Teófilo F. Ruiz
In the introduction to this ambitious and superb collection of essays about festivals in the Spanish Habsburg world, the co-editors succinctly examine and assess recent contributions to the topic. If I am allowed, I would like to evoke an older historiographical tradition and to summarize some of the salient questions and difficulties connected with the study of medieval and early modern festivals. These are indeed the questions and problems so beautifully and insightfully addressed in this volume. For example, in Jacob Burkhardt’s classic, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, there is a pioneer study that raised important questions as to what was the role of festivals in Renaissance culture. Burckhardt provides precocious insights into the nature of festivals and ceremonies, as well as the relationship between spectators and performers. His intervention has had a significant role in the shaping of our evolving interest in the nature of festivals and of their role in the social, cultural and political life of polities throughout history. It is however in that crucial period which Burckhardt defined as the Renaissance – and which later scholarship has generally renamed early modern – that festivals, especially those linked to the articulation of royal and lordly power and now extended beyond Italy to other realms throughout western Europe and beyond, acquired a special valence.
Since festivals and ceremonies of power are cultural artefacts or cultural products, they can be read for their different meanings. Moreover, since festivals and ceremonial performances also operate at different registers, they serve as lenses through which to explore the peculiar mentality of each society. Festivals throughout the medieval and early modern West shared many similarities, however, an attempt for a comprehensive study of European-wide festivities can be problematic, unless it is done from a comparative perspective, as in this volume. After all, the diverse political and social contexts in which these festive events were enacted, performed and displayed imbued each of them with peculiarities that were sui generis to each location. This is clearly seen in the descriptions we find in another pioneer study of cultural and festive forms, Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga argued that the festive cultures of Burgundy and Flanders were very different from those of Italy.1 The present book approaches the study of festivals comparatively, through case studies in specific locations that assess both the local voice (to the extent it can be assessed) and the influence of transnational trends in the creation of a particular common cultural identity across the Spanish empire and beyond. As the co-editors present in the introduction, the study of festival culture in this book focuses on the world of the Spanish Habsburgs, which is examined as one cultural system.
The local registers varied depending on the nature of royal or noble power, social class, the specific location where the festivities were held, and other factors. But they also differed according to how one was positioned within the multiple spaces of festive performances. That is, whether one gazed on the festive displays as part of the crowd or one of the people in attendance, or whether one was the subject of the gaze as the centre of the spectacle as, for example, the king in a royal entry. Moreover, one’s place in the enactment of festive performances reflected one’s position in the hierarchy(ies) of power. And location, whether at the centre or at the margins, affected the understanding of the codes and messages conveyed by festive performances across the early modern world.
Reception is a complex topic to assess in medieval and early modern festivals research. After all, we know about the festivals, the reaction of the populace and the movement of kings mostly through the mediation of those who described the festivals to us in writing or in iconographic representations. But the people who wrote these accounts were often in the employment of the crown, the church or the municipal authorities that paid for the ceremonies and wished their efforts to be noted. Their descriptions are representations shaped by their own interests and the needs of their patrons. These ‘official’ accounts are often challenged by contemporary writings such as reports by ambassadors, contrasting archival data and ‘counter’ propaganda. The rich variety of essays in this book offers the reader a number of case studies that reflect these tensions and thus shows some of the events from alternative angles, other than the official chronicles.
Moreover, since Burckhardt, we have come to have a deeper understanding of the polyvalent meanings that can be found in festive events. In that line, Victor Turner’s influential work has allowed for an anthropological reading of festivities and for an understanding of such concepts as liminality and performance. If few in the audience were capable of understanding the learned discourse of emblems, poetry and acclamations, often – as was the case of Philip II’s entrance into Brussels as Charles V’s heir to Flanders in 1548, written in Greek, Latin and even Hebrew – those describing the events and with access to these languages took special relish in noting them and/or translating them. Something is always lost in translation. Yet, perhaps after all, the more remote and incomprehensible, the greater the impression on the lower social stratum. That was certainly the case with tournaments and jousts in which references to courtly literature and to mythological stories were probably only partially understood at best, but which remained effective in terms of entertaining and didactic lessons to those below.2
These brief remarks serve as an introduction to the real question of how we are to understand festivals and their role in the late medieval and early modern world unless we consciously examine all the different aspects of festive traditions and the characteristics that were integral to the process of constructing particular festivities. This means a growing sensitivity to music, iconography and literary aspects. The awareness of all these different elements that contributed to the making of a feast permit us to reconstruct, as far as is possible, what a particular festival was like and, far more important, what was the intent – one could almost say the political and festive discourse articulated by specific festive traditions – of those imagining and carrying out the planning and mise en scène of entries, coronations, death rituals and the like. Sir Roy Strong’s deservedly famous and often cited book, Art and Power, is enchanting because of his attention to such topics as ballet, masques and other types of representations that were certainly not peripheral to a central festive theme, but that, together with other aspects of festivals, constituted an organic whole. Nonetheless, Strong, for all his brilliance, examines these festive traditions from the top down, and there is a functionalist bent to his explications. And, as is the case with most books written about festivals in Western Europe, it neglects the rich traditions that found a home in the Iberian realms.3
It is against the backdrop of my brief remarks above and of the conundrum of writing a history of festivals from truly interdisciplinary perspectives that I, and all subsequent readers, should admire and benefit from the ambitious scope of this book and its scholarly accomplishments. Festival Culture in the World of the Spanish Habsburgs is remarkably faithful to its title description. What we see here is a thoughtful and careful rendering of festival culture (not in the plural but in the singular), through the insightful and exhaustive examination of the different components that make for one single cultural artefact: the festival, and one specific context: the world of the Spanish Habsburgs. Written in English by an impressive roster of distinguished international scholars, the book provides a most welcome examination of those festive events and traditions that were part of the Habsburg Spanish monarchy’s strategies for self-representation. Festival Culture in the World of the Spanish Habsburgs is exemplary in many ways, but two in particular are worth noting in this brief foreword. The first one, and the most decisive aspect in making this collection of articles a very original enterprise, is that, eschewing the emphasis on one disciplinary approach, it presents a new understanding of festivals from a diversity of angles. Art history and studies of visual material are blended with historical accounts of festivals, with music, religion and other disciplinary approaches. We are fortunate that the authors pay as much attention to questions of space, iconography, music and texts, as to visual materials, thus offering a complete account of festivals, their meaning and function in the Spanish Habsburg world.
Many books focused on the history of festivals, my own included, analyse a discrete chronological period, but through its diverse chapters this book addresses the entire Spanish Habsburg period, allowing, therefore, for an assessment of the changes that festivals underwent from the reign of Philip II to that of Spain’s last Habsburg ruler. We are fortunate to have such an interdisciplinary treatment of festive traditions in the Iberian early modern period. It is a powerful reminder that we can only see the past fully when scholars from different disciplinary perspectives come together, in this instance to forge an engaging and valuable contribution to our understanding of festival culture. The outcome is a complex and nuanced portrait of festivals, emerging from the historical and cultural contexts in which they were performed.
Teófilo F. Ruiz,
Distinguished Professor of History,
UCLA
1 First published in 1860, see J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 2002), pp. 249–96 (and, in particular, 269–96); J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996).
2 See T. F. Ruiz, A King Travels. Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Princeton, 2012), chapters 4 and 5.
3 See R. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berkeley, 1984).