The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642 is the first study to focus on the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the travels and public profile of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king's progresses and Caroline progress entertainments than currently exists, this volumes throws fresh light on the question of Charles I's accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the political conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles's overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the history opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practiced by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king's accessibility further through case studies of Charles's three 'great' progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles's spectacular royal entry to the city on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his subjects or able to deploy the propaganda power of public display as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.

In examining the relationship between the royal monasteries in tenth- and eleventh-century Germany and the German monarchs, this book assimilates a great deal of European scholarship on a central problem - that of the realities and structures of power. It focuses on the practical aspects of governing without a capital and while constantly in motion, and on the payments and services which monasteries provided to the king and which in turn supported the king's travel economically and politically. Royal-monastic relations are investigated in the context of the 'itinerant kingship' of the period to determine how this relationship functioned in practice. It emerges that German rulers did in fact make much greater use of their royal monasteries than has hitherto been recognised.