Ernulphus’s excommunication

Ernulphus’s excommunication is a formal curse attributed to Ernulphus, bishop of Rochester, which Walter Shandy brings out when Dr. Slop is angry over an accident involving his thumb. The document’s sweeping religious authority and exhaustive penalties make a domestic grievance sound momentous; read aloud, however, it becomes comic theatre. Slop supplies the solemn words, Toby answers them with a tune, and the difference between the text’s severity and Toby’s reluctance to curse gives the episode its moral force.

Origin and Use

Walter introduces the document while discussing how anger should be expressed. He argues that small curses are inadequate to serious occasions and describes a gentleman who prepared forms of swearing for different degrees of provocation, keeping them within reach on the chimney-piece. Walter has one such form ready: a copy of an excommunication, which he says he obtained from the Rochester church register. He offers it to Slop on the condition that Slop read it aloud, turning the doctor’s irritation into an opportunity for performance.

The account also frames the document as an object of disputed authenticity. A prefatory note says that because the genuineness of a Sorbonne consultation on baptism had been doubted and denied, the original excommunication was thought worth printing; Walter’s account credits the Rochester chapter clerk with supplying the copy. That editorial framing gives the text the appearance of documentary authority, even as the scene around it makes its use unmistakably theatrical.

The Curse’s Reach

The Latin heading identifies the text as an excommunication from the church of Rochester, attributed to Ernulphus. Its opening invokes God, the persons of the Trinity, Mary, the saints, and the ranks of heavenly powers. It then declares the unnamed offender excommunicated and anathematized, separated from the church, and threatened with punishment unless repentance and satisfaction follow. The English reading makes the target more specific: Slop’s words repeatedly redirect the curse toward Obadiah, blamed for tying the knots at issue, while allowing that another person involved might also be meant.

The curse expands from formal exclusion to an all-encompassing catalogue. It follows its target across places, from house and stable to garden, field, road, wood, water, and church, and across ordinary conditions and activities. It then proceeds through the body from head to foot, ending in the declaration that there should be no soundness in the offender. Its scale is the joke’s engine: the document leaves no corner of life untouched, although the occasion that prompts its recitation is a comparatively small domestic mishap.

Reading as Performance

Slop initially stops after the opening invocation, suggesting that he might read the rest silently. Walter objects that this would violate their agreement and deprive him of the pleasure of hearing the latter part. When Toby offers to take over the reading, Slop chooses to continue, holding the paper before his face to conceal his displeasure. Toby whistles Lillabullero throughout, at first loudly and then less so, laying a sustained musical counterpoint beneath the escalating catalogue.

The listeners make the text’s excess audible without diminishing its formal gravity. Toby compares the curses heard in Flanders with the printed maledictions, yet says he could not bring himself to curse his dog in such a fashion. Walter interjects at particular points, including the curse on the head, and reacts with a gesture when the reading reaches further bodily particulars. The repeated interruptions, the tune, and Slop’s effort to keep reading convert a document designed to pronounce solemn exclusion into an uneasy comic scene.

Mercy Against the Formula

The episode ends by exposing the gap between the curse’s exhaustive language and Toby’s instinctive restraint. Toby says that his heart would not allow him to curse even the devil with such bitterness. Slop replies that the devil is already the father of curses and is eternally cursed; Toby answers that he is not the father of them, then says he is sorry for the devil’s condition. His response does not dispute the document’s words on their own terms. Instead, it turns attention from the machinery of condemnation to the compassion that the machinery cannot contain.

Ernulphus’s excommunication thus works both as a text within the fiction and as a test of its readers. Its accumulation of authorities, locations, circumstances, and bodily parts performs the logic of total denunciation; the surrounding voices reveal how that logic sounds when applied to a minor quarrel. Toby’s sympathy is the scene’s decisive contrast: while Slop can recite the curse and Walter can relish its composition, Toby remains unwilling to make cruelty a source of satisfaction.