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  • Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions Edited by Margaret M. McGowan
  • David Parrott
Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions. Edited by Margaret M. McGowan. (European Festival Studies, 1450–1700.) Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. xvi + 307 pp., ill.

This volume is the first in a new series generated by the Society for European Festivals Research. Some of the projected volumes will focus on particular themes or types of early modern festival, but the fourteen essays here are concerned with multifaceted aspects of a single set of courtly celebrations, those held in France, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere to mark the double marriage linking the young Louis XIII to the infanta Dona Ana, and Louis’s sister Élisabeth to the future Philip IV of Spain. The contracts — the outcome of mutual military exhaustion and a strong desire for peace abroad and internal retrenchment — were exchanged in August 1612 after extensive negotiations and, particularly in France, lively internal opposition. Largely owing to the continued strength of this opposition, the actual exchange of the two princesses was deferred until November 1615 and took place in a floating pavilion set up in the middle of the Bidasoa River — depicted in a painting that has become almost an icon for festival studies. The most remarkable of the numerous ceremonies held in honour of the exchange of contracts was the great tournament or carrousel that took place between 5 and 7 April 1612 within the recently constructed Place Royale in Paris. The carrousel is examined specifically in six of the essays, a justifiable weighting given the scale and diversity of the celebrations, the richness of the trappings, decorations, and iconography, and the event’s subsequent influence on court festivals in and beyond France. Such a concentration poses the obvious risk of repetition and overlap, but Margaret McGowan has shown outstanding editorial control here in maintaining the distinctive subject matter of the chapters and keeping introductory repetition to a minimum. Her own chapter, looking at the literary afterlife of the festivities, again succeeds in taking the discussion in a profitably different direction from Marie Baudière’s examination of the Festival Book for the carrousel, from Monique Chatenet on costumes and decor, and from Patrice Franchet d’Espèrey on the equine elements of the carrousel. Franchet d’Espèrey points out that the celebrated ‘horse ballet’, linked to the skills taught through Pluvinel’s Maneige royal, lasted only fifteen minutes and was far outshone by the demonstrations of martial horse management. Iain Fenlon provides an outstanding view not only of the use of music in the Paris celebrations, but also of the classicizing theories of musique mesurée underpinning the compositions produced for the events. Paulette Choné’s excellent essay goes beyond the festivities in France to highlight the importance of fireworks in early modern court festivities, a role regularly acknowledged but seldom explored in any detail. John Elliott provides a masterly summary of the diplomatic and political background to the marriage negotiations. He reminds us that political contemporaries could be as cynical as modern historians about the solid political value of dynastic marriages, but that early modern rulers well understood the value of ‘soft power’, and the value of celebrating these dynastic events with all the presentational care, elaboration, and expense that are detailed and so richly illustrated in these essays.

David Parrott
New College, Oxford
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