Royal Legitimacy Research Articles

Seeing and Being Seen. The Itinerancy of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France, Duchess of Angoulême and Dauphine, as an Embodiment of the Royal Presence in Restoration France, 1814–1830

This article looks at the many official journeys made around France by Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France, Duchess of Angoulême and last Dauphine of France, during the Restoration (1815–1830). Rich archival sources make it possible to see the practical organisation of these trips and the court staff assigned to the Princess to follow her from Paris. They also enable us to follow the Princess’s itineraries, the security measures put in place and the activities she took part in. These journeys enhanced the image of the Princess, the only survivor of the Revolution, and served as a crucial means for the restored monarchy to make itself better known and loved by its subjects. Far from the sedentary monarchy of the Ancien Régime, Louis XVIII and Charles X both understood that the monarchy and the members of the royal family had to be seen. As the daughter of Louis XVI and the guarantor of royal legitimacy, the Princess was a critical asset in boosting the image of the monarchy.

Conjuring Up a King

Conjuring Up a King

Why was The Cult of Arsinoë II Philadelphus established in Egyptian Temples?

The cult of Arsinoë II Philadelphus is considered one of the most significant cults in Hellenistic Egypt. It originated from the Greek oriented cult of Theoi-Adelphoi after Arsinoë’s death and soon became a vital part of both Greek and Egyptian religious life. What is even more important, Arsinoë became the first member of Ptolemaic dynasty to receive such a cult in Egyptian temples. Yet we still do not quite understand why was it so prominently established there. This article proposes a possible answer to this question. Based on the information from Sais inscription, a source from the reign of Ptolemy II, we can conclude that the main reason for the spread of the cult of Arsinoë in Egyptian temples was the natural conditions that developed in Egypt in the mid-260s. BCE. The text mentions a certain deficiency of the land during the king’s visit to Sais in 265/64 BCE. It seems that at this time Egypt faced low floods of the Nile, which could possibly lead to a lack of crops throughout the country. This in turn could threaten the legitimacy of Ptolemy II, who, as a king of Egypt, was viewed as the one responsible for the floods of the Nile river. Thus an event like this could become a cause for major instability in society or even a revolt. Under these circumstances the cult of Arsinoë II Philadelphus was used to promote royal legitimacy and bind part of the Egyptian priesthood to the ruling house of the Ptolemies.

The Symbolic Safeguard: Royal Absence in Cambodia’s Constitutional Monarchy

AbstractThe product of an internationalized peace process, Cambodia’s 1993 Constitution restored the monarchy and endowed the Crown with a political safeguarding role that successive kings have been unable to fulfil in practice. After a brief survey of the tragic modern history of Cambodia’s monarchy, this paper outlines the formal constitutional role of the king, highlighting the central dichotomy between the provisions that promise that the king “shall reign but shall not govern” and those that provide the king a more active role as “guarantor.” The paper highlights how this fundamental ambiguity has been borne-out publicly, by focusing on a handful of specific instances in which both King Sihanouk and King Sihamoni are understood to have been strategically absent from the country to avoid signing controversial legislation. Short of providing a veto power in the legislative process, the king’s safeguarding role is shown to manifest in the symbolic denial of royal legitimacy.

Ambiguity of Divine and Royal Portraiture and the Hiyawan Image of Kingship: Political Identity through the Monuments of ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE

This paper examines the content of the ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE Inscriptions, the selection of scripts on the monuments, and the choices of iconography on the two statues of the Storm God. These monuments represent a regionally and temporally specific practice of representation that ambiguously blends elements of divine and royal imagery into a new form, while taking a similar approach to the semiotics of rulership as the Neo-Assyrian kings. The combined elements of the monuments suggest a unique cultural strategy in which the agency of the ruler is blended with that of the Storm God, exemplifying the specific worldview of Iron Age Cilicia that informed their composition. The rulers who created these monuments sought to assert their political identity through the combination of the figural representations, the visuality of the scripts, and the content of the inscriptions; the two monuments illustrate a drastic change in the political agenda of the kingdom of Hiyawa, reflecting a shift in power among opposing political factions. These identities also contain a sense of intentional ambiguity, as the various elements do not immediately support the same message, but rather work together to propagate a multifaceted message of military prowess, commercial interconnectedness, and royal legitimacy and kingship.

