Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life ([1912] 1991) (hereafter Elementary Forms) is considered by many the conclusive statement on religion of the Durkheimian school. In fact, this is rather a simplification of a more complicated intellectual history. A more careful evaluation of the examinations of religious phenomena by the members of the Durkheimian team demonstrates some intriguing theoretical distinctions that give rise to broader differences in intellectual position-taking and helps explain serious differences in the trajectory of influence of the Durkheimian school on subsequent generations of intellectuals. These differences stem largely from the description of the nature of the sacred in the Durkheimian tradition.

The sacred is of course the key to the Durkheimian definition of religion. In Elementary Forms, Durkheim proceeds in typical fashion toward a working definition of this difficult category by eliminating competing definitions, only offering his own after all others examined have been effectively annihilated. Religion, he argues, can only adequately and inclusively be characterized as ideas and rites oriented toward the setting aside and protection of sacred things. But in what manner can we as social scientists classify sacred things and distinguish them from things non-sacred? One might suggest that sacred things can be defined merely as those things set aside and protected in any given society. But this is clearly a circular definition. In any society, Durkheim asserts, there are things sacred and things profane. The profane he is content to leave with a negative definition: that which is not sacred. But it will not do to take the same route with respect to the definition of the sacred (i.e. the non-profane), as this is the substantive category upon which his entire theory of religion is based. The sacred inspires respect, but why? What is it about sacred things that so inspire us and that allow us to distinguish them from profane things? And is this awe-inspiring capacity monolithic and identical in all sacred things?

Although this chapter will begin with Émile Durkheim's ([1912] 1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Elementary Forms), I will focus on the place of ritual in the Durkheimian tradition, rather than add to the already enormous amount of explication of that book and the place of ritual in it. Even so, because of the vast influence of Durkheim on several disciplines, my treatment will be highly selective. I will focus on the ways in which ritual continues to be central for the understanding not only of religion, but of society.

There is probably no better place to begin a discussion of the place of ritual in the thought of Émile Durkheim than with a famous passage in his Elementary Forms:

‘Translation [translatio] is the exposition of meaning through another language [expositio sententiae per aliam linguam]’, claims Hugutio of Pisa in the Magnae derivationes which he compiled between 1197 and 1201. That sentiment, which is rooted in grammatical theory, makes it abundantly clear that medieval ‘translation’ does not mean merely the production of a replacement text: exposition, exegesis, interpretation (however one wishes to denote hermeneutic process) is involved as well. Hence in a twelfth-century gloss on Priscian interpretatio is defined as the exposition (expositio) of one language through another, and in his Summa super Priscianum Peter Helias describes interpretatio as ‘translatio de una loquela in aliam’. Such theoretical discourse is echoed in one of the most widely disseminated vernacular prefaces of the later Middle Ages, Jean de Meun's introduction to his French Boethius (c. 1300). If he had ‘expounded [expons] the Latin by the French word by word, Jean explains, the book would have been too obscure for laymen’ and clerks of moderate learning would have found it difficult to understand the Latin from the French. Therefore he has opted for a freer form of translation – an activity which, quite clearly, remains inseparable from expositio.

The activities of expositio or interpretatio and translatio were complexly interrelated. This chapter seeks to explore some of those relationships, with reference to late-medieval English, French, German and Spanish literary traditions. It will range from quite pedestrian vernacular renderings of standard glosses along with the texts which they expounded, to exceptionally sophisticated exploitations of the techniques – and the scholarly prestige – of commentary in the valorisation of texts composed anew in the emergent European languages.

A year or so before his death in 1332, at the end of a distinguished career as a scholar and public servant in the imperial court, Theodore Metochites composed his Epistasia kai Krisis, a critical comparison between two preeminent orators in the Greek rhetorical tradition, Aristides and Demosthenes. After setting out their respective stylistic merits at some length and discussing their effectiveness, the profit to be gained from reading their discourses, and the different political circumstances in which they wrote, Metochites announces his verdict. Demosthenes was indeed eloquence incarnate – an opinion shared by the vast majority of his critical predecessors – but it is Aristides who should be awarded the palm. He is, Metochites writes, the more ‘useful’ of the two (§ 31.14–23). Like himself and the readers of this epistasia, Aristides lived under a monarchy and composed a sort of rhetoric appropriate to that political setting.

