based on urban legal structures

in the German-speaking regions of the Empire, his conclusions hold
good for the northern Italian cities as well. As late as the fourteenth
century, northern Italian cities were at least nominally under impe-
rial sway and participated in a shared legal discourse. Although
differing from the legal mechanisms of civic renewal that Ebel inves-
tigated, the rites of peace and reconciliation are just as good an illus-
tration of his perceptive insight. Unlike the regular reenactment of
civic unity and the aggregate identity it entailed through the sworn
oath of the entire eligible population, the ritual enactment of peace
was a sporadic phenomenon involving selected groups and individ-
uals. Still, three features made it a type of constitutive act of coniu-
ratio reiterata on a par with the oath of citizenship.
First, peace ritual intervened in times of internal discord that
threatened with destruction the very concept of the city as a willful
association. The inter- and intra-city conflicts during the Alleluia move-
ment and the Guelf-Ghibelline struggles, as well as the moments of
sharpened apperception of the concept of the city as patria, were
routinely accompanied by waves of interpersonal reconciliation as
presentation of civic identity.
Second, ritual peacemaking reenacted the moment in which the
city was initially created as a social, legal, and political entity. Piacenza,
again, is a case in point. Ritually ‘created’ with the ritual kiss in
1090, as a social and legal entity it was legally re-created on at least
one more recorded occasion. In May 1233, after a prolonged intra-
city conflict, representatives of the warring parties, twenty on each
side, gathered together in the main square and, under the instigation
of the Dominican Leo who served as an external mediator, exchanged
the kiss of peace.71 The peace of 1090 lasted for years, the one of
May 1233 until the following month, but in functional and typo-
logical sense both represented the same phenomenon. The private
reconciliations mediated by Cardinal Latino Malabranca in Tuscany
and the Romagna in 1278–1280 and the numerous private peace-
makings arranged by the angeli pacis and by Emperor Henry VII in
the beginning of the fourteenth century followed the same pattern.72

71
Giovanni Musio, Chronicle, RISS vol. 13, quoted after Carl Sutter, Johann von
Vicenza und die italienische Friedensbewegung im Jahre 1233 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1899),
26–27.
72
Cardinal Latino’s activity in Tuscany was already mentioned in reference to
Florence; see also the pacification of Faenza and Bologna, according to Pietro
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Third, personal peacemaking was a liability taken by all citizens

alike, causing them to become aware of themselves as personalized
representations of the supra-personal unity ingrained in the law that
enabled the transition of association into corporation. Once the tran-
sition was completed, the role of interpersonal peacemaking as rep-
resentation of the communal coherence declined. This does not mean
that ritual peace stepped off the foreground of urban life. It con-
tinued to be carefully staged under the watchful eye of the officials
of the corporate body and later under the urban rulers, for two
major reasons. First, ritual reconciliation helped represent, propa-
gate, and inculcate in people’s consciousness a new type of civic
identity, the conception of the individual citizen as a social person
in relation to the authorities. Through the rites of peace with which
the individual citizen integrated him or herself into the totality of
the city, a process developed that slowly but decisively marked urban
identity as a derivative of corporate membership. Second, the orches-
tration of ritual peace between private citizens was the ultimate proof
of the legitimacy of the city government.

Peace Ritual and Political Legitimacy

Legitimacy was of paramount concern for the urban authorities. In

the long run, the thirteenth-century transformation of occasional pri-
vate peacemaking into a public institution had profound consequences
for the political dimension of urban lay piety. This phenomenon can-
not be characterized as contingent and episodic. The great Italian
peace movements, the Alleluia of 1233, its later offshoot in 1239, the
penitents of 1260, the pacification wave of 1278–80, the movements
of 1310, 1315, 1335, and the Bianchi of 1399 were all intimately
connected with issues of power and Herrschaft.
The transition from reconciliation between private citizens to peace-
making as a device of power legitimization is perhaps best illustrated
in the Alleluia movement. Its most conspicuous figure, Giovanni of
Vicenza, began his career as a reformer of private life and a preacher
of morals and peace in interpersonal relationships, and ended up

Cantinelli in Francesco Torraca, ed., Petri Cantinelli Chronicon [AA. 1228–1306] in

RISS, vol. 28, 29–31. For Bologna see Gina Fasoli, ‘La pace del 1279 tra i partiti
Bolognese,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. 7, 20 (1933), 49–75.
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284  

asserting himself as a political leader.73 The connection between peace-

making and political power was manifest in the activity of the Fran-
ciscan and Dominican friars who worked alongside him. Brother Leo,
a Milanese by origin, was another of the politically active figures.74
This political potential was further developed by Pietro of Verona,
who converted the amorphous, easily dissolving peace movements
into an enduring phenomenon with the establishment of the tertiary
orders. The process he began was stabilized with Raniero Fasani’s crea-
tion of confraternal structures.75 Finally, Emperor Henry VII’s Romzug
in the beginning of the fourteenth century demonstrated the extent
to which lay authorities relied on peacemaking for their legitimacy.76
The pacifying efforts of the friars and the specially authorized
agents of the papal curia, the angeli pacis, among whom cardinal
Latino Malabranca was the highest ranking, complemented but also
competed with the activity of the communal authorities. As already
mentioned, control of private peacemaking was one of the legal
expressions of the descending of the imperial ban into the domain
of communal jurisdiction. The problem with this transition was that
legally speaking the communes were utterly illegitimate.77 Their appro-
priation of imperial rights after the disintegration of Staufen author-
ity, around the middle decades of the thirteenth century, was a
natural process but it was fraught with technical problems. The major
one was that, possessing little legitimacy of their own, the commu-
nal governments laid their bid for monopoly on power wide open
to contestation. Urban political parties and individual citizens did
not hesitate to exploit that to the detriment of communal unity and
the public order.
In such conditions, peacemaking emerged as a major source of
legitimacy. It sustained the very existence of the urban regimes as
corporate social and political bodies. The link between peace and

73
Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy.
74
Sutter, Johann von Vicenza, 26, n. 5.
75
See the good survey of Giancarlo Angelozzi, Le confraternite laicali. Un’esperienza
cristiana tra medioevo e età moderna (Brescia, 1979), 1–71.
76
Henry’s main task during the Romzug was pacifying Italy: see numerous occa-
sions of his intervention in communal and personal conflicts in MGH Leges, 4
Constitutiones, vol. 4, part 2.
77
For the concept see Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Geselschaft (Tübingen, 1922),
who entitled Chapter 8 the ‘Non-legitimate Herrschaft of the commune.’ For a more
dynamic analysis of the evolution of the concept see Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches
Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1978), vol. 3, 1–102.
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legitimacy emerged most clearly in the authorities’ response to the

penitent movement of 1260. The governments of the Umbrian com-
munes Perugia and Foligno, those of Bologna, Parma, and Padua
in papal Romagna, and those of Emiglia Romana with Rome herself
welcomed the flagellants. The signori of the city-states, however, saw
in the movement direct threat to their authority and forbid the pen-
itents entry into their cities. The flagellants were barred from Manfred’s
Regno, from the march of Ancona, and from Crema, Cremona, and
Milan under Marquis Ugo Palavicino. The latter feared, according
to the keen observation of the Ghibelline author of Annales Placentini,
‘that he’ll lose his power’ [ut marchio perderet dominium].78 In the march
of Treviso, the penitent movement could only spread after the death
of the sons of Count Ezzelino, who had banned it from the city. In
Ferrara, in 1269, Marquis Obizzo D’Este issued a series of decrees
against ‘public or private scourging’ in the city and its contado.79
The signori had grasped well the associative character of the peace
movements as well as the fact that they drew legitimacy directly from
the divine. Either way, the peacemakers circumnavigated and under-
mined the tyrants’ right to rule, the sources of their legitimate Herrschaft
and their social role as mediators in urban conflict. The peace move-
ments represented the citizens as amici, individuals legally bounded
by acts of their free will for cooperation and cohabitation. The rites
of peace stressed their equality and responsibility as agents of the
peace, not as subjects of the peace-imposing ruler. In times of trou-
ble, when the survival of the commune was at risk, the former issues
outweighed all other political considerations. In the eve of Montaperti,
the bishop of Siena extolled the citizens to kiss and become ‘friends’
[che tutti sieno amici insieme].80 But in the ever scheming minds of the
signori, if peace were to be, it had to be mediated by themselves
alone. Not by coincidence, the more subtle signori of latter times
engaged personally to arrange the reconciliation of their subjects. In
1399, for example, Francesco Novello, the Carrara ruler of Padua,
went as far as personally intervening to end feuds between simple
peasants in his contado, having them kiss one another on the mouth.81

78
MGH SS, 18, 512.
79
Ludovico Muratori, Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi (Bologna, 1965), vol. 6, 471.
80
Ceruti, ‘La battaglia di Montaperti,’ 40.
81
Quoted after Benjamin C. Kohl, Padua under the Carrara, 1318–1405 (Baltimore,
1998), 290.
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The intimate link between the peace movements and the stabil-
ity of the communal regimes is clearly spelled in the Annals of Padua:
‘in that time began the freedom of Padua, that is, in the vigil of St.
Martin.’82 The power to mediate evolved in power to rule, as the
Alleluia had shown. The papal program of pacification in the late
1270s was founded on precisely this premise. The quashing of com-
munal disorder emerged as the chief legitimizing device in the course
of the papal acquisition of the Romagna. The communal authorities
saw it the same way. Communal government as a way of representa-
tion of the urban association drew vital support for its legitimacy
from the divinely validated peace ritual that it shared with the peace
movements.
Once the message took hold on urban politics, the public authorities
could work on representations designed to transform the city from
a free association into a corporate body under their command. For,
unlike the peace movements, the authorization to use coercion resulted
directly from the associating citizenry’s will to peace, and could be
appropriated by the corporate body that stood for the citizenship.
The evolution of the angeli pacis, the special legates of the curia, into
paciarii, officers of the peace operating as part of the city structures
was, among other things, an illustration of the process of solidifying
governments secure in their legitimacy. By the end of the thirteenth
century, the thrust of the peace movements had been transformed.
In Harald Dickerhof ’s apt expression, once aiming at ‘Herrschaft
through peacemaking’ it became ‘peacemaking through Herrschaft.’83
In terms of practical politics, the city had constituted itself as a cor-
porate body, and could enforce the peace as legitimately and as
effectively as the invocation of the divine and the ritual associations
of its citizens had done in the previous period of urban history.

Ritual Peace and Obedience

The exercise of Herrschaft to bring about peace and stabilize the

super-personal corporations that peacemaking legitimized was a basic

82
In quello tempo cominciò la libertà di Padoa, cioè nella vigillia di san Martino, see RISS,
n.s., vol. 8, part 1, 227, col. 2. I am indebted for the survey in this paragraph to
Meersseman, Ordo Fraternitatis, I, 450–63.
83
Harald Dickerhof, ‘Friede als Herrschaftslegitimation,’ Archiv für Kulturgeschichte,
59 (1977), 360–89.
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process in the building of early modern civic identity. Reproducing

this identity in the mind and conduct of the individual citizen was
an ongoing effort of late-medieval and Renaissance urban govern-
ments. Max Weber’s classic formulation of Herrschaft as the evoca-
tion of obedience captures its essence best.84 In the city-corporation
whose head and sole bearer of legitimate power was the prince, obe-
dience reigned supreme in the construction of the hegemonic rep-
resentation of citizenship. The representation of ritual reconciliation
was accordingly modified to reflect and propagate the promotion of
obedience to the status of civic disposition.
The idea and practice of civic peace as the major preoccupation
of the Renaissance Italian city-state has been the subject of numer-
ous studies. It was a multi-dimensional construct, however, and the
implications of interpersonal reconciliation is perhaps the least stud-
ied of its aspects. By way of conclusion, I will explore a specific rep-
resentation of ritual peacemaking in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
Florentine political theology that was built on the matrix of the tale
of the forgiving knight.
In several Renaissance Florentine versions of Gualberto’s story, the
kiss of peace was allotted a place in the ritual sequence. The most
popular renditions were those of a play performed in Florence on
the saint’s feast day. Local variants of the play follow different sce-
narios and liven up the plot with many additions, but they all agree
on the major points. As in the standard narrative of the Tale, the
dramatic peak of the play came as Giovanni, burning in desire for
revenge, raised his hand to strike the murderer. Despairing of his
life, the latter fell on his knees and entreated Giovanni to spare him,
pointing to Christ’s example. Moved by the plea, Giovanni lifted the
knight up and with the words ‘I forgive you and want to give you
peace’ [A te perdono e vôti render pace] took him by the hand and led
him to church to thank God. There they prayed with thankfulness,
Giovanni for being made stronger through the act of forgiveness,
the knight for avoiding sure death. The crucifix bowed his head in
recognition. Giovanni noticed the act of divine approval, went out
of the church, kissed his enemy, and set him free [ poi lo licenza].85

84
Weber, Wirtschaft und Geselschaft, 122–30. See also the illuminating discussion
in Sabean, Power in the Blood, 21–31.
85
Alessandro D’Ancona, ed., Sacre representationi dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI (Florence,
1872), vol. 3, 139–43. The fragments I use are from a late fifteenth-century ver-
sion and three versions from 1554, 1555, and 1561.
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288  

