International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

Nearly twenty years ago, Umberto Eco argued for the impossibility of an ‘ars oblivionalis’, such voluntary techniques of forgetting being semiotic and therefore in itself mnemonic processes. Nevertheless, medieval excommunication rituals and their cursing formulas reveal an intentional effort to forget the person concerned. By remembering the biblical canon and the performative potentials of its perdition/salvation dichotomy, the ritual actors stated that the “memory and name” of the excommunicate “should be erased out of the book of life” which meant no less than complete and everlasting oblivion. Thereby, this anticipation of eschatological forgetting is imagined as a deletion of material signs which leaves no semiotic traces and which allows no remembrance of the ‘having forgotten’. In addition, ritual excommunication stigmatised the excommunicate as an object of social oblivion. This becomes particularly clear regarding the posthumous fate of an excommunicate who died without prior absolution. In this case, the church denied every kind of liturgical memoria as well as proper Christian burial in the cemetery, thus implicitly eliminating, as Jean-Claude Schmitt has shown, the latent side effect of these rites de passage – to separate the dead from the living and to enable the bereaved to forget. Consequently, the medieval imaginary depicts a dead excommunicate who dismisses its actually irrevocable state of physical absence and prolongs its liminal presence among the living. In this context belong historiographical references to the incorruptibility of its corpse (analogous to the saint who is likewise perceived as a liminal figure) as much as medieval revenant stories in which the excommunicate appears as a literally unforgettable protagonist. Altogether, the paper will discuss transcendental and social effects of ritual excommunication as distinct but interrelating techniques of forgetting, oscillating between the production of absence and (hyper)presence, between fulfilment and expectable failure of Eco’s paradox of an ‘ars oblivionalis’.