Metochites' ‘essay’ has been variously praised by scholars as a masterpiece of humanist criticism and condemned for not being literary criticism at all, but the work of an astute politician – which Metochites was. To readers persuaded that ‘literature’ can be set apart from other ‘modes’ of discourse, Metochites' observations may indeed seem odd, perhaps confused or disingenuous, since they appear to confound literary principles and political aims. But Metochites' essay, though by no means a paradigm of Byzantine criticism, is far from atypical. It exhibits a number of presumptions that are more or less constant in the large body of critical literature that extends over six centuries, from Photios in the ninth century to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

What we normally think of as medieval literary criticism – whether in the form of gloss, commentary, treatise on writing poetry, or defence of classical studies – predominantly concerns written composition. It presupposes texts or lettered traditions of enough heuristic value to warrant critical study or imitation. Such criticism dominates the available manuscript evidence, which obviously reflects learned, usually academic and clerical, interests. Yet throughout medieval Europe people not only studied literature but attended performances or read poems (aloud or silently) or told stories for their own enjoyment. In 734 Bede complained of bishops who support people ‘addicted to laughter, jests, storytelling [fabulis], gluttony and drunkenness’. In 1119 the entertainment at a marriage feast in Iceland was reported as including ‘many kinds of games, dancing as well as wrestling and saga entertainment’. Around 1300 a prioress complained about damage to her convent's property from Londoners trekking across it to see ‘miracles and wrestling’. One of the major lessons we have learned from contemporary theory is that no attitude towards literature is free of social or ideological influence and implication; some sort of interpretative context underlies even the most seemingly transparent descriptions of literary activity and reception. These three brief passages, the tiniest tip of a medieval iceberg of references to performance, signal as well medieval attitudes towards it: in every case forms of narration or representation that might in more modern contexts be treated as literary genres are linked with other types of amusement, recreational activity or social indulgence. Stories, sagas and enactments of some sort are conceptualised not as ‘literature’ but as part of a diverse group of activities that provide entertainment.

The first signs of a critical stance towards poetic composition in the Castilian vernacular are to be found in the clerkly metre of cuaderna vía, which accompanied the emergence in the early thirteenth century of a new class of university–trained clerics. Writers such as Gonzalo de Berceo and the anonymous poets of the Libro de Alexandre and Libro de Apolonio introduced their narratives with self–conscious statements about their ‘clerical ministry’ (mester de clerecía) and their role as intermediaries between the laity and the received wisdom of bookish authority. Theirs, they claimed, was a new poetic movement, superior to the work of juglares (minstrels), and characterised by its metrical polish and civilising goals. These prefatory remarks are undeveloped (and have been variously interpreted), but they are nonetheless significant. They are evidence for the fact that, for the period in question, what may loosely be called ‘literary theorising’ was undertaken fundamentally in order to establish a social relationship: it is, so to speak, literary theory ‘in action’. This is to say that those who wrote for a lay public were less concerned with philosophising about an abstract category later to be called ‘literature’, than with defending their status as writers, and confronting the problems that attended the composition and interpretation of their own work. Thus, although theoretical treatises were written during this period, theory and criticism find expression principally through the medium of the literary text itself, prologues and, later, commentaries on specific works in the Castilian vernacular tradition.

In the fifth century CE, the erstwhile colony of the Roman Empire known as Britain became home to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, Germanic tribes moving across continental Europe in what has been somewhat romantically characterised as the ‘Age of Migrations’. Pushing the Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants of Britain westward and northward, these tribes rapidly consolidated their hold over the island, which they soon termed engla-lond, ‘land of the Angles’ (and hence ‘England’). The Germanic dialects they brought with them developed into a language that they called englisc, ‘English’. Modern scholarship terms this language ‘Old English’ (in distinction from ‘Middle English’, which developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066), or, sometimes, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, after the two major tribal groups, while ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ refers to England between the Saxon Advent and the Norman Conquest.

Anglo-Saxon England was one of the earliest European cultures to produce a substantial corpus of vernacular prose, alongside a flourishing monastic literacy in Latin and a robust tradition of vernacular poetry in the alliterative Germanic style. Much of this writing has survived in the dialect of Old English that philologists distinguish as ‘late West Saxon’. Both prose and poetry were used for narrative, hagiographic, exegetical and hortatory purposes.

Whilst it is reasonably assumed that there extended from the Merovingian period a long tradition of oral poetry in France which embraced the lyric, hagiography, epic and drama, a tradition which drew on Indo-European traditions, more localised folklore, and historical events, it is certain that vernacular French literature (i.e. what has been set down in letters) owes its emergence entirely to the church. It is doubtful whether the romana lingua of the Strassburg Oaths (as sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in June 842) can really be called French, but the short Sequence of Saint Eulalia (c. 881–2) from the area of Valenciennes is certainly French, as are parts of the Sermon on Jonah, also produced near Valenciennes, towards the middle of the tenth century. A Passion narrative and a Life of St Ledger copied c. 1000 have been preserved in the south-west of France, whilst in the following century we have fragments of Occitan and, from Normandy, two literary masterpieces, the Vie de Saint Alexis and the Chanson de Roland. With the exception of the last two we are dealing with works written in a supra-dialectal koiné or scripta, designed to find favour with supra-regional audiences who could not tackle whatever Latin originals were available. Secular French literature written in a relatively standardised language (ultimately identified with that of the Ile de France) is the product of the twelfth century. It was preceded in England by the curiously precocious literary productions that owed much to the patronage of Henry I and II.

