| Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe Contributor(s): Howe, Nicholas (Editor) |
|
 |
ISBN: 0268030758 ISBN-13: 9780268030759 Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press OUR PRICE: $24.75 Product Type: Paperback Published: January 2007 Annotation: By enabling the spiritual or ineffable to register as visible and palpable, ceremonies perform the essential cultural work of ensuring continuity of belief and practice across generations. In the process, each ceremony becomes a visual drama with highly scripted acts, movements, and rhythms. Unlike anthropologists in the field, scholars of the medieval and early modern world cannot witness ceremonies--the processions, dramas, rituals, and liturgies--and their choreography, or how they engaged with time and space. Denied the possibility of personal observation, how are historians to understand ceremonies such as a Catholic liturgical procession moving through a medieval town or the triumphal entry of a Renaissance ruler into a subjected city? Fortunately, considerable documentary, visual, and material evidence survives from Europe to help scholars frame necessary questions about pre-modern ceremonies. The essayists in this volume identify and recover the excitement and dynamism that characterized ceremonial culture in pre-modern Europe. Each turns to key issues: the relation between public and private space, the development of fully-realized dramas and rituals from earlier forms, and the semiotic code that ceremonies manifested to their audiences. Their subjects include the Adventus procession at Chartres; Epiphany and Palm Sunday rituals in medieval Moscow; the staged entry of the future Emperor Charles V into Bruges in 1515; and ceremonies in Italian Renaissance cities interpreted through the lens of Renaissance optical theory. What emerges from each essay is a deeper understanding that any ceremony is, finally, an attempt to close the divide between abstract and literal, ideal andactual. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Europe - Medieval - Social Science | Customs & Traditions - History | Europe - Renaissance |
| Dewey: 390.094 |
| LCCN: 2006032465 |
| Physical Information: 0.48" H x 6.32" W x 9" (0.57 lbs) 168 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In this volume, Nicholas Howe has brought together original and important essays focusing on medieval and early modern processions in Western Europe. The contributors share numerous insights that will interest scholars in anthropology, history of religion, performance history, social history, medieval and Early Modern studies, and art history.--Diane Wolfthal, Arizona State University The perceptively analyzed case studies in this volume constitute a reader's guide on how to interpret ritual and other ephemeral forms of celebration, as well their concrete manifestation in the visual arts.--Patricia Fortini Brown, Princeton University A ground-breaking collection of compelling and wonderfully cohesive essays, which sets the standard for future study of ceremonial culture. Nicholas Howe and his collaborators are to be congratulated for having revealed so many of the ways in which this operated as a force for both continuity and change in pre-modern Europe.--Alastair Minnis, Yale University The essayists in this volume identify and recover the excitement and dynamism that characterized ceremonial culture in pre-modern Europe. Each turns to key issues: the relation between public and private space, the development of fully-realized dramas and rituals from earlier forms, and the semiotic code that ceremonies manifested to their audiences. Their subjects include the Adventus procession at Chartres; Epiphany and Palm Sunday rituals in medieval Moscow; the staged entry of the future Emperor Charles V into Bruges in 1515; and ceremonies in Italian Renaissance cities interpreted through the lens of Renaissance optical theory. What emerges from each essay is a deeper understanding that any ceremony is, finally, an attempt to close the divide between abstract and literal, ideal and actual. |
Contributor Bio(s): Howe, Nicholas: - Nicholas Howe (1953-2006) was professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author and editor of several books, including Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (Notre Dame Press, 2001). |