This book investigates rituals and ceremonies, but it is not just another book about these topics. The enormous historiographical field about kings, queens, and their rituals that throve in the 1980s and 1990s focused on the monarchies of England and France and on Italian and German nobility and princely realities. Rather than centering the institution of monarchy or the people who represented it, this book concentrates on the rituals and ceremonies of the period. It was not the king that made rituals and ceremonies, but rituals and ceremonies that created the king—and not only him. Rituals and ceremonies shaped the coronations of kings and queens as well as every phase of their lives, from marriage and divorce to death and burial.
Through meticulous analysis, the authors show how rituals and ceremonies shaped and guided people's lives and deaths in the late Middle Ages. The editors acknowledge they did not have many sources to investigate, but they were able to use the few available to craft scrupulous, detailed descriptions that give us a vivid image of Renaissance Bohemian and Eastern European society. They trace rituals and ceremonies, showing those that involved not only kings and queens but also their courts, the nobility, the clergy, their subjects, and the territories under their control.
Ritual and ceremony are used to describe both the tangible expressions and intangible mindsets that affected people's actions throughout their lives. While the two words are not synonymous, investigating their precise meanings allow the authors of this volume to dig deeply into Bohemian society. What emerges is a picture of a society in which life, from beginning to end and at all levels, was punctuated by well-defined gestures and actions that people performed, often without being consciously aware that they were performing: it was through rituals and ceremonies that their lives came to exist.
Not only kings and queens’ lives were shaped by rituals and ceremonies. Going down the social ladder, we meet the royal courts, the nobility and clergy, royal subjects, and townspeople. Their lives, too, were defined by rituals and ceremonies, using objects from swords to simple belts, and spanning attempts to hold festivities according to church rules and with greater freedom. No one escaped from the demands of ritual—every action performed and every piece of clothing worn had its meaning, the authors argue, because ritual and ceremony were so intrinsic to people's lives that they were not necessarily even able to recognize it.
Despite the different hands that wrote this book, Festivities is so harmonious that it could have been written by a single author. It is not easy to describe every essay, because each one is deeply connected with the others. Above all, the book's authors have been able to use their sources not only to make a precise historical investigation but also to create a real painting of the Bohemian environment between the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. We can clearly see every image of each ritual and ceremony, of every street or space where festivities took place, and of every object used by people of that time, from kings to subjects. The authors have created more than a historical book—they have crafted a scenography that allows the reader to live inside the story. Even more, it is essential reading for everyone who wants to investigate Eastern European society, because of the sources used and referenced and the book's methodology in the study of human behavior.
