Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples, by John A. Marino. Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xi, 342 pp. $60.00 US (cloth). Owing to the primacy of the city-state in Renaissance Italy, studies of civic ritual in the Renaissance tend to focus either on republican settings or princely courts, each with a distinctly different set of issues at stake. Here, as in so many other areas of study, the republics of Florence and Venice have generally dominated the scholarship. More socially fluid and politically open than the princely courts, self-governing city-states proved particularly fertile ground for studying the way in which ritual, embedded in the iconography, festivals, and processions of urban culture, masked and defused the tensions generated by an agonistic and competitive political culture. By contrast, studies of ritual in the court cultures of Italy tend to illuminate the process by which dynasties manipulated symbols and behaviour to legitimate their rule. Put bluntly, in republican settings, civic rituals appear to have been central to how citizens constructed meaning in public life in general, whereas in monarchical settings, civic rituals appear to have been more central to the narrower process of dynasty-building. John Marino's Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples is a significant exception to that contrast. A study of civic ritual in Naples under the rule of the centralizing Spanish Habsburg monarchy, the book reveals an exceptionally wide variety of meaning, social variety, and adaptation in Neapolitan ritual. Marino's perspective is plural, focusing on the various uses of ritual by the Spanish monarchy, the church, the nobles, and the people. Philip II and Charles V manipulated rituals to help control and rule a distant kingdom of particularly strategic importance during the religious wars. This involved hybrid fusions of European ritual cultures, such as Charles V's processions that combined Aragonese, Burgundian, and Neapolitan symbolism and traditions. The church promoted a competing conception of Neapolitan citizenship as membership in the Heavenly City of the New Jerusalem. Nobles and people likewise engaged in ritual activities that contrasted their competing definitions of Neapolitan citizenship and of the city itself. The book's five chapters are roughly equally divided between the structure of the Neapolitan ritual setting and tracking changes within it over roughly four generations of Spanish rule. …