Herrschertreffen des Spatmittelalters: Formen--Rituale--Wirkungen

Abstract

How the coming-together of medieval kings was managed is a question of self-evident interest. Staging the personal encounters of crowned and anointed rulers, each laying claim to ambitious, though not always fully defined or generally accepted, forms of supremacy, raised delicate problems. Partly in recognition of these, there had developed in Latin Europe by the late middle ages an elaborate, largely (though not wholly) internationally-common repertoire of performance intended to cover such occasions. The character and consequences of these meetings, and the role of ritual in making them what they were, are the themes of Gerald Schwedler's ambitious and learned book. It is a book which draws authority from the breadth of its comparative vision, encompassing most of the monarchical realms of Latin Europe and supported by enviable erudition in the sources and in a vast, multi-lingual scholarly literature. Coverage concentrates on the period 1270 to 1440, over the course of which Schwedler identifies more than two hundred actual and projected encounters, though there are also periodic glances forward to the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.