1. Antidisciplinarity

We medievalists are more complacent about our crossdisciplinarity than we have any right to be. To be sure, we are unique among academic fields in the extent to which our journals (such as Speculum) and our conferences (Medieval Academy, Medieval Institute) foster cross-disciplinary encounter. But such encounters are more often "shoulder to shoulder" than "face to face." We most often read the article or attend the paper in "our field" without actually leaving the security of our disciplinary home (with historians, for example, returning to their "sources" and literary people to their "text"). Such are the emotional and material comforts of the disciplinary home that little explanation need be offered for the academic reluctance to leave it, or, leaving it, the disposition for a prompt return. The question, rather, is how the more adventurous (but more fraught and less rewarding) state of interdisciplinarity is to be sustained against the constant temptation of a return to more familiar environs.

The liminal and fragile state of interdisciplinarity is to be sustained only by adopting the most active and aggressive means; by resolving, not just to be interdisciplinary, but actively to oppose disciplinary complacencies. To be, in a word, "antidisciplinary." To be antidisciplinary is to interest ourselves and actively to prefer precisely those knowledges which are underrecognized or unrecognized within existing disciplinary terms. A discipline constitutes itself in and through the kinds of knowledges it seeks and endorses, and equally through those its methodologies render unpresent or invisible. As a result, the processes of disciplinary analysis are likely to in fact are bound to leave a "remainder," a residue of phenomena unvoiced or uncommented upon. Antidisciplinarity asserts the importance of this invisible remainder.1

Antidisciplinarity begins with a sense of our respective fields' constructedness, a sense of where their unspoken boundaries operate to define and limit objects of disciplinary notice. But since, as Emerson says, the contours of a field cannot

Theories of practice are by no means giddily new. A determinate point of origin would be the work of Bourdieu and Giddens in the 1970s, with the appearance of Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice in English in 1977 and Giddens's Central Problems in Social Theory in 1979. Disciplinarily, its origins are appropriately vague, but are indebted more or less equally to anthropology and sociology, with reasonably early pickups in political science and literature. In its inception, practice theory posed a welcome alternative to the unwelcome binary in which human behavior was seen either as rational, purposive, and agent-driven or as a wholly agentless product of synchronous social structure.2 As a theory founded in resistance to simplifying binaries, it has proven highly resistant to disciplinary appropriation, and it flourishes twenty years after the fact precisely by virtue of its capacity to subvert or override the very simplifications (textual vs. extra-textual, temporal vs. atemporal) by which disciplines once closed themselves.

At the heart of practice theory lies an understanding of human activity as what Bourdieu calls "regulated improvisation,"3 as activity occurring within structure, but not structurally determined. Or, to put it slightly differently, practice theory offers an analysis of activity as conceived, and made intelligible within, a set of tacit rules, but not as wholly predetermined by those rules. Even so short a summary suggests the advantage of practice theory over its adversaries in the 1970s: over, that is, a residual humanism that admitted no obstacles to individual self-determination, and a briefly triumphant structuralism which insisted on the subjection of individuals to rules. But what conceptual advantages does practice-theory, twenty years after, continue to allow to its practitioners? What disciplinarily specific binds does it nullify or elude?

(1) Refuses to differentiate objects of analysis. A text, a symbolic object, a performance, a ceremonial or pageant, an event may all be found equally to unfold within structure, to be subject to "practical" analysis. A more specific observation, bearing on a particular problem of my discipline, is that practice soars over the imagined chasm between the symbolic and the material, or (to put it slightly differently) the textual and the historical. This particular achievement is enabled by Bourdieu's introduction of a powerful concept which identifies the goal of all practice as identification of the goal of all practice as the accumulation of "capital," that is, social leverage, and then argues that capital may be variously symbolic or material or both at once (see his Outline, p. 183).

