Description
Book SynopsisCivic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London brings together a group of essays from across multiple fields of study that examine the socio-cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pageantry in sixteenth and seventeenth-century London.
This collection engages with modern interest in the spectacle and historical performances of pageantry and entertainments, including royal entries, progresses, coronation ceremonies, Lord Mayor's Shows, and processions. Through a discussion of the extant texts, visual records, archival material, and emerging projects in the digital humanities, the chapters elucidate the forms in which the period itself recorded its public rituals, pageantry, and ephemeral entertainments. The diversity of approaches contained in these chapters reflects the collaborative nature of pageantry and civic entertainments, as well as the broad socio-cultural resonances of this form of drama, and in doing so offer
Table of Contents
List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Civic to Global 1. ‘To the Honour of our Nation abroad’: The Merchant as Adventurer in Civic Pageantry 2. Locating the Rhinoceros and Indian: Strangers, Trade, and East India Company in Thomas Heywood’s Porta Pietatis 3. "Cleopatra in Her Barge": Anne Boleyn’s Coronation Pageants and the Production of English Cultural Capital 4. The Unspoken Language of Aliens, or the Spectacular Conversation between Visiting English and Dutch that Transcended Time and Space Part II: Material Encounters 5.The Social and Political Dynamics of the Lord Mayor’s Show, c. 1550-1700 6. Arion’s Harp, Apollo’s Lute: The Instrumental Sounds of London’s Lord Mayors’ Shows 7. Financial Encounter Customs: Tradition and Form in London’s Civic Pageantry Part III: Methodologies for Re-viewing Performance 8. The Duke of Lennox and Civic Entertainments 9. Stephen Harrison’s The Arches of Triumph (1604) and James I’s Royal Entry in the London Literary Marketplace 10. Musical Transformations of the City Soundscape: King James I’s Entry into London in 1604 11. Building a Digital Geospatial Anthology of the Mayoral Shows Index