Modern editors divide the Epistle into thirty-three paragraphs or chapters. These fall into three main sub-sections: paragraphs 1–4 dedicate the Paradiso to Can Grande; paragraphs 5–16 begin by presenting a general introductory discussion of allegory with reference to the four interpretative ‘senses’ of biblical exegesis (§7), and then analyse the Commedia as a whole and the third cantica in particular under six headings drawn from one of the standard models of academic prologue to an auctor (‘There are six parts … which need to be discussed at the beginning of every didactic work, namely, the subject, the author, the form, the aim, the book's title, and the branch of philosophy to which it belongs'; §6); finally, paragraphs 17–33 offer a close ‘literal’ reading of the opening twelve lines of Paradiso, concentrating in particular and with considerable expertise on many of their philosophical and theological allusions.

One of the most controversial issues in present-day Dante studies concerns the authorship and significance of the Epistle to Can Grande, whose apparent addressee was the Lord of Verona between 1311 and 1329. Unlike most other critical disputes, the question of whether the letter is or is not by the poet has a direct and fundamental bearing upon our appreciation of the Commedia and of its author's intellectual development. If genuine, then, the Epistle is a key auto-commentary to the poem, second only in importance to the Commedia's own self-reflexive critical system, although any comparison between them confirms the undoubted greater exegetical range and sophistication of the poem.

The previous chapter stressed the ways in which Dante's achievement represented a challenge to prevailing orthodoxies: he had chosen the vernacular for a major poetic work, and the Commedia itself had engendered a tradition of commentary on a par with that usually reserved for classical texts. Petrarch's literary hegemony, which from 1350 onwards restored Latin to its privileged position, in a sense constituted a linguistic counterrevolution. The rivalry between the two languages was to continue for two centuries from the death of Dante, and since it represents an obligatory topic in critical thinking in this period it seems best to treat the question in this separate chapter. There are four major stages in the debate: first the Petrarchan revolution; second the arguments for and against the vernacular around 1400; third the crucial decade 1430–40; and finally the age of Landino, Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The conflicting currents, set in motion on the one hand by Dante's enhancement of the status of the volgare and on the other by the new humanist conviction of the superiority of Latin, were already visible in Dante's last years in his exchange of Latin hexameters with Giovanni del Virgilio (c. 1320). Giovanni criticised Dante for writing serious poetry for the masses, bemoaning their ignorance, their tendency to distort the poet's words in the street, and the fact that the vernaculars are too many and transitory to be the vehicle of serious work (Eclogues 1.6–16). Dante replied to Giovanni in the same metre but reviving the ancient genre of the eclogue (Eclogue 2), possibly to couch the content of his reply (defence of the layman's language and the comic genre of the Commedia) in an appropriate form (pastoral was the lowest genre, according to the rota Virgilii; see p. 517 above).

In the course of the thirteenth century, the intellectual initiative passed from Orléans to Paris, from school to university, from the antiqui to the moderni. This changed topography of learning had important implications for the ways in which texts were transmitted and read. The continuing ramification of higher education into ever more vocational areas of study and training was a response to the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning and to the pastoral effects of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The technologising of preaching and the development of more sophisticated analyses in applied pastoral theology went hand-in-hand with refinements in logical terminology. When scholastic lectio replaced monastic lectio as the dominant style of academic reading, new questions were asked about how books meant. The modistic analysis of the written word, developed from the practices prevailing in the exposition of secular classical texts, acquired new subtleties in its application to the literary strategies of the Bible and was again in turn reapplied to secular texts with some added emphases drawn from scriptural commentary. Throughout the thirteenth century a fruitfully symbiotic relationship existed between exegesis of the sacred page and of the secular text, mediated through a common interest in the affective force of all literature. These developments depended for their success on a continuing and reliable supply of literate and competent students.

Although the logic of language came to be studied with new rigour, it would be wrong to suggest that the old ways of learning decayed. The interplay between disciplines and institutions was always more subtle and profound than medieval satirists and modern social historians care to allow: even logicians must learn to read, and must sit at the knee of Dame Grammar.

In medieval terminology the Latin word ars (plural: artes) denoted a body of principles relating to a specific activity such as painting, music, preaching or writing. By extension the term was also used for a written treatise on the subject of a particular art. For example the Ars nova of Philippe de Vitry, written at Paris about 1320, lays out the principles for musical notation which were dominant during the fourteenth century. The term ‘art’ or ars when applied to such a treatise indicates a discussion of what the ancient Greeks would have called techné – ‘technique’ or ‘craft’ – rather than an abstract or theoretical discussion of a subject.

