The introduction provides the thematic, heuristic, methodological, theoretical and disciplinary clues of the book. It has accordingly four parts. The first locates the research in the context of existing scholarship published on the general subject of coronations and announces the original information on self-coronations and the new perspectives offered by this book. The second details the primary sources available for direct access to the knowledge of self-coronations – i.e. coins, inscriptions, images, liturgical books and narrative accounts. The third describes the theoretical assumptions and methodological options taken in order to accurately interpret these primary sources: the emphasis on political theology, the use of long-term chronology and cultural comparative exercise, the concept of agency and the use of the ritual studies and theories. It also notes the academic disciplines at play in the necessary interdisciplinary approach deployed such as history, theology, liturgy, iconology and symbolic anthropology. The last part of this introduction explains the principles governing the basic structure and chapter organisation of the book, and provides a summary of the content of each of the chapters.

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.