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.

Venice's reputation for political stability and a strong, balanced republican government holds a prominent place in European political theory. Edward Muir traces the origins and development of this reputation, paying particular attention to the sixteenth century, when civic ritual in Venice reached its peak. He shows how the ritualization of society and politics was an important reason for Venice's stability. Influenced in part by cultural anthropology, he establishes and applies to Venice a new methodology for the historical study of civic ritual.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

"At the heart of the book is a detailed account of four major events that significantly shaped the history of Venice, the formation of the Holy League (the coalition that brought the republic into conflict with the Ottoman Empire): the victory of that League against the Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto; the ceremonial arrangements that were made to welcome Henry III of France to the city in 1574; and the devasting plague of 1575-7." "This central part is frame by two others. The first concentrates on St. Mark's Square, the buildings that surround it and the social and religious life that used it as a backdrop. This involves reconstruction of the historical and mythical events that gradually led to the elaboration, by Jacopo Sansovino and others, of a monumental civic arena invested with layers of meaning that were fundamental to a sense of Venetian identity. The final section considers how the major events of the 1570s, and above all the victory at Lepanto, were metabolized in Venetian history and reconfigured in the realms of memory and myth. Important factors in this process were the role of the printing press (Venice lay at the heart of the Italian booktrade) in disseminating accounts of current events and reworking them into a further elaborator of the Myth of Venice, and the ritual and other transformations that took place (such as the construction of Palladio's church of the Redentore), and their connection to the religious matrix that provides the key to the civic ethos of the city in the late sixteenth century. Venice had become the City of God."--Rabat de la jaquette

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

The comprehensive 2005 study of rituals in early modern Europe argues that between about 1400 and 1700 a revolution in ritual theory took place that utterly transformed concepts about time, the body, and the presence of spiritual forces in the world. Edward Muir draws on extensive historical research to emphasize the persistence of traditional Christian ritual practices even as educated elites attempted to privilege reason over passion, textual interpretation over ritual action, and moral rectitude over gaining access to supernatural powers. Edward Muir discusses wide ranging themes such as rites of passage, carnivalesque festivity, the rise of manners, Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the alleged anti-Christian rituals of Jews and witches. This edition examines the impact on the European understanding of ritual from the discoveries of new civilizations in the Americas and missionary efforts in China and adds more material about rituals peculiar to women.