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Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to understanding modern governance—an idea that this volume challenges through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon over time.
“…excellent research by a younger cadre of historians, for it testifies that they lay the important groundwork for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of culture and power. These prospects will also be possible thanks to the visual reproductions, the index, and the general care by the editor and publisher, as each essay closes with meticulous notes and a bibliography.” • Journal of Austrian Studies
“A significant and welcome contribution to the literature on political symbols and ritual that argues for their continued relevance through the early modern era and into the nineteenth century and, by implication, beyond.” • Hugh Agnew, The George Washington University
“This is an interesting, coherent, and important collection. It provides broad geographic coverage (from the Low Countries to Galicia) of a topic and an era that has heretofore been relatively understudied.” • Nancy M. Wingfield, Northern Illinois University
Klaas Van Gelder is a postdoctoral researcher at the State Archives in Ghent and at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Regime Change at a Distance: Austria and the Southern Netherlands following the War of the Spanish Succession (1716–1725) (Leuven, 2016).
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Place Names
Introduction: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy: Why Do They Matter?
Klaas Van Gelder
Chapter 1. The Care of Thrones: A Plethora of Investitures in the Habsburg Composite Monarchy and Beyond from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
Petr Maťa
Chapter 2. Meaningless Spectacles? Eighteenth-Century Imperial Coronations in the Holy Roman Empire Reconsidered
Harriet Rudolph
Chapter 3. The Hungarian Coronations of Charles VI and Leopold II and the Representation of Political Compromise
Fanni Hende
Chapter 4. Maria Theresa, the Habsburgs and the Hungarian Coronations in the Light of the Coronation Medals, 1687–1741
Werner Telesko
Chapter 5. The Bohemian Coronation of Charles VI and Its Hidden Message
Petra Vokáčová
Chapter 6. Inaugurations in the Austrian Netherlands: Flexible Formats at the Interface between Constitution, Political Negotiation, and Representation
Klaas Van Gelder
Chapter 7. Conditioning Sovereignty in the Austrian Netherlands: The Joyous Entry Charter and the Inauguration of Maria Theresa in Brabant
Thomas Cambrelin
Chapter 8. Shaping a New Habsburg Territory: The 1773 Lemberg Act of Homage and the Galician Polish Nobility
Miloš Řezník
Chapter 9. Pageantry in the Revolutionary Age: Inaugural Rites in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790–1848
William D. Godsey
Chapter 10. After 1848: The Heightened Constitutional Importance of the Habsburg Coronation in Hungary
Judit Beke-Martos
Afterword: The Last Habsburg Coronation and What it Means to Be Anointed
Helen Watanabe O’Kelly
Index