Civic Pageantry Research Articles

Fame, Civic Pageantry, and the Standard in Cheapside

Fame, Civic Pageantry, and the Standard in Cheapside

Poor commons and kings’ propines: food and status in later medieval Aberdeen

ABSTRACT Assuring the supply of food and drink in the medieval Scottish town, and safeguarding the town’s reputation in relation to this, were at the heart of the burgh government’s duties. Some foods were specially associated with the poor; conversely, provision and consumption of high-status comestibles was at the core of guild ceremonial, civic pageantry and celebration, and hospitality offered to important visitors. There was a recognised ranking of crafts engaged in food and drink production, and those who failed to meet expectations were threatened with loss of equipment or status – although burgh officers risked their own reputation when they failed to carry out the prescribed penalties. Employers were expected to give meals to their servants and townspeople had a mutual responsibility to provide sustenance for those engaged in public service. Status and reputation, individual and collective, and social relationships, depended on the successful provision of food and drink.

The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran

Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Leslie Woodcock Tentler The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire. By Katherine D. Moran. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 330. $48.95. ISBN: 9781501748813.) Jacques Marquette, a seventeenth-century Jesuit, loomed incongruously large in my non-Catholic childhood. I learned to swim at Pere Marquette beach on the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan; the priest-explorer also featured prominently in what passed for history instruction at my Grand Rapids public school. I remember the pride those lessons engendered—pride that one of our own, geographically speaking, could be claimed as an American Founding Father; pride too in Marquette’s French origins, redolent to my childhood self of sophistication and glamor. But although I was certainly aware that Marquette was a Catholic, I never wondered at his being so lionized in what was then a stronghold of Dutch Reformed Protestantism. That surfaced as a puzzle only many years later. Given my personal history, I was primed to appreciate Katherine Moran’s The Imperial Church, the first section of which centers on the secular cult of Jacques Marquette. The commemorative culture surrounding Marquette, peculiar to the upper Midwest, emerged in the 1870s and resulted by the early twentieth century in a plethora of statues and place names, along with the occasional civic pageant, [End Page 611] honoring the hitherto obscure Jesuit. Marquette was claimed by that commemorative culture as a co-founder of the American nation, “naturalizing, after the fact, the imperial nation’s expansion into formerly French and Native American territory” (p. 18). Pride in their booming region was a powerful motivator for the priest’s admirers, many of whom were Protestants. For some he also served, however incongruously, to legitimize the region’s explosive industrial growth, even as the priest’s undoubted anti-materialism spoke to the need for a less rapacious mode of industrial relations. Many such advocates of a more paternalistic capitalism also saw in Marquette, who was famously open to the region’s Indian cultures, a powerful endorsement of the nation’s assimilative capacities. But notwithstanding the priest’s own example, it was assimilation to a white Christian norm that his admirers had in mind. Moran turns next to Junípero Serra, the eighteenth century Franciscan founder of California’s Indian missions, who—like Jacques Marquette—was reimagined as a Founding Father and a bearer of white Christian civilization. Serra’s secular cult, underway by the 1880s and largely confined to California, was more vigorously commercial than that of Marquette: many of its mostly-Protestant promoters hoped to stimulate tourism and the state’s nascent hospitality industry. The cult had its mildly progressive side, presenting Serra as a model paternalistic employer—unlike the itinerant Marquette, Serra presided over a chain of missions where Indian neophytes lived and worked—and embracing an assimilationist ideal that rejected anti-Catholicism. Some of Serra’s admirers condemned the violence that early Anglo arrivals in California had wreaked on what remained of the local Indian population. But as in the case of Marquette, the assimilationist ideal that Serra allegedly embodied made no room for those unwilling or unable to conform to a white, Christian norm—or indeed for those who would challenge the racialized hierarchy of California’s emerging agro-industrial economy. The third and final section of Moran’s book, which deals with American occupation of the Philippines, presents a more complicated narrative, impossible to summarize here. It too involves Catholic priests, both Spanish and American, and serves to “naturalize” American expansion, now in an overseas mode, and affirm a vision of the nation as heir to an earlier wave of mostly Catholic imperial “civilizers.” Like the rest of this formidably intelligent book, these chapters are deftly argued and grounded in thorough research. But in this section especially, one would like to learn more about how this logic—the American war in the Philippines, not wholly popular back home, was unfolding in the present rather than the distant past—was received by a diverse national audience. This is less a criticism, however, than a tribute to Moran’s fine...

