Religious Hegemony Research Articles

Tehmina Durrani’s Exposition of Great Britain’s Religious Hegemonic Designs in the Subcontinent in Blasphemy

This paper aims to analyze Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy in light of Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. The paper dwells deep in the study of the religious hegemony of the colonial master in the subcontinent, particularly in the Muslim communities. Although the novel is set in after partition Pakistan, the issue discussed is very much related to the role of British imperialists in establishing religious hegemony. The paper takes a content-based analysis of the novel and unravels instances of religious hegemony. The plot of the novel illustrates how the British colonial masters, to subjugate the natives, fabricated the religious hegemonic ideas in the Muslim society of the subcontinent. Durrani has not only adroitly exposed the hegemonic designs of the British colonial masters, but she has also delineated the after-effects of such hegemonic ideas on the society in general, and on women in particular. This study also, from evidence present in the novel, tries to portray the history of shrines in the subcontinent and studies the behavior of the Pirs who rules these shrines and their attitudes towards women.

Post-War Religious Violence, Counter-State Response and Religious Harmony in Sri Lanka

Abstract Sri Lankan military forces and government authorities have succeeded to counter measure terrorism by defeating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). However, their initiatives and efforts to restore peace and harmony among different ethno-religious groups in the post-war context are highly complex. The additional space given to the reemergence of radical religious groups has negatively influenced the process of fostering religious tolerance and harmony, which have been maintained for centuries in the country. Ethno-religious minorities became the major targets of religious hatred and violent attacks. At both the societal and political platforms, majoritarian religious sentiments and discourse have established a dominant presence in opposing the existence and practice of the religious fundamentals of minorities. This study has attempted to investigate the nature and impact of majoritarian religious violence in post-war Sri Lanka, as well as the efforts made by the government authorities to control them in order to foster religious tolerance and harmony in the country. This study argues that religious violence under the shadow of religious nationalism has been promoted by many forces as a mechanism by which to consolidate a majoritarian ethno-religious hegemony in the absence of competing ethnic-groups context in post-war Sri Lanka. In many ways, state apparatuses have failed to control religious violence, maintain religious tolerance and inter-religious harmony, particularly of accommodating minorities in nature. The study concludes that the continuous promotion of majoritarian religious hegemony through anti-minority religious hatred and violence would further promote religious intolerance and radicalism challenging the establishment of religious harmony in the country.

Gegen Heiden, Papst und Mittelalter

In carnival 1527, the former Franciscan and fervent Lutheran Burkard Waldis staged his Parable of the Prodigal Son in Riga, Livonia, a place of fierce struggles for religious hegemony between the archbishopric and the Protestant citizenship. The printed play text takes an emphatic position against moral decline in Rome, the Papal church and the ‘dark’ medieval times associated with religious medieval plays. This article traces the theatrical profile of the Parable in contrast to these older theatrical traditions. Whilst Easter or Passion plays typically aim for the audience’s immersion in order to make the truth of salvation evident,Waldis, in accordance with Lutheran theological and didactical positions, calls for a hermeneutical attitude to ensure the correct understanding of what is shown on stage. Even when the carefully structured levels of fictionality blur, the audience is called to take a position between the Catholic and the Lutheran doctrine of salvation from a rational distance.

Introduction

The seven articles in this thematic issue address written responses to different periods of turmoil that impacted Muslim and Christian societies in the western Mediterranean from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. By highlighting the complexities of the literary artifacts produced in Sicily, al-Andalus, and North Africa, it offers new perspectives on the interactions between Islam and Christendom at a time of traumatic transition from one political and religious hegemony to another, as reflected in a variety of genres: apologetic and hagio-graphical works, interreligious polemics, military and diplomatic dispatches, historiography, travel narratives, and romance. These analyses reveal a cultural panorama in which "internal otherness" and religious rivalry are both generative forces within a Mediterranean of fungible linguistic and social boundaries, where traditional genres are inflected and re-invented and new vernacular forms arise from multicultural and multi-confessional encounters.

