The Rituals of the Cardinalate: Creation and Abdication

Chapter 3 The Rituals of the Cardinalate: Creation and Abdication

Jennifer Mara DeSilva

Examining the elevation and abdication ceremonies reveals how the rituals of the cardinalate created visions of institutional cohesion and collaboration between pope and cardinals. Maria Teresa Fattori, Paolo Prodi, Günther Was- silowsky, and others have highlighted the tensions that surrounded early modern cardinals’ participation in ecclesiastical governance and the popes’ inability to resolve the issue satisfactorily.1 In this fraught environment the im- ages and messages produced by ritual acts worked to counteract this tension.2 While the College of Cardinals grew substantially throughout the early modern period, the transformative experience of becoming a cardinal changed little from the late 15th century. Joaquim Nabuco identified the late 15th-century ceremonialists Agostino Patrizi Piccolomini and Johann Burchard as pivotal initiators to the changes that characterized the early modern papal liturgy as “more and more solemn and officially ceremonious.”3 As Marc Dykmans and Bernhard Schimmelpfennig have shown, the ceremonial texts describing and guiding the papal liturgy and ceremonies before this point are a mixed collection that focus primarily on the pope and pay little sustained attention to cardinals.4 This irregular and myopic character is espe- cially apparent when seeking rubrics that describe the cardinal’s elevation,

1 Maria Teresa Fattori, Clemente viii e il Sacro Collegio 1592–1605: Meccanismi istituzionali ed accentramento di governo (Stuttgart: 2004), 10, 263–314; Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls. The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins (Cam- bridge, Eng.: 1987), 80–91; Günther Wassilowsky, Die Konklavereform Gregors xv. (1621/22) (Stuttgart: 2010). 2 Maria Antonietta Visceglia, La città rituale: Roma e le sue cerimonie in età moderna (Rome: 2002); Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago: 2000), 163. See also Günther Wassilowsky and Hubert Wolf (eds.), Werte und Symbole im früh- neuzeitlichen Rom (Münster: 2005). 3 Filippo Tamburini and Joaquim Nabuco, Le cérémonial apostolique avant Innocent viii (Rome: 1966), 22. 4 Marc Dykmans, Le cérémonial papal de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, 4 vols. (Brussels: 1977–1985); Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, Die Zeremonienbücher der römischen Kurie im Mit- telalter (Tübingen: 1973).

The Rituals of the Cardinalate: Creation and Abdication 41

abdication, or deprivation through the Middle Ages.5 Whereas Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi’s ceremonial (ca.1300–40) offers an extensive discussion of the elevation ceremony, mirroring much of what is found in Patrizi Piccolomini’s Caeremoniale Romanum (1488), texts written between these dates often omit this material leading to uncertainty regarding the development of ritual forms and practices.6 However, from the end of the 15th century, extant ceremonialist diaries reveal the fundamental role in papal court ritual occupied by the Col- lege of Cardinals, and how certain ceremonies positioned cardinals in relation to other curialists and courtiers.7 To understand the ritual structure underpin- ning the cardinalate one must consider the elevation ceremonies as a series of gestures that created clientelismo bonds between the pope and new cardinals, projected institutional cohesion between new and old cardinals, and asserted the pope’s authority overall. In a parallel fashion, the abdication ceremony drew on themes that originated at the elevation ceremony. Gestures of obedience and consensus formed the basis of both elevation and abdication ceremonies, which strengthened both individual and institutional ties.8 In a period of criticism and conflict, these ceremonies moved men into and out of the College of Cardinals while also projecting messages about loyalty to the pope and collegiate cohesion to the public and members of the

5 A mid-15th-century ceremonial, likely authored by the ceremonialist Petrus Burgensis, pres- ents only a brief ordination ritual for new cardinal-deacons constituted as a dialogue spoken by the pope and the prior of the cardinal-deacons. This elevation ceremony could take place as part of a single mass; Tamburini and Nabuco, Le cérémonial apostolique avant Innocent viii, 118–20. Likewise, the late 14th-century text by Pierre Amiel, which offers a papal ceremonial, a twelve-month liturgical calendar, and diary-like additions, includes no rubric for the cardinal’s elevation, abdication, or deprivation; Dykmans, Le cérémonial papal de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, vol. 4: Le cérémonial de Pierre Amiel (Brussels: 1985). 6 Stefaneschi describes a multi-day event that begins with the pope broaching the College of Cardinals’ expansion in a consistory session. This description includes the presentation of new cardinals and announcement of their titles, the obeisance to the pope and senior cardinals, the escort of the new cardinals home, the closing and opening of their mouths, a thanksgiving visit to the cathedral, and the receipt of hats and rings. Dykmans, Le cérémonial papal de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, vol. 2: De Rome en Avignon ou Le cérémonial de Jacques Stefaneschi (Brussels: 1981), 475–89. 7 Unfortunately, and in contrast to Burchard’s diary, there is no complete copy of Grassi’s diary in print; Paride Grassi, Le Due Spedizioni Militari di Giulio ii, ed. Luigi Frati (Bologna: 1886); Il Diario di Leone X di Paride de Grassi Maestro delle Cerimonie Pontificie, eds. Pio Delicati and Mariano Armellini (Rome: 1884); Johann Burchard, Johannis Burckardi Liber notarum ab anno mcccclxxxiii usque ad annum mdvi, ed. Enrico Celani, 3 vols. (Città di Castello: 1907–1914). 8 One of the best-known and longest-used gestures of obedience and consensus is the kiss of peace (osculum pacis); Kiril Petkov, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Leiden: 2003).