Late medieval and renaissance cities, though powerful communities jealous of their own jurisdiction, were constantly negotiating their relationships with other secular and religious authorities. The seven essays in this collection treat various aspects of civic display and pageantry during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The overwhelming sense one receives is that the solemne pomps were essentially about power -- how to get it, display it, share it and retain it. Each paper demonstrates how, through ceremony and symbol, municipalities sought to fashion their own corporate self-image in order to establish the limits of their authority in relationship to the countervailing powers sur-rounding them. The essays are concerned with the period before the ever widening impact of the Reformation and the intellectual and political revolutions it spawned had reached the level of civic pageantry. In the varied rituals considered here we can see reflected the highly sophisticated minds of their creators using the symbolic landscape of their religious and cultural past in important acts of corporate self-fashioning.

This study describes for the first time the ritual purposes, symbolic vocabulary, and quasi-dramatic form of one late medieval courtly festival, the royal entry. Although the royal entry as a formal ceremony can be traced back as an unbroken tradition from late Classical times through to the Renaissance, Kipling begins where the royal entry adopts pageantry as its essential medium in the late fourteenth century.

Myth of Venice - Myth and ritual - Government by ritual - Social relationships - Scuole - Cittadini - The golden book - Festivals in Renaissance Venice - Festival of the twelve Marys - Procession of Redentore - Feast of Saint Justina.

Public life - Humanism - Civic humanism - Friendship - Ritual - Alberti - Women in Florence - Family - Everyday life in Florence.

Civic Rites explores the religious origins of Western democracy by examining the government of fifth-century BCE Athens in the larger context of ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Deftly combining history, politics, and religion to weave together stories of democracy’s first leaders and critics, Nancy Evans gives readers a contemporary’s perspective on Athenian society. She vividly depicts the physical environment and the ancestral rituals that nourished the people of the earliest democratic state, demonstrating how religious concerns were embedded in Athenian governmental processes. The book’s lucid portrayals of the best-known Athenian festivals—honoring Athena, Demeter, and Dionysus—offer a balanced view of Athenian ritual and illustrate the range of such customs in fifth-century Athens.