Solidly linked to the late-medieval notion of civic interaction, the

play set apart the ritual resolution of the conflict from Giovanni’s
conversion as an act of affiliation with the divine. The kiss of peace,
the secular reconciliation, and the achievement of the social peace
it stood for were a thing apart from the integration of Giovanni’s
personality by the transcendental. His mind already made up, Giovanni
led the offender out of the church to exchange the kiss and thus
legally terminate the conflict. The sacred space was separated from
the act of peace, thereby rendering it a secular affair. Peacemaking
was no longer based on the do ut des principle, nor was it oriented
toward the future. Rather, it followed in the wake of identification
through remembrance awakened by human prayer but actualized by
the sanction of the divine. Bodily interaction was reserved for the
human actors; the numinous retained a detached stance.
This representation of the reference to God had two levels, a
moral and a political one. Unlike the high medieval cases docu-
mented by different versions of the Tale, the moral dimension of the
Florentine play maintained that persons integrated through their
unique remembrance of the divine were capable of moral acts on
their own, without counting on retribution or retaliation. The polit-
ical dimension also strengthened the distance from the high medieval
models. Most importantly, the play implied that the moral act in
itself was not a sufficient condition for the resolution of the conflict.
Giovanni was a true agent in choosing forgiveness over revenge; but
that was a display of a moral rather than a political agency. The
sanction of the divine finalized it, not the actor’s decision or the
approval of the audience whose participation was not required or
expected. The legal instrument enacted in the ritual kiss that the
deity authorized was actually outside of the sacred sphere. Against this
background, the mystification of the source of agency cannot deceive
us. The authorizing divine was a mirror image of the city authorities,
appropriated by them to buttress their legitimacy. The validation of
the act by Christ’s salute was but a faint reflection of the sanction
of the divine in the original story. Mediated by the government of
the city that had identified itself with the numinous, the legally val-
idating ritual act of reconciliation took place only after the permis-
sion to act had been given by the politically appropriated deity.
Thus, one and the same gesture, a stable practice that endured
through the centuries and was modified and transformed to answer
local needs, at times reverting to its original form, in the end was
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employed to serve diametrically opposite purposes. The practices of

the acephalous high medieval French and Italian political societies
fused in one ritual legality, association, and affiliation with the divine
to back up their pleas for moral behavior as the basis of the social
order in times of transition. The late-medieval political discourse of
the Italian city-states dissociated ritual morality, harmony of thought
and feeling, and the divine from legal ritual to assert the rights of
the secular authorities to appropriate agency and promote order at
any price. The shift to functionality was completed. Having institu-
tionalized themselves as the head of the corporation, the urban
authorities closed the discursive loophole that afforded the individual
the power to do and undo peace at will. Attempting to mold indi-
vidual identity through a new pattern of representation was an impor-
tant part of this new social policy that relied on duty and obedience.
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290

CHAPTER EIGHT

IDENTITY FROM WITHIN: SELF AND PERSON

In the late-medieval collection known as The Little Flowers of St. Francis,

there is a story about brother Juniper and his reconciliation with a
man whose rage the friar had provoked. Inflamed with the spirit of
charity, Juniper had cut off the foot of a live pig and prepared a
savory dish to fulfil the wish of one of his bed-ridden fellow-brethren
and fortify him against the sickness. Seeing his animal badly maimed,
the owner of the pig took to the friary in a fury, shouting angrily
at the brothers that they were ‘hypocrites, thieves, false knives, and
wicked rogues.’ His charge aimed at the friars’ image of saintly men;
Juniper’s crime, he implied, had exposed their real identity. The
insults did not offend the friars bent on humility, yet St. Francis’
attempts to mollify the greatly scandalized man came to naught.
Concerned with the Order’s reputation, Francis then commanded
Juniper to seek out the man, humiliate himself, and appease him by
offering to make full amends.
Juniper, although astonished to see that his act of charity caused
such a trouble, ran to obey the orders and confronted the master
of the pig, who by then was ‘raging beyond measure, boiling with
anger, and overcome with fury,’ with the joy of his cheerful coun-
tenance. He first sought to conciliate the man by telling him the
story of the sick friar’s wish. It did not help. Patiently, the friar told
the story a second time believing, in his simplicity, ‘that he had not
heard aright’ the other’s angry response. Failing again, Juniper changed
the tack radically. He suddenly fell on the raging man’s neck, embrac-
ing and kissing him, and told him anew how he had acted for the
charity’s sake alone. At this point, the author tells us, the man was
so overcome by Juniper’s simplicity and humility that ‘being come
to himself, fell on the ground’ before the friar, not without many
tears, and asked to be pardoned for the insults he had heaped on
the brothers. He then took the pig, killed it, cooked it and carried
it with much devotion and offered it to the friars as amends ‘for the
wrong he had done them.’1

1
The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 175–8.
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This story can be read as a series of dichotomies—social, reli-

gious, and literary—enfolding on different discursive levels. What
matters most for our purposes are the factors that led to the resolution
of the conflict. Given Juniper’s character and his act, behind which
we can see the friar’s unwillingness to conform to social practices
based on private property, there seems to have been little in the way
of verbal intercourse that brought about reconciliation. Despite the
author’s assertions about friar Juniper’s otherworldly person, the
enraged man remained immune to his demonstrations of ‘simplicity
and humility.’ The sudden, unexpected exposure to the ritual kiss
was the decisive moment in the interaction. It was through the kiss
that the man ‘came to himself ’ and turned from wrath to peace.
Even if we are dealing with a colloquial expression, the context
within which it operated is telling. It was ritual, not the friar’s ‘sim-
plicity,’ that had provoked the conflict in the first place and kept it
going thereafter, nor his ‘humility,’ which we only see in the com-
pliance with Francis’ request that accomplished the task of collaps-
ing the barriers of insult and injury sustaining the conflict. The ritual
kiss overcame the gap that separated the action of the friar and the
motivations behind it from the standpoint of the owner of the animal.
The kiss of peace ‘translated’ for the furious man the code that had
been up to then incomprehensible and which rendered the friar’s con-
duct an act of charity. Unlike the friar’s verbal harangue, the kiss was
capable of penetrating the shell of worldly values dominating the
man’s concept of socially acceptable action and reaching to the power-
ful organizational principle that lay hidden beneath it. In a forceful
manner, ritual stripped the socially validated vestments in which the
person was clad and laid bare his true self. That self, it appears,
was able to connect to the ‘simple and humble,’ God-inspired nature
of the social persons of the friars unified by their godly selves.

Ritual Unveiling of Identity: The Medieval Model

In this narrative, reconciliation and social intercourse became possi-

ble due to the ritual ‘discovery’ of the substance point at which the
interlocutors could meet. On the one hand, ritual clarified friar
Juniper’s personality in the opaque perception of his opponent, since
it made transparent that his public person was an extension of his
moral self. It accomplished something words could not do. It was a
proof that his intentions had been honorable and that he had acted
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292  

with integrity. The kiss dispelled the shadow of duplicity, which the
other party’s perception of the friar’s identity had created. On the other
hand, under the impact of ritual and in the manner of the new lay
piety propagated and exemplified by St. Francis, the raging man
became self-conscious. Having received the kiss, he apperceived his
true nature, his self, and the essence of his own identity as well as
that of the friar. Through this act, as Marcel Mauss wrote at a time
when the issue was being problematized, he acquired the attributes
of a moral person.2 Having been awoken to the identity staked on
the moral self, the man then reintegrated himself around it and
adopted a new personality, expressed fittingly in his apology, amends,
and new attitude toward the friars.
The story underscores the multidimensional functionality of the
ritual kiss on the level of identity. The conflict resulted from mis-
communication due to the different levels on which the complex per-
son of the layman confronted the one-dimensional, unified personality
of the Franciscan. Leveling the ground to the unified self within,
and dispensing with roles and personality defined by sociality, ritual
eliminated the source of trouble. Sustaining the link between self and
person, the kiss structured the communication in a manner that reor-
ganized the internal hierarchy of the ritual actors around the ‘in-
relation-to-God’ concept lodged in their selves.
In this religious narrative, constructed to serve the needs of the
Franciscan propaganda of the faith, the ritual act of coming to one’s
self was not an act of the person’s will. It was a forceful unveiling
of what lay down below the skin’s surface and the verbal discourse,
covered up by social conventions. The ritual kiss that made the dis-
covery possible was a convention itself, but one which, using the
body as an instrument, stimulated revelation and ‘remembrance’ of
the basic constituents in the composite nature of the person. The
kiss produced a kind of ‘personality shock’ imposed from the out-
side to reintegrate the person around a new identity pole.
Friar Juniper resorted to the kiss after he had despaired of bring-
ing about reconciliation cognitively, by verbal entreaties revealing
the reason behind his action. Ritual appeared to be the only com-
municative device capable of peeling off the layers of sociality wrapped
around the layman’s self. A host of examples conforms to this pat-
tern of peace interaction. The kiss that Emperor Henry II and arch-

2
Marcel Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Person,’
in Carrithers et al., The Category of the Person, 19.
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bishop Heribert exchanged in private unmasked the emperor’s true

self and revealed the archbishop’s self as well. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln
seized and shook King Richard’s tunic to make the king smile and
received him in the kiss of peace, revealing the king’s real self.
Richard himself delivered a forceful harangue to make Emperor
Henry VI shed tears and kiss him, seized by the realization that the
noble self of his prisoner was in fact no different than his own self.
In all these cases the kiss was able to rearrange the components
of the person on the basis of two premises. First, ritual worked
because it was the self, not so much the social person, that provided
the locus of the person’s identity, morality, and goodness. Second,
goodness, although seen as ingrained in the basic building-block of
personality, was socially immanent. The individual could be unaware,
or self-unconscious, of it. The godly self was a potentiality, a dis-
position that could or could not be realized. Its actualization as an
organizing principle of identity was contingent and depended on a
proper intervention for its awakening.
These observations highlight the importance of ritual in the extrac-
tion of the moral principles of premodern personality. The mode of
interaction and the consequences for the identity built on it depended
on the efficaciousness of the social tools mediating the encounter. In
ritual, the godly self was called to action to integrate the person.
This was possible because ritual confronted the person with a socially
determined depository of goodness that defined its contents and
boundaries. To take my case further, I argue that, from the point
of view of interpersonal interaction, the godly self did not exist out-
side the sphere of ritual practice; the self was because it was a self
in action.3 This does not mean that the self was ‘constructed’ by the
social matrix of ritual, however, as the constructionists would assert.
The ritual interaction unveiled only the moral dimensions of the self;
what lay beyond remained unknown. The revealing of the godly self
in the ritual kiss conformed to the principle of aesthetic coordina-
tion, demanding that the nature of the message and the nature of
the means of communication be in concert with one another. The
self that reached out in the kiss could only be a moral self.
Nevertheless, it is remarkable that in the Franciscan discourse dis-
cussed above, as indeed in any ideal Christian discourse, the inter-
action of individuals became possible due to the link that ritual

3
For a succinct definition of this model see Steven Lukes, ‘Conclusion,’ in
Carrithers et al., The Category of the Person, 299.
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294  

established between their selves seen as ontologically similar, if not

the same, by virtue of their otherworldly nature. This is a particular
illustration of the general rule that for interaction to become possi-
ble individuals should connect on a certain level of equality. In the
modern Western tradition, this concept is based on the idea of equal-
ing the individual and the person and the ensuing postulate that all
individuals are equal as persons, hierarchy and inequality being con-
ceptualized as attributes of their social roles. The self, for its part,
stands for individual uniqueness and irreduciblility. This construct,
however, became the dominant operative base of civil society only
with the emergence of the post-Enlightenment nation-state and the
rule of law.4
By contrast, premodern ritual interaction and its rules appear to
rest on a typologically different phenomenon, one in which the self
was seen as a social actor on a par with the person, capable of inter-
acting and asserting itself vis-à-vis the social and the collective. All
this happened within the acknowledged legal and power frameworks
of the group and was conditioned by the capability of the media of
interaction to decode and reveal the actors’ selves. Sociality was not
limited to entering the scene only in transactions between persons;
it operated just as efficiently on the level of self. On this level, equal-
ity as the fundamental precondition of social interaction was not a
principle external to the ritual encounter. It was the shared social
code inscribed in the interacting selves; a code coterminous with rit-
ual action itself. The predictability of social interaction was thus a
function of the acquisition of control over the discourses informing
the contents of the self in action, that is, over the selection of the
cultural registers capable of extracting the moral self from the indi-
vidual or collective whole.

The Architectonics of Ritual Identity

Although one cannot build a comprehensive picture of the structures

of premodern identity by discussing only the rites of peace, some of
its dimensions can be discerned.

