Chapter 3 turns to the medieval Venetian ritual of the Festa delle Marie, a multiday celebration that began on the eve of the Feast of Saint Mark’s Translation (31 January) and ended on the Feast of the Purification (2 February). The feast centered around twelve wooden effigies of the Virgin Mary, each sumptuously dressed, adorned with gemstones and pearls, and crowned with a golden headpiece. From around 1267 until 1379, when the feast was abolished, the state threw all its financial backing behind a new facet of the celebration: a procession made on 31 January to the church of Santa Maria Formosa, where a sung Annunciation exchange, unique within the medieval dramatic corpus, was performed. This chapter provides the first in-depth musical study of this unique Annunciation drama and its sung ceremonial context. Using previously lost sources, I reconstruct the dialogue’s melodies, all based on the antiphonal repertory of San Marco, and show how this preexisting repertory was refashioned into a version of the Annunciation story that helped aligned the Festa delle Marie celebration with the interests of the state and its empire. Central to this chapter is a concern with the ways song worked in tandem with the plastic arts (effigies, thrones, costumes) to create the ceremony’s special representational effects.

Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

Chapter 17, “Entertainment,” considers Constantinople as a nexus of social space, civic ceremony, commercial entertainment, and endless diversion where streets and plazas were regularly taken over by processions, churches and monasteries were filled with clergy and worshipers, and competitive games and performances took place in the open-air hippodrome.

This chapter analyzes Livy’s narrative of the events of 207 BCE, when Roman officials addressed a pressing religious and military crisis by commissioning an innovative musical event – a Greek-style maiden procession with a hymn composed by Rome’s first known poet, Livius Andronicus. Livy’s account asks us to confront the question of how Roman musical and ritual traditions were created and remembered, by inviting the reader to witness a tradition in the very process of being invented. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on how the hymn’s ritual actors created a collective memory of its success and incorporated it into the religious traditions of Rome. On the other, Livy refuses to record the hymn himself on the basis of its primitive aesthetics, with the paradoxical result that a significant document in the history of Roman music is simultaneously remembered and forgotten. Self-consciously aware of ritual song and narrative history as differently constituted repositories of collective memory, I propose, Livy draws attention to the processes by which his account of Rome’s early song culture shapes his reader’s musical memory.

In the parodos of Aristophanes’ Frogs, the entrance of the mystic chorus is preceded by its chant of Ἴακχ’ ὦ Ἴακχε, | Ἴακχ’ ὦ Ἴακχε (316–17), the same cry that was traditionally voiced in the Iacchus procession from Athens to Eleusis during the Great Mysteries. It is the aim of this contribution to peel back the emotional and cognitive layers of what may have been the first audience’s response to this religiously, politically, and historically significant sound. What did the theatrical mimesis of this ritual vocalization, which for several years prior to the play’s production in 405 BCE had been “muted” due to the Spartan occupation of Attica, make the Athenian audience think, feel, and remember? To answer this question, philological and historical methods of inquiry native to classical studies as well as cross-cultural perspectives drawn from sound, religious, and memory studies are employed. A central argument is that Aristophanes’ evocation of the Iacchus cry gives sonic expression to the cultural and political nostalgia and longing that inform Frogs, in particular, nostalgia for the Athenian-led victory over the Persians at Salamis.

This chapter reconstructs how temple visitors engaged with idols, and the daily lives of idols. Some Roman reliefs represent encounters with statues in terms of epiphanies, and accounts of personal interactions with idols suggest that proximity to the idol itself was desirable. Varro, Ovid, and other writers describe interactions such as anointing, adorning, cleaning, bathing, and feeding idols, suggesting they had the same needs and pleasures of a human body. The veracity of these accounts, too often dismissed by historians of ancient religion, are confirmed by finds on the floor of a temple at Thun-Allmendingen. Idols could also accept gifts, such as coins, or pieces of jewelry to add to their wardrobes, and worshipers placed these offerings as close as possible to the idol. Sometimes, idols, or representative cult images, left their temples in processions, participating in public events. After examining the concept of darshan in contemporary India, it is suggested that Roman interactions with idols are understandable if the idol was regarded as an elite member of local society, endowed with agency, who participated in the life of the community. Idols made the gods accessible by allowing worshipers to interact with them in a human way.

Analyzes how black confraternities created communities for slave and free Africans, their celebrations, and the racism they faced. It also talks about devotion to black saints in white communities