Ritual in Early Modern Europe
Ritual in Early Modern Europe

Author: Edward Muir

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-08-18

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780521841535

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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.

Music and Ritual
Music and Ritual

Author: Keith Howard

Publisher: Semar Publishers Srl

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 887778086X

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Cultural Writing. Published through Muske, whose purpose is to research, recover, document and conserve the world's ethnomusicological heritage and to disseminate it across a wide audience, the papers in MUSIC AND RITUAL "were first prepared for a panel...at the 2005 annual conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology....At the conference, it seemed timely to return to how performance informs, illustrates and interpenetrates ritual, without setting a clear, narrow, agenda in our call for papers...[These papers] explore questions raised by the performance of music and movement, and their interrelationships, in artistic practice beyond the European art and popular music canons"--from the Introduction by Keith Howard.

Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order in Northern Europe, C. 650-1350
Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order in Northern Europe, C. 650-1350

Author: Wojtek Jezierski

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503554723

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This multidisciplinary volume draws together contributions from history, archaeology, and the history of religion to offer an in-depth examination of political ritual and its performative and transformative potential across Continental Europe and Scandinavia. Covering the period between c. 650 and 1350, this work takes a theoretical, textual, and practical approach to the study of political ritual, and explores the connections between, and changing functions of, key rituals such as assemblies, feasts, and religious confrontations between pagans and Christians. Taking as a central premise the fact that rituals were not only successful political instruments used to create and maintain order, but were also a hazardous game in which intended strategies could fail, the papers within this volume demonstrate that the outcomes of feasts or court meetings were often highly unpredictable, and a friendly atmosphere could quickly change into a violent clash. By emphasising the conflict-ridden and unpredictable nature of ritual acts, the articles add crucial insights into the meanings, (ab)uses, and interpretations of performances in the Middle Ages. In doing so, they demonstrate that rituals, far from being mere representations of power, also constituted an important mechanism through which the political and religious order could be challenged and transformed.

Musical Ritual in Mexico City
Musical Ritual in Mexico City

Author: Mark Pedelty

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-06-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0292774184

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On the Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City, Mexico's entire musical history is performed every day. "Mexica" percussionists drum and dance to the music of Aztec rituals on the open plaza. Inside the Metropolitan Cathedral, choristers sing colonial villancicos. Outside the National Palace, the Mexican army marching band plays the "Himno Nacional," a vestige of the nineteenth century. And all around the square, people listen to the contemporary sounds of pop, rock, and música grupera. In all, some seven centuries of music maintain a living presence in the modern city. This book offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and ethnography of musical rituals in the world's largest city. Mark Pedelty details the dominant musical rites of the Aztec, colonial, national, revolutionary, modern, and contemporary eras, analyzing the role that musical ritual played in governance, resistance, and social change. His approach is twofold. Historical chapters describe the rituals and their functions, while ethnographic chapters explore how these musical forms continue to resonate in contemporary Mexican society. As a whole, the book provides a living record of cultural continuity, change, and vitality.

Images and Objects in Ritual Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Northern and Central Europe
Images and Objects in Ritual Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Northern and Central Europe

Author: Krista Kodres

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-07-18

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1443864285

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This multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the functions, meanings and use of images and objects in various late Medieval and Early Modern social practices, which were linked by their ritual character. The book approaches ‘ritual’ as an action which is discussed under the general umbrella term “performative practice”, and is characterised by a synthesis between the repetitive and the extraordinary that carries an intense symbolic meaning and is emotionally charged. Images, spaces and rituals were closely interconnected in both the religious and the secular spheres, and played a relevant role in the symbolic communication of the time. The essays in this volume are devoted to a complex study of these phenomena in Northern and Central Europe, including regions which, due to linguistic or cultural barriers, have thus far received comparatively little attention in Anglo-American scholarship, including Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic states.

Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life
Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life

Author: Elaine Stratton Hild

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0197685919

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"Medieval documents reveal that for centuries of European history, singing for a person at the moment of death was considered to be the ideal accompaniment to a life's ending. Rituals for the dying were well developed, practiced widely, and thoroughly integrated with music. Indeed, these rituals reveal that music, rather than the Eucharist, held a privileged position at the final breath. Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life examines and recovers, to the extent possible, the music sung for the dying during the Middle Ages. The book offers a view of the plainchant repertory through the sources of individual institutions. The first four chapters contain a series of "case studies": close readings of rituals from diverse communities, each as they appear in a single source. The rituals' chants are transcribed into modern notation and analyzed, both for their relationships between text and melody and for their functions within the rituals. Created for the powerful and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, women and men, monastics, clerics, and laity, these manuscripts offer a glimpse into the religious practices that distinguished communities from one another and bound them together within a single tradition. The book provides the first editions of the rituals' chants and considers the functions of the music. Why was music given such a prominent position within the deathbed liturgies? Why did communities gather and sing when a loved one was dying? The manuscripts reveal a lost art of comforting the dying and the grieving"--