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Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History)

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Muir, an expert on civic ritual in Venice in the Renaissance, has brought his knowledge of ritual in early modern Europe to this textbook in succient and compacted prose. Muir shows how in the early modern period time, the body, religion all underwent conceptual transformations. He draws on antropological studies, as well as other sociological methodologies in dealing with rites of passage, carnivalesque activity, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and with the relation of Jews to the larger christian world. As he is an expert on Venice, his writing on the rituals of the northern Italian cities tends to be more animated and eruidte and the sections of northern European cities. The end of each chapter has a bibliography with books highly recommended for further reading starred. It is a textbook, and best suited for undergraduates or advanced level high-school seniors. The independent reader may want to stick with a less packaged history.

Muir's "Ritual in Early Modern Europe" approaches the idea of ritual, its impact on society and its pervasiveness. All rituals contain an element of change and rituals occur every day in our lives and all contain the consistence of the prelimenal the limenal and the postlimenal steps to the change. And while the author divides the rituals to those of the lower and upper body they all follow the same basic structure. The books provides very interesting accounts of Charaviri which is "rough music" - but really a ritualized form of primitive justice where the perpetrator of an act is embarrassed into proper behavior. Further the book describes the ritual calendar and the assault the reformation attempted on it. Most of these rituals are religious fast and feast days. Obviously ritual won the battle though often the names and figures are changed but the underlying ritual remains constant. Another amazing account of ritual described in this book is that of the Sacre where the king of France is both coronated and deified. This is really interesting stuff and though bordering the high academic is a very enjoyable read that is engaging and well written enough to not be dull in the least bit.

The book is very useful to the historian but would be interesting even if history is not your main source for reading enjoyment. This book should be definitely read with some background on Early Modern Europe (even a 101 course on European History might be sufficient) I would suggest that this is a book to be read before attempting any in depth study of the reformation the middle ages or even Rome. The concepts developed here will be of great benefit to anyone trying to understand the mindset often the specific nature of rituals in these times and really lends a hand to the developing professional historian who wishes to connect ideas and further develop deeper historical inquiries. This book is packed with well documented data for a book that covers such a long period. Further this book contains a great bibliography and is sure to inspire further inquiry into the nature of ritual. I highly recommend this to all students of history but further believe that anyone with an ounce of curiosity will enjoy this book.

Ted Murena