Food, Festival and Religion: Materiality and Place in Italy [Paperback]

Food, Festival and Religionexplores how communities in northern Italy find a restorative sense of place through foodways, costuming and other forms of materiality. Festivals examined by the author vary geographically from the northern rural corners of Italy to the fashionable heart of urban Milan. The origins of these lived religious events range from Christian to vernacular Italian witchcraft and contemporary Paganism, which is rapidly growing in Italy.

Francesca Ciancimino Howell demonstrates that during ritualized occasions the sacred is located within the mundane. She argues that communal feasting, pilgrimage, rituals and costumed events can represent forms of lived religious materiality. Building on the work of scholars including Foucault, Grimes and Ingold, Howell offers a theoretical Scale of Engagement which further tests the interfaces between and among the materialities of place, food, ritual and festivals and provides a widely-applicable model for analyzing grassroots events and community initiatives.

Through extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork data, this book demonstrates that popular Italian festivals can be ritualized, liminal spaces, contributing greatly to the fields of religious, performance and ritual studies.

Provides rich ethnographic detail on some of Italy's fascinating community festivals and gatherings. Howell's scale of engagement may provide other researchers with a tool on which to build a comparative body of information on such events, not only in other regions of Italy but in other parts of the world. I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it for courses in ritual and religion as well as to the more general reader. Nova Religio

I believe this work has the potential to be something major. In my opinion and from my experience in the overall field, this blCÓ