Medieval writers had access to three major types of such artes dealing with separate kinds of literary composition. The first type was the school art, usually called an Ars poetriae but teaching how to compose both poetry and prose regardless of genre. The second was the Ars dictaminis, or art of letter-writing (on which see Chapter 3 below), while the third was the Ars praedicandi, or the art of preaching (see Chapter 4). All three types deal with specific techniques for finding ideas, arranging them, and putting them into verbal language for transmission to an audience of readers or hearers.

At the outset it may be recalled that medieval language-use involved a much greater oral element than is common nowadays. Poems were written to be read aloud, just as letters were often written to be heard and therefore involved careful attention to aural rhythms in their prose; the audience's experience of the sermon was of course primarily aural.

The majority of the Welsh poems extant from the medieval period were composed by praise-poets for oral performance at courts, religious foundations and noble houses. While the standing and livelihood of the poets depended mainly on their effectiveness in ‘making fame’ and on their technical ability, they also felt the need to explain and promote themselves, both as representatives of an august, ancient and autonomous bardic order, and as individuals vying for favour and position. These reflections, frequently conventional, are embedded in the verse, and in the absence of any treatise on Welsh poetics before the bardic grammar of the early fourteenth century, they are a guide to the practitioners’ conception of their work. A corresponding emphasis on the poetic self, vis-à-vis the heavenly Patron, is evident in the religious poetry. Poems in the personae of the prophet Myrddin and especially the primordial poet and sage, Taliesin, are a subsidiary source, dramatic and perhaps archaising, which detail concerns such as inspiration, performance, competition, poetic worth and aesthetic criteria, and contain many technical terms. Prose criticism, by contrast, is minimal: native texts before c. 1300 are all anonymous and lack prologues, although they are usually assigned a name and a type in brief concluding colophons, which in rare cases elaborate on the nature of the text. Explicit translation theory is poorly attested, and must be inferred from working practice.

Chapter 23 documented the manner in which the humanist revolution initiated by Petrarch diverted intellectual energy away from the volgare into the study and writing of Latin. Consequently prose literary criticism in this period is, as we shall see, largely dominated by the increasing sensitivity displayed by Italian humanists towards developing a classical prose style in Latin. Only towards the end of the fifteenth century do critics take the first steps towards an analysis of vernacular prose. This section will thus be mostly concerned with the development of Latin prose criticism, a development which comprises four major phases. First there is Petrarch's discovery of the distance that separated medieval Latin dictamen from Cicero's Latin; then Bruni achieves an almost exact replica of classical prose; subsequently Valla inaugurates a more rigorous and practical guide to acceptable lexis and syntax; and lastly, the second half of the Quattrocento witness the emergence of both a rigid Ciceronianism, championed by Cortese and later Bembo, and an eclectic anti-Ciceronianism, promoted by Poliziano.

If the Petrarchan revolution forced Boccaccio and his successors to question Dante's wisdom in using the volgare, the same upheaval also caused a reappraisal of Dante's Latin works. In the first half of the Trecento the consensus on Dante's greatness had been universal. In the 1340s Giovanni Villani, in the first brief biographical note on Dante, was prepared to criticise his fellow-citizen's mores, but was unable to find fault with his Latin works. In particular he praised the ‘robust and elegant Latin’ of the De vulgari eloquentia, as well as Dante's epistles which were composed ‘in the high style, with excellent sententiae and quotations from ancient authors, and were highly praised by learned connoisseurs’ (Cronica 9.136).

In Christian society, preaching is a formal response to the injunction the risen Christ had given to his apostles to ‘go out to the whole world and proclaim [praedicate] the Good News to all creation’ (Mark 16:15; cf. Matthew 10:16–17). Whatever form it has taken through history, its content or subject (the Good News, i.e. the word of God as revealed and deposited in Scripture) and its purpose (instruction and emotional appeal aiming at conversion and moral perfection) have remained constant elements. Preaching thus is an essential ministry that has been carried out since the beginnings of Christian history. From early times on, it was naturally accompanied by reflections and instructions on its nature and form. Thus, in his treatise on how to understand and explain Scripture, De doctrina christiana, Augustine devoted the last of four books to such questions as the relation between wisdom and eloquence, the various functions the latter might have, and the use of rhetorical art in preaching. In a more practical vein, Gregory the Great in his Cura pastoralis provided specific advice on what the spiritual shepherd (called praedicator in 3.19ff.) should say to various social and moral groups and types in his attempt to foster virtue and eradicate vice. And for many centuries church authorities collected homilies preached by the Fathers and made them available for official use in the liturgy. Yet in spite of such longstanding practice and concomitant instructions on how to carry it out, it was not until the late twelfth century that the conception of preaching as a rhetorical art gained its full realisation in the proclamation of the sermon as an art form which obeyed rules that could be taught to, and followed by, individual preachers.