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

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Reviewed by: Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir ed. by Mark Jurdjevic, Rolf Strøm–Olsen Frances Muecke Jurdjevic, Mark, and Rolf Strøm–Olsen, eds, Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir (Essays and Studies, 39), Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2016; paperback; pp. xi, 440; 11 b/w illustrations, 17 colour plates; R.R.P. $49.95; ISBN 9780772721853. Contributions to this volume honouring Edward Muir, a key initiator of 'ritual studies', were gathered from a 2014 conference called 'Methodological and Critical Innovation since the Ritual Turn'. The original title may give a better idea of the volume's thrust than the eventual one. Not all of the chapters conform to it, but, taken together, they give a good representation of the scope and aims of the discipline of ritual studies as practised by those working on early modern Europe and beyond. The editors chronicle the development of Muir's ideas, and a bibliography of his publications is provided. The authors of the opening series of five essays take their cue from Muir's Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981) and Richard Trexler's Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Academic Press, 1980). They examine public ceremonies, ritual entries, religious processions, and other 'performative' behaviours in specific historical/political contexts: Venice's Mediterranean empire (Patricia Fortini Brown), Venice's empire on the mainland (Monique O'Connell), Florence's exercise of dominance over subject communities (Michael Paul Martoccio), the Certame coronario held in Florence on 22 October 1441 (Brian Jeffrey Maxson), and new governmental policies for regulating sexual behaviour in early fifteenth-century Florence (John N. Najemy). The rest of the collection is more diverse, though the spotlight remains on Italy for a while. Guido Ruggiero and Albert Russell Ascoli treat beffe, in Boccaccio and in the Novella del Grasso legnaiuolo respectively. Ruggiero is interested in the role of virtù and fortuna, Ascoli in fiction and history. Antonio Ricci again invokes the dialectic between literature and history in arguing, with Orlando Furioso as his example, for book history as history. Fortuna returns in Nicholas Scott Baker's examination of the financial, and other, risk-taking of merchants and gamblers in the Renaissance. The next two contributions take us to post-Tridentine Italy, with Sarah Gwyneth Ross on the cultural implications of the celebration of the actress and humanist Isabella Andreini, and Celeste McNamara on the changes in confraternities in the Veneto from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Finally, Ethan H. Shagen advocates taking 'belief' as a category with a history, Rolf Strøm-Olsen reads Thomas Basin's (Latin) Histories of Charles VII [End Page 221] and Louis XI of France, Susan C. Karant-Nunn examines emotional expression in the light of manuscript illustrations of Elector August I of Saxony's funeral, and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia explores ritual aspects of the cult of Mazu, protectress of seafarers, encountered by Jesuit missionaries to China. Frances Muecke The University of Sydney Copyright © 2018 Frances Muecke