A collection of fifteen essays is a fitting tribute to a historian who in recent decades has been a major influence on historical writing about early modern Europe. Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton,1981) remains an important exploration of the ritual behavior, urban topography, and origin legends that shape a community’s sense of itself. At a time when the study of ritual by historians was just taking root (prompted in large part by Davis), Muir’s book offered a refined model that showed how it could be done.1
Whereas in a contemporary book about Florence, equally impressive, Trexler had examined changing ritual structures as indicative of political change, Muir found in sixteenth-century Venice an intensification of the city’s processions, officeholding rituals, and religious devotions that had the hegemonic effect of reinforcing social and political continuity.2 Muir’s second book, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the...