IMS Open Lecture Series: ‘Medieval Cursing and Its Uses’

Tuesday 31st October 2017 at 17.30 in the Parkinson Building: Nathan Bodington Council Chamber.

Sarah Hamilton is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter. She researches religion and society in the early Middle Ages with an especial interest in liturgy. Her books include Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, edited with Helen Gittos (2015), Church and People in the Medieval West, 900-1200 (2013) and The Practice of Penance, 900-1050 (2001). She is currently PI for the HERA funded project, After Empire: Using and not using the past in the crisis of the Carolingian world, c. 900-c.1050.

‘Let them be above the face of the earth on a dung heap, so that they are an example of disgrace and cursing to present and future generations. And just as these lights are extinguished, thrown down from our hands today, so may their lights be extinguished in eternity.’

This paper explores texts like this one from early tenth-century Rheims to investigate the gap between the oral world of ritual performance and that of text. Anathema – the cursing and excommunication of obdurate sinners – was the most powerful spiritual weapon available to bishops. Its use is attested from the time of the early Church onwards, but the earliest surviving liturgical records date only from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Investigating how and why such records came to be made at this time, this paper suggests they can cast fresh light both on the development of episcopal authority in this period, and on how and why service books came to be compiled.