Gegen Heiden, Papst und Mittelalter: Theatralität und Textualität in Burkard Waldis' Bibeldrama Parabel vom verlorenen Sohn (1527)

In carnival 1527, the former Franciscan and fervent Lutheran Burkard Waldis staged his Parable of the Prodigal Son in Riga, Livonia, a place of fierce struggles for religious hegemony between the archbishopric and the Protestant citizenship. The printed play text takes an emphatic position against moral decline in Rome, the Papal church and the 'dark' medieval times associated with religious medieval plays. This article traces the theatrical profile of the Parable in contrast to these older theatrical traditions. Whilst Easter or Passion plays typically aim for the audience's immersion in order to make the truth of salvation evident, Waldis, in accordance with Lutheran theological and didactical positions, calls for a hermeneutical attitude to ensure the correct understanding of what is shown on stage. Even when the carefully structured levels of fictionality blur, the audience is called to take a position between the Catholic and the Lutheran doctrine of salvation from a rational distance.

Neutrality without pluralism

Friends and foes of liberal neutrality assume that neutrality presupposes pluralism. On this view, the state should be neutral among the many permissible conceptions of the individual good that citizens affirm. I argue that neutrality need not be construed as a response to pluralism. I focus on the case of specifically religious neutrality and argue that it can be an appropriate political response to what I call “the fact of religious hegemony,” which is a social scenario in which a particular religion is unanimously recognized as dominant. Religious neutrality, in this kind of context, requires the state to avoid all religious words and symbols that can be taken as an expression of endorsement or criticism of religion. I take this conception of religious neutrality from both political history and current political practice and discourse. Neutrality was originally conceived of as a proper political response in contexts of religious hegemony both in France and in Mexico. Today, and despite the growth of religious pluralism, this conception continues to be a live political posture in the places where it first originated. I call it “neutrality as independence from religion” and argue that it differs from liberal neutrality in crucial respects.

Did the Rabbis Believe in Agreus Pan? Rabbinic Relationships with Roman Power, Culture, and Religion inGenesis Rabbah63

AbstractThis article presents a reading of the story of the Patriarch's meeting with the Emperor Diocletian as it appears in the late antique midrashic compilation,Genesis Rabbah. The story encapsulates the complexity of the relationship between the rabbis and Roman political, cultural and religious hegemony, showing the rabbis as both in eternal conflict with the Roman Empire and its culture and, yet, in many ways, very Roman themselves. In the second half of the article, I argue that this story presents a unique perspective on rabbinic views of both “demons” and the Olympian gods themselves. I conclude by comparing and contrasting these views with the approaches of early Christian thinkers.

“El enemigo llama a las puertas de la República…”: estrategias e iniciativas del clero contra la Revolución liberal en la Arquidiócesis de Quito (1895

Dentro del conflicto entre Iglesia y Estado o clero y liberales, suele ponerse atención al ámbito político antes que al religioso. El estudio del conflicto político de inicios de 1895 y la posterior guerra civil, en el contexto de la Revolución Liberal en Ecuador, no ha sido la excepción. Este artículo pretende abordar las estrategias e iniciativas del clero de la Arquidiócesis de Quito con el fin de detener el avance de las montoneras liberales que subían desde la Costa hacia la Capital. Para tal fin, se analizan fuentes impresas y manuscritas poco tratadas. En estas se abordan los discursos eclesiales para aproximarlos a las prácticas religiosas que se llevaron a cabo entre junio y agosto de 1895. Dentro del cruce entre política y religión, los discursos de las autoridades eclesiásticas y sacerdotes, sobre el liberalismo, dejan apreciar la preocupación del clero hacia el avance de la secularización y una posible pérdida de la hegemonía religiosa. De ese modo, se propone que el clero dispuso de recursos económicos, de su relación pastoral con los fieles, y de actos religiosos masivos, como la Visita de la Virgen del Quinche, para mantener su monopolio social y el orden que el liberalismo amenazaba.

Institutional Relations Rather Than Clashes of Civilizations: When and How Is Religion Compatible with Democracy?

This study develops and examines the concept of hegemonic religion and its relationship with democracy. A religion is hegemonic not only when the state grants that religion exclusive material and political privileges and benefits, but also when the religion is a core element of national identity and citizenship. We empirically examine the link between hegemonic religion and democracy using the Religion and State round 2 (RAS2), Polity, and CIRI datasets. We specifically use religious education policy, financing of religion, and religiously based laws as measures of the extent of religious hegemony in a state. We find that the presence of these religiously hegemonic traits, especially in combination, is strongly associated with a lack of democracy. However, it is possible for democracies to have some hegemonic features but not all of them.

