Diplomatic Ceremony Research Articles

Diplomacy and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox

Early modern diplomatic history has begun to emerge from the shadow of Garrett Mattingly’s seminal Renaissance Diplomacy. Several collections of essays and special editions of journals have begun to question a once-familiar chronological framework and to bring the insights of cultural historians to a field that was once conceived of as high political history (see, for example, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, xxxviii/1 [2008], Journal of Early Modern History, xiv/6 [2010], D. Frigo, ed., Diplomacy and Politics in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1700 [2000]). This present volume, edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, which professes to be part of this reassessment, arises from a conference held at the University of Kent in 2008. Anyone who picks it up expecting a collection of essays exploring the role of diplomats as art agents and cultural consumers, or a discussion of the significance and complexity of diplomatic ceremonies, or the role of diplomacy in mediating cultural conceptions, will be disappointed. Few of the essays in this volume deal with such issues: in many, culture is more textual, rooted in correspondence, treatises, ciphers, and news, while the thread holding them together is intelligence—whether conceived of as news gathering, news networks, or espionage, albeit sometimes in diplomatic contexts. Consequently, the volume contains several valuable contributions which further our knowledge of an underexplored area, but it also neglects important fields that are essential for a cultural understanding of early modern diplomacy.

Music for Diplomatic Ceremonies in Late Chosun Dynasty and Daehan Empire

Music for Diplomatic Ceremonies in Late Chosun Dynasty and Daehan Empire

More light on Tripoli's Protestant Cemetery

AbstractTripoli's Protestant Cemetery is a place of some mystery. One of the most persistent of these mysteries is the whereabouts of the £200 Sterling that the former British Consul General in Tripoli, Colonel Hanmer Warrington, publicly claimed to have deposited in the Bank of England around 1841 to maintain his family mausoleum and the rest of the cemetery. Research at the Bank of England and in the National Archives in Kew, London, has thrown fresh, but not conclusive, light on this matter. Another of the cemetery's mysteries are the five graves, said to be those of some of the United States sailors killed in Tripoli harbour in 1804. In the 1950s and 1960s these graves were the focus of an annual American diplomatic and military commemoration ceremony. But were the graves really what they were supposed to be?

Notes on the golden horde diplomatic ceremonial: The origin of the wordKorešin Russian slang

The article deals with the word koreš ‘close friend’ used in Russian cant. It comes from the Russian verb koreševat’sja ‘to greet each other friendly, to establish friendship and close relations’ that, in turn, has its origin in the Turkic verb körüš- ‘to see each other, to have an audience’. The diplomatic ceremony of koreševan’e ‘a kind of very close embrace’ was common in the Golden Horde and its successor states — the Khanates of the Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan, the Noghay Horde and Muscovy, at least up to the end of the 16th century. Soon the word koreš (literally:’ a man participating in the ceremony of koreševan’e’) with the meaning ‘true and close friend’ was ejected to the sphere of Russian slang and acquired a secondary, alleged link with the Russian word koren’ ‘root’ as if it were its pseudo-diminutive form.

Sealing Signs and the Art of Transcribing in the Vierzon Cartulary

Of the many surviving Romanesque cartularies, very few are illuminated. After reviewing general considerations of the oral, textual, and visual elements at play in these works, this paper then focuses on the Vierzon Cartulary, particularly on the processes of its charters' transcription to codex. Specifically, this paper argues the performative role of the scribe and illuminator, who, by their transformation of the mise-en-page, appropriation of papal notarial authority, and translation of sealing practice, participated in a new diplomatic ceremony of conveyance. This paper advances a reconsideration of text-image relations to account for ritual performance, both actual and symbolic.

Japanese-Korean Relations from the Standpoint of Diplomatic Ceremony

Japanese-Korean Relations from the Standpoint of Diplomatic Ceremony