J. R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring, eds, Court Festivals of the
European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance (Aldershot and
Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2002) xiv + 401 pp, 79 b&w illustrations,
ISBN 0 7546 0628 7
This is the first major publication associated with the Europa Triumphans
Project based in the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites
and Court Cultures here at Warwick. Ronnie Mulryne (the Centre’s
Director) and Elizabeth Goldring (Research Fellow) have drawn together
a genuinely multi-disciplinary collection of essays from twenty scholars
working across Europe and North America. Almost all originally given
as papers at a conference in Tuscany, funded by the European Science
Foundation (ESF) in its European Research Conferences series
(EURESCO), each essay has been rewritten, annotated and edited to form
a coherent collection that significantly advances research and scholarship
in the festival culture of Early Modern Europe.
The essays probe the complex nature of festivals as they remake
the language of their classical heritage (Margaret M. McGowan),
contribute to national and international power and politics (Monique
Chatenet, Elizabeth Goldring, R. J. Knecht, Victoria Musvik, Nicolas Le
Roux, Bernhard Schimmelpfennig) and make notable contributions to the
full range of cultural developments and performance languages employed
across Early Modern Europe.
For none of the scholars contributing to this volume is the subject
of festival merely one of record. Rather, each essay extends the analysis
of its particular festival topic, from Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly’s
distinction between ceremonies and spectacles through to the complex
relationships between funding, material and artistic organization (Chantal
Grell, Jochen Becker) and the practical performance implications of
staging the events (Flora Dennis, Dinko Fabris, Iain Fenlon, Nicoletta
Guidobaldi, Roger Savage). Issues of the reliability of documentation
and evidence are addressed (Richard Cooper), as are the challenges of
detailing the spectacular ephemeral architecture for festival entries (Peter
Davidson, Marina Dmitrieva-Einhorn, Maximilian L. S. Tondro), itself
very much a part of the politics and economics of festival occasions as
well as their cultural legacy.
Ronnie Mulryne’s introduction to the collection places the
scholarship of festival at a contemporary turning point, at which the few
major groundbreaking studies and critical bibliographies have mapped
out a crucial area of scholarship to enhance our understanding of the
European Renaissance. Resources now increasingly need to be made
available, allowing students and scholars access to a wider range of
festival books and occasions – a need partly being met by Europa
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Triumphans, a two-volume, fully edited and annotated collection of
festival books, and by the festival book digitisation projects at
Wolfenbüttel and at Warwick in collaboration with the British Library.
The scope of this collection of essays, as well as its considerable
contribution to the scholarship of festival culture, marks it out as a
valuable advance in a rich area, ripe for further multi-disciplinary
exploration.
Margaret Shewring
University of Warwick
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