Bringing together distinguished scholars in honor of Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, this volume presents original and innovative research on the critical and uneasy relationship between authority and spectacle in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, focusing on Spain, the Mediterranean and Latin America. Cultural scholars such as Professor Ruiz and his colleagues have challenged the notion that authority is elided with high politics, an approach that tends to be monolithic and disregards the uneven application and experience of power by elite and non-elite groups in society by highlighting the significance of spectacle. Taking such forms as ceremonies, rituals, festivals, and customs, spectacle is a medium to project and render visible power, yet it is also an ambiguous and contested setting, where participants exercise the roles of both actor and audience. Chapters in this collection consider topics such as monarchy, wealth and poverty, medieval cuisine and diet and textual and visual sources. The individual contributions in this volume collectively represent a timely re-examination of authority that brings in the insights of cultural theory, ultimately highlighting the importance of representation and projection, negotiation and ambivalence.

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.

The fourteen essays that comprise this volume concentrate on festival iconography, the visual and written languages, including ephemeral and permanent structures, costume, dramatic performance, inscriptions and published festival books that ’voiced’ the social, political and cultural messages incorporated in processional entries in the countries of early modern Europe. The volume also includes a transcript of the newly-discovered Register of Lionardo di Zanobi Bartholini, a Florentine merchant, which sets out in detail the expenses for each worker for the possesso (or Entry) of Pope Leo X to Rome in April 1513.

The King's Body offers a unique and up-to-date overview of a central theme in European history: the nature and meaning of the sacred rituals of kingship. Informed by the work of recent cultural anthropologists, Sergio Bertelli explores the cult of kingship, which pervaded the lives of hundreds of thousands of subjects, poor and rich, noble and cleric. His analysis takes in a wide spectrum, from the Vandal kings of Spain and the long-haired kings of France, to the beheaded kings of England and France, Charles I and Louis XVI. Bertelli explores the multiple meanings of the rites related to the king's body, from his birth (with the exhibition of his masculinity) to the crowning (a rebirth) to his death (a triumph and an apotheosis). We see how particular occasions such as entrances, processions, and banquets make sense only as they related directly to the king's body. Bertelli also singles out crowd-participatory aspects of sacred kingship, including the rites of violence connected with the interregnum (perceived as a suspension of the law) and the rites of expulsion for a tyrant's body, emphasizing the inversion of crowning rituals. First published in Italy in 1990, The King's Body has been revised and updated for English-speaking readers and expertly translated from the Italian by R. Burr Litchfield. Deftly argued and amply illustrated, this book is a perfect introduction to the cult of kingship in the West; at the same time, it illuminates for modern readers how strangely different the medieval and early modern world was from our own.

Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, material objects, literary texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge within cultural, political, and theological contexts. In considering new methods to examine the process of beholding violence and the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: How does the process of beholding function in different aesthetic conditions? Can we speak of such a thing as the 'period eye' or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze, or does it risk universalizing perception? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?

Medieval Europe is known for its sense of ceremony and drama. Knightings, tournaments, coronations, religious processions, and even private celebrations such as baptisms, weddings and funerals were occasions for ritual, feasting and public display. This volume takes a comprehensive look at the many types of city spectacles that entertained the masses and confirmed various messages of power in late medieval Europe. Bringing together leading scholars in history, art history, and literature, this interdisciplinary collection aims to set new standards for the study of medieval popular culture. Drawing examples from Spain, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, most of them in the 15th century, the authors explore the uses of ceremony as statements of political power, as pleas for divine intercession, and as expressions of popular culture. Their essays show us spectacles meant to confirm events such as victories, the signing of a city charter, the coronation of a king. In other circumstances, the spectacle acted as a battleground where a struggle for the control of the metaphors of power is played out between factions within cities, or between cities and kings. Yet other ceremonies called upon divine spiritual powers in the hope that their intervention might save the urban inhabitants. We see here a public cognizant of the power of symbols to express its goals and achievements, a society reaching the height of sophistication in its manipulation of popular and elite culture for grand shows.

Monarchy is an enduring institution that still makes headlines today. It has always been preoccupied with image and perception, never more so than in the period covered by this volume. The collection of papers gathered here from international scholars demonstrates that monarchical image and perception went far beyond cultural, symbolic and courtly display – although these remain important – and were, in fact, always deeply concerned with the practical expression of authority, politics and power. This collection is unique in that it covers the subject from two innovative angles: it not only addresses both kings and queens together, but also both the medieval and early modern periods. Consequently, this allows significant comparisons to be made between male and female monarchy as well as between eras. Such an approach reveals that continuity was arguably more important than change over a span of some five centuries. In removing the traditional gender and chronological barriers that tend to lead to four separate areas of studies for kings and queens in medieval and early modern history, the papers here are free to encompass male and female royal rulers ranging across Europe from the early-thirteenth to the late-seventeenth centuries to examine the image and perception of monarchy in England, Scotland, France, Burgundy, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Collectively this volume will be of interest to all those studying medieval and early modern monarchy and for those wishing to learn about the connections and differences between the two.