Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence.

This is an impressive history of Florentine death rites from the aftermath of the Black Death to the end of the Republic. The framework of the book will be familiar to students of Florentine history; the literature on social organization and political change in this Renaissance capital is already exhaustive. Professor Strocchia's work is not meant to recast the history of the city but rather to illuminate the "ways in which ritual constructed and communicated a variety of social and cultural categories and understandings, ranging from definitions of kinship and gender roles to forms of patronage and political domination" (pp. xiv-xv). The book, thus, is an important contribution to the history of culture in action. It is sustained by a rich body of primary research in testaments, chronicles, histories, diaries, letters, financial records, sumptuary legislation, literature, folklore, and law.

Funerary ritual was a vehicle through which corporate groups, families, and individuals acted out relationships of power and status on the urban stage, particularly within parish units. Through the study and analysis of funerary decoration, ceremony, and the socio-political topography of burial sites, Strocchia illuminates the dynamics of social organization. She also considers changes in the forms and distribution of power, modes of political patronage, definitions of gender roles, and complex relationships between women and men, between family and state, and among social orders. Death ritual, we learn, is another way to study conflicts and ambiguities in social and political relations and in cultural ideals.

Strocchia's study of the complex place of women in funerary custom is particularly valuable for the light it sheds on the less visible forms of kinship and power that they exercised. She demonstrates that Florentine women's kinship orientation, in contrast to men's, was bilateral. Further, the social and sexual control built into sumptuary legislation is an indication that propertied women's manipulation of mourning garb was both a source of power and a social strategy. Finally, Strocchia does a fine job pinpointing how death ritual served as a nexus for lines of gender, class, and occupation in Florentine society.

The book has two parts. In Part 1, "The Structures of Ritual and Society," Strocchia combines methods of social history with cultural anthropology to outline the structure, organization, conflicts, ambiguities, and symbolic dimensions of death rites over the longue duree. Part 2, "The Making of a Ritual Form," reconstructs and contextualizes death rituals from the late fourteenth century to the end of the Republic. The rituals are considered as "both a product and a constituent part of changing social and political relations".

It is in Part 2 that Strocchia makes a new and important contribution to Florentine studies. She describes with masterly skill the changes in the style and practice of death ritual that signaled periodic disjunctions in society, politics, and culture. Intense competition for power and status among established citizens and new men produced a flamboyant funerary style during the fourteenth century, when the entire polity was engaged in demonstrating communal strength. By the early fifteenth century, corporatism gave way to elitism as key families moved to the forefront of Florentine politics and society. Funerary conventions, cast in a humanist framework, sustained the new ruling order by emphasizing the patrilineal ideals ingrained in the fabric of Florentine society. The importance of women's moral and domestic roles in the family emerged in consolatory letters. From 1434, the beginning of Medici dominance, ceremonies became increasingly opulent, ecclesiastical participation grew, and death ritual reflected the growing contrast between the upper and lower orders. Elites came more to occupy the central burial space of the parishes, while laborers were pushed to the periphery. In the sixteenth century, funerary style witnessed a rearistocratization that recalled chivalric models from northern Europe, and requiem theater replaced the funeral as a primary form of mortuary spectacle. Students of ritual and ceremony in early modern Europe, of historical anthropology, art history, and gender studies will want to read this book.

Joanne M. Ferraro San Diego State University