Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ashe, Laura

Titel

'A Prayer and a Warcry' The Creation of a Secular Religion in the "Song of Roland"

Ist Teil von

• Cambridge quarterly, 1999-01, Vol.28 (4), p.349-367

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1999

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A reading of Song of Roland as an expression of the unity of secular power and divine inspiration, an extremely subversive challenge to the Catholic Church, then engaged in its greatest act of papal propaganda and secular power, the First Crusade. The Frankish epic does not depict the Church as the instrument of God on earth; instead, Charlemagne is guided by an interventionist and heavily unmediated God. Roland creates, challenges, and reaffirms a coherent system of feudal relationships between men, and between God and man, which forms the supporting social structure of a secular and divine empire. In every respect this refuses to admit the Church: it reveres Charlemagne as the sacred king, who receives his authority from heaven, appropriating the papal role; it allows each warrior to trace his feudal loyalty directly to God, denying the purpose of the mediator; and it is informed by the Carolingian principle of the unity of all aspects of the state, rejecting a separate church. As a sung, rhythmical, aural experience it offers itself as a secular liturgy, ritualistic and formulaic in its basic materials, vivid and cathartic in its execution. It mounts its own, distinctive, form of secularised Christianity. (Quotes from original text)