(2) Recognizes structure but rejects its tyranny. Practices manifest abstract (and hence timeless) structure, but the process of structuration occurs in time, with meaning subject to modification by temporal arrangement and duration or

(3) Outflanks the question of intent. An event may objectively be perceived as strategic, whether or not it is the product of a "strategic intention" (p. 73). Without ignoring people's sense of what they think they are doing, practical analysis finally bets on observed behavior, on what they may be seen to do.4

(4) Opens a theory of resistance. Practices tend, naturally enough, to reproduce the structures of which they are a product (p. 72). Yet, as Bourdieu observes, practices open the possibility of symbolic manipulation of the power relations out of which they are produced (p. 165). Moreover, as Ortner and Sahlins point out, social change may be a paradoxical result of good-faith failure; that is, change may result from "failed reproduction."5

I don't mean that practice theory is always trying to do all these things. They might be seen as among its incidental derivatives, as effects of its implementation. For it is, above all else, an "applied" theory, a "hands-on" theory, which is why I want to move as quickly as possible to some illustrative applications. As my title suggests, I will concentrate on several late-medieval English coronation events, seen as occasions of "ritual practice."

2. Richard II: Bad Timing as Bad Luck

Social practices including those relative formalizations which Bourdieu calls "ritual practice" manifest structure, but in their own way: not in static arrest, but as a process of structuration or realization, occurring in time. Time is, in this sense, not only the proper element of practice, but one of the ways in which it makes meaning. Bourdieu observes of the slightly different case of exchange-relations, "Even the most strictly ritualized exchanges, in which all the moments of the action, and their unfolding, are rigorously foreseen, have room for strategies: the agents remain in command of the interval between the obligatory moments and can therefore act . . . playing with the tempo of the exchange" (p. 15). Similarly, considerations of temporal order, timing, and tempo are centrally important within rituals of coronation, where the ordo of coronation (ordo referring in this case not to stratum or rank but to sequence) was of sufficient importance to be written down, revised, argued over, and learnedly commented upon.

The objective of the coronation ritual, as with most ritual practices, may be understood as what Bourdieu calls the "euphemization" of a boundary crossing (pp. 120-124). The passage from late king/present king, old king/new king presents a relatively elementary boundary-crossing, but nevertheless a crossing to be euphemized, by insistence upon legitimacy, continuity, rebirth, divine sanction, and other means. Whichever of these strategies is pursued, the analysis of practice locates its chances for success in its manipulation of time. Analysis of

In the process of claiming his hereditary role as king's champion, John Dymock showed a clear enough sense of his moment in time: that the responsibility of the champion is to "come . . . the day of the coronation, and ride before the king in the procession ["chiuacher devant le Roi al procession"] and . . . say and cry to the people three times together . . . that if there be any man high or low who will deny that his liege lord Sir Richard, kinsman and heir to the King of England, Edward, now lately dead, ought not to be crowned King of England, that he is ready with his body to adventure now . . . that he lieth as a false traitor" (pp. 141, 160).6 The notion that he should defend Richard's title on the morning of the corona-

Yet, according to anti-Ricardian Walsingham, this is not what happened.7 As he tells it, the coronation was underway behind the closed doors of the Abbey when John Dymock, splendidly arrayed on a charger with two attendants, arrived at the doors of the Abbey to await the end of the coronation mass. First issuing from the Abbey doors was marshal Thomas Percy, who abruptly addressed the king's champion, saying that he ought not to have come at this time but should have postponed his arrival until the coronation banquet ("dicens non debere eum ea hora venire, sed quod usque ad prandium Preis distulisset adventum suum"). Percy then, in what seems a preemptory way, instructed him to go take off his heavy armor, and to await that time for his return ("monuit ut rediret, et, deposito tanto onere armorum, quiesceret ad illud tempus"). Walsingham says that unsurprisingly given Percy's authority and tone Dymock took his advice and withdrew. Twenty-three years later, when Dymock's nephew performed the role of champion on the occasion of Henry IV's coronation, he does indeed seem to have entered the king's hall in the course of the banquet ("in medio prandio . . . aulam intravet") fully mounted, and ready to sustain the king's right against any challenger.8

Dymock's withdrawal, and presumed humiliation, is the moment at which a tacit and barely visible, but nonetheless vital, system of reciprocity begins to break down. The king's champion customarily received his horse and harness as payment for his services though this payment is couched as the king's gift, lying within the "volonte" of the king (Legg, p. 141). Thus, Dymock's gift of loyalty was reciprocated by the king's gift of a horse: loyalty for horse, horse for loyalty. Yet records suggest that Dymock, having never fought for the king, and perhaps in disfavor besides, received no gift. Here suggested in miniature is a rending of the tissue of obligations that left Richard, in 1399, with few supporters in a time of need.

