The Joyous Entry of Albert and Isabella in Lille: History, Conquest and the Making of Belgium

Abstract

This article investigates the planned festivities for the Joyous Entry of Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella Eugenia, joint sovereigns of the Low Countries since 1598, when they entered their city of Lille in 1600. In particular, this article focuses on the tableaux vivants and triumphal arches created by city authorities to commemorate the long history of collaboration between the counts of Flanders and the urban corporation. Accounts of these arches and tableaux vivants have survived only in two chronicles and an intriguing set of contemporary images. These posed scenes evoked newer forms of historical writing popular in the early modern period – urban, chorographical, and cosmographical – that did the work of renewing bonds of sovereign to people in the midst of the Dutch Revolt. They also produced a version of history that effectively silenced the problematic recent past, and placed the city of Lille firmly within the larger empire of its Habsburg sovereigns.