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Historians of medieval kingship have been influenced by a teleology that sees the development of the secular modern state as inevitable. Therefore, the desacralisation of kingship is considered a key moment on the path to modern state formation. In Germany, the moment of desacralisation has traditionally been identified in 1077, when king Henry IV submitted to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa. Thereafter, the spell of Ottonian sacral kingship was punctured, and Henry's twelfth‐century successors were forced to look to Roman law and the support of the princes for legitimation. In this essay, we first examine the historiography of this traditional three‐phase paradigm, before introducing some recent scholarship that challenges the paradigm and criticises the universal explanatory power of the demise of sacral kingship as a catch‐all reason for change, at the expense of complex political, social, and economic factors.

8 As Andreas Büttner has pointed out in his useful summary of existing scholarship on inauguration, the structure of the Empire has acted to ensure the imperial rite has received more attention than the royal ritual.

Bringing together the work of musicologists and historians, this essay interrogates the contents of secular and monastic offices for Oswald of Northumbria in the northern province across the high and late Middle Ages, identifying the ways in which perceptions of St. Oswald and his relationship to communities in northern England and Scotland were articulated through the night office. It argues for the importance of considering a liturgical office in its entirety, demonstrating that they were not static, but could be adapted to differing needs. In the northern province the inclusion of geographical and topographical markers within these liturgies was central to the construction of a complex liturgical web connecting the historical Oswald to the communities where the offices were recited. Saints' offices collapse time and mediate between historical figures and the communities in which they are present through liturgical veneration. Particular places can also act to suggest connections across time and that essay argues that the invocation of local landmarks such as Lindisfarne, Bamburgh and Hadrian's Wall in matins readings for Oswald in the northern province enabled the communities of the north to navigate between their historical pasts and their liturgical presents.

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