The Privileges of Being a Hindu, Upper Caste and Elite Class, Male in India

When Peggy McIntosh referred to the term 'White Male Privilege' she describes conditions that systematically 'overempower certain groups' and 'confers dominance, gives permission to control, because of one's race or sex', in a Western society. These privileges according to her are unjust and unearned. She stated that, "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group". Similarly, in a conservative, patriarchal, stratified, casteist, hierarchical, unequal modern Indian society, the undeserved 'Male Privileges' besides the unwarranted advantage of being a 'Hindu' hailing from an 'Upper Caste' and 'Elite Class' plays a significant role in defining the social status of a person which accordingly confers him the voice, the dominant position, the decision making authority and the power to exercise control over others. These socially sanctioned prerogatives conferred to a person operate together to legitimize his superior and authoritative position, on the basis of which he may tend to subjugate others including poor, women, minorities and those from lower caste or deprived classes. Also, a particular episode of violence that occurs because of such unbalanced power equation is often seen in its micro context without realizing the undesirable systemic macro-structure in which it happens. McIntosh in her paper argued that in 'the same way men are not taught to acknowledge the ways in which they enjoy the benefits of being a male, similarly whites are conferred with privileges that they are taught not to recognize'. Likewise, in the present Indian society, these systematic structured unearned privileges of being a Hindu, a male, hailing from an upper caste and an elite class operate unjustifiably, invisibly and visibly, knowingly or unknowingly, where those privileged are neither taught to recognize the plight of 'others' nor the prerogatives conferred to them. These matrixes of privileges are inter-related, interconnected, intersecting, interlocked and operates together in a manner to reiterates, and strengthens the structures of oppression. Thus, patriarchy, religious hegemony, casteism and wealth inequalities, all operate together to reinforce the culture of domination in an unconscious and invisible manner though the Constitution of India as well as the legal system is premised on the principles of equality, substantive equality and social justice. This essay looks at these systemic oppressions or the set of privileges which are structural, inbuilt, institutional and often remain hidden or unnoticed and unrecognized in social, political or legal debates relating to marginalization of subaltern groups. It is accordingly suggested to recognize, acknowledge and work around these privileges in order to comprehend the unarticulated darkness surrounding it and to gain a holistic perception of the prevalent structural and systemic exploitation with the aim to reconstruct the egalitarian society where social structure is free from conditions that favours a few at the cost of majority of 'Others'.

“False Doctrine” and the Stifling Of Indigenous Political Will

I hypothesis that there is a correlation between the failure of Indigenous politics to achieve its goals and the sway of what Thomas Paine refers to as the false doctrine of Christian dogma. Unremitting evangelism and Christian hegemony has led to silencing or compromising authentic grassroots voices of too many Indigenous people. High conversion rates have weakened opportunities for resistance to colonialism and the loss of vital traditional values. (I suggest that a similar problem may relate to the failure of contemporary black politics.) It is important at this critical time for human civilization to reflect carefully on the influence of dominant worldview assumptions as relates both to the tragic problems facing Indigenous Peoples as well as to the broader consequences globally of having dismissed Indigenous understandings about the world. Overcoming the problems of religious hegemony does not require wholesale rejection. It includes possibilities for a complementary relationship between Indigenous spiritual understanding and alternative interpretations of Biblical Gospel that have existed for centuries. Moving to a different location is a simple process, though it often takes courage. One merely decides what to take and what to leave behind. What man makes, whether computers or religions, requires consumers to critically and intuitively consider both positive and negative potential outcomes. We must engage dialectically about likely universal truths and those that we invent about how best to live in flowing balance. All of us, Indigenous as well as those far removed from their Indigenous ancestors, however, can learn to again trust in the laws of Nature on which Indigenous worldviews are based.

