Realms of ritual : Burgundian ceremony and civic life in late medieval Ghent /

In his important revision of Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), Arnade challenges its characterization of Burgundian ritual as formal and stagnant. He affirms Huizinga's recognition of the centrality of court ritual to Burgundian state power while demonstrating that public ceremonies were not empty, but served as mechanisms through which the court and cities periodically renegotiated their relationships. Arnade's work, methodologically grounded in Geertzian anthropological insights and recent studies of late medieval urban life, focuses on Ghent from 1440 to 1540, a period of mounting tensions between an expanding state and the city. The author stresses the dynamic "theater of power" in which conflicts between city and ducal court were played out in ritualized encounters that tested and even altered the symbolic boundaries of power. Through case studies of urban disturbances and ducal responses in 1541 and 1539, he traces the decline of Ghent's political autonomy by analyzing the transformation of ceremonies that reveal how ritual "orchestrated legitimacy and imparted definition" to the city's public life. Arnade successfully argues that rituals were not empty symbols of the past, but mechanisms for shaping future social and political relations. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. Harrie; California State University, Bakersfield