4
A useful survey of different constructs of personality is still Victor Barnouw,
Culture and Personality (Homewood, 1973).
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Let me begin with the contexts within which the earliest case stud-
ies of reconciliation enfolded. If Codagnello kept true to the word-
ing of his source, the discovery of one’s self was the precondition
for the large-scale reconciliation in Piacenza in the 1090. Knights
and burghers moved from armed confrontation to reconciliation and
lasting peace not merely by being persuaded or forced by the inter-
vention of the divine. They ran to make peace after having come
to themselves, that is, after having been brought to the apperception
of their own ‘worthlessness and foolishness’ and having experienced
remorse over that sorry condition. As the conflict was provoked by
the contradictory demands for social preeminence and political con-
trol over the city, both parties were equally implicated in the discord
that ensued. Accordingly, both sides were led to experience the same
feeling of personal and collective deflation.
Despite appearances, a closer reading of the episode leaves the
impression that the resolution of the conflict through the interven-
tion of Christ was not the result of an attempt to shift responsibil-
ity and transfer all agency to the transcendental. This became a
standard feature in later accounts.5 In the early model, individuals
were not expected to have their personalities ontologically integrated
around the concept of godliness. While the intervention of the divine
as an external matrix of moral integration was absolutely necessary
for normal civic intercourse, the concept of common good shifted
the emphasis in a more mundane direction. Codagnello’s narrative
allows us to extract the principles of the logic of identity construc-
tion revealed in the course of ritual interaction.
To begin with, the spirit of the account is closely related to the
political construct extolling the virtues of communal life. In Codagnello’s
rendering, the sense of worthlessness reflected the destructive effects
of the social alienation of the two political camps. In terms of related-
ness, the conflict caused the organic self, represented by the city as
its primary social unit, to fall apart. Yet the separate selves divided
by strife could not exist independently. They were worthless and
helpless individuals. They were not yet discrete personalities. The
commune was the source of goodness and morals integrating the
citizens, for it alone possessed discreteness and completeness. Its

5
See the early fourteenth-century reconciliation in Daniel Waley, ‘A Blood Feud
with a Happy-End,’ 51–3.
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individual members were able to have these qualities only as poten-

tialities, as dispositions reflecting the faculties of the collective body.
The operative concept behind this injunction was the idea of a
collective self-as-whole. In terms of substance, the knights’ and the
burghers’ value as social persons depended on their being organically
connected members of the urban body politic. The idea of urban
society as conceptualized by the account was interdependent with
the idea of the nature of the person. It reflected a stage in the devel-
opment of personality in which the collective self was the social per-
son. It confirms that the individual had significance only if actualized
exclusively in the form of a corporation sole, collective self-as-whole.
At the juncture of the particular—the political agenda of the urban
world—and the general—the concept of the self-as-whole—the rites
of peace entered to erect the organic city from the mingling bodies
of its constituents. Maintaining the integrity of the social self, on the
one hand, and its individual components, on the other, necessitated
the re-insertion of the individual selves into the corporate whole. A
rite of aggregation and incorporation, the ritual kiss of peace repaired
the damage caused by the attempts to assert the acquisition of social
agency and independence by any unit distinct from the collective
entity of the city.
Paradoxically, ritual’s legal implications introduced dynamics into
this somewhat static reconstruction of the relationship between the
self and the social person. As we have seen, the obligatory connec-
tions of the kiss of peace as a legal rite gave rise to personal liability.
Long before the time the citizens of Piacenza kissed to establish their
commune, Henry II’s law of peace obligation had stipulated that lia-
bility taken with the kiss of peace entailed bodily responsibility. The
contract sealed with the kiss was supported by the individual’s own
body. The ritual actor could not substitute another in case of judi-
cial duel and his perjury after the kiss entailed the loss of his own
hand. No other person of his kith and kin bore the responsibility or
could assume the liability.
For the purposes of this investigation, it matters little that the let-
ter of the law could not be and in reality was not enforced in the
intra-communal conflicts. The principles underlying it reflected the
legal ritual’s inroads into the idea of the collective self-as-person and
the shifting of attention to the self as defined by the human body,
narrowly seen as an entity confined within its surfaces. This legal
frame constructed the body and, as we shall see later, through it the
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self, by limiting corporeal boundaries and defining what belonged to

the individual and what did not. Within the legal discourse govern-
ing the rites of peace, the individual self acquired features of a social
person. That type of personality was operative in punishment, but
the responsibility entailed a changed emphasis in the conceptualiza-
tion of personal identity. Legal ritual was the instantiation of a larger
discourse designed to chip away at the collective self, steadily decon-
structing it to isolate and expose the individual self to the hegemonic
pressures of the public powers appropriating the concepts of law and
functional ordering of society.
The analysis of the interaction through the rites of peace in the
beginning of our period thus reveals one dynamic and two static dimen-
sions in the architectonics of high medieval personality: the operation
of sociality through the principle of the self-as-person, the ritual indi-
viduation through the body, and the social actualization through the
collective whole. I will proceed by considering these features sepa-
rately, and then reintegrate them in model personalities to define
the contours of the evolution of the modes of ritual identity building.

The Self as Person

The perception of the person as a social phenomenon almost undis-

tinguishable from the self was not a monopoly of the religious and
legal discourses. It can be inferred from ritual practice in a variety
of settings. For one thing, the frequency with which refusals to rec-
oncile with the kiss occurred against the background of thin source
coverage cannot be the effect solely of cultural myopia or the slack
grip of coercion. One only needs to recall the knight in Ursmar’s
story, the conflicts between the English King Henry II and Thomas
Becket, the emperor in Duke Ernst and Guy of Warwick, Gautier and
Bernier in Raoul, the grieving ladies in Wolfram’s Parzival, and some
Flemish cases, to gather a rich sample from across cultural, social,
gender, and political domains. Such evidence illustrates patterns in
the actualization of the premodern self according to which, when
the individual was under pressure, it was virtually impossible to dis-
entangle his or her person and self from one another. The social
person engaged in fides contracts was permeated by the ‘inner being.’
This was perhaps one of the reasons why the legally binding fides
was rarely, if at all, engaged on trivial occasions. It was the last
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resort of the ritual actors, employed after all other options had been
exhausted. The self was called to inform individual identity in excep-
tional circumstances only.
The role of the self as a social agent is further illustrated by the
legitimization of displays of anger at crucial junctures of the social
interaction. By this transformation of affect into emotion, anger—
the most powerful though short-lived mode of self-actualization—
bridged the space between self and person. The identification of law
and anger invokes an order in which society acknowledged the per-
son as a unit dominated, organized, and mobilized by the self. A
natural reaction of the ‘inner’ being, which could be provoked by
extra-social and extra-cultural pressures, was sublimated and socially
validated to display the crucial role of the self in organizing iden-
tity. For as long as legal grievance were legitimately expressed in
anger outbursts, the order of the day identified the self as either the
primary or at least a licit social agent.
The model of individual identity construed in ritual in which the
self fused with the person left enough traces to allow a partial recon-
struction of its most visible features. The latter transpire consistently
in the ongoing effort to eliminate contingency and increase pre-
dictability by ritual reorganization of the self. A close look at this
process highlights the types of personality operated on through rit-
ual intervention with the primary task of changing the social being
by integrating the self around specific cultural codes. Two ritual
engagements from 1095 capture moments of the attempt to gain a
hold on the basic identity features of continuity, integrity, and sin-
cerity transpiring in the ritual engagement of the self as the under-
lying factor of personality.
The first is the case in which Gill of Seuly restored the church
of St. Gundolf to the monks of St. Florent. The transaction, sealed
with the ritual pledge of Gill’s fides, was a kind of contract known
as convenientia. Most transfers of property being based on some sort
of projection into the future, late eleventh-century convenientia was a
transaction in which future relationships played a special role.6 It
bore directly on the issue of identity, for continuity in time is one

6
See Paul Ourliac, ‘La ‘Convenientia,’ 413–23; and Pierre Bonnassie, ‘Les con-
ventions féodales dans la Catalogne du XIe siècle,’ in Les structures sociales de l’Aquitaine,
du Languedoc, et de l’Espagne au premier age féodal, Toulouse, 28–31 March 1968 (Paris,
1969), 187–219.
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of identity’s two essential traits. As the document reads, the monks

did not seem to expect Gill to attempt to deceive them. All that
concerned them was a change of his mind at some later time. Sincerity
was not an issue. The problem was that the monks conceived of
their noble partner, with good reason perhaps, as a social agent of
the here and now. He was not expected to extend his existence in
time unchanged. The social partner coterminous with self was seen
by the monks as highly unstable. The continuity and hence the iden-
tity of the individual who was engaged in the convenientia being thus
in a state of flux, the stability of the agreement itself was called into
question. It is important to note that the individual was not seen as
an ontological threat to the fabric of social relationships. Gill was
not considered to be evil or wicked. The unpredictability of the self
and the inability of the social to control it destabilized it in the eyes
of the monks.
This was the problem that the monks sought to eliminate by bind-
ing Gill’s fides, the most tangible expression of his self, to the terms
of the transaction by a specific rite, the kiss of peace. The decision
to create obligation with the kiss-fides in order to perpetuate the con-
tract stabilized identity. It was conditioned by the monks’ mistrust
of the capability of the secular form in which fides was routinely
couched to properly operate the binding substance of the person.
The interpretative framework of the traditional gesture, the hand-
shake, rendered the self-as-person less predictable than the monks
wished it to be. It lacked the powerful obligatory dimensions encoded
in the kiss. The kiss-fides switched registers. It created an acceptable
form of liability for it integrated the obligating act within the inter-
pretative scheme of both the religious and the lay nobles. Through
the kiss, the monks incorporated fides, the concept of liability, the
self, and the person of their social partner into a discourse that guar-
anteed that the self-as-person would be perpetuated as a moral agent.
The legal engagement with the kiss, modeled on the ecclesiastical,
Christian concept of trust, identity, and retribution, ensured the con-
struction of lay fides as religious faith, thus integrating the self around
the conceptual domain of the deity. The discourse instantiated in
the ritual kiss led Gill to the awareness that the welfare of his self,
the soul pledged in the kiss, hinged on the continuous adherence to
the terms of the contract he struck as a social person. It stabilized
his self in time. Ultimately then, to guarantee the agreement the reli-
gious resorted to constructing a new identity for the lay noble by
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300  

imposing on him a specific ritual form that fitted his personality into
an appropriate interpretative discourse.
In another case, the reconciliation of bishop Otbert and abbot
Berengar of St. Lawrence in 1095, we are told that the public kiss
sealing the peace between the prelates scandalized the audience. The
two men had had their differences on the issue of reform and this
was well known. Bishop Otbert had even been excommunicated by
the pope. The kiss that Berengar gave him not only went against
the grain of the abbot’s dedication to reform, but infringed on the
postulate of not kissing excommunicates, stated in several church
councils and part and parcel of contemporary canon law.7
As the story goes, the problem was not the abbot’s lack of integrity.
The author of the Chronicle of the Abbey of St. Hubert, who recorded
the reaction of the public, explicitly said that the people, that is, the
zealot party of reform, marveled how such a staunch reformer as
Berengar could compromise on this fundamental issue.8 For the audi-
ence, therefore, the reconciliation had little to do with sincerity. Their
main concern was the continuity in Berengar’s social role and the
lack of stability in his conduct. The abbot was seen as a bounded,
coherent, and discrete being all along. Even if the author was imput-
ing his interpretation on the observers, his own preoccupation with
continuity is telling. Berengar, he claimed, had always been and
remained a reformer; his conscience was clear. Innocence in the eyes
of the Lord was the personality trait that supported Berengar’s iden-
tity throughout the conflict with the bishop and the subsequent rec-
onciliation. Berengar did not change into a simoniac by accepting
Otbert’s peace, nor did he kiss without integrity. The two appar-
ently contradicting acts, the peace with Otbert and the abbot’s sym-
pathy to the reform party, were both true and sincere.
The contradiction is startling for the modern observer, but only
because we operate with the category of the person as a distinct
social phenomenon and the self as an ‘inner being.’ In Berengar’s
situation the integrated self mattered more on the social stage than
his public persona as a reformer. The condition of preserving integrity
while committing oneself to two diametrically opposite causes was

7
Elizabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986).
8
A. L. P. de Robaulx de Soumoy, ed. and trans., Chronique de l’abbaye de St.
Hubert, dite Cantatorium (Brussels, 1847), 300–301. Commentary in John H. Van
Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983), 34–6.
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possible only because the abbot’s personality was thought of as dom-

inated by his self, which provided for a continuous identity by being
a social agent in its own right. If that was the case, it mattered lit-
tle that as a public being Berengar was subject to different and, as
it turned out, conflicting validations. His position as abbot imposed
on him the duty of taking care of the community. His identification
with the reformers required continuous opposition to Otbert. The
peace was a way to assert himself as head of the monastic commun-
ity, with obligations to what mattered most to his self, God, and his
patron, St. Lawrence. Identity in this case was carried by self, unified
by the divine and the saint and actualized with the conscious adop-
tion of a social role that precluded duplicity or insincerity.
The fact that Berengar could choose between roles is significant.
Choice implies the presence and acceptance of contingency. Berengar’s
choice pitted the welfare of the collective against the validation of
the social agency, juxtaposed the particular versus the universal.
Making peace under the criticism of the group with which he identified
himself focused his attention on what mattered for him most. It made
him aware that his continuous self integrated by conscience was the
true foundation of his personality and allowed him to play social
roles where discontinuity was the rule, without actually increasing
the unpredictability of the arrangement and jeopardizing his integrity.
The last observation is crucial. Role-playing on such terms was a
thorough reconstruction of the components of the social person in
the act of the ritual obligation, pushing to the surface the divinely
unified self. The level of contingency was drastically curtailed when
the transcendental was constructed as its organizational principle. As
our authors would have it, the actors exhibited little agency in the
achievement of that feat. The divine integrated the self in the ritual
act. Once its presence was attested to by employing the appropri-
ate ritual form, the issues of sincerity and integrity did not apply
any longer. The divine in the self was the paradigm of integrity,
constancy, and stability in a world of perpetual flux. In a broader
perspective, the divine in the religious account was the only source
of agency integrating the self around a pole of stability.
God was the most powerful conceptualization of the mode of ritual
intervention in the ordering of the self that dominated the early part
of our period, but it was not the sole factor. Family and clan bonds,
real and imaginary, played the same role in lay interaction. With them,
another concept came into play, the principle of co-substantiality.
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Ritual Peace and Embodiment

The last point leads us to the second feature testifying to the oper-
ation of ritual in the construction of self-identity. Form is crucial in
every ritual model, but in the case of the kiss it was crucial because
it was substance as well. Ritual engaged the most universal, overar-
ching form available, the human body. The self-as-person was, above
all, an embodied self. I have already dwelt on practices conveying
the notion that the organic self depended on its body for its iden-
tity and the broadly conceptualized corporeality extending beyond
it. The legal and moral carrier of the self, fides, was conveyed through
bodily action in its two main forms, handshake and kiss.
It is also worth remembering that there was a reflection of that
practice on a theoretical level. In ritual praxis, embodiment unified
self and person in action. At least one theory of the constitution of
man, the influential and enduring premodern concept of the humors,
conditioned social relationships on physiology.9 According to this
scheme, corporeality extended the self into the social sphere, since
the humors located in the body connected the self to the personal-
ity of the unified whole of the individual. On both counts the nexus
of agency was the material, corporeal self. The self-as-person was
not just in its body; it was of it. Ritual intervention was therefore
efficacious on the level of self because it was a corporeal action. This
entailed two important consequences.
First, although bodily action normally expanded being in the social
space, the self whose locus was in the body that ritual limited to its
surfaces, as Henry II’s law prescribed, was a dissociated self. The
collective ordering of the self diminished to the degree by which
these boundaries hardened and solidified, increasing the level of self-
awareness and thence autonomy. As a consequence, from a social
point of view the autonomous self emerged as a problematic self and
required rules for socialization. With the bodily dissociated self, the
social transparency inherent in the self-as-person built within gener-
ally acknowledged norms, legalism for example, turned into opacity.