Also revealed through these alterations of sequence first from the coronation procession to the Abbey doors and then to a ceremonial cameo at the coronation banquet is a more general decline of the king's champion's role to derisory status. Although superficially conflictual in nature, the champion's appearance may be viewed more accurately as a euphemization, in the way it collects and stages potential conflict in a manageable form, transposing potential civil unrest into a temporal ceremony with a finite conclusion. The shunting of this ceremonial to a less consequential (and in fact redundant) moment incidentally reveals everything about the coronation that the coronation is designed to conceal. The coronation seeks, not only to elide a boundary crossing, but even more ambitiously to perform an act of "social alchemy" by which participants are encouraged to misrecognize interested gestures (magnate control, dynastic perpetuation) as disinterested or consensual in nature, and hence as Voluntary and legitimate rather than constrained (Bourdieu, p. 192). Derogation of the champion's role is a tell-tale indication of the coronation, not as a consensus-building event, but as a "done deal" a consequence of backroom brokerage within a magnate elite.

The scene in which Richard's elaborately harnessed champion is told to go away and come back later has a certain Monty Pythonesque quality . . . or at least I can imagine what the Pythons would have done with it. But such minor slips and transpositions need not amount to much, unless somebody wants to make something of them; unless, that is, they are caught up in some larger signifying network. Walsingham's comments on Dymock's untimely appearance would seem to derive from a willingness to see Richard embarrassed, but perhaps no more than that. The real scandal, which Richard's enemies were not soon to forget, was next to ensue.

It involves, in certain respects, a charming moment. The celebrants now issuing in confused tumult from the Abbey, amidst a rout of mounted lords and preceded by a great number of minstrels ("praecedente magno numero diverse generis histrionum"), the young Richard was carried from the Abbey to the royal palace on the shoulders of a knight ("portatus est in humeris militum usque ad regale Palatium"). Although Walsingham leaves the matter there, it is pursued by the Westminster chronicler (who, via his association with the Abbey and its privileged relation to ceremonies of coronation, and his chapter's responsibility to keep the coronation regalia has a great deal more to say about the matter). Writing in 1390, the chronicler redescribes the circumstances, and informs us that the knight in question was the young Richard's tutor, the now-reviled and two years dead Simon Burley. Moreover, he tells us about a grievous blow to the ceremonial security of the coronation, a blow resulting from carelessness, but even more from failure to observe the proper order of things:

It is generally accepted that immediately after his coronation the king should go into the vestry, where he should take off the regalia and put on the other garments laid out ready for him by his chamberlains before returning by the shortest route to his palace, but at the coronation of the present king the contrary was done, with deplorable results; for when the coronation was over, a certain knight, Sir Simon Burley, took the king up in his arms, attired as he was,

Surely one could forgive the eight-year-old king's carelessness in this matter, but the monk of Westminster's actual grievance seems to be against, not the young Richard or his tutor Burley, but the violation of order, of good ritual sequence.10 Already by Richard's time the regalia were known to have been highly venerable, with written record connecting many of the items to the reign of Henry III (Legg, pp. 54-56) and with common report connecting them with the coronation of Edward the Confessor (Legg, pp. 191-192). Yet antiquity alone is not at issue here; the reason for keeping Richard's ritual failure alive was its relevance to a pro-Lancastrian project of delegitimization, proceeding (among numerous other stratagems) by means of a deconstruction of its ritual basis. Among the avalanche of pro-Lancastrian portent and rumor and innuendo launched between Richard's deposition and death was this analysis by Adam of Usk:

