{"product_id":"gwen-kennedy-neville-the-mother-town-9780195088373","title":"The Mother Town","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.\n\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\n 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.","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53767920386390,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0925\/5829\/5382\/files\/product_image_9780195088373_1.jpg?v=1781803903","url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/gwen-kennedy-neville-the-mother-town-9780195088373","provider":"momoxbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}