Aux limites de l’hérésie et de la magie. L’ordalie du pain et du fromage

The present article focuses on a specific medieval ordeal - namely, the bread and cheese ordeal - which has attracted little attention from scholars, especially regarding its possible origins. In the first section of this contribution we analyse the main characteristics of the iudicium panis et casei (or iudicium offae) described in the Franco-German Ordines iudiciorum Dei (9th-12th cent.). We then contextualize this practice historically by following two different but complementary routes. On the one hand, the analysis of fundamental Christian and heretical precedents dating from early Christian times casts light on beliefs and alternative Eucharistic liturgies, which were similarly based on the elements of bread and cheese. On the other, a comparative approach is applied that seeks to demonstrate the existence of pre-Christian roots underlying the bread and cheese ordeal: parallels are drawn between certain characteristics of the iudicium offae and magic beliefs from Graeco-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian spells from as early as the second century BC, in order to show that the medieval bread and cheese ordeal might well have been a Christianized version of an ancient, pre-Christian spell.