Religinės įvairovės reprezentavimas Lietuvos internetinėje žiniasklaidoje

This paper analyzes the issue of the representation of religious diversity in Lithuanian online media. The first part of the article represents the media’s influence on the formation of public opinion. Also, it describes the most important issues of religious diversity representation in the media. The second part reveals the aspects of media representations of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, other traditional and non-traditional religious communities, and new religious movements. According to the empirical data, it can be stated that very popular online media in Lithuania frequently presents information that is negative, stereotypical and lacks objectivity about various issues related to religious diversity. The empirical data also showed that the analyzed online news portals are in favor of mainstream religious community representational politics that spread dominant religious values, attitudes and contribute to the existence of religious hegemony. However, representations of various new religious movements and other non-traditional religious communities are mostly negative, stereotypical and full of subjective judgments and argumentation.

O Sistema Nacional de Educação e o ensino religioso nas escolas públicas

A criação do Sistema Nacional de Educação no Brasil tem sido justificada por diversos elementos, entre os quais não aparece a laicidade da educação pública. Para o autor, tal omissão expressa a insuficiente compreensão do Estado republicano e de suas políticas, em especial as políticas educacionais. Esse conveniente (conivente?) silêncio propicia a situação atual da disciplina Ensino Religioso nas escolas públicas, marcada pela anomia jurídica e pela folia pedagógica. Ambas as "patologias" prosperam no aparato educacional brasileiro, fragmentado em múltiplos sistemas, o que abre espaço para a luta pela hegemonia religiosa no campo educacional, privando a escola pública de uma condição essencial da prática republicana - a liberdade de pensamento e de crença, uma e outra propiciadas pela laicidade do Estado.

Marking a New Holy Community: God's Neighbors and the Ascendancy of a New Religious Hegemony in Israel

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Menny Ya'ish's recent film God's Neighbors (2012, ...) opens on a peaceful Friday eve with Avi (Ro'ee Asaf ), a rough-looking but attractive young man, who performs the ritual of Kiddush, or sanctification of the wine, that ushers in the Jewish Sabbath. When he is done eating alone with his father, Avi retires to his room to study scripture, basking in the sweetness of the Torah and relishing the peace and quiet of the holy day after a long week of hard work. But his blessed reverie is soon interrupted by loud music that comes from the street below. Looking down, he sees a group of young Russians drinking and loudly making merry in the yard to the sound of booming music. Faint cries by neighbors in surrounding flats to keep the music down in honor of the Sabbath are rebuffed vulgarly and dismissively by the carousing Russians. This incenses God's first neighbor, Avi, who calls on God's two other neighbors, his friends Koby (Gal Friedman) and Yaniv (Itzik Golan), to help him drive the Russians out. What follows is probably one of the most articulated action scenes in Israeli cinema to date-a rapid action sequence, in the course of which the Russians are violently beaten and forced to leave, bleeding and humiliated, to the sound of cheering neighbors.Piety and violence distinguish God's three neighbors-Avi, Koby, and Yaniv-who, since their return to the faith, have become religious vigilantes in their working-class urban neighborhood of Bat Yam. Avi is the leader of the gang. During the day he helps his father in their produce store. In his free time, he makes religious trance music. Having recently joined the Breslev Hasidic sect, the three friends practice their newfound faith in some of their former gang ways, imposing God's laws on their neighbors by force: they beat up drunks, impose the Sabbath on local businesses, force neighborhood women to dress more modestly, and fight a rival Arab gang. Their lives are a strange mixture of a lackadaisical drug culture, religious faith, and tough street action.1 But Avi's life changes when a pretty young woman, Miri (Rotem Zisman Cohen), moves into the neighborhood. At first Avi tries to impose a stricter dress code on her, but eventually he falls in love with her and is transformed by his love into a kinder and less vengeful religious person.I want to propose that God's Neighbors marks a significant cultural moment in the legitimation of Jewish religiosity in Israel and records an important milestone in the country's metamorphosis in recent years from a secular, liberal society to a more fundamentalist religious one. The film demonstrates this change in three interrelated ways. First, by combining Jewish religiosity with a powerful and aggressive Israeli Mizrahi2 masculine identity, the film relegitimizes Jewish religiosity, presents it as attractive and sexy, and declares it as the new Israeli hegemony. Second, by not killing off the members of a rival Arab gang , the film symbolically minimizes the conflict between Jews and Arabs, and advances the importance of mythical Jewish time over Zionist historical time. Finally, by ending happily with a union between Avi and his girl, Miri, the film provides a neat closure that offers an alluringly simple, Hasidic-like tale of Jewish life in Israel today, promising rewards to the righteous who believe in Hashem, the Lord.3The secular nature of early Zionism is fairly well known by now and needs little elaboration.4 Zionist culture, which was greatly influenced by the civic religion of European bourgeois nationalism, also developed as a reaction against Jewish traditional life and religious practices in Eastern Europe.5 But Zionism not only preserved the secular liberalism of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlighten- ment. It was also inspired by the great social reform movements of the time, such as socialism and communism, which were decidedly antireligious. When Zionism was later transferred to Palestine and developed there, it continued to be animated by the antireligious sentiments of its early thinkers, a sentiment that eventually grew to the outright animosity of what came to be known as the Zionist or Israeli negation of exile. …

