Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (review)

Several of the editors and authors of Europa Triumphans were involved in the planning of two EURESCO conferences on festival studies in 2000 and 2003 or in the editing of their proceedings. It is quickly apparent, however, that this large and handsomely illustrated new publication does not reproduce the proceedings of a scholarly meeting but is the fruit of a long-term and carefully coordinated collective project. Following an organizational conference held in 1996 at the University of Warwick in Coventry, direction and editing of the project were based at that institution with its Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures established by the British governmental Arts and Humanities Research Board. While a plurality of the thirty-nine contributors of essays are British, there are almost as many continental scholars, as well as three from American institutions. The primary aim has been to provide "an easily accessible and widely representative collection of printed festival books, with transcriptions, translations, illustrations, introductions and commentary" (1:xix). Some forty-four accounts describing about fifty specific festive events are in fact reproduced here, either wholly or, more commonly, in part. Most are from publications of the time, ranging from ephemeral news bulletins to elaborate, handsomely printed commemorative volumes. A few come from manuscript sources. Only one of the original accounts, as it happens, is in English, but all others are provided with facing English translations, the editors having conceded that even for the world of scholarship ours is "a largely monoglot age" (1:xx). Certainly it would be a rare linguist who was comfortable in all of the eight modern and two ancient languages found in the accounts. While most of the prose narratives may have been fairly straightforward, other translations, such as those of learned Latin and Greek inscriptions and those of conceited occasional verse in the vernaculars, must have presented difficulties. A spot check of the translations from languages in which I am competent shows them to be quite well done. The translators, listed on the title page of each section, are rather numerous and include some people not concerned with the scholarly essays.

There are two basic sorts of introductions: six general ones that deal with subjects embracing numerous festivals, grouped at the beginning, and, preceding each of the eight major sections (e.g., "Festivals in Scandinavia"), two or more essays meant to introduce the texts of that section. Each section has a chief editor. Rather full bibliographical and explanatory endnotes are provided both for the essays and for the translations of sources. Although the project's focus is on the editing and translation of source material for festival research, its essays sometimes bring new facts and frequently offer important new scholarly syntheses. Space considerations prohibit giving even the briefest attention to all of the essays, and I shall mention only a few that were particularly interesting either because they had to do with subjects close to my own concerns or, for the opposite reason, of their dealing with material about which I am particularly ignorant. The very first general introduction, "The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form," by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, is a remarkably broad and coherent characterization of an entire minor but culturally rich literary genre. Only someone who has held in her hand hundreds of these rare and scattered publications could have undertaken such a comprehensive survey and permitted herself generalizations embracing a number of different cultures, e.g., "So festivals were not put on in general to express the self-confidence of rulers or cities with a sound power base, but rather to counter feelings of instability and political upheaval, to assert power or control over a certain group or city or to win their allegiance" (1:5). Exceptional clarity...