9
A good example of the durability of this tradition is Michael G. Schoenfeldt,
Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare,
Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999).
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With such a ‘de-codification,’ as Deleuze and Guattari refer to the

process, the problem of social control arose.10
Second, in the hegemonic ideological discourse of the religious,
the body was corruptible and corrupting flesh. By virtue of the fail-
ures of the flesh, the embodied self as a social actor was a contin-
gent agent. Its embodiment constituted a permanent contingency
because of the ‘natural’ propensity of the body to play host to the
evil spirits of discord. The contingency of the body was due not so
much to its inherent evilness as to its openness and ontological insta-
bility. As the quite substantial body of evidence preserved in monas-
tic rules and visions throughout the Middle Ages suggests, the forces
of evil used the body to direct the person and overcome the intel-
ligent self. They did not absorb it, nor did they fuse with the self.
They could, however, temporarily shut the self off from command-
ing the body’s obedience. The body acquired a degree of existential
autonomy. Still, while the evil spirits could easily enter it, they could
just as easily exit at the intervention of the peace exorcist or the
prayers of fellow-humans.11
To confront these difficulties and close the loopholes in the archi-
tectonics of the social agent under such conditions meant revamp-
ing the intestinal contents of the self. In the high-medieval paradigm,
it was the discursively constructed ritual intervention of the divine,
not the conscious action on the part of the individual, which over-
came contingency and actualized the person as a peacemaker. Perhaps
the best illustration of the concept of the corporeal self as the nexus
of contingency and therefore danger is Thomas of Cantimpré’s ‘intesti-
nal’ hate that had to be physically expunged from the body of the
obstinate knight before he became a moral person. ‘In πe πat pese
may not be, If πou be oute of charyte; πen is gode of god to craue,
πat πou charyte may haue,’ advised the author of the Lay Folks Mass
Book, a Middle English treatise on the correct way and benefits of
hearing mass at the moment when the pax board was passed along
for kissing, ‘πere when πo prest [πo] pax wil kis, knele πou & praye
πen πis.’ Charity, he went on, was threefold: one ought first to love
God; second, to love oneself with a ‘priue loue, πat is nedeful to my

10
Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New
York, 1983).
11
See the cases quoted in Chapter Five.
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304  

behoue, πo whilk loue is propirly by-twix my soule & my body,’ and

the ‘thrid loue is with-outen to loue ilk neghtbur me aboute[n].’12
The second love was therefore not a passion, but a process, a coor-
dinated action of body and soul, each of which was seen as having
its own ‘will’ and ability to act independently. God had to inter-
vene, by means of the ritual invocation of the kiss of the pax, and
preclude any bodily action that would make ‘my soule spille.’ The
high medieval ritual self was a composite unit, a consortium, as
Caroline Bynum defined it, of the contingent body and the soul.13
The author was especially careful to preserve the soul from ‘spoil-
ing’; but the soul was in an equal relationship with the body and
did not integrate the individual by itself alone. Ritual involved the
externally bounding factor, the numinous, achieved the integration
forcing the components of the self to act with ‘assent’ and caused
the consortium to function as a unified social whole.
The assimilation of external phenomena therefore happened in
the body as well as in the soul and was a process in which the self
obtained integrity by aligning itself in some way with the ritual ref-
erent of the numinous. The alignment was accompanied with the
absorbing, expelling, or molding of corporeal matter. Where there was
visible expression of corporeal involvement, in tears, in convulsions,
or in expulsion of smoke or ‘evil’ substances, there was the sign of
peace. Predictability rested on tangible evidence; the body had to
be disciplined from within.14
Peace following the ritual kiss, a corporeal gesture itself, was the
ultimate confirmation that the intervention had been successful and
that the godly selves had met and coalesced onto the matrix of the
external paradigm that governed their interaction. The failure of rit-
ual, on the other hand, was the failure of society to reach to the
self and integrate it properly. Here lay a facet of the communica-

12
Thomas F. Simmons, ed., The Lay Folk Mass Book or the Manner of Hearing Mass
with Rubrics and Devotions for the People in Four Texts and Offices in English (London,
1879), 50–53. The treatise is traditionally dated in the late twelfth century. It is
not my purpose to engage the issue of its origins, but the primary version, as we
have it, could not be earlier than the thirteenth century, judging from the men-
tioning of the pax-board.
13
Bynum, The Resurection of the Body, passim.
14
On the disciplined body in a more theoretical perspective see Arthur W. Frank,
‘For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review,’ in Mike Featherstone, Mike
Hepworth, and Brian S. Turner, eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory
(London, 1991), 36–102.
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tive function of ritual. The lack of integrity might have been detected
where there was no corporeal expression of the impact the embod-
ied action had on bodily contingency: at least that was what the dis-
cursive frame insisted on.

Ritual and Social Validation of Identity

It is hard to pinpoint at what time this model began to break down

and be transformed into another. For one thing, it was never as homo-
geneous and dominant in the ritual interaction as a glance at the
extant sources would mislead us to believe. The institutions involved
in peacemaking and the discourses they were connected with evolved
at a different pace. If there really was a period during which per-
sonality was completely dominated by the self, it did not preclude
role-playing and the existence of practices in which the person was
the source of individual identity. Roles caused ritual identity informed
by the self and the one ensuing from the social person to seep into
each other. Assumed identity revolving around roles was in flux itself.
Roles were signs that the links between the self and the person which
determined identity in the early part of the period were becoming
increasingly more complex. As a general trend, the self tended to
dissociate from the person, and ritual identity was becoming reori-
ented, as in Berengar and Otbert’s case, to social roles.
In terms of substance, too, there were significant differences between
the high and late Middle Ages. With the objectification of the rules
governing the definition of roles, there was a reformulation of agency
in the construction of identity.
We have seen that in earlier models the ritual integration of the
social being was achieved through the action of the self, the inner
being acting on a social level. As in Kierkegaard’s narrative, the self
in ritual action entailing liability had an unified identity to the extent
that it displayed constancy in its discourse and action, in the deliv-
ering on its past promises, and in the pre-enactment of a commitment
for the future.15 These features were borne by the ritual instantiation

15
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lilian M. Swenson
with revisions and a foreword by Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, 1971), vol. 2,
133, 211. See also the discussion of Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Post-Modernity
(New Haven and London, 1997), 60–65.
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306  

of the person as embodied motility. The body played an important

role, since on it sociality encoded in legal ritual impressed continu-
ity and sought to enhance differentiation, the other major feature of
identity building. Spanning past, present, and future in the ritual act,
the self was built in and through its body by organic memory.
Memory turned the self into a historic phenomenon, conferring a
distinct personal identity.
In the late-medieval models, although the self could still be the
prime mover of action and/or reaction, it was not the sole integrative
agency and was not bounded on a sole interpretative matrix. In both
models the person was actualizing itself in acts of social significance,
but in the second model the validation of that significance might or
might not be forthcoming, might or might not be based on the same
frame of reference as the one employed by the self. Continuity and
differentiation became subject to interpretation rather than residing
in a rigid self-justifying frame. The meanings of the act of actual-
ization varied, since the stable legal discourse had given way to mul-
tiple ideologies. The agency of identity building slipped from under
the control of the self and emanated from competing social domains.
Contrary to interactionists’ position, the increased presence of the
social did not necessarily mean that ritual identity rested entirely on
the continuity of other persons’ perception of personality. The increas-
ing references to the free will of the parties to the reconciliation, a
legal prerequisite by the thirteenth century, emphasized choice. The
choosing of a course of action was still the domain of the self. Choice
centralized the self and occasioned its continuity and unity. These
were fragile constructs, however, since they were stabilized by the
worth conferred on the act by the social. The validation of the lat-
ter was the measure of social control exercised through ritual. Hence,
the identity of the person, self, body, and soul appears as a com-
posite being in the making of which the integrated self and the per-
ceptions of the social and the collective were in constant competition
and cooperation.
Varying within its contextual realizations, the objectification of the
social control realized through role-playing was a step toward decreas-
ing the contingency inherent in the acknowledgment of free will and
choice. It codified and thereby limited the variety of modes of appro-
priation of the paradigmatic totalities on which individuals drew for
their ritual identity. The major step in this direction was the dis-
cursive rendering of ritual action as self-discipline. It was a conse-
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quence of a shift in the production of identity in ritual that inserted

sociality between the self and the person as a coordinating device.
An example of the environment in which the new form emerged
is the evolution of the discourse on courtliness and peace in the thir-
teenth-century manuscript tradition of Aliscans. The shift in the par-
adigms on which the rules of control and restraint governing the
conduct of the courtly knight were based is clearly visible. The ear-
liest versions, from the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, char-
acterized the drive for conflict as ‘madness’ [ folie], as in Raoul. By
contrast, the late-thirteenth century versions switched to ‘rusticity’
[ruistie].16 The explanation of asocial behavior shifted from a stress
on individual psychology to a social connotation with a pronounced
ethical dimension. Even though both terms were conventions sub-
ject to contextual appropriations and continued to be used in the
late-medieval and early modern period to signify social transgression,
their emphasis was distinct. ‘Madness’ momentarily discontinued the
self and was a quality of the mind. Although since the late eleventh
century there had been a trend to ontologize it, madness could still
be a temporary slip as a result of which one put oneself outside of
the normal social intercourse. It carried no ingrained implications
for the social identity based on rank and status. ‘Rusticity’ was an
implicit quality of the social person. It rendered the being ontolog-
ically different and lower down in the social hierarchy.
This new paradigm, conspicuous in the mature romance tradition,
highlighted ritual identity not so much as a role phenomenon as a
quality of the person. In Wolfgang’s Willehalm and Parzival, triuwe
and the integrity embodied in gemüete were integral parts of the hero’s
person. They constituted much of the actors’ habitus and established
it as the locus of self-discipline.17 I use the latter term to denote a
technology of management of the social person different from both
social control and control by the self. Unlike control by the self,
which could be informed by non-social and extra-temporal factors,
such as temperament, for example, self-discipline was a factor of the
degree of compliance to outside intervention. Unlike social control,
it did not allow for negotiation of roles and exploration of fissures
in competing discourses. Being compressed sociality, ritual self-disci-
pline enforced emotion work to maintain integrity.

16
Rasch, ed., Aliscans, 171.
17
On habitus see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
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308  

The shift to the socially constructed person entailed a major con-

sequence for the efficacy of ritual action. Its success depended on
the intensity of the clash between individual grievances and the
demands of the social. Ritual reconciliation as an identity-building
factor became purely contextual.
In cases of low-intensity encounters, usually occurring in cases of
interaction dominated by a single basic paradigm of relatedness, the
family or the religious confraternity, for example, ritual furthered the
integration of the person around the moral principle it stood for.
The self-disciplined person became the integrated, embodied instan-
tiation of the hegemonic moral discourse. ‘Three things are needed
to forgive your enemy,’ preached San Bernardino, ‘First, you have
to forgive with your heart; Second, you have to forgive with words;
Third, you have to forgive with deeds. Heart, words, and deeds. If
one of these three is missing, you have not done anything.’18 Ritual
made such persons aware of the standards of objective morality. It
exposed rebellious selves to the punishing consequences of the breaches
of that morality caused by deviant action and gave an opportunity
to the person to express worthiness by externalizing most conspicu-
ously in tears or in displays of shame the crushed and complying
self. The person emerged as the dominant building-block of the inte-
grated social being. It mastered the self, either by defining a strictly
controlled domain for the self ’s action or by overcoming it. The
courtly person overcame the self by relegating the source of angry
outbursts below the social level of existence or down the social hier-
archy. Giovanni Gualberto became stronger by staying his hand,
sparing the offender, and forgiving him in a conscious act of fol-
lowing the moral discourse of peacemaking. The techniques of mas-
tering the self differed according to context and discourse, but the
end result was essentially the same: identity integrated in ritual equaled
moral sociality and lay in the domain of the person as the subject
of the interaction. The sufferings of the ritual actors ensured that
nothing immoral remained as integrating principle of their persons.
Ritual itself was a repetitive action embodying self-constancy in exer-
cising morality. The ritual actor reintegrated him or herself, over
and over again, around the pole of remembrance that permeated
identity and stabilized the embodied individual.
Yet if the intensity of the clash was sufficiently high to threaten
the individual with disintegration however—something that happened
18
Cannarozzi, ed., San Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari, vol. 2, 230.
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when more than one paradigmatic totality with strong claims on

individual identity was involved—ritual led to the dissociation of self
from person and strengthened the self ’s autonomy. The interaction
of individuals was reduced to the level of personality alone. Ritual
ordered the external person, the social phenomenon rather than the
moral being in its totality. Forgiveness did not apply on this level
and reconciliation was never complete. Emotion work was reduced
to suppressing the link between self and person, not the asocial emo-
tions and affects. The internalized sentiments of conflict, the ‘old
horded hate’ of Gower and Love God and Drede, lurked beneath the
surface of personality ready to give rise to deadly ‘wratte.’ Nor did
self-discipline apply. Peacemaking was governed more by the ethical
standards of conduct than the internalized demands of morality. To
preserve integrity, the individual shut itself up to embarrassment,
guilt, or shame, which would have necessitated moral transformation.
The linkages attaching it to the person severed, the self could not
be reached and ordered through the moral discourse instantiated by
ritual. Social control through ritual was helpless, too, for the dissociated
self could always don the corporeal vestments of a role, ‘leave its true
feelings at the church’s door’ as Gower put it. ‘I have kissed my
neighbor,’ agreed Duke Henry of Lancaster in his Livre, ‘in the name
of good friendship, yet I did not always have it my heart; sometimes
I even wished his downfall more than his well-being.’19 Ritual was
helpless; only coercion could cope with such pressures.
In the conditions of the highly autonomous, dissociated self, with-
out the support of social control and self-discipline, ritual lost its
quality of a mechanism of interaction working on the principle ex
opere operando. It retained the vestiges of efficiency in the new form
of social disciplining, a practice that adopted many of the features
of social and political coercion. With it, ritual identity was trans-
ferred entirely to the domain of the person, where the more efficient
restraints imposed on individual sovereignty by the political author-
ities, the dissociation of private and public life, and the separation
of morals from conduct gradually eliminated the necessity of ritual
peace in public life.