Buddhist Kingship and Symbolic Architecture in Silla Korea

The evolution of kingship in the early Korean state of Silla (ca. 300–935) was closely linked with the accommodation of various Buddhist practices that conferred symbolic legitimacy and promoted royal authority. During the sixth and seventh centuries, Silla’s sovereigns assimilated several overlapping approaches to statecraft and kingship drawing on Sinitic and imagined Indian models mediated through such Buddhist literature as the Sūtra for Humane Kings and the Sūtra of Golden Light, resonant with policies followed in the Northern and Southern Dynasties in China. Buddhist monarchs in Silla adopted several overlapping and increasingly sophisticated approaches to symbolically consolidate and project political authority. Silla merged native East Asian cosmological symbolism with Buddhist architecture to establish royal legitimacy. Hwangnyong Monastery combines Sinitic symbolism with Buddhist-inspired propaganda, which both assert Silla’s regional dominion. The significance of the yellow dragon was astrological, signifying Silla’s ascendancy among the Korean states. Hwangnyong Monastery was the locus for state-protection rituals centered on the Sūtra for Humane Kings beginning in the sixth century, but early monasteries built with a single golden hall and two pagodas may have some connection to the Sūtra of Golden Light. Sach’ŏnwang Monastery was the most important twin pagoda monastery in seventh-century Silla, with Yŏngmyo Monastery and Kamŭn Monastery also performing a magico-religious function as loci for ritual centered on divine protection by the four heavenly kings, the eight classes of divine beings, spirit generals, and wholesome deities from the unseen world.

Theological Polemics and James I’s Diplomacy, 1603–1617

Historians have typically represented James I as a king whose foreign policy was driven by a principled commitment to peace, religious reconciliation, and royal legitimacy that led him to avoid military engagement in confessional conflicts, notably the Thirty Years’ War. But his published writings on topics related to international politics and less formal pronouncements of principle in verbal discussions of European affairs have never received close contextual analysis. This essay examines how James deployed theoretical arguments in conducting diplomacy with other European states, especially France, in the period before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. It argues that rather than basing policy decisions on principled convictions, he often deployed ideas strategically in efforts to justify and advance his own interests, and sometimes to mislead other statesmen about his true intentions. He did have some deep convictions, especially his abhorrence of theological justifications for rebellion and regicide, but even his efforts to combat such arguments were shaped by practical political calculations as well as purely theoretical concerns. Although he took ideas seriously, a closer examination of his record reveals him as a shrewd, flexible, and sometimes duplicitous royal politician, adept at fashioning high-minded justifications for self-interested maneuvers, rather than an idealistic scholar-statesman.

Crime and Testament: Enemy Direct Speech in Inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal

AbstractNeo-Assyrian royal inscriptions are always narrated in the first-person voice of the king. Within this framing narrative, the device that we would call ‘direct speech’ is used only rarely, and judiciously. The texts that make the greatest use of this literary device both come from a period of particular innovation and experimentation in royal text forms: Esarhaddon’s Nineveh A and Ashurbanipal’s narratives about his campaign against Elamite king Teumman. In these examples, and in other texts of the time including Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty, the words of enemies stand out as particularly threatening – and yet also particularly useful, as a literary device employed to further Assyrian agendas. Royal narratives use enemy speech for one of two purposes: either to document criminality, or to show enemies, in defeat and despair, testifying to the might and rightness of their Assyrian conquerors. Looking at all examples of speech – from enemies, gods, and the Assyrian king – I distinguish between ‘direct speech’ (as a literary device) and ‘quotation’ (as a practice). Most, though not all, direct speech in the sources considered here is also quotation, in that it seeks to document and preserve speech made in some other prior form (a verbal statement, a letter, an omen on an animal’s liver). Quotations demonstrate royal legitimacy and enemy culpability, while literary invention allows enemy voices to be turned to new purposes, as forced testament to Assyrian supremacy.

“Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge”: Medicine and Sovereignty in Macbeth

“This essay surveys Shakespeare’s Macbeth in terms of medical discourses. Macbeth was produced at a time when the English people were obsessed with the identity of the commonwealth due to the accession of an alien King, James I. At this historical juncture of Tudor-Stuart dynastic change, the nation was increasingly conceived through a corporeal metaphor. People imagined the political community was vulnerable to pathogenic infiltration, and this essay situates Macbeth as a contribution to the Jacobean political debate dealing with immunity politics. Critics have argued that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s affirmative response to the royal claim of the ‘union of two kingdoms, Scotland and England.’ The medical discourses of this play, however, disable this sort of reductive interpretation as the semantic features of Scotland in the play are ambiguous. In Macbeth, Scotland is the source of James’s sovereign legitimacy, but it is simultaneously portrayed as a morbid land and a source of plague and illness. It is healed, in the play, by English royal legitimacy, not by Scottish rule, to which James’s authority returns. Malcolm’s power ‘unknown to woman’ and Macduff’s birth that ultimately destroys the female matrix as he “untimely ripped his mother’s womb” are none other than ten thousand soldiers borrowed from the English King. Macbeth is a peculiar nationalist play which conflates the discourses of medicine with Englishness, not the newly claimed British sovereignty.”

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne. Joseph Hone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi+209.

<i>Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne</i>. Joseph Hone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi+209.

The Genealogy and Theology of Isaiah 11:1

Abstract Isaiah 11:1 traces the genealogy of ideal king back to Jesse and not a Davidic king in order to portray him as a new, or second, David. This depiction was motivated by the religious decline of the Davidides, and it allowed for a sense of disjuncture, or distance, from the Davidic line in order to claim royal legitimacy on theological grounds.

Sociedad política y diálogo con la realeza en Navarra (1134-1329)

Se analiza aquí el ensanchamiento de la base social operativa en Navarra, un proceso que debe retrotraerse al siglo xii y que alcanza su punto álgido en el tránsito del siglo XIII al XIV. En 1329 se producirá un freno inesperado, que atajará una parte importante de esa ampliación. Si hasta ahora se conocían bastante bien las claves esenciales de la renovación altonobiliaria del siglo XIII, y se habían tratado por separado tanto el progresivo protagonismo de la baja nobleza como la articulación de las identidades urbanas, faltaba una reflexión de conjunto que situara estos elementos en un argumento común. Queda quizá únicamente el clero –inusitadamente ausente de este escenario– como elemento merecedor de una mayor atención ulterior, desde el punto de vista de su espacio natural en la sociedad política. El hilo conductor aquí ha sido el estudio de los interlocutores de la corona, y el análisis de las relaciones de éstos con los reyes hasta la crisis desatada en 1328 con el llamado “golpe de estado”. La complejidad de una realeza “ausente”, y de sus etapas de legitimidad cuestionada o dudosa en los inicios del siglo XIV, dan a Navarra unos parámetros explicativos ciertamente singulares en el panorama peninsular.

The Demise of Cambodian Royalism and the Legacy of Sihanouk

Cambodian royalism is in its death throes. While the death of King-Father Sihanouk in 2012 caused an outburst of popular emotion, in the national elections held the following year royalists failed for the first time to win any parliamentary seats. A detailed case study of the difficulty of transposing royal legitimacy to the party-political context explains this apparent paradox. During the Second Kingdom (1993–present) a largely hidden struggle to imbue royalism with meaning has unfolded. At the centre of this struggle has been the difficulty of transferring legitimacy from Sihanouk to other royalist actors, and in particular to his son Norodom Ranariddh. Sihanouk’s unmatchable significance has resulted in formidable challenges that now confront Cambodian royalism.

The Demise of Cambodian Royalism and the Legacy of Sihanouk

Cambodian royalism is in its death throes. While the death of King-Father Sihanouk in 2012 caused an outburst of popular emotion, in the national elections held the following year royalists failed for the first time to win any parliamentary seats. A detailed case study of the difficulty of transposing royal legitimacy to the party-political context explains this apparent paradox. During the Second Kingdom (1993–present) a largely hidden struggle to imbue royalism with meaning has unfolded. At the centre of this struggle has been the difficulty of transferring legitimacy from Sihanouk to other royalist actors, and in particular to his son Norodom Ranariddh. Sihanouk’s unmatchable significance has resulted in formidable challenges that now confront Cambodian royalism.

