Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir ed. by Mark Jurdjevic and Rolf Strom-Olsen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir ed. by Mark Jurdjevic and Rolf Strom-Olsen Gregory Murry Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir. Edited by Mark Jurdjevic and Rolf Strom-Olsen. (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2016. Pp. 440. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-7727-2185-3.) Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, a compilation of essays in honor of Edward Muir, takes as its theme a subject to which Muir has contributed as much as any living historian: the relation of ritual to the political and cultural life of early modern Europe. Contributors include both distinguished scholars of early modern Europe and several young scholars (largely former graduate students of Muir at Northwestern University). The high quality of the essays testify to the centrality that ritual has come to occupy as a hermeneutic for understanding culture and politics in the early modern period and as a vindication of the anthropological turn in history, to which Muir's work has been fundamental. The volume begins with an editorial introduction to the work of Edward Muir, then turns to a number of essays inspired by Muir's interests and methodologies. The range of categories to which the framework of ritual is applied is impressive. We have here some familiar suspects: studies of the ritual aspects of early modern processions, religious ceremonies, coronations, and pastoral visitations. But the volume also includes a number of essays that analyze topics whose ritualistic aspects have been less well-appreciated: the production of book manuscripts, the procedures associated with granting pardons for sex crimes, the historiographies of the Burgundian ducal court, and the "deep play" of the Renaissance gaming table. One major theme that emerges from this collection of essays is the polyvalent nature of most early modern rituals. The success of any given ritual often seems to have depended on a certain slipperiness in its meaning: thus, as both Patricia Fortini Brown and Monique O'Connell point out, political rituals might simultaneously function to project the dominant state's power and to affirm the local traditions and concerns of subject communities. Similarly, Celeste MacNamara's study of rural confraternities in the Veneto shows that the Counter-Reformation flourishing of rural devotion played out largely in the spaces of "mutually beneficial compromises" between Church and community. Or, as Susan Karant-Nunn demonstrates, the veiled faces at a Saxon elector's funeral might simultaneously represent an expression of real grief, a calculated conformity to the societal expectation to cry, or even some hybrid emotion generated from the ritualized cultivation of grief in the funeral procession. Thus, the volume as a whole seems to affirm that rituals were most successful when the same ritual could be molded in different ways to meet the needs and expectations of diverse audiences. This work will likely be of much more use to historians of early modern Italy than to others, since the preponderance of essays are on Italian topics. Nevertheless, on the whole, this impressive work contains much excellent scholarship by many leading historians, and though a few essays in the volume do stray from the topic [End Page 375] of ritual, even in these cases, the meeting of ideas with Muir's work remains a welcome constant. Gregory Murry Mount Saint Mary's University Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press