The Introduction to the work outlines the history of the study of Western Zhou royal ritual, describing its role in early Chinese and early imperial governance and noting how it came to dominate the historical memory of the Western Zhou period. It then explains the book’s commitment to describe Western Zhou royal ritual from a historically embedded perspective, relying on sources contemporary to the rituals themselves.It explains the advantages and pitfalls of working with bronze inscriptions – the bulk of these sources – and presents a methodological framework for understanding inscriptions through the modern frames of actor-network theory and ritual studies.

Ceremonies of royal investiture have become a privileged site for historical understanding of medieval symbols and politics since they serve to emphasise the king’s authority, the nature of that power, the use of political symbols, the relationship between the king, nobles and prelates and the sacred idea of monarchy. The words and gestures included in the coronation ceremony (its form) validate its communicated particular message (its content). Based on this reality, this first chapter provides a theoretical exposition of the key theories around the ritual nature of self-coronation and its symbolic implications, focusing on historians and anthropologists’ theoretical perspectives. The intensive debate in the field of symbolic anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s on the meaning and interpretation of the rituals, in which scholars like Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas became celebrities, seems to have moved to medieval studies in the past two decades. Scholars such as Philippe Buc, Janet Nelson, Geoffrey Koziol, and Gerd Althoff imported these anthropological theories to medieval studies through their agreements and disagreements around the idea of how the medieval rituals must be interpreted – if they exist at all. Taking into consideration these debates, this chapter questions to what extent or whether self-coronations may be considered ‘medieval rituals’ and what self-crowning reveals about ritual.