medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 19/2023
Oaths in Premodern Japan and Premodern Europe. Guest Editors: Philippe Buc and Thomas D. Conlan
No.:
19
Year of the volume:
2023
In this volume, guest editors Philippe Buc and Thomas D. Conlan use oaths as the pivotal point for their comparative thematic section. Focusing on the differences and similarities between Japanese and European oath-taking and oath-breaking practices during the medieval period, on terminology and on chronology, Philippe Buc provides an introduction that contextualises the studies in this collection. For Japan, Yoshikawa S. and T.D. Conlan give insights into the development of the written oath (kishōmon) from its predecessors and origins in the third to sixth centuries to the sixteenth century, M. Gilbert and Horikawa Y. provide case studies of kishōmon in the heyday of its use. For Western Europe, S. Esders outlines the development of oaths from Late Antiquity to the tenth century under Christian doctrinal influence. In three case studies, H. Reimitz, H. Débax and O. Richard illustrate the use of oaths in the Early, High and Late Middle Ages.
In our individual articles section, E. Worrall, R. Kramer and T. Grant offer a new edition and commented translation of an Icelandic fragment of the Nikuláss saga erkibiskups, the Saga of Bishop Nicholas.
“medieval worlds” provides a forum for comparative, interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Its aim is to overcome disciplinary boundaries, regional limits and national research traditions in Medieval Studies, to open up new spaces for discussion, and to help developing global perspectives. We focus on the period from c. 400 to 1500 CE but do not stick to rigid periodization. medieval worlds is open to submissions of broadly comparative studies and matters of global interest, whether in single articles, companion papers, smaller clusters, or special issues on a subject of global/comparative history. We particularly invite studies of wide-ranging connectivity or comparison between different world regions. Apart from research articles, medieval worlds publishes ongoing debates and project and conference reports on comparative medieval research.
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Page 2 - 2 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023s2
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Oaths in Premodern Japan and Premodern Europe. An Introduction
This introduction to this collection of articles on oaths in premodern Japan and premodern Latin Europe aims merely to survey the data presented in the articles, and some comparativist findings. It considers terminology, chronology, avoidance of oath-taking, identity of oath-takers, diversity in formulas and practices of swearing, depending on hierarchy and situations, sanctions for perjury, and the efficiency (or not) of oaths.
Keywords: Oaths, Japan, Europe, perjury, ordeals, symbolic communication
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Before Written Oaths (kishōmon): Oaths (sensei) in Ancient Japan
In medieval and early modern Japan, a style of written oath, called kishōmon, came into existence. Recent archaeological excavations have made it possible to prove that the kishōmon appeared in the twelfth century at the latest. This article recounts the process through which these sources originated and developed into the kishōmon format. Divinatory curses, called ukei, existed in Ancient Japan (already in the third to sixth century CE), and they provided the basis for requesting divine judgment or swearing oaths. During the seventh through eleventh centuries, the Japanese state consolidated its authority and a new type of political oath came into being. Initially, these oaths resembled those employed in China, although oaths in this format may also have been used in Japan for diplomacy. Next, oaths influenced by Buddhist prayers came to the fore whereby the oath-taker cursed himself if his statements were untrue. Finally, Buddhist oaths became prominent, in which other persons than the oath-taker were cursed as well. After the ninth century, the Chinese-style political culture withered within Japan, and only Buddhist oaths remained. Although oaths cursing others would remain, the self-curse would become the foundation for standard contracts in later times. As medieval society emerged in Japan, and predicated upon these customs and beliefs, the kishōmon came into being.
Keywords: Kishōmon (written oaths), ukei (divinatory curses), shinpan (divine judgments), Chinese style oaths, Buddhist oaths, standard contracts
Yoshikawa Shinji
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The Gods Are Watching: Talismans, Oaths, and Political Allegiance in Medieval Japan
This contribution explores oaths and talismans in medieval Japan. After recounting the early use of talismans and the practice of pledging to the gods, it explains how oaths underpinned laws and alliances, even though they were only binding for a short period of time. Analysis of oaths reveals much about changing social norms and how people perceived their interactions with the gods and buddhas.