19
L’autre beiser qe me deust, si est cely qe j’ai beisee mon proeme en manere de bon amys-
tee, et n’ai mye cella entierment portee en ceur, mes a la foiye volu son damage plus qe son bien,
et ceo a la foiye moustree en fait ou en dit, ou en touz diaux, qe pis vaut; see Arnould, ed.,
Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, 178.
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310

CHAPTER NINE

ENDS AND NETWORKS:

RITUAL IDENTITY AND THE OTHER

Identity won through self-constancy in embodied action was sus-

tained not only through a proper relation between self, person, and
context, but also in and through the individual’s relation to other
persons. This postulate reflects the basic premise of social inter-
actionism, which reifies the role of ‘significant others’ who mediate to
the sociological subject the values, meanings, and symbols of the cul-
ture in which the social actors live. In this theory, the ritual actor
would still have an inner core, its self, but unlike the substance con-
cept of the pre-Enlightenment’s self, it not only would evolve through
time, but would also be subject to radical transformations due to the
shifting perceptions of other persons of what one’s own self was like.
The attentive reader might note that this conceptualization is a some-
what moderate version of the Durkheimian vision of the self. In its
radicalized variant, postmodern constructionism conceives of the social
actor as having no fixed, essential, or permanent identity; at most,
the continuity of the self is sustained by identification within a sta-
ble discursive frame.1
In the following pages I will briefly discuss the impact of ritual
on the other-related dimension of the individual actualized in a role.
One of the oldest questions in sociology, the relationship between
role, self, and person is a source of frequent confusion among con-
structionists and organicists alike. For simplicity’s sake, the problem
can be reduced to the following question: Is the ritual actor merely
a collection of roles made possible by the perception of others, or
is there an organizing principle, which integrates and orchestrates
the ritual actualization through any given social role?
The issue is a lofty one, and although I cannot do it justice by
analyzing peacemaking alone, no account of ritual identity building
will be complete without considering it. Reconciliation through the
kiss allows us to address two of its most problematic areas. The first

1
The two positions are aptly summed up in Allen et al., On Durkheim’s Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, 97.
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is the substance controversy over embodied or otherwise self-integrated

continuity of identity versus identity resting on the continuity of other
persons’ perceptions of personal identity. The second bears on the
type of interrelationship between the individual and the collective.
Is the relationship a hierarchy of ends, that is, is agency delegated
down the line by the dominant self or person of the ritual actor; or,
is the attachment to the group a system of networks which allows
for multiple origins and distribution of the agency acquired in ritual
action?

Ontological versus Constructed Identity: Kudrun

Let me begin with the first problem, introducing it through an episode

in Kudrun, the thirteenth-century German romance. Abducted by the
Norman Hartmut and refusing to marry him, Kudrun was forced
to live the life of a washerwoman for five and a half years, until her
brother and beloved finally arrived to rescue her. At the sight of the
boat carrying the heroes, Kudrun, albeit not knowing who the
strangers were, felt utterly ashamed to be seen in such a disgrace-
ful state and wanted to run away. Her fears were hardly justified
since the knights did not initially recognize her. Only eventually, in
the process of a long conversation, did the parties realize each other’s
identity and rush to embrace and kiss. Yet Herwig and Ortwin had
a plan. Instead of setting Kudrun free at once, they left her to col-
lect their army and launch an attack on the castle: a move conso-
nant with their knightly ethos and sense of honor. Kudrun and her
maid, a high-born lady herself, were left ashore to cope, the best
they could, with their chores and their mistress’s anger. Anticipating
her impeding freedom, however, Kudrun refused to do the wash-
ing. Reproached by her companion, she quipped ‘I am too noble
ever to wash again for Gerlind [Hartmut’s mother—KP] and I will
refuse to do such degrading service from now on. Two kings have
kissed me and embraced me in their arms.’ Later, she added, ‘I am
again a Princess,’ and ‘set the washing free,’ that is, she threw the
queen’s linens into the sea.2

2
Mich kusten zwêne künige und ruochten mich mit armen umbevâhen and daz ich mac
gelîchen einer küniginne; see Bartsch, ed., Kudrun, 253–4, translation in McConnel,
Kudrun, 132–4.
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312  

This intriguing episode highlights the centrality of ritual in the

restoration of identity and the level on which it operated. Throughout
the story Kudrun demonstrated acute self-consciousness. Her per-
sonality was integrated by the memory of her high birth and for-
mer social status. The self-consciousness she carried was the source
of her ‘sadness’ in captivity and the ‘shame’ at the thought that her
kin or friends could see her so debased. She’d rather be a servant
forever, she declared, than allow herself to be seen in such a wretched
state by someone who had known her before. The matrix of honor,
mapped out by the socially constructed meanings of occupation, cos-
tume, and status mediated between self and person. It was the dis-
cursive frame sustaining the maiden’s self-consciousness as a noble
lady to which her identity was hitched. In other words, there was
a core inner being in Kudrun’s identity that was stable and contin-
uous despite all tribulations. And yet, her self-identification was sub-
ject to social conventions. Turned washerwoman, Kudrun had lost
her identity as princess, however strong her inner sense of identification
might have been. It took the intervention of ‘significant others,’ her
royal kin, embodied in ritual, to restore her identity. With the kisses
of two persons of royal birth—note that that affirmed her status as
their equal—Kudrun was transformed into a princess once again.
What was the balance of the two factors?
Kudrun’s subsequent actions provide us with a clue. She ratified
her transformation and made it definitive, acquiring agency and sub-
jectivity by exercising her power over the only object she could by
‘setting free’ Gerlind’s linens. Later she extended her actualization
into her old-new identity by tricking Hartmut: offering him what she
had staunchly refused thus far, her body. Two ritual actions, the kiss
and the act of ‘liberating’ herself, symbolically shed Kudrun’s tem-
porary ‘social skin.’ The pretended submission with stress on the
body was an act of self-assertion vis-à-vis her abductor. All this inte-
grated Kudrun’s disjointed personality, adjusting her varying, dis-
continuous public roles to her stable, continuous inner self.
It is worth stressing the variety of domains from which identity
features were gathered and the hierarchy of their significance in iden-
tity (re)building. Most of these were devices through which identity
was carried over. The kiss, the lady’s beautiful body, pale skin, and
fair face, and the rings she wore were all actions and artifacts medi-
ating the transformation through different degrees of corporeality. It
is also important that the idea of loss and restoration of identity
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linked embodiment to another organizing principle of personality,

individual memory. Finally, the acts of acquisition and exercise of
power and the ritually restored capacity of domination employed
corporeality to complete the transformation process.
Nonetheless, it is significant that part of the princess’s loss of iden-
tity was staked on lack. Lack ensued from the discontinued corpo-
real recognition of others, represented in Kudrun’s bodily separation
from her peers, her royal brother, her betrothed, and her no less
noble wooer. The body of the princess still carried the features of
a noble lady and commanded the attention of her relatives. Ultimately
this led to recognition triggered by another discursive frame, that of
the features constituting the identity of a courtly being. The restora-
tion of Kudrun’s identity was therefore realized primarily by over-
coming the corporeal lack and the consumption of domination through
a conscious manipulation of embodiment in the interaction with other
corporeal actors.
The ambiguity of the body, which both carried identity and could
discontinue it because of lack due to isolation from other corporeal
subjects, and which existed physically but was continuously recon-
structed socially against the backdrop of dominant discourses, was a
stable feature of the interaction with the kiss. Kudrun’s cognitive self
existed as an awareness and a memory of past integrity. It was dis-
sociated, however, and contributed only in part to her identity.
Identity was built in the course of ritual corporeal interaction. The
kiss exchanged with ‘significant others’ linked self and body. Judging
from a casual remark of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, this seems to have
been a high medieval development. The kiss that St. Martin gave
the leper, observed the bishop, cleansed the poor wretch. That had
been the case back in the distant past. The kiss that he himself gave
to the afflicted ones who approached him healed him in his own
soul. It affected his personality by carrying his self through the iden-
tity threshold of disgust.3 The body, as Foucault pointed out, was
the locus of the dissociated self and was therefore as necessary to
identity building as much as the disembodied self was. Corporeal
identity was not a self-sustaining phenomenon, however; it depended
on a network of embodied links operated by ritual.
Whoever dominated the construction of these links determined the
specifics of the identity-building process. If the validation of the ritual

3
Loomis, ed., Gerard of Wales, The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, 31.
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314  

link was dominated by social institutions or discourses, which the

parties to the reconciliation could appropriate but not control or
shape, in the process the ritual link constructed the ritual partner
and the placement of audience as ends through which the identity
of the ritual actor was actualized. The ritual covenant was relatively
stable but the actors remained isolated from each other. If meaning
was subject to the ultimate validation of the participants in the ritual
act and the observers, the construction of identity was enacted within
a network. The level of contingency in the construction of identity
increased; but the degree of coalescence between the ritual actors
was high, and the parties to the reconciliation shared identities on
a certain level.
The transition from the one to the other model of identity, which
has been partially explained as an example of the interrelation of
‘grid and group’ by Mary Douglas, is very complex, fraught with
pitfalls, and in need of further research. Role-playing, performance,
or Inszenierung in which identity was being reproduced in an ritual
act of self-representation, has recently been explored in detail by
Geoffrey Koziol, Gerd Althoff, and Peter Arnade, among others.4
Their findings, focused on power, chart the multiple political dimen-
sions of this practice throughout the Middle Ages. I would like to
expand on the models they develop by adding a few touches attempt-
ing to capture some of the features of peacemaking that went beyond
the competition for power and affected total social practice. The
awareness that there was a shift from engagement of the self to role-
playing was demonstrated by the increased sensibility to integrity and
sincerity in reconciliation. Stressing intentional deception and lack of
sincerity in the ritual partner was one of the major developments.

Integrity and Sincerity

Intention, as we saw it in Berengar and Otbert’s story, played an

important role as identifier of personality structures. William Longsword
might not have doubted Arnulf of Flanders’ sincerity or expected
him to change his mind so soon, but twelfth-century peacemakers
knew better. Peter Abelard, the foremost twelfth-century theorist of
intention, chose a different and, as it was, increasingly popular man-

4
Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter.
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ner of connecting intention to identity. Among the bitter memories

that he shared with his readers in the History of my calamities was the
verdict of the duplicity of his beloved’s relatives. The kiss of peace,
he insisted, that the collective body of Heloise’s kin gave him to seal
the peace agreement after the discovery of their affair had been
given ‘to better to betray me.’5 Abelard was writing with hindsight,
of course. We have reasons to believe that at the moment the agree-
ment was struck it had been he, rather than his opponents, who had
been having second thoughts as to the manner of its execution.
Suspicious and self-centered as Abelard was, it is significant that he
chose to emphasize lack of sincerity, rather than a subsequent change
of mind. Around the time he wrote, an ecclesiastical man of affairs,
Herman of Tournai, was one of the first commentators on Emperor
Henry V’s ritual kiss with Pope Pascal in 1111 to stress the emperor’s
‘long-premeditated betrayal and perfidy.’ Like Abelard, Herman had
an ax to grind, and just like the scholar he highlighted the issue of
dishonesty in ritual interaction by making a point of the offender’s
insincerity in proffering the kiss of peace.6
The high Middle Ages saw the intensification of references betray-
ing an awareness of the vital importance of sincerity and integrity
in ritual interaction. ‘The peace existing between us is integral,’ pro-
claimed count Otto of Tecklenburg in the charter that recorded his
reconciliation with Gottfried of Arnsberg in 1257, ‘guaranteed by
the kiss, and will be kept firm by us and all of our friends.’ He then
added that to document his commitment, he had a charter com-
posed, sealed with his seal, and given in the hands of the other
party.7 The stress fell on the integrity of the covenant, resulting from
the actors’ sincere commitment and the will to observe it in the
future. The reference to the will was still a novelty in social inter-
action by the first half of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, the
document above is representative for the legalistic discourse on
integrity. Reflections of the legal thinking that structured it are found

