Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power: The Triumphal Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Antwerp by Stijn Bussels (review)

On 10 September 1549, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son, the future Philip II, triumphantly entered Antwerp, a prosperous city in the northern part of his kingdom. The nature and circumstances of their entry is the subject of a new book by Stijn Bussels.

The first chapter, "Sources of the Entry into Antwerp of 1549," provides the solid critical basis for Bussels's cultural-historical reconstruction of this renowned event, presenting the main sources of the princes' entry into the Flemish trading center: factual records from the city archives as well as the more biased accounts of the festivities by the chief organizer Cornelius Grapheus (Triumphelijcke Inkompst, 1550) and the Spanish courtier Juan Cristobal Calvete de Estrella, who wrote about them in his account of Philip's journey to his possessions in Italy and the Netherlands (El felicissimo viaje, 1552). Furthermore, a number of less comprehensive sources are presented, and the various political and social negotiations surrounding the triumphal entry are enumerated, notably those between the city authorities and the imperial powers concerning the liabilities of both parties, and those between the foreign trading nations competing for priority in the procession following the Spanish princes through the city of Antwerp. The chapter then presents a general introduction to the neoclassical style of the triumph, which ends in a few notes on the Renaissance representation of triumphant monarchs.

The second chapter, "A Forum for the Confirmation of Power Relations," further elaborates the analysis of the political and social negotiations taking off from several of the introduced sources, notably the Inauguration Charter (in whose description of the treaty between the Habsburg rulers and the city of Antwerp both parties swore a solemn declaration to uphold at a ceremony on the Grote Markt), Pieter Coecke van Aelst's illustrations to Grapheus's account, and this account itself. Oscillating between the contents of the various textual sources and the evidence contained in the illustrative plates—each reproduced on a full page—the chapter circumscribes the entry into Antwerp as a problem area of multiple, mutually contradictory meanings rather than as a unitary and unequivocal statement. Like the first chapter, it ends with a brief metabasis to another level of abstraction, this time to the well-known topic of the world as a stage. This topic is linked with a discussion of the ambiguous Renaissance conception of the prince through the work of Erasmus.

The third chapter, "The Entry into Antwerp Mirrored in Time and Space," presents various parallels to the Antwerp entry of 1549: Charles V's entry into Bruges in 1515; the entries into Lille (1549) and Genoa (1549) of father and son; and Henry II's entry into Paris in 1549. On the basis of a comparison ex contrariis et similiis a development away from the associative thinking of the late Middle Ages toward an early modern "thinking in contrasts," or a move away from a logic of resemblances to a logic of dichotomies, is suggested. Up to this point, the social and political-economic negotiation between the city authorities and the foreign rulers, as these were conducted through the medium of the entry, has been examined. In order to broaden this picture, the chapter presents an excursus describing the interaction of the prince with the aristocracy in chivalric tournaments, and continues with another one describing the communication of the town guilds with the monarch through the pageant plays that formed part of the great procession. It closes with a consideration of the so-called rederijkers' cultivation of the tableau vivant as the artistic genre underlying these plays.

The fourth chapter, "The Antwerp Entry and the Studia Humanitatis," finally takes up the rhetoric-aesthetic lead, inquiring into the classical and humanist build of the entry, notably the influence of classical rhetoric with its emphasis on persuasion...