Late Medieval and early modern ritual Studies in Italian Urban Culture

Europa Sacra(ES 7) Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Studies in Italian Urban Culture S. Cohn, M. Fantoni, F. Franceschi, F. Ricciardelli (eds.) VIII+364 p., 14 b/w ill., 4 b/w tables, 156 x 234 mm, 2013 ISBN: 978-2-503-54190-7 Languages: English Hardback The publication is available. Retail price: EUR 158,00 Combining aspects of recent scholarship in history and anthropology, this book explores how 'Survivals and Renewals' can be used as tools for understanding the society of Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy. This collection of fifteen studies brings together scholars of late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Italy to reflect on the multifaceted world of ritual. The scope is expansive, covering four centuries, and the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. Because of older presumptions about the modernity of the Renaissance and hence its supposed aversion to the irrational, scholarship on ritual life in Italian city-states of the Renaissance has lagged behind the historiography on symbols and rituals in monarchies north of the Alps. Only by the 1990s had a wide range of scholars across disciplines become interested in these subjects and approaches for the late medieval and early modern Italian city-state; yet no synthesis or comparative work on rituals and symbols has peered across the regional enclaves of Italy. Through original research in libraries and archives across the Italian peninsula, these essays analyze the richness and importance of ritual at the heart of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation states, the importance of oaths, ritual space, the power of images, processions, curses, guild ceremonies, saints, and more. The wide geographic and disciplinary range of these essays provides a new platform for viewing the significance of ritual and symbolic power in Renaissance and early modern Italy. Table of Contents Introduction: Symbols and Rituals - Samuel Cohn Jr Symbols and Rituals: Definition of a Field of Study - Marcello Fantoni Part I. Consensus and Social Identity Between Rules and Ritual: The Election of the Signoria in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries - Ilaria Taddei The Rituals of the Guilds: Examples from Tuscan Cities (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries) - Franco Franceschi The Rhetoric of Power in Renaissance Florence - Fabrizio Ricciardelli Peace and Revolt: Oath-Taking Rituals in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy - Carlo Taviani Part II. Family and Gender Family Rituals in Northern Italy (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries) - Guido Alfani The First Female Nudes of the Quattrocento - Christiane Klapisch -Zuber Part III. Death and Violence Honour and Insult: Military Rituals in Late Medieval Tuscany - William Caferro Philip II's Royal Exequies in Two Italian Cities: His Deeds and Virtues as Seen in Florence and Naples - John A. Marino Rituals of Youthful Violence in Late Medieval Italian Urban Societies - Andrea Zorzi Part IV. Civic and Power Rituals Papal Sovereignty and Civic Rituals in the Early Modern Age - Maria Antonietta Visceglia Ritual Form and Urban Space in Early Modern Rome - Genevieve Warwick Symbol of Venice: The Doge in Ritual - Andrew Hopkins The Pope as Conqueror: Rites of Possession, Episodes, and Unexpected Events in 1598 Ferrara - Giovanni Ricci Interest Classification: Medieval & Renaissance History (c.400-1500) Medieval European history (400-1500) : main subdisciplines Cultural & intellectual history Medieval European history (400-1500) : local & regional history Italian Peninsula Size: 156 x 234 Mm.