Abstract
Reviewed by: Margit Thøfner, Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK
This is the third anthology in a new series entitled European Festival Studies, 1450–1700, published in partnership with the Society for Festivals Research. On balance it is a useful and wide-ranging contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on early modern public ceremony. Yet it is rather uneven.
The problem largely stems from the editorial framing. Mulryne states in his acknowledgements that the ‘Iconography of Power’ has been ‘no more than marginally adapted as the title of this volume’ (vii). Even so, much of his introduction is given over to defining this unwieldy term, which quickly morphs into the mealy-mouthed ‘language of iconography’ (vii). As this suggests, Mulryne sees ceremonial entries as texts to be deciphered rather than as performances, with all the messiness that this entails. Moreover, he understands entries as essentially instrumental, serving the social and political elites of early modern Europe. This is a rather reductive view, given the collaborative as well as ludic, performative and even bibulous aspects of these admittedly enormously complex events. As a whole, this anthology would have been better served by a clear definition of what is meant by ‘ceremonial entry’, followed by some suggestions about appropriate methodology.
That said, there are some exemplary essays, carefully rooted the available sources and with a fine sense of how ceremonial entries worked in practice. These include Lucinda H. S. Dean’s thoughtful and meticulously researched account of queens’ entries in Scotland and Margaret M. McGowan’s magisterial analysis of Henri IV’s entry into Rouen. There is also Lucia Nuti’s interesting study of how successive papal ‘possessi’ into Rome triggered reshaping of the urban fabric; there is also Anna Maria Testaverde’s intelligent evaluation of how Florentine public ritual was reworked across time to serve shifting political needs. Although it is not strictly about entry ceremonial, there is also Sara Trevisan’s excellent discussion of the motif of the Golden Fleece in Lord Mayors’ shows held in London. At the end comes a wide-ranging yet coherent overview of recent research on Renaissance festivals in German by Andrea Sommer-Mathis. She concludes with some helpful suggestions about current methodology, on which could have been built a more effective editorial framework. Thus it is a pity that her work is appended as if an afterthought.
These seven essays set a high standard which some of the other contributors do not quite reach. Iain Fenlon’s discussion of music in ‘the Italian Renaissance Entry’ draws a thoughtful contrast between public and courtly music-making during entry ceremonial. Disappointingly, his title belies a focus on Florence only – rather odd given that Milan, Venice, Mantua and Rome were also important musical centres. Jacek Zukowski’s essay on ‘Ephemeral Architecture in the Service of Vladislaus IV Vasa’ comes with an ambitious attempt to explain the conceptual underpinnings of royal entries but the argument does not quite coalesce. There is a similar problem with Veronica Sandbichler’s contribution on Habsburg ceremonial. It gets off to a promising start by drawing on Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, but these early insights are not carried efficiently into the rest of the argument.
Then there are four essays simply seeking to do too much; this is where the lack of firm editorial framing is most keenly felt. Three are on France: Richard Cooper’s account of representations of war in sundry entries, Linda Brigg’s tracing of ‘Perceptions of Royal Power’ as articulated in the entries made by Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s discussion of entries made by Louis XIII. The fourth is Julia de la Torre Fazio’s essay on the entries held for Elizabeth of Valois as she became Queen of Spain. To a greater or lesser extent, these essays tend to flatten the marked cultural and political distinctions between the various cities who hosted the entries.
Finally, there is one essay of considerable intellectual audacity: Margaret Shewring’s discussion of waterborne entries into London. At face value, her evidential basis is rather patchy. On the other hand, she gives a striking evocation of the pageant held on the Thames in 2012 for Queen Elizabeth II. Never mind that this is out of the temporal remit given for Ashgate’s new series or that it is not really a ceremonial entry. In the volume as a whole, Shewring’s is by far the most effective discussion of the many and often improvised roles played by the audience during public ceremonial. She shows clearly that such festivities are not texts but contingent and collaborative events, where the formal performance is only one of many. What matters is the event itself, especially the sheer scale of collaboration. As this shows, to understand ceremonial entries as the ‘iconography of power’ is to bind them into an ill-fitting interpretative straitjacket.