Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History)

Rating:
Summary: Textbook on Ritual with Good Bibliography
Review: Muir, an expert on civic ritual in Venice in the Renaissance, has brought his knowledge of ritual in early modern Europe to this textbook in succient and compacted prose. Muir shows how in the early modern period time, the body, religion all underwent conceptual transformations. He draws on antropological studies, as well as other sociological methodologies in dealing with rites of passage, carnivalesque activity, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and with the relation of Jews to the larger christian world. As he is an expert on Venice, his writing on the rituals of the northern Italian cities tends to be more animated and eruidte and the sections of northern European cities. The end of each chapter has a bibliography with books highly recommended for further reading starred. It is a textbook, and best suited for undergraduates or advanced level high-school seniors. The independent reader may want to stick with a less packaged history.