Keywords: Oaths, talismans, alliances, ordeals, adjudication, social hierarchies
Page 40 - 64 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023s40
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Writing Oaths: Embodied Evidence in Fifteenth-Century Japan
This article examines the role of written oaths in preventing and resolving disputes in central Japan during the fifteenth century. It examines the circumstances in which probatory oaths were used and the characteristics that made them effective. Probatory written oaths, which established facts of past and present rather than making promises for the future, both depended upon and were constitutive of community cohesion. They were public performances that could accommodate a broad array of distinctions in social status, from imperial prince to temple servant. Written oaths were united by one shared danger – increased vulnerability to the sanction of deities. Conversely, different status groups had access to different methods, such as the prince writing on a talisman or the servant pulling a stone from boiling water, to lend weight to their oaths, which both humans and gods could then use equivalently. The disparities in effort helped to compensate for status differentials among disputants and witnesses. After establishing the functioning of probatory written oaths in Japan – a function treated more sparsely than promissory oaths in the existing literature – this article analyzes the use of such oaths in resolving one type of dispute – accusations of adultery. Adultery was treated with increased severity as the century progressed. This example demonstrates how written oaths were used to investigate, proclaim innocence, and navigate status in public. Written oaths created factual consensus in disputes but left room to negotiate outcomes. Fifteenth-century Japan produced a rich array of records that reveal the negotiations that took place behind official action, particularly diary-chronicles – individuals’ daily records (diary) that were intended to guide posterity in official actions (chronicles) – as well as meeting notes from the governing council of a major temple. Such records make it possible to capture some of the experience of using written oaths.
Keywords: Oaths, ordeals, kishōmon, medieval Japan, Muromachi era, ritual and writing, construction of community, juridical proof
Megan Gilbert
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Oaths and Divine Punishments in Warring States Japan from the Princeton University Collection
This article introduces five oaths (kishōmon) from sixteenth-century Japan, currently held by the East Asian Library, Princeton University, United States. Each of these documents can be identified as one half of an oath passed down to the Saji family, a local warrior (samurai) family based in Kōga district, Ōmi province, central Japan (the other half was separated). Local warriors of Kōga are well known for their multi-layered networks and organizations called collectives (sō), which served as mediators in local disputes. Combining these Princeton oaths (we shall keep to this English term for the Japanese kishōmon) with other documents that survived in the Saji’s hereditary archive, this article discusses their function. We have here a case study of Kōga that reconstructs local disputes and mediation by local warriors and sheds light on their collective organizations. This article also explores how medieval people envisioned divine punishments for breaking promises to deities. The diary of Yoshida Kanemi, a Shintō priest in Kyoto, contains valuable information: people of Kōga and its surrounding areas often visited Kanemi and asked him for prayers to cancel the oaths they had written. Kanemi’s diary shows that the people of Kōga on the one hand did indeed fear divine punishments but, on the other, tried to avoid them by drawing on new practices offered by Yoshida Shintō. After the destruction of the Kōga gunchū sō, a district-wide collective of local warriors of Kōga, in 1585, the Saji and other local warriors were banished from Kōga. They later returned to their homeland but lost their warrior privileges in the region. In this process, the Saji lost some of their inherited documents, including those currently held by Princeton University. Thus, the Princeton oaths not only tell us how medieval oaths functioned in Warring States Japan but also describe the hardship one local warrior family experienced in the socio-political transition from the medieval to the early modern (Tokugawa) period.
Keywords: medieval Japan, Warring States period, oath, kishōmon, Kōga district collective (Kōga gunchū sō), Yoshida Shintō
Yasufumi Horikawa
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Loyalty Oaths and the Transformation of Political Legitimacy in the Medieval West
Starting from more general considerations on the nature and functioning of promissory oaths, this article seeks to shed light on the Christian contribution to the legitimate use of oaths since the Late Antique period. Taking oaths – contrary to Christ’s prohibition of swearing as formulated in the Sermon on the Mount – led to a qualification of oaths and to ecclesiastical punishment of perjury, while early medieval oath formulas show a remarkable legal diversification of the notion of fidelity. General oaths of fidelity enabled post-Roman kings to establish a special kind of legitimacy for their rule that addressed their subjects of Roman and barbarian origin alike. Focusing on individual commitment, enhancing religiously motivated devotion to a ruler, and linking loyalty to essential concepts of the Christian religion, the widespread use of these oaths introduced a change in political discourse that eventually led to the Carolingians addressing their subjects as the fideles Dei et regis, the »faithful of God and the king.«
Keywords: oath, perjury, Christianity, fidelity, loyalty, Carolingian empire, military
Stefan Esders
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The Promise of History: Oaths in Frankish Historiography
The article explores narratives of the oath in the Histories of the post-Roman Frankish kingdom – the most enduring successor state of the Western Roman Empire – and how they reflect the increasing salience of the oath of fidelity for the constitution of legitimate political authority in that kingdom. It studies the ongoing work on the interpretation and function of the oath of fidelity from the Frankish kingdoms under the Merovingian dynasty (ca. 480-751 CE) to the early Carolingian rulers – from the establishment of the general oath of fidelity as the legitimizing basis of post-Roman rule to its increasing sacralization in the Carolingian period establishing a dualism of fidelity to God and the ruler, as is well documented in the formula fideles Dei et regis. As Paolo Prodi observed some time ago in his study on the Sacrament of Power (Il sacramento del potere), it was in the Carolingian period that the Christian church managed to establish its interpretative prerogative to define how oaths could be linked to claims to power. The study of histories written in the early medieval Frankish kingdom indicates that this was not a steady process of increasing ecclesiastical control over the interpretation of the oath, but should be seen as a more dynamic process in response to the intensified instrumentalization of the dualistic view of the oath by early Carolingian politics.
