A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain by Teofilo F. Ruiz (review)

Ruiz's "original plan was to write a traditional and chronologically determined history of festivals—royal entries, calendrical and noncalendrical events, Carnival, Corpus Christi, and the like—from roughly the 1320s and 1330s, when Castilian chronicles began to provide some detailed accounts of these activities, to 1640, when the Spanish monarchy sank under the unbearable weight of military defeat, regional secession, social and economic upheaval, and its fragmented past" (4). Such a book, had it been done well, would have been an enormously valuable work, accomplishing for the rich tradition of festive Spanish performances what N. D. Shergold's A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times to the End of the Seventeenth Century did nearly fifty years ago for the more conventional theater of the period. Given the wealth of material at Ruiz's disposal, however, such a book would have been a huge undertaking, potentially requiring a work at least as long as Shergold's 624 densely packed pages. One can hardly blame Ruiz for abandoning so monumental a task.

Instead, he chose to build his work around a central chapter that focuses on the festive performances accompanying two long journeys undertaken by Philip II in 1585-86 and 1592—with occasional reference elsewhere in the book to the earlier (and much longer and more exuberantly festive) travels of the future monarch through Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands between 1548 and 1550—and to devote the surrounding chapters to a thematic consideration of the larger topic. "At its most basic level," Ruiz writes, "this book, focusing partly on Philip II's reign, hopes to present a thematic history of festive traditions in the Iberian peninsula. To this end I offer a typology of festivals, providing examples of different types of festive activities and, I hope, explicating their meanings in the context of Spain's social, political, and cultural life, and, by implication, within the wider context of Western European festive traditions" (5). Thus, after a long introductory chapter, Ruiz crafts a preliminary typology of festivals (chap. 2), before dealing with royal entries in general (chap. 3) and their "different components" in particular (chap. 4). Following his central study of Philip II's travels (chap. 5), Ruiz turns to tournaments, jousts, and other forms of martial festivities (chaps. 6-7), Carnival and Corpus Christi (chap. 8), and such "noncalendrical celebrations" as birth, coronation, marriage, and death (chap. 9).

Ruiz's thematic approach is not entirely successful. The reader is repeatedly confronted, in the first half of the book, with remarks like "it may be best to leave any detailed explication for the following chapter" (102), and in the second half of the book, "I do not wish to leave this section without a brief reprise of my earlier comments on..." (219). Around the middle, the reader is asked to look both ways: "Throughout the previous chapters, we have already seen descriptions aplenty of elaborate ephemeral constructions. And we will have opportunity to see more of them in later chapters" (142). The result is not merely that Ruiz's material is at times repetitive, but also that the treatment of particular sets of festivities is fragmented, that any sense of developing narrative is repeatedly interrupted, and that it becomes difficult to hold on to particular social, political, and cultural contexts when they shift at short notice from one period or reign to another. Ruiz might have done better to avoid both the daunting size of his abandoned chronological history and the disruptive effect of his thematic arrangement by focusing exclusively on a close reading of festive events during the reign of Philip II, or by adopting a broad but still selective chronological approach that aimed not at historical completeness but at illustrative elucidation of key festivities spread across four centuries. His chosen approach is certainly more ambitious than either of these, but I'm not sure...