5
Peter Abelard, The Story of Abelard’s Adversities. A Translation with notes of the
Historia Calamitatum, by J. T. Muckle, with a preface by Etienne Gilson (Toronto, 1964).
6
Herman of Tournai, The Restoration of the Monastery of Saint Martin of Tournai, trans-
lated with introduction and notes by Lynn H. Nelson (Washington, DC, 1996), 119.
7
Integra quoque et osculo confirmata existit inter nos compositio ordinata, quam compositionem
nos cum amicis nostris universis vulumus firmiter observare; see Westfälisches Urkunden-Buch.
Fortsetzung von Erhards Regesta Historiae Westfaliae, herausgegeben von dem Vereine für Geschichte
und Alterthumskunde Westfalens. Vol. 7. Die Urkunden des kölnischen Westfalens vom J.
1200–1300, bearbeitet vom Staatsarchiv Münster (Münster, 1908), 438, N. 968.
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316  

in reconciliatory acts all over the continent until the end of the
period. The trend to stress the crucial role of sincerity is clear. In
the reconciliation of the nobles of Macerata, for example, sincerity
was invoked three times in the terms of the agreement, all referring
to the ritual act establishing the covenant.8
It is tempting to trace, at least in a snapshot manner, the con-
textual variations in the discourses in which integrity and sincerity
were identified as central conditions of the ritual reconciliation, and
to highlight some of the features the former shared.
Perhaps the first thing to note is that the dichotomies inner/outer
or public/private were only part of the story. Much more impor-
tant was that the ritual kiss operated relationships within which the
peace contract was stabilized by the adoption of new and enduring
social roles.
In the feudal epic El Cid, integrity was demonstrated in King
Alfonso’s willingness to accept the Cid ‘with all his heart and soul’
[d’alma e de coraçón], the king’s inner being reaching out to confirm
his words with the kiss.9 Apart from the legal connotations of the
act—the Cid was pardoned and the ban of exile he was subject to
was lifted—the scene enfolded in a setting that reintegrated the hero
into the feudal hierarchy of the realm, reattaching him to his liege
lord [natural señor]. The Cid restored his position of a vassal; Alfonso
reestablished himself as his lord. The roles the parties to the rec-
onciliation adopted to define their relationship in the future stabi-
lized the integrity of their ritual peace.
Roles could thus be subject to social governance beyond the con-
trol agreed upon by the ritual actors in the creation of the network
within which identity was constructed. In Raoul of Cambrai, the new
roles of ‘brothers’ adopted by Bernier and Gautier forged a new
identity for the characters, its dimensions established and controlled
by the collective entities of clan and estate and enacted immediately
in the joint action against the king. Integrity in Melibeus, the classic
thirteenth-century example of the ecclesiastical discourse on moral trans-
formation in an urban setting, was staked entirely on role-playing to
which the supplicants resorted to ‘connect’ to the forgiver. The ritual
link established a social alliance in which the offenders became mem-
bers of Melibeus’s extended kin, his consorteria. In a similar environment,

8
Dante Checci, ‘Sull’istituto della pax,’ 147.
9
Hamilton and Perry, eds., The Poem of El Cid, 128.
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the reconciliation of the bishop and podestà of Assisi reinstated them

as worthy incumbents of their respective offices; their identity derived
from the roles they had to play by virtue of their rank and appoint-
ment. In the world of the feudal contract, in Silence, the king’s inter-
nal torments and his decision to act with integrity and spare Silence’s
life followed from the realization of the political role the ruler had
to play and the necessary preconditions—such as recognition—that
went with it. Neither the king nor the barons were inherently evil
or good; their selves and their social persons remained detached from
the case. At stake was the king’s role as a defender of the law and
the feudal contract. It was only one component of his public per-
son, but the one that ensured the essential continuity of his social
being. ‘Who would ever trust me again?’ asked the king in despair.
Finally, in a more mundane setting and in a conflict of relatively
low intensity, in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, the kiss between the par-
doner and the host was the only act that informed the pardoner’s
social identity as defined by his office. It was, as one might expect
after having learned from the character himself what a sinful and
corrupt personality he was, an identity entirely staked on role-playing.10
The integrity of the peace act in all these cases was sustained by
the ritual actors’ identity as defined by the social roles they adopted
in the course of the interaction and continued to exist in thereafter.
The sociality that structured their relationship through roles was a
represented practice emerging from a network of relationships of
which the self was but a fragment interacting on an equal basis with
other selves. Its rules were based on the objective realities of the dis-
courses governing the instances of role-playing. The relationship was
a minuscule particle of the social texture held together by the ide-
ology legitimizing the roles. Identity reproduced in ritual-sustaining
role adoption ordered personality in a manner similar to the one
stemming from emotional outbursts socialized as transitional roles.
On a typological and functional level, the similarity was complete.
Ritual reconciliation was a mirror or reverse action going back from
the social to the self. It reinforced the linkages between the two poles
of the identity continuum and stressed its wholeness as a social
phenomenon.

10
Robert A. Pratt, ed., The Tales of Canterbury, Complete Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston,
1966), 437; commentary in Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury
Tales (Oxford, 1989), 270.
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318  

In the second place, one cannot help but notice the ambiguity of
the relationships operated by ritual as an extension of the actors’
social roles. In Raoul and in Wolfram’s Parzival, ritual reconciliation
pressed home the issue of integrity to ensure that the morals of the
group were upheld and that nothing beyond or outside the value
system on which the group staked its identification integrated per-
sonality. Embodied action triggered emotional reaction in order to
assure that the self was not being preserved intact at the expense of
the identity pool informing the other actors’ identities. Ritual was
the guardian of group virtue; indeed, it constituted the group as a
network. The postulate is valid in a number of other discourses and
contexts of reference. It is supported by practically all examples from
the rebelling noble sequence, but is perhaps best illustrated in the
Macerata reconciliation. In light of Jorge Arditi’s recent reinterpre-
tation of civility, the ritual respect embodied in forgiveness appears
not so much as an example of the ‘civilizing process’ as an demon-
stration of social identification.11 By respecting each other, the Lamanno
and de Antici clans staked their reconciliation on a pool of shared
values from which both parties drew for their identity. The ritual
kiss was an expression of the coalescence of identity among the mem-
bers of the upper classes in the late-medieval and early modern West:
the perfect case of horizontal relationship and network identity.
In the third place, the openness of the structure allowed for an
uneasy transition from networks to ends. The reformulation of iden-
tity in the course of the ritual reconciliation often resulted from the
construction of a hierarchy in which the forgiving selves interacted
with others with the exclusive purpose of rebuilding their own identity.
Sincerity and integrity played a small part in this model, for in it
the others were ends through which the self achieved actualization.
Lack played a prominent role in this scheme. Alice in Willehalm
forced her uncle into ritual reconciliation by reminding him that his
conduct was lacking the qualities of role model that he, as a courtly
man, was supposed to exhibit vis-à-vis the ladies and through which
he maintained his dominance over them. The element of lack and
contested domination was paramount in Donato Velluti’s story where
the Velluti constructed their desire to actualize into a higher social
role as lack, in this case lack of peace. The lack was made good by

11
Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners.
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the Mannelli’s ritual validation of the reconciliation and hence the

Velluti’s social standing. Precisely for that reason the Mannelli rejected
the reconciliation with disgust, intensifying the social distance and
contesting the Velluti’s mild attempts at dominating not only the sit-
uation but its lasting consequences as well. In the blueprint of the
forgiving knight tale, Giovanni Gualberto’s ‘overcoming himself ’ was
his desire to break free from the tradition of the feud and assert
his self by filling the spiritual lack informing his personality with the
link to the divine established in the course of the reconciliation. The
story spells clear the discursive attempt to exploit the void created
by the suppression of revenge as a mode of actualization and build
the morality of peace into the motivational structure of the lacking
individual by integrating him within the discourse of the sacred.
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320

CONCLUSIONS TO PART THREE

By way of conclusion I would like to sum up the main findings of

this part from the point of view of the ritual kiss of peace as a func-
tional device of identity building.
In the first place, ritual stabilized identity. Stabilization was achieved
by limiting the contingency inherent in the body and the dissociated
self. Contingency generated within the person was ritually countered
by exposure to incorporation or the construction of identity with ref-
erence to relatively stable external phenomena. Ritual thus produced
the phenomenon of the ‘mirroring’ personality in which well-known
cultural codes were incorporated into one’s motivational structure.
The ‘mirroring’ personality, for its part, was often reduced to the
‘mirroring’ body, with its fundamental predilection toward consump-
tion of external objects and an identity staked on self-(re)presentation
through the qualities of the consumed objects. The predictability of
the ritual actor increased dramatically in the course of the ritual
‘consuming’ of identity, since the socially constructed meanings of
the appropriated objective totalities were considered to have become
qualities of the person.
Second, the ritual kiss reconstructed identity by reformulating past
experiences. The kiss affected both cognitive and affective experi-
ences, working on the continuity-discontinuity dimension of identity
construction. The continuity of identity depended on experiences
being integrated into some kind of continuum. Memory, the orga-
nizing principle of modern identity, could, and did act as an iden-
tity building device along that line throughout the period. Attempts
to disregard its role push the argument somewhat further than our
sources seem to allow. Rather than proclaiming memory as the lack-
ing organizational pole of premodern personality, I would see it as
only one of the principles operating past motivational structures.
More important, it was complemented and had its role in the iden-
tity-building processes structured by the principles of the practice of
remembrance. Operated by ritual and no less efficient in integrat-
ing personality, remembrance could override memory and reinte-
grate the person along a totally different set of experiences, thus
giving rise to a new identity. Integration reconstructed identity by
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bringing together the disjoined personality through mediation between

self and person. Once achieved, the integration in action served to
sustain identity through time.
The ritual action of peacemaking also resolved identity. The point
has been frequently made in recent scholarship, mostly for criticiz-
ing the functionalist-structuralist paradigm of ritual identity resolu-
tion.1 In my opinion the criticism has been carried too far, especially
in reference to the level on which the resolution was accomplished.
While there is some truth to the statement that the fragmentation
of the late-medieval self was enhanced rather than overcome in rit-
ual, it appears that on another level resolution was still the most
common outcome of the rites of peace. The dissociation of the self
from the once dominant social totality by the beginning of the high
Middle Ages and the increasing functionalization of society led to
the acquisition of multiple social roles. The development of a more
complex, multilayered personality resulted in tensions that could gen-
erate identity crisis. The ritual actors found themselves caught up in
the conflicting demands of their social roles, cases well documented
with the outbursts of grief and anxiety. The transformative and heal-
ing role of ritual in such cases, as in Parzival or Silence, was to resolve
identity by limiting the options of the individual. The resolution was
achieved on the level of the person and might or might not affect
the self, which might remain just as fragmented, in expectation of
resolution on another existential level.
Finally, ritual defined identity by forcing actors to apperceive the
boundaries of the territory within which the practices that operated
the self and the person were effective. Establishing the content and
limits of embodiment, socialization, and individuation, and the inten-
sity of the links to larger totalities, the ritual kiss mapped out the
conceptual codes within which identity was defined.

1
Sara Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings
(London, 1993), 51.
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323

CONCLUSION

THE KISS OF PEACE AS PRACTICE

How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress
something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this
personification of forgetfulness, so that it sticks?
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, II, 3

At the time when modern critical inquiry was still in its infancy,
Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of ritual studies, rec-
ognized that ritual reproduces society by reproducing individual dis-
positions that are at the same time corporeal, emotional, and cognitive.1
Since then, practitioners of a host of disciplines have applied, devel-
oped, modified, and challenged the Durkheimian paradigm. Scholarship
has oscillated between refuting and rehabilitating it, unable to escape
from engaging its implications. In spite of all effort, Durkheim’s
insightful strategy for research has not been fully integrated into the
expanding inquiry on ritual. The history of the premodern West in
particular, albeit overcoming with an impressive tour de force the
lag that left it behind in the field of ritual studies, has yet to fully
utilize the potential of this deceivingly simple tripartite scheme.
In the preceding chapters I have attempted to employ Durkheim’s
construct to supply what seems to be an insufficiently developed facet
of the inquiry into ritual by focusing on a narrow issue, the ritual
kiss in medieval peacemaking. I have poised the kiss against the
background of diverse contexts in a long-term perspective. My goal
in the investigation of individual affective, cognitive, and corporeal
dispositions has been, to borrow a phrase from Marshal Sahlins, to
explore the implications of ‘the presence in culture of universal struc-
tures that are nevertheless not universally present.’2 The scrutiny of
instances of ritual reconciliation and its discursive representation has
borne out, I hope, evidence to the hypothesis I postulated at the

1
Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en
Australie (Paris, 1912), 552.
2
Marshall Sahlins, ‘Colours and Cultures,’ in Dolgin et al., Symbolic Anthropology, 179.
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324 

beginning of the study. I have offered a model analytical strategy of

the complexities of the process of insertion of social governance in
interpersonal relations. The investigation of the sublimation of a
specific ritual form to a hegemonic practice of the body in which
the organizing principles of the social context were lodged seems to
me an appropriate way to engage this problem. How apposite my
approach has been and how pertinent the conclusions it led me to,
the reader will decide.
In the pages that follow, rather than sum up my argument I will
try to extract some of the basic premises of the complex knot of
relationships in which the kiss of peace entangled the ritual actors.
Three issues stand out. First, of paramount importance are the ways
in which ritual was employed as a strategy to alter being in the
world. Second, the widely employed but poorly understood empha-
sis on the functioning of the kiss as an efficacious representation and
a communicative device deserves more attention. And third, we
should account for the accommodation of difference and contesta-
tion in the rearranging of peaceful relationships between individu-
als, groups, and society, a phenomenon David Kertzer has called,
in a modification of Durkheim’s definition of ritual, ‘solidarity with-
out consensus.’3 I will address these three problem clusters in turn.
To reverse the existential condition and subjective status of the
ritual actors characterized by the state of feud and formal hostility
ranked high on the agenda of the ritual managers promoting rec-
onciliation. A highly charged practice with strong implications of
emotional attraction and corporeal aggregation, the kiss provided a
versatile ‘implement’ with which the social codes governing conflict
could be worked on. High intensity conflict in high- and late-medieval
societies was a paradigmatic expression of the competition for sub-
jectivity and the acquisition, accumulation, and preservation of the
symbolic capital consisting of social respect, power, and prestige. It
was thus as much structural clash as it was an individual problem.
Quelling violence through reconciliation meant mending the fissures
that had gaped in the social fabric as the result of insult or injury.
I use the physical metaphor on purpose, for it conveys the essence
of the transformative action of the kiss. Two premises underlay the
functioning of ritual: the ambiguous, multi-referential field of the kiss