Fragments and Reflexes of Kingship Theory in Ælfric's Comments on Royal Authority

ABSTRACTFor some time now, scholars have mined the homiletic writings of Ælfric of Eynsham in order to gain insight into late Anglo-Saxon notions of royal authority. While Ælfric generally preferred to talk about kingship in moral terms, discussing what constitutes a good or bad king, some passages have been interpreted as reflecting the homilist's own views about royal legitimacy. The utility of these passages as providing honest glimpses into Ælfric's theory of kingship have since been called into question based on the nature of the homilist's sources and our understanding of Anglo-Saxon political practices. On occasion, the relevant passages have also been read against each other as expressing potentially conflicting notions regarding royal authority. While acknowledging the difficulty of consulting passages that were originally applied in moral or theological contexts, this paper reassesses the usefulness of Ælfric's comments on kingship in reconstructing the homilist's views on royal authority and demonstrates that he likely viewed elective kingship, theocratic authority and hereditary birthright as complementary notions consonant with late tenth-century and early eleventh-century political ideologies.

The Crown of the Divine Child in the Meroitic Kingdom. A Typological Study

The crown of the divine child was one of the headdresses that transferred from Egypt to the Meroitic Kingdom. It was integrated in the Egyptian decoration program in the early Ptolemaic time. The first king of Meroe to use this crown in the decoration of the Lion Temple in Musawwarat es-Sufra was Arnekhamani (235-218 BCE). It also appeared later in the sanctuaries of his successors Arkamani II (218-200 BCE) and Adikhalamani (ca. 200-190 BCE) in Dakka and Debod. The Egyptians presented it as the headdress of child gods or the king. In the Kingdom of Meroe the crown was more like a tool to depict the fully legitimised king before he faced the main deity of the sanctuary. To show this the Meroitic artists changed its iconography in such a way that the primarily Egyptian focus on the aspects of youth and rebirth withdrew into the background so that the elements of cosmic, royal and divine legitimacy became the centre of attention. Even if the usage and parts of the iconography were different, the overall meaning remained the same. It was a headdress that combined all elements of the cosmos as well as of royal and divine power.

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre ed. by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison (review)

Reviewed by: Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatreed. by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison Frank Swannack Uman, Deborah and Sara Morrison, eds, Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre( Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 232; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781409449003. Editors Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison claim the essays collected in this volume ‘complicate what has become a standard reading of the blazon’ (p. 3). However, the blazonic dismembering of the female body is a somewhat over-familiar trope in early modern studies. Perhaps in recognition of the difficulty of providing fresh insights into the subject, the editors admit that the anthology is indebted to the critical work of Nancy Vickers and Jonathan Sawday. The essays also draw heavily upon Lynn Enterline’s The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare(Cambridge University Press, 2000). Grant Williams’s essay uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories and early modern notions of lovesickness to interesting effect. Unfortunately they lack clarification, and the essay seems rushed. A far more accomplished piece is Katherine R. Kellett’s analysis of the underappreciated female ghosts in the complaint poems of the 1590s. She finds an affinity with these female ghosts in Hermione from The Winter’s Tale. Hermione’s uncertain state between living and dead allows Kellett to explore the blazon through an incorporeal body. Elizabeth Williamson examines courtly love in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The confusion of gendered identities and bodies caused by a boy actor playing Julia finds its expression with a sympathetic audience. Lisa S. Starks-Estes investigates the blazon being staged literally in Titus Andronicus. She argues that [End Page 257]Shakespeare uses ‘a fresh, new, innovative Ovid’ to reinvent the Petrarchan sonnet (p. 54). Her reading of Lavinia being played by a boy actor and the conceit’s resonance with Ovid’s Metamorphosesis fascinating. Sara Morrison finds a refreshing change in the use of blazonic language by female characters in Measure for Measureand The Duchess of Malfi. In particular, she gives details of how Petrarchan conventions are used to depict scars on the female body that represent pain on stage. Patricia Marchesi’s captivating essay examines how theatrical props and human limbs become interchangeable in the B-text of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The fact that traitors’ dismembered limbs were displayed in Elizabethan society finds an intriguing correlation with the way Faustus’s body is easily pulled apart. Added to this is Marchesi’s insight that Faustus is comparable to the objectified beloved of a Petrarchan sonnet. Ariane M. Balizet’s subject is cuckoldry in Arden of Favershamand A Woman Killed with Kindness. More specifically, she looks at ‘blazons ofmen bymen’ (p. 98). Balizet argues that the dehumanising effect of the cuckold’s horns erodes the husband’s role as the head of the household. Thomas P. Anderson explores Julie Taymor’s Titus(1999), a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus. He argues that Lavinia’s fragmented body in the film ‘offers a form of corporeal feminism’ (p. 111). The most fascinating section of Anderson’s essay is his exploration of the artificial limbs and how Lavinia attempts to make her dismembered body whole again. Joseph M. Ortiz investigates other uses for the blazon apart from erotic desire. In Shakespeare’s history plays, he finds faces being scrutinised for signs of royal legitimacy. His impressive close reading of Henry Vfinds an allusion to printed history books. Lisa Dickson examines scenes of fragmented and dismembered bodies and texts in The War of the Rosesand The Plantagenets. Erin E. Kelly argues that The Rebellion of Naplesshould be regarded as a play rather than a play-pamphlet. Its graphic depictions of violence imitate the falling apart of Charles I’s body politic. The ending to Kelly’s essay is the most enigmatic and chilling in the anthology. The problems of blazoning the female reproductive body in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whoreare investigated by Sara D. Luttfring. In particular, she examines Giovanni’s anxieties over his sister’s sinful womb. Nancy Simpson-Younger explores identity in the sleeping or dead characters...

