Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Printed commemorations of Renaissance pageantry have been used as important sources of knowledge about the people and circumstances surrounding key political events, with less attention paid to the internal structure and original function of the printed works themselves. This essay explores a particular commemorative book and its illustrations as a case study of the collaborative construction of civic identity in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. It considers the growing conception of print as a space for communal definition and political diplomacy, functioning not as a replacement for civic ritual, but an analog to it.
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference (20–23 October 2005) and “Formulating a Response: Methods of Research on Italian and Northern European Art 1400–1600,” a conference at the University of Leiden (20–23 May 2006). I thank the participants at each for their comments and suggestions. Thank you as well to Dirk Imhof and Karen Bowen in Antwerp for their guidance through the Plantin archives. I am grateful to my advisor, Mark A. Meadow, for his insight and guidance on my dissertation, of which this research forms a part. I am also indebted to Mary Bergstein and to two anonymous Renaissance Quarterly readers for their helpful insight. This research was funded by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Professional Development Fund, The Rhode Island School of Design, generously assisted with imaging costs.