Writing royal entries in early modern Europe

Abstract

Writing royal entries Europe, edited by Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Jean Andrews and Marie-France Wagner, Tumhout, Brepols, 2013, xviii + 420 pp., euro115.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-2-503-53602-6This collection of essays, edited by a specialist French seventeenth-century festivals, makes an important contribution the discussion of the European textual genre of the festival account. As the title makes clear, the focus is on one type of festival, the royal or princely entry. However, the aim is not discuss the entries themselves but the written and visual form which they were recorded for posterity. The editors have assembled an impressive group of contributors. As well as such stalwarts of festival research the UK as Margaret McGowan, Canova-Green herself, Richard Cooper, J. R. Mulryne and Sara Smart, they include younger UK researchers such as Alexander Samson and Elizabeth Goldring and no fewer than five Canadian colleagues. As might be expected given the editors, the book leans heavily towards France. Of the 20 chapters, 12 are concerned with French texts and 8 are actually written French. Of the remaining eight chapters, Italian and English entries are discussed two chapters each, while one chapter is devoted each of Spain, Mexico, Flanders and Brandenburg-Prussia. The early modern of the title is interpreted as meaning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with only two chapters making it as far as 1701.We learn from the introduction that the collection is divided into four sections, viz. the varied status of the printed record; entries as propaganda; the historical authenticity of festival books; and the transformation of entry texts contemporary literature and culture. These sections are not indicated the table of contents or the itself. This is a pity, as they highlight the questions the book is posing and help the see connections between different contributions. The aim of the book is to investigate the diverse status of the entry text (xi). According Canova-Green, such a has main functions: commemoration, information, and glorification (xiii). I would add two others: interpretation and reflection, the latter be found the long moral and philosophical disquisitions sometimes appended the actual festival account.The individual chapters contain many fascinating insights. Some of them demonstrate yet again that festival accounts do not necessarily inform the about what happened on the day but rather what should have happened. Marie-France Wagner, for instance, discusses the account by Antoine de Laval of the triumphal arch he devised for the entry of Henri IV into Moulins 1595. The account was written beforehand and the actual events did not tally with the account, because the arch was not ready time and the entry had be cut short by the king's premature departure. Margaret McGowan, an excellent piece, shows how the historian Pierre Matthieu, three festival books dating 1595, 1598 and 1600, goes out of his way detail what was missing from the festivals he is describing and even illustrates what was not there at all. As McGowan writes, his accounts are remarkable for describing the absence of various ephemeral structures in such detail that their presence is made tangible the reader (251). …