Igreja católica e ecumenismo/inculturação: da revisão conceitual ao impasse com o advento das estratégias de marketing

Este artigo apresenta a evolução do pensamento e da prática de ecume­nismo e inculturação adotados pela Igreja Católica até sua história mais recente no Brasil, quando o contexto pluralista, a disputa religiosa (sobretudo com as Igrejas neopentecostais) pela conquista de fiéis, notadamente por meio de estratégias de marketing, colocam em suspensão - se não, em crise - o projeto ecumênico oficialmente assumido por essa instituição. Nesse sentido, o esforço de diálogo, de aproximação e cooperação recíproca entre católicos e cristãos de outras denominações está em flagrante conflito com a luta pela hegemonia religiosa na sociedade brasileira.

Institutional and Ideological Re-construction of the Justice and Development Party (PJD): The Question of Democratic Islamism in Morocco

An analysis of fieldwork research on the deliberations, policy option debates, and outcomes of the 2008 Sixth National Convention of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) crystallizes issues relevant to the party's recent transformations, with focus on the balance between its Islamist character and its democratic/governance merits, central to the leadership transition that occurred during convention. This investigation presents potential scenarios of this ambivalent Islamist democratic experiment in Morocco amid rapidly changing national and regional contexts in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011 and the new politics that resulted. Outcomes were hardly predictable during the July 19-22, 2008 Sixth National Convention of the Islamic Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco. Counter to all political speculations, the ten-year leader of the party, Sa'd al-Din al-Othmani (marketed during his visit to Washington DC in 2006 as the Erdogan), came second in votes for the Secretary General post to 'Abd al-Ilah Benkiran. Al-Othmani was later elected to head the party's national convention in succession of its previous leader, Mr. Benkiran himself. This outcome was far from being pre-engineered. On the contrary, this complete bombshell took all observers and party leaders, including al-Othmani and Benkiran, by surprise.1 The case of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) demonstrates how far non-violent Islamist movements have been integrated into Morocco's democratic transition process and how much they have transformed their ideological and organizational positions in the adaptation. That said, Islamism still challenges the religious hegemony of the Moroccan monarchy and the policies of the political establishment, but the movement has adapted well to new political circumstances and institutional constraints following the rise to power of King Muhammad VI in 1999. This investigation of the effects of the PJD's institutional structure and ideological choices on the broader question of democratization of Moroccan Islamism addresses several questions. First, does the democratic institutionalization of an Islamic movement reflect its de-Islamization or rather its considerable maturity in organization and objectives? Second, how were the deliberations, outcomes, and debates on policy options during the PJD's 2008 convention carried out,2 and how can they shed light on the potential scenarios of this Islamist democratic experiment? This article will start with an analysis of the institutional and ideological politics of the PJD in the lead up to the 2008 party convention, including politics/prosletyzing relations, PJD factional politics, and standpoints on questions of national democratic and constitutional reforms. Then, it shall proceed to explore the details and deliberations of the 2008 sixth national convention and contextualize its outcomes within the changing national and Islamist politics in Morocco before and through the Arab spring in 2011. THE END OF PROSELYTIZING AND THE BEGINNING OF POLITICS The separation of the Movement of Unity and Reform (MUR, founded in 1993) and the Party of Justice and Development (PJD, 1997) was an all-important and controversial issue. Critical to its democratic development, the PJD ventured to separate proselytizing from politics. Questions of Islamic identity were relocated as a function of the social and cultural movements operating in the proselytizing field. The party was to be responsible only for governance and administration. The theoretical merits of such a hypothesis are still controversial, but the practicalities precluded the awaited full separation. In a country like Morocco, identity politics are inescapable given the traditional ruling regime and the active secularization projects of the Francophone elites. In contrast, full separation was possible in the Turkish case. The Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP), in its official discourse, presents itself as a center-right socially conservative party lacking any cultural agenda. …

