Competing Spectacles in the Venetian Feste delle Marie

Abstract

This article clarifies the ways in which a civic spectacle such as Venice’s lavish celebration of the Purification, the Feste delle Marie, functioned as an opportunity to articulate alternatives to the dominant understanding of the social order. Although intended to honor the Virgin and present Venice as united and prospering, the festival was repeatedly marred by disorderly behavior and ultimately abolished by the authorities. The article examines contemporary sources, including Pace del Friuli’s Descriptio festis gloriosissime Virginis Marie and Boccaccio’s Decameron, to highlight a growing disjuncture during the fourteenth century between popular and official conceptions of the festival. Disruptive behavior at the festival was neither blasphemous nor spontaneous, but a public performance that endorsed a vision of Venetian society based on a neighborhood rather than a municipal identity, on competition instead of unity.