Edward Muir, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA
The Gesture and the Eye: Ritual Meanings without Words
When children learn to cross or genuflect what do they understand of the theology of Christianity? When pilgrims visit a shrine what do they know of its meaning other than its reputed powers? When citizens watched pageants in the sixteenth century, did they need to have a sophisticated understanding of iconography and classical Latin epigrams to appreciate the significance of what they saw? This paper argues that verbally articulated understandings of ritual performances, especially those recorded in prescriptive and liturgical texts, were decidedly secondary to the experience of a ritual in the late medieval and early modern periods. By examining embodied memories and late medieval theories of sight, the paper suggests that the experience, as opposed to the meaning, of rituals derived from a fundamentally materialist conception of human experience, best explained by late medieval Aristotelian theories of the emanation species. In fact, the late medieval preoccupation with books of ceremonies and prescriptive ritual texts betrays an anxiety about the power of rituals to evoke affective experiences that could not be contained by linguistic formulas.