At the coronation of this lord three ensigns of royalty foreshadowed for him three misfortunes. First, in the procession he lost one of the coronation shoes; whence the commons who rose up against him hated him ever after all his life long; secondly, one of the golden spurs fell off; whence the soldiery opposed him in rebellion; thirdly, at the banquet a sudden gust of wind carried away the crown from his head; whence he was set aside from his kingdom and supplanted by king Henry. (pp. 200-2) Adam here deconstructs or unbinds the ordered significances that make the ritual of coronation "work" as a metaphor of ordered transference. No slipper, no metaphor; no metaphor, no transference. And thus, without the stately and ordered progress through the signs by which the royal dignitas is invoked and secured, no smooth euphemization of the passage from one reign to the next. Disregard of sequence opens a rift or rent in the symbolic fabric, and this rift is the place where an argument for a new king can take hold and flourish.

3. Henry IV as Social Alchemist

"Officializing strategies," according to Bourdieu, transmute private and particular interests into disinterested, collective, publicly avowable interests. Thus, the "capital of authority" works by solemnizing and thus universalizing private incident, and also (in reverse) by disowning a person "who, failing to identify his particular interest with the general interest,' is reduced to the status of a mere individual" (p. 40). We have seen this process of demotion applied to Richard's coronation, where Lancastrian interests made much of Richard's small failures to observe temporal, and hence ritual, coherence. Not only de-officializing but de-sacralizing the coronation, they performed something akin to the ceremony of clerical degradation, in which the effects of time are reversed and run backward, with the people finally "holding him not for king, but for a private person, sir Richard of Bourdeaux, a simple knight" (Adam of Usk, pp. 32, 185). But

Perhaps this is why Henry IV enjoys such an affirmative and Kennedyesque reputation today: his genius was to use power ruthlessly, but to encourage its misrecognition as a participatory exercise. The "participation" of which I speak is by no means to be understood (… la Bishop Stubbs) as precocious parliamentarianism. The participation encouraged by Henry IV's ceremonies of acclamation and assertions of free election was less parliamentary than ritualistic and spectacular.11

Henry, for example, appears to have wrought significant changes, as measured against previous practice, in the crucial element of the coronation ceremony, that of unction or anointment with holy oil.12 According to normal practice, as described in the fourteenth-century Liber Regalis, the loosening of the king's garments and his anointment is to occur while a pallium or canopy is spread over him to conceal him from view ("pallio supra dictum principem extenso" Legg, p. 92). Yet in the detailed, sponsored description of MS. Julius B. ii, the pallium is unmentioned. We are told that, "Kyng Herry lay vpon a cloth off golde before the hyh awter in Westm'. Chirche. And there in ffoure parties off his body his clothes weren opyn, and there he was anoynted" (p. 49).13 Furthermore, according to the account of Julius B. ii, this anointment was followed by another apparent innovation, in which the anointed monarch, rather than transporting himself from place to place, is borne to the place where crowning is to occur: "And affter this anoyntyng his body was leffte vp into another place" (p. 49). These two alterations might be found superficially discordant, with the former a gesture of accessibility or popular access and the latter a deliberate elevation of the king's supra-mundane status. Yet the two alterations possess a common denominator, which is the king's enactment of a willingness to pacify and subordinate his own volition, first as an object of his subjects' gaze, and then as the vessel of God's will. In each case, he is the object of regard first by his subjects and then by God (whose gaze the principal prayer invites: "Prospice omnipotens deus serenis obtutibus hunc gloriosum regem" p. 92). Invited is a gaze which consents in his elevation, which enstates and beholds Henry as "glorious king." Having recently seized the throne by magnate alliance and force of arms, Henry was in a position to demand compliance; yet, condescending to his subjects' (and God's!) gaze, Henry solicits consent, and transmutes an occasion of forceful seizure into a seemingly Voluntary and elective one.