“Of Robyn-hood and of His Traine": Competition, Combat, and Experimentation in Early Modern Robin Hood Drama

This article asks what cultural work is done by different types of Robin Hood performance in early modern England, examining how specific instances of Robin Hood plays and games differ from each other in form, function, and meaning. It examines dramatic and festal activities during the late medieval and early modern period, focusing approximately on the years 1500-1625. A varied corpus of evidence exists illustrating the volume and diversity of Robin Hood activities, ranging from largely unscripted contests and processional activities undertaken at a parish level; to brief, semi-improvisational dramas probably acted by amateur participants; to civic pageants and shows; to the flourishing of Robin Hood plays on the commercial stage in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Given the frequency with which Robin Hood activities are attested and discussed in this period, this article asks precisely what early moderns found useful or appealing about the legend, and what this reveals about how customary performance functioned more generally. It starts by investigating the recurring evidence of combat and improvisation in extant records of parochial Robin Hood activities, before setting these alongside Robert Greene’s George a Greene, Pinner of Wakefield (c. 1587-1593), arguing that this play deliberately adapts and engages with the festive tradition as much as with the Robin Hood stories circulating ballad form. Finally, the article turns to Star Chamber records for occasions where Robin Hood games became entangled with local conflicts, asking what these incidents reveal about the customs more broadly. Throughout the article, Robin Hood games are approached, not as monolithic or static in meaning, but as multistranded and adaptable, shaped by and selected for the contexts in which they appear.

Moving London: Pageantry and Performance in the Early Modern City

Despite a legacy of critical misapprehension, the study of early modern civic pageantry reveals a vital and wide-ranging performance culture that animated the city and its inhabitants. Investigation of the place of pageantry in the early modern imagination illustrates the potent accessibility of the forms it encompassed. Placing the diverse experiences and competences of pageant consumers, from the urban spectator in the crowd to the readers of printed pageant books, alongside the skilled work of the cast of collaborators involved in pageant design and performance, illustrates the multi-layered fabric of pageant culture in early modern London as well as the possibilities for critical engagement exemplified by the contributors to this special issue.

Rich Ornaments and Delightful Engines: The Poetics of Failed Festivity and Figural Automation in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

The present study focuses on the poetics of failed festivity in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, tracing analogies between early modern festival culture, in particular the Joyous Entry of the Renaissance prince into the city, and the machinery of the play, which is set in motion by Titus. The principal element of this machinery is the figure of Lavinia, who can be seen as the inverted version of such wonders of occa- sional architecture and civic pageantry as the automaton, the breathing sculpture and the automatic waterwork. One of the major problems explored is the confrontation of reality and fiction, or human flesh and art, in the manifestly echoic universe of the play, where the objectified automaton-like figure responds to the actions of its animators with its own stirring.

A Chivalric Show of Civic Virtue: The Society of Prince Arthur’s Archers

Abstract This article explores civic pageantry’s role in detaching King Arthur and aspects of the Arthurian world from the narratives of the medieval tradition by examining the Society of Prince Arthur’s show, a popular event hosted by an archery fraternity in late sixteenth-century London. The processional nature of the Society’s annual show, the account of the Society provided by Richard Mulcaster, and readers’ annotations in copies of Richard Robinson’s The Ancient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable of Prince Arthure and his knightly armory of the Round Table (1583) reveal the importance of performance in the early modern reimagining of Arthur and his knights as symbols of civic virtue. The Society’s adaptations of Arthurian characters and the chivalry of the Round Table thus influence both satirical responses to chivalric literature in the period and Edmund Spenser’s presentation of the Arthurian legend in The Faerie Queene (1590).

Civic Pageantry in Early Modern London

Book reviews:
 Finlayson, J. Caitlin and Amrita Sen, eds. Civic Performance. Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London. Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2020. xiv + 254 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-22839-9. Hb. £96.

Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre ed. by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek

Reviewed by: Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre ed. by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek William N. West TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS IN EARLY MODERN THEATRE. Edited by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 320. Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre is one of the rare edited collections of essays that offers more than the sum of its parts. Severally, its chapters address a range of performance traditions in early modern Europe, some infrequently studied. Collectively, they demonstrate the variety of early modern performances and the lively interchange among traditions that made them possible. Most significantly, as brilliantly introduced and organized by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek, Transnational Connections articulates a sustained orientation towards performance in the early modern period and a powerful theory of a distinctive early modern strain of performance, native to no single place, inherently mobile, growing up as it passed among the nodal points of multiple communities—cities, regions, and contact zones; shared and diverging languages, identities, and creeds; as local as individual objects or events and as broad as continents and centuries. The result is a new and "explicit methodological approach" (7) to early modern performances that maps changes and differences across expanses of time, space, and culture. Transnational Connections plots early modern performance's decisive transgressiveness, in the literal sense of stepping across boundaries. The transnationality the title promises is not merely circulatory, moving from one fixed point to another—Italian performance styles in the Spanish peninsula, or English ones in German-speaking central Europe—but supranational. These diverse kinds of performances were born on the road. By being at home nowhere, or, in the case of performance styles that emphasized their foreignness, simply elsewhere, they seemed able to find a welcome everywhere. While the central concern of Transnational Connections is performances that developed outside other forms of community, its individual chapters show that any attempt to map this category must begin from the seemingly disparate particulars of performances, themselves only visible now in material remains—letters, scripts, implied gestures, in one memorable instance a shoe—that require effort and imagination to revive. Many chapters explore what Louise Clubb calls theatergrams, recurring scenes, situations, characters, gestures, and even gags, that appear across a spectrum of performances in early modern Europe, crossing every generic, linguistic, and class barrier. In the first chapter, "If the shoe fits, or the truth in pinking," for instance, Natasha Korda takes a shoe found in the excavation of The Rose Playhouse as "a point of convergence where the material, textual, theoretical and theatrical worlds meet" (29), then models how this quotidian object made precious by its time and place summons an inclusive past that runs through the representations of plays, the realities of continental traffic in goods and persons, and the peculiar substantial intimacy of the foot. This contextualization, Korda argues, "need not take the form of a utilitarian pairing" (37) in which details are reduced to expressions of the contexts within which they are nested. Korda's framing of the shoe suggests the methodological commitment to detail that all the chapters share. Further chapters of Transnational Connections reveal more supervenient qualities of performance arts over their materiality: what they are is enlivened by how they have entered into different worlds and what they uniquely carry with them. Performance may be particular among cultural productions for its insistence on showing off its borrowings, as Katritzky and Drábek argue: "Theatrum mundi is here understood not only as metaphor but even more as literal display" (7). They propose that we learn to reposition this aspect of early modern performance as a "cultural type" (17), a social, [End Page 435] aesthetic category rather than a temporal one. Although they do not develop this suggestion, it might distinguish this kind of early modern inter-theatre from more rooted, local forms like civic pageants and festive performances staged by a community for itself rather than by one, perhaps fleeting and temporary, perhaps more permanent but mobile, community for another. Drábek's chapter, "'Why, sir, are there other heauens in other countries?': The English Comedy as a transnational style," considers what was called "English comedy...

‘A supplicacion for the Havon’: Sandwich, Civic Pageantry, and Queen Elizabeth i’s Visit of 1573

Though typically seen as occasions of royal performance, Elizabethan progresses were also opportunities for the cities visited by the English queen to fashion and project images of themselves to the reigning monarch. Unlike those created by Bristol (1574) and Norwich (1578), Sandwich’s 1573 entertainments feature few formal pageant devices and therefore appear to be much less elaborate. Nonetheless, the citizens of Sandwich did indeed “speak” to their queen over the course of her three-day visit, though they relied primarily on spatial and topographical performance. Everywhere Elizabeth went and everything she saw—the gate through which she entered, her route through the town, the location of her lodgings, the buildings and landmarks that she was shown—were part of a calculated attempt to assert Sandwich’s historical importance and continuing vitality. These messages sought both to refashion reality (Sandwich was in economic decline) and to shrewdly lay the groundwork for the town’s formal request for royal aid. This paper looks closely at sixteenth-century Sandwich’s layout, topography, buildings, and town records to provide a “close reading” of Elizabeth’s visit.

