Nowadays pageants often take the form of parades of effervescent young women competing for popular recognition in hyped up media events. However, these “beauty pageants” are a mere pastiche of the elaborate historical parades of the medieval period that took significant, social, religious, or civic events and their protagonists, as subjects. Pageants were historically characterized by resplendent costuming and elaborate processions that were often given to much pomp and ceremony. Pageantry has formed an important part of the civic life of most societies, both ancient and modern, serving a variety of cultural and political purposes. The use of drama and public spectacle as an instrument of civic, social, and religious activism has recently become the focus of renewed academic inquiry. The essays in this interdisciplinary anthology provide carefully researched insights into the phenomenon of pageantry over the centuries and across broad cultural boundaries.

Processionals, Props, & Pageantry is an extremely comprehensive guide about the subjects. Each section, respectively, is divided into two parts: Scriptural Significance; Practical Guide These sections will not only help you have a greater scriptural understanding, but also give you innumerable practical ideas to help with your arts ministry presentations.If you always wanted to know...this is your answer. The chapter titles include:Care To Go for A Walk?A scriptural look at processionalsLet's Have A Feast!How feasts mentioned in the Word relate to dancePrayer, Planning, & Practice (with diagrams)Nuts & bolts of putting dances togetherPositioning and Patterns (with illustrations)Great ideas for placement and movement on the floorWhat's In The Hand Is Worth...A LotScriptural significance of flags in ministryHis BannerUtilizing flags and bannersProp IncorporationPractical prop useMishap or HappyMistakes to avoid with good tipsGod Loves Color! (With a full color significance chart)Scriptural significance of color in the WordFaith In A "Material" WorldFabric used in the prophetic artsCreative CostumingPractical costume ideasMinistry PaletteArts in ministryIsaiah 62:10 ? Go through, go on through the gates, clear the way for the people! Build up a highway, build it up. Clear away the stones. Raise a Banner for the peoples.We can see the significant and prolific use of banners throughout the Word. Should it not stand to reason that we be able to use flags and banners as part of our worship to the Lord and as warfare against the enemy? Should we not be able to disturb the airways against the principalities to gain victory for our God? Let us then lift His banner high over our circumstances and wave!

The book examines the roles that rare and exotic animals played in the cultural self-fashioning and the political imaging of the Medici court during the family’s reign, first as Dukes of Florence (1532-1569) and subsequently as Grand Dukes of Tuscany (1569-1737). The book opens with an examination of global practices in zoological collecting and cultural uses of animals. The Medici’s activities as collectors of exotic species, the menageries they established and their deployment of animals in the ceremonial life of the court and in their art are examined in relation to this wider global perspective. The book seeks to nuance the myth promoted by the Medici themselves that theirs was the most successful princely serraglio in early modern Europe.

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, this book identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved, it demonstrates how it gives tangibility to the values that underpin different communities.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.