City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe: Volume 6 (Medieval Studies at Minnesota, Vol 6) - Softcover

Hanawalt, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816623600 ISBN 13: 9780816623600

Verlag: University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

Medieval Europe is known for its sense of ceremony and drama. Knightings, tournaments, coronations, religious processions, and even private celebrations such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals were occasions for ritual, feasting, and public display. This volume is the first to take a comprehensive look at the many types of city spectacles that entertained the masses and confirmed various messages of power in late medieval Europe. Bringing together leading scholars in history, art history, and literature, this interdisciplinary collection sets new standards for the study of medieval popular culture.

Drawing examples from Spain, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, most of them in the fifteenth century, the authors explore the uses of ceremony as statements of political power, as pleas for divine intercession, and as expressions of popular culture. Their essays show us spectacles meant to confirm events such as victories, the signing of a city charter, or the coronation of a king. In other circumstances, the spectacle acts as a battleground where a struggle for the control of the metaphors of power is played out between factions within cities or between cities and kings. Still other ceremonies called upon divine spiritual powers in the hope that their intervention might save the urban inhabitants.

We see here a public cognizant of the power of symbols to express its goals and achievements, a society reaching the height of sophistication in its manipulation of popular and elite culture for grand shows.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara A. Hanawalt is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, where she is director of the Center for Medieval Studies. Kathryn L. Reyerson is professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Urban ceremonial in the Middle Ages took various forms and served a number of different ends--private, collegial, political, and religious. Broadly construed, urban ceremonial included public functions of multiple sorts. From private, but public, celebrations of births, marriages, and deaths to the grand entries of rulers into cities, the spectacles were designed to impress events on collective memory. - from the Introduction.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Minnesota Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0816623600
• ISBN 13: 9780816623600
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande