Occasions of State

<p>This sixth volume in the European Festival Studies series stems from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the European Science Foundation’s PALATIUM project. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, a Europe-wide group of early-career and experienced academics provides a unique account of spectacular occasions of state which influenced the political, social and cultural lives of contemporary societies. International pan-European turbulence associated with post-Reformation religious conflict supplies the context within which the book explores how the period’s rulers and élite families competed for power – in a forecast of today’s divided world.</p> <p><strong>Introduction </strong>The power of ceremony <b>Part I: Performing diplomacy: festival and the identity of the state </b>1. The identity of the state: a new approach to festivals in the early modern Holy Roman Empire 2.<b> </b>The Bastille banquet, 22 December 1518 3. Triumphal arches in court festivals under the new Holy Roman Emperor, Habsburg Ferdinand I 4. Ernest of Bavaria’s joyous entry into Liège, 15 June 1581 5. Valladolid 1605: a theatre for the peace 6. The shield of ceremony: civic ritual and royal entries in wartime 7. <i>Les Réjouissances de la Paix</i>, 20–23 March 1660: the allegorical transformation of Lyon into a city of peace for the celebration of the Pyrenees Peace Treaty <b>Part II: Space and occasional performance</b> 8. Space for dancing: accommodating performer and spectator in Renaissance France 9. Ducal display and the contested use of space in late sixteenth-century Venetian coronation festivals 10<i>. Con grandissima maraviglia</i>: the role of theatrical spaces in the festivals of seventeenth-century Milan 11. <i>Palazzo eguale alle Reggie più superbe</i>:<i> </i>Schloss Eggenberg in Graz and the imperial wedding of 1673 12. In public and in private: a study of festival in seventeenth-century Rome <b>Epilogue</b> Turning tables: from elite to egalitarian banquets in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Paris</p>