‘Euer Obedient in His Studies’: Thomas Middleton and the City, 1620–1622

Thomas Middleton’s career in civic pageantry commenced at the very start of the seventeenth century, and it was consolidated in 1620 when he was appointed Chronologer of the City of London. Although the City Chronologer appointment was a token of the esteem in which Middleton was held in civic circles, these were troubled times for the nation at large as well as for the City that offered Middleton both work and kudos. His new role came during a run of bad luck for the City and his initial commissions were written during a period of political and economic crisis. This article explores the ways in which Middleton negotiated some complex civic appointments and transitions in the early 1620s, focusing on his composite work Honorable Entertainments compos’de for the Seruice of this Noble Cittie and his mayoral Shows for 1621 and 1622.

"Their labour doth returne rich golden gaine": Fishmongers' Pageants and the Fisherman's Labor in Early Modern London

Audiences for early modern English plays inhabited an island kingdom. Therefore the drama's preoccupation with the sea comes as no surprise. Maritime settings abound in comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Even the most ostensibly land-bound genres, such as city comedy, incorporate the ocean in ways that signal its importance to the nation's identity and, more specifically, its economy. (1) Indeed, A. F. Falconer speculates that the period's most famous playwright, Shakespeare, spent time at sea himself--so diverse and plentiful are the maritime references in Shakespeare's canon. (2) The ocean also figures prominently in the London Lord Mayors' shows, civic pageants staged to commend one citizen's ascendancy to the City's highest office. Oceanic images typically play an allegorical or a mythological role in these productions. The shows regularly incorporate of state metaphors into visions of civic governance. (3) Neptune makes occasional appearances to convey his mightiness, only then to submit to the new mayor's superior virtues. (4) Pageants sometimes call for the mayor to arrive by barge, a custom that recruits the Thames into the shows' penchant for waterworks. (5) Such imaginative features serve the general purpose of providing counsel for the incoming mayor and inspiring him to cultivate the qualities needed to see the City through the perilous waters of inevitable change. The successful mayor, these productions suggest, will distinguish himself as an upright, judicious, and knowledgeable captain of his proverbial ship and its charges. (6) The Lord Mayors' shows represent the mayor's leadership as critical to the capital's--and by extension the nation's--social, economic, and political health. But London's livery companies--those ancient institutions that commissioned the shows and, indeed, conferred the prestige of urban citizenship in the first place--also viewed themselves as critical to those ends. Scholars have characterized the Lord Mayors' shows as promoting among various civic interests. (7) However, these perspectives tend to leave underexplored the reality of competition among London's industries and, by extension, the ways in which guilds' specific interests registered in the pageants they commissioned. (8) This paper complicates the unity aesthetic by analyzing representations of English fishing in pageants commissioned by the Fishmongers' Company. I will home in on the three early modern shows surviving in print (9)--Thomas Nelson's The Device of the Pageant: Set forth by the Worshipfull Companie of the Fishmongers (1590), Anthony Munday's Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing: Or, Honour of Fishmongers (1616), and Elkanah Settle's The Triumphs of London (1700)--to analyze how one company used the civic pageant to argue for its industry's continued relevance in an economy increasingly dependent on the long-distance trade of luxury goods, goods different in value and kind from those yielded by the humble fishermen who supplied the Company. I argue that these productions affirm fishing, and sea labor in general, in a way that anticipates the maritime foundation of the British Empire and argues for the Fishmongers' importance within that economic scheme. I will suggest further that the London guilds, although sometimes viewed as fossilized in nostalgia, (10) in fact were highly responsive to change and, more specifically, attuned to the representational possibilities of the pageant for imagining a specific industry's role in a prosperous national future. The Fishmongers' wealth and position derived in part from their ability--or, more precisely, the ability of the fishermen with whom they worked--to extract fish from the surrounding waters. Significantly, the English fisherman's skill in sailing and navigation would one day become central to the success of the British Empire, a project that David Armitage characterizes as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free. (11) Armitage roots these four interrelated ideals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when figures such as John Dee, Richard Hakluyt, and Thomas Mun began to conceive of the oceans as highways for the kinds of large-scale trade and colonization that would ensure Britain's prosperity for centuries to come. …