Keywords: Oath of fidelity, transformation of the Roman world (West), Frankish kingdoms, Merovingian period, Carolingian period, Gregory of Tours, Chronicle of Fredegar, Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar/Historia vel Gesta Francorum (Childebrand, Nibelung), Annales regni Francorum
Page 141 - 162 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023s141
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Oaths as an Instrument of Power in Southern France, 11th-12th Centuries
In the Languedoc of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, given the absence of a state or an uncontested sovereign authority in this southern part of the kingdom of France, oaths were instruments of power. They constituted the backbone of this society, with very specific modalities for taking them and for the contents of the commitments. In the last analysis, this sacramental act, very flexible in the formulation of its provisions, and based on faith, was far superior to homage in securing power relations. These southern oaths were widely practiced at all levels of aristocratic society, and even had an effect of standardization – creating a formal homology between great lords and petty castle lords (same words, same conditions). However, the oath was probably never free from the hint that it implied service. From the end of the twelfth century, some greater lords (e.g., the King of Aragon and the Count of Foix) asked one of their relatives to take the oath in their place, or promised to pledge their causimentum or their credentia in lieu of an oath. The texts preserved show the casuistry of situations when sworn commitments were not kept, but more often than not it was the actual balance of power that settled the conflicts.
Keywords: Oaths, aristocracy, Southern France, castles, feudalism, fiefs and vassals
Hélène Débax
Page 163 - 194 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023s163
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Oaths and Socio-political Hierarchies in the Urban »Sworn Society«: South-west Germany in the Late Middle Ages
Since the nineteenth century, historians have fundamentally considered the medieval town as a conjuratio, a sworn association of free and equal burghers. The oath does indeed appear to have been a crucial instrument capable of inspiring confidence in social relationships and of binding people to the city government. However, the analysis of oath practices actually highlights more than the cohesion of the political community: it reveals internal divisions and hierarchies. The first part of this article examines which oaths foreigners, burghers, clerics, noblemen, women or Jews had, or were allowed, to swear. The second part deals with the differences between the oath rituals in which these various socio-political groupings took part, in terms of gestures, wording or frequency. Finally, the article suggests the factors that made for the efficiency of the oath as a technique of government: its simplicity and adapt-ability to the progress of literacy.
Keywords: oath, urban society, citizenship, Holy Roman Empire
Olivier Richard
Page 195 - 215 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023s195
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Nicholas in the North: A Fragment of Nikolaus Saga Erkibyskups in Oslo, Nra 69 – Text, Translation and Commentary
In this article, we present a new edition, normalization and translation of a fragment of an otherwise unknown Nikuláss saga erkibiskups (Saga of Bishop Nicholas) transmitted in the manuscript Norrøne Membranfragmenter NRA 69. Written in Iceland in the early fourteenth century, this fragment appears to present a »missing link« between various Nicholas narratives that circulated in the medieval West, and the idiosyncratic spin given to those stories in the North Atlantic world. Moreover, the story presented in this particular fragment, which details the interaction between a Jewish moneylender and a local trader, provides several invaluable clues about the dynamics of trade and money as well as the interaction between Self and Other in the region.
Keywords: Hagiography, Saint Nicholas, saints’ cults, Old Norse, Scandinavia, Jews and Christians, Othering, Trade
Elliot Worrall - Rutger Kramer - Thomas Grant
Page 216 - 240 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023s216
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Edition:
978-3-7001-9563-4, eJournal, PDF, limited accessibility , 01.12.2023
Pages:
240 Pages
Language:
English
DOI (Link to Online Edition):