Food, drink and ritualised communication in the household of Eleanor de Montfort, February to August 1265

This article investigates the use of feasts and gifts of food in the household of Eleanor de Montfort between February and August 1265. In his influential The dangers of ritual, Philippe Buc argued, through a study of early medieval chronicles, that rituals in medieval Europe were regularly targets for disruption and aggressive manipulation either in practice or in the texts reporting the rituals. This article tests Buc’s thesis against administrative records from thirteenth-century England. The evidence from Eleanor’s household accounts is illuminated through a study of contemporary literary sources and didactic texts. It concludes that the administrative records indicate that rituals in practice were less habitually the subject of manipulation and conflict than the literary evidence indicates.