As Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual demonstrates, ritual was ever present in the early modern world, woven into the workings of guilds, governments, armies, monasteries, urban life, and families. The focused study of ritual in early modern Italian historiography that began most notably with the research of Edward Muir and Richard Trexler in the early 1980s has by now evolved to demonstrate how ritual was everything and everywhere in the early modern world, in constitutional forms, youth culture, married life, and military engagements. Divided into four thematic sections on social identity, the family and gender, death and violence, and rituals of power, this volume offers an informative sampling of recent research on the great variety of ritualistic forms that shaped and were shaped by early modern Italian culture.

To offer up just some of the ideas presented in these fifteen essays, ritual was deeply embedded in early modern Italian politics. Ilaria Taddei’s chapter demonstrates how the ritualistic dimension of Florentine elections involved the swearing of oaths and the offering of wax candles to Saint John the Baptist, as the Florentine state expressed the cohesion of its body politic through an often-elaborate series of signs and gestures. Fabrizio Ricciardelli reveals how Florentines participated in ritual jousts, feasts, bonfires, and dances to propagandize the Florentine right to territorial expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Where ritual and gender are concerned, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber considers the continued importance of magic, as well as faith in the power of the image, in her discussion of painted nudes hidden on the interior lids of cassoni. According to early modern thought, husbands and wives who saw such nudes on the insides of their marriage chests in the intimate spaces of their marital chambers were more likely both to procreate and to pass on the beauty of such images to their offspring.

Ritualistic behavior was never far from episodes of early modern violence and death. As William Caferro’s contribution shows, in warfare, fourteenth-century Tuscans made regular, defamatory use of animals and their ritualistic slaughter to insult their enemies, and similarly used defaming images of warlords defecating on their rivals to insult opposing military forces. Many essays explore how ritual continued to inform the uses of public space. Genevieve Warwick describes the transformation of the Piazza Navona to exalt the princely power of the papacy in seventeenth-century Rome. Romans renovated this otherwise food market into an open-air theater to be used for papal and aristocratic festive consumption. She demonstrates how the Counter-Reformation, far from shutting down Renaissance ritual, used forms of Renaissance courtly culture to extol the princely absolutism of the papal court.

The editors of this volume assert that the purpose of their collection of essays is to rethink commonly held notions about the decay of ritualistic practices during the Renaissance. They aim to show that ritual was not archaic or on the decline with the growth of the rational Renaissance, and that forms of ritual remained vital well into the seventeenth century. Their stated purpose seems odd, however, since a truly copious amount of well-known scholarship has explored rituals in Italian Renaissance culture since the 1980s and continues to do so. Marcello Fantoni’s introductory historiographical essay, in fact, seems to belie such claims by stating, “it is thus unanimously accepted that between the Middle Ages and the French Revolution we are still within the sphere of ritual powers” (30), and that the study of ritual is “now a genre with its own modern classics” (12). The editors surely did not need to justify their volume with such contentions, since these dynamic essays speak for themselves simply by offering early modern historians the most recent historiography on ritualistic practice in early modern Italy. In addition, the value of these essays also lies in the fact that many of them represent the work of Italian historians in translation, thereby exposing their research to a wider audience. The study of ritual in early modern Italy is indeed alive and well, and this collection offers both a useful review of recent scholarship as well as fodder for thought and future investigation.