Fetes urbaines en Italie a l'epoque de la Renaissance, Verone, Florence, Sienne, Naples.

Michel Plaisance and Francoise Decroisette, eds. Paris: Klincksieck, 1993. 185 pp. n.p.

This slim volume contains four papers preceded by a very brief preface, discussing the appropriation or transformation of specific public rituals in Italian cities in periods of shifting political, social, and/or cultural conjunctures. The chronological scope varies, but the scholarly focus is uniformly narrow, involving the reconstruction of historical processes on the basis of primary sources, with little comparative consideration, still less reference to historiographical models elaborated and discussed in the rich recent literature on the history and anthropology of civic ritual. The fastidiousness of the research, however, and the interest of the sites and phenomena studied recommend this book to any historian of early modern Italy.

Michel Plaisance's essay on carnival in Savonarola's Florence builds on his important earlier work on carnival in the time of the Medici. Savonarola sought to replace the Florentine carnival, which had already been appropriated by the Medici regime, with distinctly Christian ceremonies. Plaisance traces in great detail the progress and ultimate failure of Savonarola's reformed ritual, which included the celebrated "bonfires of the vanities" modeled on carnivalesque practice. He shows how Savonarola's aristocratic enemies used the practices of carnival to articulate opposition to his program, even turning the friar's execution into a parodic reference to the customary burning of a figure of carnival, which Savonarola himself had appropriated and reinterpreted. A problem is the lack of clarity about the identity of Savonarola's opponents. Discussing the climactic events, Plaisance opposes the carnival of the Savonarolans and that of the patricians, leaving unclear whether the latter included those who in the previous year had found striking ways to mock and dishonor the friar. Plaisance himself notes that while Savonarola claimed to oppose aristocratic customs and practices, in fact he attacked those of Florence in general, including his campaign against luxury goods, which must have threatened the productive and mercantile sectors of the urban economy. Plaisance's emphasis on aristocratic opposition to the theocracy, then, may indicate undue reliance on the explanations of Savonarolan chroniclers and the assertions of the friar himself.

Carnival, with its street barricades and forced contributions, offered Savonarola a model for seizing control of public space and involving the general population in intense corporate activity. Such rituals as the round dances performed in public squares symbolically invested the total space of the city. As Plaisance stresses, the private realm was also invaded in Savonarola's campaign of purification, which sought in particular to turn children into an inquisitorial fifth column. Many of the objects displayed on the bonfires were characteristic of intimate, interior spaces. On the other hand, aristocratic opposition to the friar most obviously took the form of a lavish private banquet. Savonarola's elision of public and private space was thus turned against him.

Francoise Decroisette's article on carnival in Verona includes a most original discussion of the historiography of the festival and the contextualization of different accounts of its origin. She reviews the various meanings assigned to carnival, including the medieval celebration of the commune's patron saint; the subject city's festive recognition of Venetian suzerainty; and, in the Risorgimento, homage to a national hero. Decroisette reconstructs -- though without a structural analysis -- the carnival's movement between central and peripheral sites and centers of diverse civic significance. Thus she describes, without elucidation, the paradoxically marginal position -- both in topographical and social terms -- of the shrine of the city's patron saint, the main site of carnival.

Francoise Glenisson's study of the Assumption Day festival in Siena and Gina Ianella's examination of festivals in Naples present the familiar story of the appropriation by a monarchic regime of a communal festival. Glenisson discusses the consequent ideological shift from the festival as symbol of liberty -- or at least a site appropriate for oppositional manifestations -- to an "anaesthetic" of the people. At the same time the more elaborate and expansive rituals of the earlier period became restricted -- as they still are -- to the palio on the Piazza del Campo. Glenisson shows how the rise of the comrade as crucial civic entities -- not least in the performance of the palio -- coincided with the city's loss of liberty and the decline of institutions of significance in the republican polity and factional politics.

Glenisson ignores the very interesting anthropological literature on the palio. She notes the emphatic display of luxury in Sienese festivals as late as the mid-Cinquecento, but does not bring this into relation to the evolving contemporary climate of religious reform and personal renunciation. She astutely stresses the character of the comrade palio as a popular festival, but not a "festival of the people," since it was complicit in a repressive monarchic regime. Such an argument however would only have benefited by contextualization in terms of those debates, carried out, not least by French historians, concerning the validity and usefulness of the notion of "popular culture" in early modern history.