3
David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, 1988).
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as a bodily practice, and the obligatory relations rooted in the phys-

ical experience it gave rise to.
Multi-referentiality and ambiguity, two well-known characteristics
of ritual, stressed on a symbolic plane in the studies of Camille and
Frijhoff and seen exclusively as a clash of opposites by Koziol, were
the basic precondition for the ritual creation of cross-cutting ties on
several levels.4 I use the term ‘cross-cutting’ to connote not the estab-
lishing of social connections transcending the boundaries of collec-
tives bounded by kin, class, estate, or settlement ties. Rather, I see
it as referring to the set of positive linkages created by ritual among
the basic meaning-producing paradigms of obligatory relatedness
informing premodern existence, such as, on the one hand, love
between the sexes and natural kin, loyalty in vassalage, and charity
in the brotherhood in Christ, and, on the other hand, between these
paradigmatic relationships and the conceptually defined norms gov-
erning conduct and social interaction. This conclusion runs counter
to the symbolic base of the only coherent analytical scheme of
medieval Western ritual offered thus far, Le Goff ’s study of the rites
of vassalage, but I believe I have marshaled enough evidence to sup-
port my argument.5 Suffice it to recall the link between the seem-
ingly inconsequential welcome kiss in Silence and the king’s desperate
acknowledgment, ‘Ne doit trahir li hom qui baize!’6 By virtue of its ambi-
guity, the kiss borrowed effortlessly symbolic and non-symbolic fea-
tures from many of the meaning-producing clusters of medieval
relatedness to weave a complex net of ties across social and cultural
boundaries. Ambiguity made it possible for different meanings to
coexist and mutually reinforce one another, with a crucial functional
consequence. Societies with cross-cutting ties between their segments,
either conventionally defined as groups or as links between meaning-
related paradigms, tend to be less conflict-ridden internally.7 The
cross-cutting network diminishes the intensity of conflict by dividing
loyalties and multiplying allegiances, thus supplying a measure of
options and choice, but also obligations and responsibilities, in the

4
Camille, ‘Gothic Signs and the Surplus;’ Frijhoff, ‘The Kiss Sacred and Profane;’
and Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor, especially his Conclusion, ‘How Does Ritual Mean?’
5
Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Rituals of Vassalage,’ 237–87.
6
Roche-Mahdi, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, 212.
7
On the concept of ‘cross-cutting ties’ see Marc H. Ross, The Management of
Conflict. Interpretation and Interests in Comparative Perspective (New Haven and London,
1993), 22–3.
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326 

ordering of the social relationships which individuals locked in single-

allegiance meaning-producing collectives lack. The obligatory relations,
as we have seen, were the primary principle informing the efficacy
of the kiss of peace.
The construction of a ritual cross-cutting network feeding upon
ambiguity was not an exclusively cognitive, rationally organized, and
goal-oriented phenomenon staked on symbolic premises. Nor did it
presuppose acquisition of complete agency by the ritual actors.
Structural agency—the pressure of the authorities and the group
however defined—was even more pronounced in directing and uti-
lizing ritual. Cross-cutting referentiality and its outcomes did, how-
ever, have an underlying premise. At the heart of all ritual referents
of the kiss was the notion of corporeality. The medieval Western
individual was until fairly late, as scholars have asserted and I myself
have tried to demonstrate, on the one hand, much less limited by
its corporeal constraints than its modern counterpart and, on the
other hand, much more integrated according to a logic vested in
corporeal signs. I have tried to explore some of the features of the
types of selfhood and personhood through the concepts of self-as-
whole, organic memory, and ritual remembrance. All three share
the principle that social ties were perceived of as bodily facts, a
premise that constructed an ample playground for the operation of
the ritual kiss as a socially transformative practice.
Moreover, the practical organization of the medieval collectives
referred to in the ties created by the kiss operated on the notion of
co-substantiality. Co-substantiality and corporeality entail ongoing
traffic of material and immaterial forces between individuals and
groups, regulated by ritual. Without negating a certain level of dis-
creteness of the ritual actors, the intervention of the kiss of peace,
an action upon and through the natural gateway of the mouth, ren-
dered what Terence Turner called ‘social skin’ porous because it was
entangled with the corporeality and the substance inherent in the
ritual exchange.8 The concept of co-substantiality was appropriated
in the sensory reception created by ritual interaction. It filled the
‘between,’ as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, interlacing the social and
physical space separating the ritual actors with connections that made

8
Terence Turner, ‘The Social Skin,’ in Jeremy Cherfas and Robert Levin, eds.,
Not Work Alone (Beverly Hills, 1980).
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them not only contiguous but continuous as well. Meaning was the
sharing of being.9
The ritual mechanism worked along the two social dimensions of
medieval society, the horizontal and the vertical, and restructured
the relations between the self, the collective, and the social. On the
horizontal axle its function was restorative. Individuals and groups
of roughly equivalent position who found themselves striving for, or
defending a separate status, were linked together by ritual at the
points where their organic beings were permeable. Along the verti-
cal axle, ritual action was equalizing. The ritual give-and-take across
corporeal margins defining the boundaries of status that were fortified
with strong social emotions, such as disgust, compromised hierarchy
by ‘opening’ the thresholds of the human frame and forged a new
shared identity, that is, quashed conflict by efficiently altering being
in the world. In both cases the kiss entailed peace, since it enmeshed
actors in the sociality presented in shared corporeality. Finally, the
kiss also affected being, at least since the laws of Henry II, by chang-
ing subjectivity in a reverse mode. Ritual played out its religious and
legal-cognitive dimensions by ‘centering’ obligation on the organic
individual represented in the soul and defined by his or her physi-
cal husk. In this way ritual peace contributed to individuation, deflated
the extended corporate self entailing a larger field of violent reac-
tion, and later related it directly to the authorities to facilitate its
subjection and the incorporation of obedience.
The ritual kiss thus physically inscribed the social order it stood
for upon the ritual actors’ sensory perceptions. To stabilize the agree-
ment, these perceptions, just like the emotional experiences engaged
in ritual, had to be attuned to mesh, i.e., the ritual kiss was an
efficacious representation to the extent it explicitly communicated
the premises, rules, and norms of the engagement. On several occa-
sions extant records confirm that the basic principles of the ritual
act of the kiss were made explicit, through the one-time normative
injunction of ‘brothers and friends,’ the goal-oriented rationality of
do ut des morality, and so forth. Yet the ritual kiss, multi-referential
as it was, could never attain the level of communicative capacity
and ability to convey and explicate the variety of meaning that lan-
guage offered. In the highly complicated area of conflict and peace,

9
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, 2000), 5.
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328 

this might have been more of an advantage than a drawback. If we

set aside the verbal formulas accompanying the ritual sequence of
reconciliation of which the kiss was but a part, ritual did have its
own function as a communicative device. But what and how did the
kiss communicate, given its ambiguity and inadequacy to differentiate
and explicate the contexts of its referential fields?
The question of ‘what’ concerns the ability of ritual to address,
embody, and translate certain ideas. The key to this activity, again,
is to be sought in corporeality as the basic premise of ritual action.
The engagement of the body implies that the nature of the links,
which I suggest were the main creature and objective of ritual, was
of the ‘untheorized’ sort, as Comaroff and Comaroff called it.10 Such
generally inexplicable connections between the social-functional fields
in which the rite worked, on the one hand, and among these and
the meaning-producing paradigms of relatedness, on the other hand,
can hardly be conceptualized. They rest on notions whose knowledge
is implicit and inchoate. That is why, perhaps, the formal approaches
of positivism objectified and thus sacralized them, empiricism (vide
legal scholarship), attempting to rationalize, reduced them to fragments
of what they stood for, and the symbolic approaches resorted to dis-
regarding or even (in Le Goff ’s scheme) outright negating their exist-
ence. The problem with most, if not all, of these approaches arises
from their failure to locate the functional ‘space’ in which the rit-
ual kiss constructed the links between meaning and action. They find
it difficult to situate ritual as a strategy for action, to follow Catherine
Bell’s insight, as the practice mediating between two levels and lead-
ing from the inchoate, non-rationalized paradigms informing exist-
ence to the rationalized concepts structuring organized social action.11
We need not go the ‘collective unconscious,’ however, to decipher
the workings of the mechanism of bodily actions signifying basic phe-
nomena of social existence through the symbolically meaningful cul-
tural code of the ritual kiss. What the ritual code seems to have
promoted is a particular form of awareness of these paradigmatic
forms of existence. Indeed, in a variety of cases we read that the
actors ‘come to themselves’ or became emotionally ‘moved’ or ‘enlight-
ened’ by the intervention of ritual. Even if conscious awareness did
not occur, the ritual kiss was still an indispensable tool for reveal-

10
Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 71.
11
This is the central postulate of Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritiual Practice.
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ing the ‘facts’ of paradigmatic relatedness held in the ritual actors’

‘bodily container,’ as Casey termed it, by creating appropriate expe-
riences.12 Such experiences could not be ‘understood;’ they were
appropriated and reproduced in specific action. While there are a
variety of ways to represent them, there are few other ways to expe-
rience them but in ritual or ecstatic rapture. The reason for this is
that paradigmatic experiences of relatedness are rooted not in con-
cepts but in perceptions produced by touching. Touching is the only
sense that requires action to make perception, and thus the experi-
ence based on it, occur. When framed in an appropriate discourse,
in the manner Valeri explicated the function of sacrifice, the kiss of
peace was the action that led to the apperception of the most fun-
damental paradigms of existence through relatedness in the pre-
modern Western societies, in their pristine and socialized, to various
extents, forms.13 The apperception arose in the experience of min-
gling bodies, interacting along one of their most intimate fissures.
This answers the question of ‘how’ the kiss communicated. Bodily
interaction in ritual created situations in which such experiences could
be produced and shared and in which the apperception of social
principles, norms, and codes through the body was made possible.
The more basic the paradigm, the simpler the experience it gave
rise to in the process of its apperception. The most fundamental
meaningful facts produced typical experiences. Indeed, the goal of
the ritual kiss was to induce typical results, though, as we have seen
the connection between experiences and their outcome was by no
means stable and conventionalized. It was open to contestation, of
which the abuse of the paradigms it helped to apperceive was the
most lamented outcome. Abuse, however, was itself conventionalized
in the paradigmatic example of Judas’s kiss and was only a facet of
the possibilities for appropriating the ritual kiss. The salient issue is
how and why a ritual gesture that existed as an inchoate but fun-
damental and almost reflexive practice embodying basic relatedness,
and appropriated by authorities and groups to regulate and curtail
interpersonal and group rights of violence, was adopted in turn by
the ritual actors. When prescribed and enforced as the form of
reconciliation, the interaction with the kiss clearly made the actors

12
Casey, Remembering, 146–80.
13
Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, trans.
Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1985), 340–48.
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330 

acquiesce in the obligatory intentionality of ritual. This led to the

transformation of liability into duty, affect into emotion, ethics into
morality and, ultimately, to the transformation of power into hege-
mony that, through the embodied will of the actors, legitimated the
might of the authorities into acknowledged right. There is little doubt,
however, that with the lack of effective coercion example, persua-
sion, and injunction alone would not have succeeded in achieving
the practically universal (with Sahlins’s qualification) integration of
the kiss in the ritual scheme of peace making.
I would venture to state that however strong the structural pressures
of the social and the collective, the marked preference for a specific
form out of the welter of options offered by custom and tradition
would not have been possible without the reconciling parties’ own
appropriation of the ritual kiss. In other words, the interacting indi-
viduals were just as implicated in its sublimation as were the authorities.
The specifics of their participation should be sought in at least three
directions and bear on the problem of the interrelationship of indi-
vidual and group freedoms. Modern and post-modern societies have
worked out a model of existence in which these two forms are mutu-
ally exclusive. Any extension of the social in the domain of indi-
vidual liberty is believed to cause its restriction and vice versa. Three
dimensions of the premodern ritual exchange, its existence as a form
and as a process, and its character of corporeal co-substantiality,
challenge this paradigm and present us with a different picture.
The centrality of form in social interaction, of which the kiss was
a particular instantiation, was a virtually universal feature of pre-
modern cultures that continues to open new areas of exploration. In
view of our subject matter, it is appropriate to borrow the apt for-
mulation of one of the finest nineteenth-century legal historians,
Rudolf Jhering, that ‘form is the sworn enemy of arbitrariness and
the twin sister of the freedom [provided by the law].’14 Jhering’s
statement was a generic reference to the formal institutions of the
law and the codification of legal ideas; yet his postulate fully applies
in the case of the ritual kiss of peace. Form, nowadays the epitome
of constraint, appeared as the most solid guarantor of the freedom
of the medieval individual. In the specific embodiment of the kiss
form carried the sensations of familiarity and predictability. It shielded

