Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe

Ceremonial entries marked urban centers across early modern Europe. Types of entries varied widely, from events celebrating a newly elected monarch to festivities honoring foreign brides’ journeys across the continent. Such entries necessitated the cooperation and planning of a huge variety of people, depended upon an interactive audience, and became multi-sensory spectacles involving poets, composers, musicians, artists and architects, theater performers, and more. Evidence with which to study entries proliferates, including manuscript sources relating plans and expenditures, graphic material making permanent the ephemeral decorations of an event, eyewitness accounts and published pamphlets or books detailing the participants, visual materials, and the official record of the day. While entries in many European territories have been studied, scholars have focused the most attention on France, Italy, and England. To a lesser extent, entrance ceremonies in the Low Countries, Germany, and Spain have received scholarly attention. Even less studied are those in Portugal, Poland, and Scandinavia. As with scholarship across humanistic fields, the study of entries has become increasingly global and concerned with issues related to gender performance. The literature on ceremonial entries in early modern Europe has exploded in recent decades, becoming a more integrative and interdisciplinary concern. This is made evident by the existence of multiple research organizations that bring together scholars of diverse disciplines and nationalities. Digitization projects have resulted in several online resources, most notably the “Early Modern Festival Books Database” and “Treasures in Full: Renaissance Festival Books from the British Library.” Thus, research in this field is becoming both easier, through increasing accessibility of online sources, and more complicated, as the secondary literature grows. What began in the realm of theater studies, because of the appearance of pageants as features of entries, has become a truly interdisciplinary field. The most common kind of publication on an entry is a short essay; these and edited volumes appear frequently in this bibliography because of the challenges of monographic examination of these multivalent events. It is important to note that ceremonial entries are only one type of ritual that shaped civic identity in the early modern period, and many anthologies contend with ephemeral events of all kinds.