Book Review

Methods/Theory

Philippe Buc's book is an intelligent and curious work, informed throughout by wide learning, acute argumentation, and discerning, sometimes brilliant, readings of medieval texts. Its principal goal, however, is not so much to offer a new understanding of how early medieval rituals were enacted and/or presented in contemporary texts but rather to dispute the applicability of modern social scientific theories of ritual to early medieval phenomena. The book, which Buc terms an "essay," is intended as a cautionary admonition against the use of the concept of ritual for the historiography of the early Middle Ages. In order to demonstrate his thesis, Buc sets himself a double task: first, to explicate what late antique and early medieval authors who narrated rituals thought was happening when rituals occurred (the "medieval native's implicit anthropology"); second, to disclose, by tracing the genealogy of social scientific theories of ritual from the Reformation down through the 1970s, the hidden debt of modern social theory to its theological ancestors. As he lucidly puts it: "It is one of the main theses of this essay that the roots of our contemporary concept(s) reach down, with complicated subterranean trajectories, into the humus of the Middle Ages, and this engenders metholodological problems when one wants to apply these concepts to medieval sources" (p. 2).

1

This is the first, and most significant, of the "Dangers of Ritual" specified in the title. Space does not allow me to rehearse the intellectual history of the concept of ritual that Buc learnedly provides, but let me note that the book is worth reading for this alone, although its unrelenting focus on post-Reformation neo-Catholic writers like the comte de Bonald and fascist theorists like Carl Schmitt and Percy Ernst Schramm occasions some concern.

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