Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.

In recent times, festivals around the world have grown in number due to the increased recognition of their importance for tourism, branding and economic development. Festivals hold multifaceted roles in society and can be staged to bring positive economic impact, for the competitive advantage they lend a destination or to address social objectives. Studies on festivals have appeared in a wide range of disciplines, and consequently, much of the research available is highly fragmented. This handbook brings this knowledge together in one volume, offering a comprehensive evaluation of the most current research, debates and controversies surrounding festivals. It is divided into nine sections that cover a wide range of theories, concepts and contexts, such as sustainability, festival marketing and management, the strategic use of festivals and their future. Featuring a variety of disciplinary, cultural and national perspectives from an international team of authors, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of event management and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography, marketing, management, psychology and economics.

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities’ world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh’s Summer Festivals and Adelaide’s Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.

Fifteen years after its original publication comes a thoroughly revised edition of the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Every article from the original edition has been revisited. With some articles being removed, others revised, and many new articles added, the result is a completely new dictionary covering systematic, historical, and philosophical theology as well as theological ethics.

Food, Festival and Religion explores how communities in northern Italy find a restorative sense of place through foodways, costuming and other forms of materiality. Festivals examined by the author vary geographically from the northern rural corners of Italy to the fashionable heart of urban Milan. The origins of these lived religious events range from Christian to vernacular Italian witchcraft and contemporary Paganism, which is rapidly growing in Italy. Francesca Ciancimino Howell demonstrates that during ritualized occasions the sacred is located within the mundane. She argues that communal feasting, pilgrimage, rituals and costumed events can represent forms of lived religious materiality. Building on the work of scholars including Foucault, Grimes and Ingold, Howell offers a theoretical “Scale of Engagement” which further tests the interfaces between and among the materialities of place, food, ritual and festivals and provides a widely-applicable model for analyzing grassroots events and community initiatives. Through extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork data, this book demonstrates that popular Italian festivals can be ritualized, liminal spaces, contributing greatly to the fields of religious, performance and ritual studies.

The book focusses on the origin and transformation of the priestly festival calendar. Since the epoch-making work of Julius Wellhausen at the end of the 19th century the differences between the various ancient Israelite festival calendars have often been explained in terms of a gradual evolution, which shows an increasing historicisation, denaturalisation and ritualisation. The festivals were in Wellhausen's view gradually detached from agricultural conditions and celebrated more and more at fixed points in the year. This study tries to show that the changes in the priestly festival calendar reflect a conscious effort to adapt the ancient Israelite festival calendar to the semi-annual layout of the Babylonian festival year. The ramifications of the change only come to the fore after a careful study of the agricultural conditions of ancient Israel - and Mesopotamia - makes clear that passover and the festival of unleavened bread were originally celebrated in the second month of the year. The first month of the year envisaged by the priestly festival calendar for the celebration of passover and the festival of unleavened bread in turn mirrors the date of one of the two semi-annual Babylonian New Year festivals. The two Babylonian New Year festivals were celebrated exactly six months apart at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. In order to adapt the ancient Israelite festival calendar to the Babylonian scheme with two New Year festivals a year, the date of passover and the festival of unleavened bread had to be moved up by one month. The consequences for the origin of passover, the festival of unleavened bread, the festival of weeks and the festival of huts are charted and the relations between the various ancient Israelite festival calendars are determined anew.