Since we are looking, not only at an "officializing" moment but also at a "sacramental" one, a ratifying miracle would do no harm. Henry's coronation was indeed not to happen without a divine miracle ("sine divino miraculo" Walsingham, 2:239), and we might pause to view this miracle within the lens of practice theory. The interesting thing about practice is that it manifests rules, but the rules need not be rigorously followed. In fact, practice is annihilated pre-

Accounts of such an exceptional oil, an oil presented to St Thomas … Becket by the Blessed Virgin, had been long in circulation before the accession of Henry IV. Edward II, for example, sponsored an account of such an oil, informing Pope John XXII that he had considered coronation with it, but had decided to content himself with the customary oil ("unctione consueta contentus" Legg, p. 71) but that now, as a result of reversals in his reign, he was considering a second ceremony of anointment. Among the properties of this oil were: the fifth king from the one then reigning (a slot occupied by Richard II) would, by virtue of this oil, recover the Holy Land from the heathen. Taken up by the Lancastrians, this older legend was first stripped down for use by omission of the "fifth king" in favor of a "rex futurus" (Legg, p. 169) who, anointed with this oil, will recover "sine vi," not the Holy Land, but the lost lands of Normandy and Aquitaine (p. 169).14 Now, stripped of its previous, inopportune association with Richard II and crusades, this legend lay open to new inscription. We reencounter it in Walsingham as a fully Lancastrian miraculum. Walsingham gives it a specific Lancastrian genealogy: it is now discovered by Henry, first duke of Lancaster, passed by him to the Black Prince (who, had he lived, would have been worthy recipient and fifth king), then placed in the Tower only to be rediscovered accidentally ("inopinate" p. 239) by Richard II in 1399 as he was randomly rooting around in relics of his ancestors. The insertion of Richard in the chain might seem strange, until we see how he is used: as an unwitting, and hence innocent, vehicle of Henry's felicity. Learning of the oil's properties he seeks a renewal of his unction, but is refused. He then (pathetically) carries the ampule around with him, along with other items of regalia, until handing it over to the Archbishop of Canterbury, observing (in words assigned him by the Lancastrians) that it was not the divine will that he should be so anointed but that this noble sacrament was intended for another.15

In the Arundel manuscript of Walsingham, a later (presumably Yorkist) commentator marginally debunked this account, inserting "unguentum fictitum" adjacent to the oil's discovery. But such fictions have their uses, one of which is to open new forms and modes of belief for the larger circle of the ceremony's participants. Speaking of the means by which difference may be consecrated as common consent, Bourdieu observes that, "For ritual to function and operate it must first of all present itself and be perceived as legitimate, with stereotyped symbols serving precisely to show that the agent does not act in his own name . . . but in his capacity as delegate."16 Here Henry IV, as when he permitted himself to be lifted and carried about the altar, offers himself as delegated sovereign, and agent of God's plans for England in a form conducive to ratification by all those who believe that a miraculum has indeed occurred.

4. Joanne of Navarre as Liquid Asset

Shortly after her arrival in England and marriage to the widowed Henry IV at Winchester in 1403, Joanne's leading role was solemnized in a formal ceremony of coronation, with invitations broadly distributed among the lords, ladies, and knights of the realm. This was, to judge from such indications as its ambitious guestlist,17 a sumptuous affair, conducted (in the view of one chronicler) with due honor and festivity ("satis honorifica et festiva").18 An illustration of the event (British Library, MS Cotton Julius E. iv, fol. 202) shows Joanne enstated with the contradictory symbols of majesty and subjection typical of late medieval queenly coronation: on the one hand enthroned in majesty; on the other, her hair loosely tressed, symbolically suggesting her supplementary role as the king's virginal bride.19 The point of difference from tradition which measures the esteem in which she was held is that, along with the traditional virga or rod in her hand, she extraordinarily holds an orb surmounted with a cross in her left. Before Philippa in 1330, English queens seem to have held only the virga. The fourteenth-century recension of the Liber regalis grants queens a scepter, but a lesser one, unequal to that of the king: a small one, gilt, surmounted by a dove ("paruum septrum deauratum in cuius summitate est columba deaurata" Legg, p. 100). The orb and cross are unusual, and regal indeed. Additionally, she is shown alone, rather than together with, but at a lesser level than, the king. No formality is spared because of her solitary status, with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Abbot of Westminster simultaneously placing the crown upon her head. Behind are various emblems of English and continental royalty: at her right the Plantagenet lions and fleurs-de-lys, and at her left possibly a more fanciful evocation of the arms of Brittany.

