Representing rituals in medieval Bohemia : Circuitio in the documents of the late 13th century
Title:
Representing rituals in medieval Bohemia : Circuitio in the documents of the late 13th century Reprezentace rituálu ve středověkých Čechách : circuitio v písemnostech pozdního 13. století
The transformation of legal culture from oral to written, which was taking place at a different pace and with varying intensity throughout Europe starting in the twelfth century, is the subject that has been regularly neglected by the Czech historiography. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the co-existence of legal ritual and its written records in diplomatic documents. Based on the analysis of the case from the late thirteenth century, the aim is to determine the way in which ritual circuicio was represented in charters. The question is: What strategies were chosen by the new written legal culture facing the tenaciously resisting old world of rituals? To be able to address the issue, the nature of the above mentioned sources will be defined along with the reconstruction of the intertextual network which they form.