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Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe
Nicholas Howe
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Description for Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe
Paperback. Identifies and recovers the excitement and dynamism that characterized ceremonial culture in pre-modern Europe. This work talks about: 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. Editor(s): Howe, Nicholas. Num Pages: 208 pages, Illustrations. BIC Classification: HBTB; JHBT. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 229 x 161 x 12. Weight in Grams: 259.
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 ... Read moretriumphal 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 and actual.
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Product Details
Publisher
University of Notre Dame Press
Place of Publication
Notre Dame IN, United States
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About Nicholas Howe
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).
Reviews for Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe
"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 “A ground-breaking collection of compelling and wonderfully ... Read morecohesive 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 “In this volume, Nicholas Howe has assembled a valuable collection of essays, each one of which contributes to our understanding of ceremonial culture. . . . Every one of these essays offers original perspectives on ceremonies in general-how they might have worked; what their purposes were; how they might effect change as well as preserve and create traditions . . . . Scholars of religious, social and art history, as well as of ceremony, in the medieval and early modern periods, will read this volume with great profit.” —English Historical Review “These four essays, introduced by the late Nicholas Howe, treat the court ceremony surrounding entries and the role of visual culture in shaping sacred and civic processions. The book is well illustrated, befitting a work that attempts to close the gap between the ephemeral, abstract world of ceremony and the actual, literal world of the event itself. All contributions explore what it meant to be a spectator to such processions, thereby expanding the previous scope of scholarly studies.” —Renaissance Quarterly “Early modern historians may wish to take note of two contributions to this collection (an additional two essays treat medieval Chartres and the medieval Rus). Gordon Kipling's 'The King's Advent Transformed: The Consecration of the City in the Sixteenth-Century Civic Triumph,' compares three royal entries in the Low Countries, from 1515, 1549, and 1582 and suggests, on the basis of a few sources, a transition from hierocratic to republican views of ruling authority. Edward Muir's 'The Eye of the Procession: Ritual Ways of Seeing in the Renaissance' describes processions as rituals 'irradiating' spiritual effects to spectators and involving spectators as coefficient performers of the event.” —Archive for Reformation History “This impressive collection of essays brilliantly illuminates aspects of ceremonial culture in early modern Europe. The book will serve a broad circle of scholars in the fields of medieval and early modern cultural studies, art history and iconography, drama and performance history, social history, and the history of religion.” —The Sixteenth Century Journal vol. XXXIX “This collection, along with Howe's introduction, marks an important contribution to studies in the interactions among Christian religion, socio-political history, and the performance arts in pre-modern Europe.” —Religion and the Arts “Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe brings together four lectures delivered at the Ohio State University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Each contributor reconstructs ways in which material practice in public ceremony implicated participants in communal systems of belief . . . this volume has much to contribute to folklore studies for its insights into performative and visual transmission of communal beliefs.” —Western Folklore “In many ways these essays work well together and demonstrate some of the new understandings of premodern use and reception of ceremony and ritual. . . this erudite and comparative collection of scholarship on ritual and ceremony in premodern Europe, although probably too advanced for undergraduate students, does offer interesting insights to scholars who work on this subject.” —Journal of World History Show Less