Women's “Positive Patriotic Duty” to Participate: The Practice of Female Citizenship in Oregon and the Expanding Surveillance State during the First World War and its Aftermath

Kimberly Jensen explores the practice of visible female citizenship in America during and after the First World War. During that time, thousands of women in Oregon participated in “visible civic pageantry” associated with national Liberty Loan drives and “an emerging surveillance state that included new strategies for scrutiny.” Jensen documents local and national forces “on women to conform to wartime norms,” and highlights ways in which women resisted wartime surveillance that challenged their civil liberties.

‘A nation of town criers’: civic publicity and historical pageantry in inter-war Britain

ABSTRACTHistorical pageantry emerged in 1905 as the brainchild of the theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker. Large casts of volunteers re-enacted successive scenes of local history, as crowds of thousands watched on, in large outdoor arenas. As the press put it, Britain had caught ‘pageant fever’. Towards the end of the 1920s, there was another outburst of historical pageantry. Yet, in contrast to the Edwardian period, when pageants took place in small towns, this revival was particularly vibrant in large industrial towns and cities. This article traces the popularity of urban pageantry to an inter-war ‘civic publicity’ movement. In doing so, it reassesses questions of local cultural decline; the role of local government; and the relationship of civic responsibility to popular theatre.

Afterlives: Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday

In 1613, Thomas Middleton produced a civic pageant, The Manner of His Lordship’s Entertainment , to commemorate the completion of the New River project that brought fresh water to London. In 1618, Anthony Munday, in his revision of John Stow’s Survey of London , included most of Middleton’s pageant text in the history. Thereby, Munday granted Middleton an unexpected “afterlife.” This unprecedented inclusion of a minor civic pageant into a historical text raises several important questions, such as why Munday decided to do this and why it seems to have been an afterthought, given its curious placement in the Survey . A number of later historians also reproduce Munday’s account of the 1613 pageant but without acknowledging their source. They thereby grant an afterlife to Munday. Just as Munday never names Middleton as the pageant’s author, so these later writers do not name Munday. This “forgetting” underscores a paradox of historical writing: namely, as writers make history, they also erase history. Thus, the 1618 Survey and all of its subsequent variations perpetuate in varying degrees an “afterlife” for Middleton and Munday, but an “afterlife” tinged with loss and death.

‘To serve us in that behalf when our pleasure is to call for them’: performing boys in Renaissance England

This essay argues for the recognition of a culture of child performance that flourished throughout Renaissance England, and foregrounds the social contexts from which the quasi‐professional boy player emerged at the end of the sixteenth century. Examining the academic and religious provenance of child acting in the period and the ubiquity of boys as performers in numerous semi‐dramatic royal and civic pageants, this article reveals that the boy's role in Renaissance theatre begins with the non‐professional performative culture to which he is integral, and stretches far beyond his presence as the transvestite boy‐heroine on an all‐male stage.The examination of the boy's theatrical roles is further contextualized in relation to moralistic, prescriptive literature on the family, which conceptualizes the child as the property of his parents. The discussion emphasizes the cultural perceptions of subordination, economic import and ownership tied in with child development, in order to make visible the link between the child's role in the theatre and his status in the family. The Renaissance boy actor served as a commodified entity which typified a social and economic structure in which children in general played a vital part.

‘Splendid Display; Pompous Spectacle’: historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain

This article examines the organisation, nature and content of historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four pageants at St Albans, Hertfordshire – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – it considers the selection of historical episodes that were depicted, the role that pageants played in the life of the community, and the ways in which the relationship between past and present was presented. Pageants functioned as both education and entertainment, and were significant events in the creation of the public image of the city, although they could also provoke local controversy and dissent. They promoted a strongly local sense of identity, and civic pride was perhaps even more important to the post-war pageants than to those staged in the Edwardian period, as communities such as St Albans negotiated a period of rapid development and change in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the large-scale civic pageant that characterised the first half of the twentieth century rapidly declined in the late 1950s and early 1960s, proving less adaptable in the context of the cultural upheavals of the period. Subsequent pageants were on a much smaller scale than those that were staged before the mid-1950s, and adopted a different attitude to the national and local past.

Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and InstitutionsPoetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions. Edward Holberton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi+249.

<i>Edward Holberton</i>, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions<i>Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions</i>. Edward Holberton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi+249.

Rites of Deliverance and Disenchantment: The Marriage Celebrations for Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, 1661–62

The lavish water pageantry on the Thames staged by the City of London on 23 August 1662 to welcome Charles II and his new Portuguese Queen, Catherine of Braganza, to Whitehall appears to be a triumph of the politics of display. Yet the splendour of the occasion could not mask the growing distance between the King and his subjects. Charles's indifference to staging public celebrations for his marriage in order to elicit popular support, no less than his inability to direct the outcome of pressing political and religious struggles, reveals the limitations of his kingship even at this early stage of his reign. Only two years had passed since his restoration and just a year since his coronation. For both occasions he spared no effort or expense to display himself to his subjects through an elaborate royal entry and, at the coronation, a scripted entertainment in which he played a principal role through the power of his presence. The royal marriage, intended politically to advance what Kevin Sharpe calls 'the process of resettling the kingdom'1 failed to settle much of anything even in the short term. Charles's reluctance to perform the public rituals of monarchy for his marriage deprived him of a signal opportunity to increase bonds of mutual loyalty and affection between him and his people. The haphazard royal celebrations were a diminution of majesty and set the stage for the lack of royal focus in the civic water pageantry. Both the King's minimal interaction with the public and the City companies' emphasis on their own magnificence at the expense of the royal couple are subtle yet tangible signs of growing dissatisfaction with Charles's rule.Charles did not abandon his commitment to royal ceremonial. Far from it - he was, as Anna Keay argues, firmly committed to the Earl of Newcastle's counsel that ritual 'was the substance of power'.2 But after 1662 he withdrew from public rituals of monarchy and focused on those at the court and in other political and cultural space where he could control the representation of royal power. This strategy enabled him to avoid impromptu and unscripted displays to large numbers of his subjects that might have yielded spontaneous expressions of dissatisfaction with his rule. Most scholarship on Charles II has glossed over the royal and civic ceremonial for his marriage or failed to examine it in a larger political and cultural context.The King's miscalculations in his diplomatic dealings with Portugal and his indifference to performing large-scale public ceremonial to celebrate his marriage are in stark contrast to the skillful manoeuvering of the Portuguese who arranged diplomacy and spectacle on the most advantageous terms. Since 1660 they were fighting to maintain their precarious independence from Spain at the same time as they were faced with Dutch efforts to whittle away at their colonial empire. As a result of the alliance with Charles in the summer of 1661, the Portuguese managed to get the aid they needed to ensure their independence without paying him a substantial part of the promised dowry. Through their own predilection for grand occasions and sumptuous display, they succeeded in presenting their diplomatic and military triumph to other European powers in repeated celebrations and entertainments that lasted for a week in the autumn of 1661 and a month in the spring of 1662.This article will examine the political significance of the negotiations and festivities in both countries. They are a study in contrasts evident in three ways: in the motivations of the two monarchies to enter into the alliance; in the content of the royal and civic pageantry held in each country to celebrate the match; and in the responses of each kingdom's subjects to the marriage. Assessing the reasons for the marked differences in the celebratory display will illuminate an important yet hitherto neglected example of the public rituals of monarchy in early modern Europe.1. Portuguese CelebrationsThe importance that Portugal placed on its alliance with England is evident from the festivities it devised in Lisbon to celebrate the successful conclusion of its diplomatic efforts. …

“But the Shows of their Street”: Civic Pageantry and Charivari in a Somerset Town, 1607

“But the Shows of their Street”: Civic Pageantry and Charivari in a Somerset Town, 1607