Chapter 4 explores the kinds of extraordinary situations experienced in the lives of royal ladies-in-waiting, asserting their prominent roles in coronations, marriages, christenings, and other ceremonies designed to cement and further dynastic prestige, such as Order of the Garter tournaments and the Field of Cloth of Gold extravaganza. Serving the queen at important life-cycle rituals, seasonal events, and diplomatic spectacles contributed to the monarchy’s propaganda program, thereby bolstering royal authority and encouraging dynastic loyalty. When kings dispatched their daughters and sisters to foreign lands, their entourages signaled the wealth and status of the English monarchy. Highborn female attendants not only assisted the queen and female royals, but also reinforced hierarchical order by their very placement in these rituals, order that was displayed, I argue, both in processions and their particular assigned responsibilities. This chapter reveals how the spectacle of such pageantry had significant political dimensions, even if such was not always recognized by the subjects who witnessed royal processions.

This chapter, necessarily making much use of Barber 1989, explores Western European illustrated editions of Longus, Daphnis and Chloe between 1626 (Crispin de Passe the Younger) and 2014 (Karl Lagerfeld’s Moderne Mythologie), picking out for closer analysis in a table nine printed between 1890 (Raphaël Collin and Eugène-André Champollion) and 1961 (Marc Chagall), editions which are witnesses to the European taste of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth. That table registers the different scenes in Longus chosen by different illustrators, which might have been expected to cluster around a few favourites: but alongside some favourites (Daphnis and Lycaenion, Chloe bathing Daphnis and herself, the couple’s wedding night) there are, as it reveals, many chosen by only two artists, some by only one. Other phenomena that emerged from its analysis are that Paris was the pre-eminent location for the production of illustrated editions, and that, unlike Crispin de Passe the Younger in 1626, later artists chose subjects bearing upon the couple’s growing understanding of ἔρως, ‘desire’, much more than ones depicting their few adventures.

A little known occasional work by Telemann, the Pastorelle en musique of circa 1714, offers evidence that a modern, enlightened understanding of freedom was manifest in the composer’s thinking during his early Frankfurt period (1712–16). It is this understanding that Jean Starobinski examined in his influential book The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789. Telemann himself described his departure from the Eisenach court for the free imperial city of Frankfurt as a move toward freedom; later, he criticized his Frankfurt wedding serenatas for having gone too far in this direction. Compositional strategies in the Pastorelle en musique document a novel, free, and extraordinarily diverse mingling of literary and musical models together with formal, stylistic, and generic traditions of the most varied provenance – a tendency toward freer composition that also surfaces in the pastorale’s details, such as the setting of the words “freedom shall be the watchword.”

Chapter 2 contends that the seemingly innocent attempt to document citizens through Operation Family (1959–1965) developed into an instrument for consolidating state power. This Ministry of Justice campaign to legalize extra-legal unions and register undocumented Cubans provoked a surge in marriage, a direct consequence – this chapter demonstrates – of fixed-term laws that concurrently restricted the power of the judiciary. The chapter also argues that Cuban leadership advanced legal matrimony in order to supplant female heads of household, whose participation in the paid-labor force could support men engaged in illegal or counterrevolutionary activities. Las Villas and Matanzas, provinces where counterrevolutionaries most threatened revolutionary government authority, had the highest rates of legal marriage during the peak years of the marriage campaign. These two provinces were also predominantly white, suggesting that MINJUS prioritized the regulation and reformation of rural, Hispanic white couples over those of Afro-Cubans. The second half of the chapter examines the inauguration of Wedding Palaces and material benefits meant to incentivize marriage. Popular discourse suggested that Cubans were marrying (and divorcing) in high numbers in order to take advantage of the increased purchasing power allocated to newlyweds. In these ways, couples showed themselves reluctant to acquiesce to the state’s marital expectations.