Printing Ritual: The Performance of Community in Christopher Plantin’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys . . . d’Anjou

Printed commemorations of Renaissance pageantry have been used as important sources of knowledge about the people and circumstances surrounding key political events, with less attention paid to the internal structure and original function of the printed works themselves. This essay explores a particular commemorative book and its illustrations as a case study of the collaborative construction of civic identity in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. It considers the growing conception of print as a space for communal definition and political diplomacy, functioning not as a replacement for civic ritual, but an analog to it.