Measureable, against previous coronation practice, is a margin of exceptionality: the exceptions, in this case, underscoring the honor and sumptuousness of this coronation event. Intent here is hard to assign, since different sorts of symbolic capital would appear to accrue to it different participants. The intent may be Joanne's. Daughter of the king of Navarre, fianc‚e of the Dauphin of France, subtle manipulatrix of the quarrelsome John Duke of Brittany, regent of Brittany, architect of an attempted deal to secure her own fortune by selling the city of Nantes,20 reputed mistress of deception and disguise,21 survivor of witchcraft charges,22 politically influential in the reigns of three Lancastrian kings she was no pushover. Perhaps the sumptuous coronation was her idea, and demand. But despite the fact that she dominated and outmaneuvered her king in every material respect Henry IV also had something to gain from her elevation. Bourdieu would locate regal marriages among those extraordinary cases occurring outside normal kinship groupings, in which the woman is treated as a "political instrument, a sort of pledge or liquid asset, capable of earning symbolic profits" (p. 54). And, if Joanne was a liquid asset, convertible to capital, the capital in question was going to have to be symbolic, because that is all the capital Henry was ever going to get.

Joanne was a wealthy heiress, and contemporary commentators supposed that Henry had reaped a financial windfall. In fact, Henry received no dowry,

5. The Antidisciplinary Remainder

Earlier I suggested that certain antidisciplinary theories highlight things which traditional disciplinary configurations leave unsymbolized, undiscussed, unseen. What, then, has practice theory rendered visible, which might otherwise have remained invisible to disciplinarily-sanctioned procedures?

A preliminary answer might involve practice theory's capacity to identify, and appreciate the importance of, the exceptional, the aberrant, the symptomatic. Richard's lost slipper, Henry's miraculous oil, Joanne's orb: each is in some way legible as a deviation from an expectation or a norm. Yet practice theory is not alone in its capacity to respond to such exceptions. The rear-guard attack on contemporary theory has deplored the extent to which almost all currently admired theories return to the exceptional case. This is true of performance-theory (with its dexterous movement across, or defiance of, traditional categories). And of queer theory (with its reinstitution of the repressed or jettisoned remainder, its interest in whatever was omitted or thrust from visibility in the process of constructing stable binaries). And of post-Freudianism (with its interest in the symptom, and what the symptom has to tell us about the whole).

Practice theory's more specific contribution is to grasp the exceptional at its moment of origin or production. The exceptional is produced (along with its near-relation the unexceptional) by a process of structuration, in which abstract and atemporal structure reproduces itself as concrete and timebound action. Moving between abstract structure and its instantiation via the process of

To be sure, practice theory is not alone in attending to the shift from atemporal structure to temporal realization. A similar "reading" of culture occurs in performance-theory, as in the performative emphasis of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (although Butler places somewhat more emphasis on the creativity of improvisation),25 and is also at least implicit in much narrative theory. The moment of structure's realization via "structuration" can be approached and described in several interrelated languages. But this moment is still often elided within existing disciplinary configurations. Social science privileges structure over its instantiations. Narrative history, and the study of literary narrative, favor the nuances of temporal instantiation over the structure's essential contribution to their intelligibility. Practice theory's obligation runs both ways at once: to structure, at the very moment when it is newly produced as possible difference. Respecting pattern and respecting sequence, practice theory brings us excitingly close to that critical moment, the point of structural difference or the gap or lapse in sequence, signaling a change, a shift of intent, the end of something and the beginning of something else.