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Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual

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Bak has put together a volume of essays inquiring into the various public rituals and symbolic acts that legitimize and solemnized monarchic rule in the Middle Ages. The fourteen studies here come primarily from papers presented at a conference on Medieval coronations and related ritual that was held in February of 1985 in Toronto. The studies span the ninth through the sixteenth century and deal with issues as varied as Viking inaugurations, the Papacy in Avignon, and civic progresses of Elizabeth I. The essay by Lawrence M. Bryant titled "The Medieval Entry Ceremony at Paris," is ground breaking in its approach on how the relationship between the city and the monarch has been reflected in and shaped by public spectacles from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The closing essay by David J. Sturdy, "Continuity vs. Change: Historians and English Coronations of the Medieval and Early Modern Period," is particularly useful in that it traces the historiography of coronation studies throughout the twentieth century and gives a clear view of the shift in scholarly perception from a view of English coronations as something "wholly English" to a better understanding of the broader European and ecclesiastic influences as well as how particular monarch's political agendas shape these public spectacles.