The Mother Town

Name: The Mother Town
Brand: Oxford University Press
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By Neville, Gwen Kennedy

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Description

Horses with riders trailed by foot processionals, silver bands and pipe bands, furling medieval banners, lavish costumes, and singers and actors--the `Common Riding' is an elaborate, little-studied ritual phenomenon of the border towns of Scotland. In this vividly written and insightful analysis, Gwen Kennedy Neville uses this civic ceremony as a window for glimpsing the process of ritual, symbol, and experience in the development of the concept of `the town' in Western culture.

Based on extensive fieldwork in the town of Selkirk, The Mother Town looks at the Common Riding in detail, uncovering pre-Reformation symbolism and pageantry--often medieval and Catholic--in a region that has been Protestant for over four hundred years. Neville shows how the ceremony is a model of the way civic ritual serves to construct a system of towns which gives rise to the modern world. Further, she contends that these civic rituals create a ceremonial setting in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity can be temporarily resolved and where past and present live side by side.

Product details

Edition:: 1
Number of Pages:: 176
Release Date:: 1994-05-12
Publication Date:: 2002-03-12
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Languages:: Original: English
ISBN10:: 0195088379
ISBN13:: 9780195088373
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:: [email protected]
Weight:: 415 g
Height:: 157 cm
Width:: 235 cm
Thickness:: 14 cm

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