Architectures of Festival in Early Modern Europe: Fashioning and Re-fashioning Urban and Courtly Space

Early modern European festivals were the catalyst for the creation of many temporary and occasionally permanent architectural feats both within courts and cities. Royal residences could be transformed into arenas for the performance of a wide variety of celebrations, while civic space could similarly become home to elaborate structures designed to facilitate festivities and make a statement about the power and influence of a particular state and/or ruler. The essays in this volume discuss examples of festival architecture ranging from imperial summer houses to the transformation of urban space in Paris, Rome and Venice.

This fourth volume in the European Festival Studies, 1450–1700 series breaks with precedent in stemming from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the PALATIUM project supported by the European Science Foundation. The volume draws on up-to-date research by a Europe-wide group of academic scholars and museum and gallery curators to provide a unique, intellectually-stimulating and beautifully-illustrated account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festival occasions across major European locations including Italian, French, Austrian, Scottish and German. Appealing and vigorous in style, the essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns – from re-shaping and re-conceptualizing early sixteenth-century Rome, through providing for the well-being and political allegiance of Medici-era Florentines and exploring the teasing aesthetics of performance at Versailles to accommodating players and spectators in seventeenth-century Paris and at royal and ducal events for the Habsburg, French and English crowns. The volume is unique in its field in the diversity of its topics and the range of its scholarship and fascinating in its account of the intellectual and political life of Early Modern Europe.

• | Author: J.R. Mulryne, R.L.M. Morris, Pieter Martens, Krista De Jonge
• | Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
• | Publication Date: Oct 23, 2017
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• | Binding: Hardback
• | ISBN-13: 9781472432001
• | ISBN-10: 1472432002