{"product_id":"9780195088373","title":"The Mother Town: Civic Ritual, Symbols and Experience in the Borders of Scotland","description":"\u003cp\u003eHorses 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBased 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNeville offers a provocative and illuminating study of how the ritual of Common Riding makes a dramatic statement about local strife, communal independence, and Protestantism in the towns of the Scottish Borders.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press, USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47011545514224,"sku":"9780195088373","price":125.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780195088373_p0.jpg?v=1763663219","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780195088373","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}