Political Culture and the Rhetoric of Queenship

Abstract

Despite the similarities carried by consort coronations, ways of celebrating royal festivals that accompanied them were strongly infused with regional flavours. Festivals in France included pageants and civic processions with the active participation of the city council, but in Poland, pageants were substituted with speeches and wedding poetry linked to the developing Sarmatian theatre. This chapter seeks to make sense of this difference by placing the royal wedding and the consort’s coronation in the context of the rise of French and Polish political cultures motivated by different patterns of urbanisation and distinctive political systems to suggest that these phenomena were congruent with the forms taken by royal festivals. Even if French and Polish forms of expression were different, the canon of rhetoric and representation of queenship in the cultural reaction to royal weddings points to the connections within European royal culture, as shown by the analysis of pageants, speeches, wedding poetry, and parliamentary speeches and pamphlets.