Ethnicity and Conflict: Theory and Facts

Over the second half of the 20th century, conflicts within national boundaries became increasingly dominant. One-third of all countries experienced civil conflict. Many (if not most) such conflicts involved violence along ethnic lines. On the basis of recent theoretical and empirical research, we provide evidence that preexisting ethnic divisions do influence social conflict. Our analysis also points to particular channels of influence. Specifically, we show that two different measures of ethnic division--polarization and fractionalization--jointly influence conflict, the former more so when the winners enjoy a "public" prize (such as political power or religious hegemony), the latter more so when the prize is "private" (such as looted resources, government subsidies, or infrastructures). The available data appear to strongly support existing theories of intergroup conflict. Our argument also provides indirect evidence that ethnic conflicts are likely to be instrumental, rather than driven by primordial hatreds.

A Textured Reading of Well-Being: An Interdisciplinary Consideration of Luke 8: 40–56

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to explore the nature of well-being by considering Luke 8:40–56 from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing a socio-rhetorical analysis of this passage together with a more broadly social-scientific approach, this paper hopes to enrich our reading of the juxtaposed healing of Jairus' daughter and the haemorrhaging woman by reflecting on how this episode re-imagines what is meant by well-being. What emerges from our analysis is a dense, multi-layered reading of this healing text that invites a more integrated and holistic understanding of well-being. Our approach acknowledges the multi-layered nature of the text and seeks to draw into conversation the insights of the social sciences in order to appropriate the text in ways that pay careful attention to the issues of power, marginalization, exclusion, political and religious hegemony in relation to women and children. In so doing, the paper considers how this text can be read with ordinary/pre-critical readers—especially those who are economically and socially marginalized—as a text that not only speaks to the issue of well-being, but serves to empower and facilitate well-being and healing.

América Latina: Entre pluri-confesionalidad y laicidad

In Latin America, as in many countries with a Catholic religious hegemony, the building of a lay (secular) regime required of a militant laicism to generate a space for freedoms, in a context of clash between the principles of political liberalism and the doctrinal intransigence of the Catholic hierarchy. The new independent countries of Latin America would be caught almost since the beginning of their lives in a tendency of confrontation additionally rooted in royalist and jurisdictionalist traditions. Two Centuries later, although this trend has not completely disappeared, it is been replaced by a regulation of the religious, more inclined to the recognition of a plurality of beliefs, the need to respect human rights, freedom of conscience, and a more democratic political life. Nevertheless, this transition does not necessarily goes from confesionalism, jurisdictionalism or laicism to a secular regime of laicity. In fact, the old tendencies and the new trends appear now as a crossroad for political regimes in Latin America: laicity or pluri-confessionality. Or, it is not clear which one of this contradictory regime proposals will prevail.

Review: Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State by Alick M. McLean

Alick M. McLean Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, 250 pp., 35 color and 98 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780300137149 With this well-produced book, Alick McLean provides a much-needed study of the urban development and architectural history of the key institutional buildings of one of Tuscany's lesser-known city-states. Between 1351 and 1992 Prato was under the administrative control of its nearby neighbor, Florence; this is perhaps the main reason why this interesting small city has been so easily overlooked as a marginal dependent in the hinterland of that paradigmatic central Italian city. The author's strategy for dealing with the overbearing presence of Florence is to make a strength out of a weakness. In the preface, McLean speaks of the “typicalness” of Prato (viii), identifying it as broadly representative of a swath of similarly diminutive city-states of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and suggesting that the in-depth study of one will offer a comparative frame for a better understanding of the others. Another ambition of the book is to trace a long history of Prato's urban development from the first documentary references at the end of the tenth century to its subjection to Florence in 1351. While the latter objective is carefully achieved through the chronological sequencing of chapters that chronicle the phases of development in relation to changing institutional arrangements, the former is rather forgotten, as McLean seems rather to overlook comparisons to other “centri minori” in favor of a predominance of Florentine referencing. Set within the fertile Arno valley and upon the …