14
Rudolf Jhering, Der Geist des römischen Rechts auf den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwick-
lung (Leipzig, 1883), vol. 2, part 2, 471.
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the individual from the chaotic, arbitrary intervention of competing

social and supernatural forces outside of its control. Interaction with
the kiss allowed for the construction of an environment in which
people moved with ease, assimilating it to the familiar social spaces
the control of which they had acquired since childhood. Masters of
their own world, the ritual agents found in the formality of ritual
guidelines for adjusting to the rules of the social intercourse and an
opportunity to maximize the traditional rights and liberties stemming
from the fundamental paradigms of relatedness reproduced in ritual.
It is a truism that ritual embodied action. We have already seen
the importance of action on a basic level, in the creation of expe-
riences through apperception. No less important was the role of the
ritual kiss in connecting apperceived experiences to the conceptual
framework of conduct and all it entailed, from ethics to obligation.
In the legal sphere, in particular, the ritual taking of liability and
the acknowledgement of duty were the supreme expressions of the
freedom of the sovereign individual to exercise his or her rights. The
ritual actor might not have been free to change anything in the ‘script’
of the ritual sequence or the discourses and institutions controlling
it. He or she did, however, have options when it came to the act
of performing the kiss. The existence of choice and the awareness
of the transformations occurring in the wake of the ritual engagement
demonstrate the extent to which the kiss of peace was an embodiment
of the principle of individual sovereignty and liberty. On the one
hand, the state of obligation resulting from the ritually taken liabil-
ity and duty was an action of self-limitation and self-restraint, an
alienation of the fundamental rights of the premodern person to pur-
sue justice on his or her own. There was no better demonstration
of the existence of these rights than the willful, self-conscious part-
ing with them enacted in ritual. On the other hand, there was the
freedom to choose between forms. Choice manifested the active par-
ticipation of the individual in drawing the lines around the territory
of the self, to use Goffman’s concept, and in the construction of its
‘social skin.’
Finally, the corporeal co-substantiality both revealed and constructed
in ritual points out a fundamental condition of the premodern exist-
ence that has been lost to the West since the Enlightenment: the
complimentary character of individual and collective freedoms. Long
misunderstood, this premise has been the bone of contention in
heated debates on the specific nature of the subjection, oppression,
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332 

and domination that emerged with the rise of the early modern state
and its monopolization of all varieties of coercion.15 Leaving aside
the issue that the social and the collective are not coterminous, rit-
ual peacemaking seems to confirm that for the medieval individual
to exist as a social person with all the rights and privileges this
entailed the individual had to exist as a member of a group. Ritual
interaction, aggregating the individual into a more or less defined
associative or corporate entity, supplied the facets of personality that
were indispensable for the former functioning as a social agent. Once
again, the selection of a specific form mattered most. The higher
the level and intensity of association and incorporation, the more
unrestricted the access of the ritual actor to the rights and privileges
guaranteeing personal freedom.
These final observations do not exhaust the range of implications
entailed by the ritual kiss of peace as a mode of social interaction.
They do illustrate, however, that no hegemonic structure was erected
by the efforts of the authorities alone. The process of constructing
it involved participation in the course of which agency was con-
tested, parceled out, and ultimately appropriated by all participants
in the ritual exchange.

15
See for a discussion of two of the most important positions in this regard
William Pencak, ‘Foucault Stoned: Reconsidering Insanity, and History,’ Rethinking
History 1:1 (Summer 1997), 34–55.
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333

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbreviations

AASS Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. Jean Bolland et al. (Antwerp &
Brussels, 1643–).
ACh Antike und Christentum.
CCCM Corpus Christianorum, continuatio medievalis (Turnhout, 1969–).
HMML Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, microfilm collection.
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica.
AA Auctores Antiquissimi.
SRM Scriptores rerum merovingiarum.
SS Scriptores in folio.
MIC Monumenta iuris canonici.
PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne. 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–64).
RISS Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. Lodovico Muratori (Milan, 1721–).
RHD Revue d’histoire du droit.
ZRPh Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie.
ZRG Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte.
GA Germanistische Abteilung.
KA Kanonistische Abteilung.
RA Romanistische Abteilung.

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INDEX
Ademar of Chabannes 263
Agnus Dei 265
Albertanus of Brescia 152, 205, 316
Alexander III, Pope 64
Alfonso the Wise, King of Spain 33, 84
Alleluia 2, 226, 273, 281, 283, 286
Alphabet of Tales 197
Amator Porcarii, Roman citizen 224–9
amicitia 75–9, 99, 100, 261
Amiens 39
Ancona 231–3
Annals of Padua 286
Anonymous of Abingdorf 150
Antwerp 28, 34, 122–3
Arnulf of Flanders 39, 314
asseurement 91
auctorizamentum 58–60
Augustine 14
Baldus degli Ubaldi 34, 73, 84
Beaumanoir 73
Berengar, Abbot of St Lawrence 300,
305, 314
Bernard of Clairvaux 34
Bernardino of Siena 202–3, 308
Bianchi 2, 200, 205, 266, 273, 283
Boccaccio 260
Bourge 48
Bruno, Bishop of Hildesheim 50
Caesarius of Heisterbach 190–91, 267–8
Cantar del mio Cid 160–61, 175, 316
caritas ceremony 248
caritas/amor 66, 102, 110, 124–7, 130
carta pacis 85–6, 95–6
compositio 93
concordia 52–3, 74, 94
coniuratio reiterata 281–2
convenientia 52–3, 298–9
Cyprian 14
Cyril of Jerusalem 14
De Antici, noble clan 231, 318
deditio 101
disciplinati 276–7
Donato Velluti 221–4, 318
Douai 106
Du Cange, Charles 21
353
Dudo of St Quentin 39
Duke Ernst 112, 151–3, 162, 297
Earl of Toulouse 153
Eilhart of Oberge 184
emotion work 141, 187
Erec 226
exempla 143
festuca 40, 87, 121–2
fideiussio, fideiussor 40, 43, 63, 65, 69
fides, fides facta 38, 45–51, 54–6, 60,
66–69, 71–8, 80, 88, 92, 94, 100,
106–7, 109–110, 116–7, 127, 130–1,
261, 297–99, 302
firmantia 38–44, 47–9, 54, 66, 80, 250
Florence 29, 85, 221
Francesco Carrara 285
Frederick Barbarossa, German
Emperor 62–3
Friar Juniper 290–92
Galbert of Bruge 41
Galvaneo Fiamma 279–80
Geoffrey IV, Abbot 43
Geoffrey of Manmouth 78, 151, 252–3
Gill of Seuly 48, 298–9
Giovanni Andrea 34, 84
Giovanni Codagnello 279–80, 295
Giovanni Gualberto 166, 189, 287–8,
308, 319
Giovanni Sercambi 205
Giovanni Villani 276
gratia 66, 71, 100–102, 130
Gregorio López 33–4
Grenoble 43
Guigo de la Mota, Count of Albi 56
Guigo Delphinus, Count of Albi 57
Guigo III, Count of Albi 43
Guillaume Durand 17, 18, 34, 84, 172
Guy of Warwick 153, 163, 181, 183–4,
194–6, 210, 297
Hegemony 9
Heloise 46
Henry II, German Emperor 28, 71,
74, 144–50, 164, 167, 253, 292–3,
296, 302, 327
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354 
Henry II, King of England 64, 71, 297
Henry IV, German Emperor 70
Henry of Dietz, Imperial noble 63
Henry of Lancaster, Duke 268, 309
Henry V, German Emperor 315
Henry VI, German Emperor 71
Henry VI, King of England 113
Henry VII, German Emperor 282, 284
Heribert, Archbishop of Cologne
144–50, 164, 167, 253, 292–3
Herman of Tournai 315
Hippolytus 13
Hugh II, Bishop of Grenoble 57
Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble 43, 56
Innocent I, Pope 14, 264
Innocent III, Pope 16
investiture 60, 66
Jacob’s Well 193–4
Jacques of Vitry 199
Jean Gobi 205
Johannes Pauli 271
John Beleth 16
John Gower 173, 309
John Mirk 192, 196
Kudrun 101, 181, 310–13
La Sauve Majore, Abbey of 42
Lamanno, noble clan 231, 318
Lambert of Deutz 144–50, 188, 253
Las Siete Partidas 33, 73, 102–3
Latino Malabranca, Cardinal and
peacemaker 282, 284
laudatio 57–8, 66, 80, 92
Lay Folks Mass Book 303
Le Bel Inconnu 239–41
Lex Frisiorum 101
Liber exemplorum 197
Liber papiensis 74
Life of St Wulfstan 200
liminality 133
Little Flowers of St Francis 290–93
Lothar III, German Emperor 47
Louis VII, King of France 65
Louis VIII, King of France 113
Love God and Drede 172, 175, 309
Macerata 231, 318
Mannelli, noble clan 221–4
Manuel des pechiez 196
Marmoutier, Abbey of 52–5
Mathilda, Countess of Albi 57
Mauricius, Abbot 51
Miracles of St Ursmar 177–9
Montaperti, battle of 207, 285
Mont-St-Michel, Abbey of 42
Nibelungenlied 169, 175, 179–80, 261
Niels, King of Denmark 170
Noyers, Abbey of 50, 258–9
osculum interveniente 46, 81–5, 92, 127
Otto, Count Palatine 63
Paluccio Guatari, Roman citizen 224–9
Papal States 114
Pardoner’s Tale 317
Parzival 153, 170, 175, 181, 218, 297,
307, 318, 320–1
Pascal, Pope 315
Paul, apostle 13
pax [and concordia] 93–7, 102, 105,
269, 278
Peace of God 2
Peter Abelard 46, 314–15
Peter Damian 166
Peter Idley 192, 269–71
Philip the Good, Count of Flanders
120
Philip, Abbot 44
Picquigni 39
pignus 43
Pistoia 87
Rainaldo Corso 174, 230
Rainerius Perusinus 83
Raoul Glaber 39
Raoul of Cambrai 151, 155–7, 169, 175,
184, 209, 254, 297, 307, 316, 318
Renaut de Bâgé 239–42
Richard the Lionheart, King of
England 151, 293
Richer 39
Rigord 264
Robert Mannyng 196–7, 202
Robert the Pious, King of France 70
Rolandino Passageri 84–5, 171
Rome 227–9
Rufinus of Sorrento 1, 3
Ruodlieb 77, 99, 103
Rupert of Deutz 150, 204
Sachsenspiegel 105
securitas 61–4, 93
Siena 207–9
Silence 213–218, 320–1, 325
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 355

Sobrado, Abbey of 62 Theobald, knight 52–4

Song of Aliscans 151, 157–9, 161, 163, Theodore of Mopsuestia 14
209, 225–6, 252, 307 Thomas Becket, Archbishop 64–5,
Song of Songs 16 71, 297
sponsio 52–3, 55–6, 66 Thomas Chestre 240
St Catherine 277 Thomas of Cantimprè 199–201, 203,
St Francis of Assisi 152, 165, 171, 291–3 303
St Hubert, Chronicle of the Abbey of treuga 71–5, 93–4, 131, 281
300 Tristan and Isolde 132, 152, 159, 181,
St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln 151, 184
161, 212, 293, 313 triuwe 171, 182, 218–19
St Julian of Tours, Abbey of 249
St Julian of Tours, Abbey of 44 Uggucio 73
St Laon at Thuars, Abbey of 50 Urfehde 88–91
St Lawrence, Abbey of 300 Usatges of Barcelona 75
St Omer 106 Uzerche, Abbey of 51
St Serge and St Bach, Abbey of
58–9, 260 Velluti, noble clan 221–4
St Vincent in Le Mans, Abbey of 50 Vendôme 52
Statutes of Aalst 120, 122–3, 186 voitval 209
Statutes of Deurne 122
Statutes of Upstalboom 115 wergild 93, 106–7, 128, 131, 259
Stephen of Bourbon 196 Wetzlar 99, 111
stipulatio 55, 83, 87, 94, 109 White Hoods 264
Willehalm 152, 163, 181, 209, 227,
Tale of Melibeus 101–2 251–2, 307
Tale of the Forgiving Knight 29, 189–90, William Longsword 39, 42, 314
194, 202, 266
Tertulian 13 Zoene [zoeve] 104
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CBTR-serie.qxd 08/04/2003 15:04 Page 1

CULTURES, BELIEFS
AND TRADITIONS
medieval and early modern peoples
Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions is a forum for an interdisciplinary sharing of insights into past popular
experience in the European and European-related world, from late antiquity to the modern era. The series
covers studies in a wide range of phenomena, among them popular rituals and religion, art, music, material
culture and domestic space, and it favors a variety of approaches: historical anthropology, folklore and gender
studies, art- and literary analysis, and integrative approaches employing a combination of disciplines. It
contains monographs, text editions (with translation and commentary), collections of essays on defined themes,
acta of conferences and works of reference.

1. HEN, Y. Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751. 1995.

ISBN 90 04 10347 3
2. MEGGED, A. Exporting the Catholic Reformation. Local Religion in Early-
Colonial Mexico. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10400 3
3. SLUHOVSKY, M. Patroness of Paris. Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern
France. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10851 3
4. ZIOLKOWSKI, J.M. Obscenity. Social Control and Artistic Creation in the
European Middle Ages. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10928 5
5. POSKA, A.M. Regulating the People. The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-
Century Spain. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11036 4
6. FERREIRO, A. (ed.). The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Essays
in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10610 3
7. SÖRLIN, P. ‘Wicked Arts’. Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden,
1635-1754. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11183 2
8. MITCHELL, K. & I. WOOD (eds.). The World of Gregory of Tours. 2002.
ISBN 90 04 11034 8
9. FRIEDLANDER, A. The Hammer of the Inquisitors. Brother Bernard Déli-cieux
and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century France. 2000.
ISBN 90 04 11519 6
10. FRIEDMAN, Y. Encounter Between Enemies. Captivity and Ransom in the Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11706 7
11. COHEN, E. & M.B. de JONG (eds.). Medieval Transformations. Texts, Power,
and Gifts in Context. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11728 8
12. TAYLOR, B. Structures of Reform. The Mercedarian Order in the Spanish
Golden Age. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11857 8
13. ROLLO-KOSTER, J. Medieval and Early Modern Ritual. Formalized Behavior
in Europe, China and Japan. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11749 0
CBTR-serie.qxd 08/04/2003 15:04 Page 2

14. JONES, P.M. & T. WORCESTER. (eds.) From Rome to Eternity. Catholicism and the Arts
in Italy, ca. 1550-1650. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12469 1
15. FROJMOVIC, E. Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other. Visual Representation and Jewish-
Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. 2002.
ISBN 90 04 12565 5
16. GODSALL-MYERS, J.E. Speaking in the Medieval World. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12955 3
17. PETKOV, K. The Kiss of Peace. Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval
West. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13038 1

ISSN 1382-5364