By hand and by voice: performance of royal charters in eleventh- and twelfth-century León

In this article I examine the public granting of royal charters in eleventh- and early twelfth-century León as an event that expressed and created ideas of royal kingship and legitimacy. The charter was not merely a record of a royal act; rather, it was a central part of an event, a ritual that engaged all the senses of those assembled at court by the monarch. Scholars have already noted that charter-granting was often accompanied by certain gestures: the laying of the document on a church altar, for example, or the conveyance of an additional object that represented the property or privilege being bestowed. The Leonese context, however, reveals a ritual that is much more complicated, sophisticated, and powerful than might be expected. Central to this ritual is the language of the charter – language that was at this time and place understood by those present. The charter is read aloud and a complex play ensues: a play between formula and innovation, orality and writing, and between the reader's voice and the king's word. There are several layers of performance enacted, and the actors include those assembled at court, who assent not only to the legal act the document was written to realize, but also to other aspects of the charter: ideas of kingship, religious declarations, and specific visions of history. The assembly becomes a field in which power is confirmed. Central to the ritual power of the event is the religious language in the charter, which sacralizes the act and gives it a quasi-liturgical character, and endows the monarch with religious as well as political power.

Political Religion and Religious Policy: How the Hittite King Chose His Patron Gods

The manner in which Hittite kings chose the supreme deities of the state or the dynastic pantheon to be their divine patrons must be considered in terms of ‘political religion’. In the Old Hittite Period, the king was empowered to rule by contract with the Storm-god of Ḫatti and the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the supreme deities of the state pantheon. Furthermore, the War-god and the Throne-goddess were connected in particular with the ideology of kingship in the original Hattian tradition. Changes in Hittite ‘political religion’ during the Empire Period resulted in a change of royal ideology.This new ideology is to be attributed to Mesopotamian ideas relating to concepts of royal legitimacy based on the authority of the Sun-god as a guardian of the cosmic order.Yet, the Hurrianized dynasty of the Empire Period had the Storm-god Teššub as its divine protector. Hence, it was Teššub and not the Sun-god who was a natural choice for the patron god of Hittite kings. Mursili II and Muwattalli II conceived a number of hypostases of Teššub with various Luwian and Hurrian epithets as their divine protectors, perceived to be identical with the supreme god of the state and dynasty. In this connection, worthy of note is the political career of Ḫattusili III, who had chosen his patron deities, the Storm-god of Nerik and šauška of Samuḫ, long before his accession to the Great Kingship of Ḫatti.

The Non-Eternal Dynastic Promises of Jehu of Israel and Esarhaddon of Assyria

AbstractThree Israelite kings receive promises of a dynasty continuing indefinitely (David, Solomon and Jeroboam I), but Jehu of Israel is the only ruler in the Hebrew Bible with a non-eternal dynastic promise. While many Assyrian rulers claim divine election and speak of “eternal” dynasties, the dynastic promise of Esarhaddon is unusual because of its modest nature. The dynastic promises of Jehu and Esarhaddon are therefore unique within their ANE context because of their lack of hyperbolic language, guaranteeing only four or two generations of continuity. Since both rulers assume the throne in the midst of a political crisis their reigns would have been reasonable times for promises legitimizing their dynasties. A comparison of these two oracles will not only allow the interesting parallels between the two promises to be clearly seen, but also reveal the crucial role that non-eternal dynastic oracles can play in establishing royal legitimacy.