Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century court and civic festivals incorporated the political ambitions and aesthetic preoccupations of their day. This lavishly-illustrated volume will prove fascinating to readers interested in the political, social and cultural features of an earlier society, together with their echoes in today's equally complex world.

Introduction The power of ceremony Part I: Performing diplomacy: festival and the identity of the state 1. The identity of the state: a new approach to festivals in the early modern Holy Roman Empire 2. 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. Les Réjouissances de la Paix, 20-23 March 1660: the allegorical transformation of Lyon into a city of peace for the celebration of the Pyrenees Peace Treaty Part II: Space and occasional performance 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. Con grandissima maraviglia: the role of theatrical spaces in the festivals of seventeenth-century Milan 11. Palazzo eguale alle Reggie più superbe: Schloss Eggenberg in Graz and the imperial wedding of 1673 12. In public and in private: a study of festival in seventeenth-century Rome Epilogue Turning tables: from elite to egalitarian banquets in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Paris