Festival books (Dutch: feestboeken, Spanish: libros de festivos) are books, often illustrated, that commemorate a notable event such as a royal entry, coronation or wedding. Funerals were also commemorated in similar fashion. The genre thrived in Renaissance and early modern Europe, where rulers utilized the form to both document and embellish displays of wealth and power.
In many countries, royal holidays commemorate dynastic events, Events of historical significance, such as important military victories or other nation-building events also provide the impetus for a festival. An early example is the festival established by Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses III celebrating his victory over the Libyans. A festival book is for listed and published a royal event, to promote the king’s merit, wealth and reputation.
Large numbers were produced, often surviving in very few copies; the largest collection, in the British Library, has over 2000 examples. Originally manuscripts, often illustrated, compiled for prince or city, with the arrival of print they were frequently published, varying in form from short pamphlets describing the order of events, and perhaps recording speeches, to lavish books illustrated with woodcuts or engravings showing the various tableaux, often including a fold-out panorama of the procession, curling to and fro across the page.
These livrets are not always to be trusted as literal records; some were compiled beforehand from the plans, and others after the event from fading memories. The authors or artists engaged in producing the books had by no means always seen the entry themselves. Roy Strong finds that they are “an idealization of an event, often quite distant from its reality as experienced by the average onlooker. One of the objects of such publications was to reinforce by means of word and image the central ideas that motivated those who conceived the programme.”
Royal Entry：
The Royal Entry, also known by various names, including Triumphal Entry, Joyous Entry, consisted of the ceremonies and festivities accompanying a formal entry by a ruler or his representative into a city in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in Europe. The entry centred on a procession carrying the entering prince into the city, where he was greeted and paid appropriate homage by the civic authorities. A feast and other celebrations would follow.
The Entry began as a gesture of loyalty and fealty by a city to the ruler, from the late Middle Ages, the Royal Entries became the occasion for increasingly lavish displays of pageantry and propaganda. The devising of the iconography, aside from highly conventional patterns into which it quickly settled, was managed with scrupulous care on the part of the welcoming city by municipal leaders in collaboration with the chapter of the cathedral, the university, or hired specialists. Often the greatest artists, writers and composers of the period were involved in the creation of temporary decorations, of which little record now survives, at least from the early period.
Coronation：
A coronation is the act of placement or bestowal of a crown upon a monarch’s head. The term generally also refers not only to the physical crowning but to the whole ceremony wherein the act of crowning occurs, along with the presentation of other items of regalia, marking the formal investiture of a monarch with regal power.
Once a vital ritual among the world’s monarchies, coronations have changed over time for a variety of socio-political and religious factors; most modern monarchies have dispensed with them altogether, preferring simpler ceremonies to mark a monarch’s accession to the throne. In the past, concepts of royalty, coronation and deity were often inexorably linked.
Examples:
The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, went a step further, creating enormous virtual triumphs that existed solely in the form of print. The Triumphs of Maximilian (begun in 1512 and unfinished at Maximilian’s death in 1519) contains over 130 large woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and other artists, showing a huge procession (still in open country) culminating in the Emperor himself, mounted on a huge car. The Triumphal Arch (1515), the largest print ever made, at 3.57 x 2.95 metres when the 192 sheets are assembled, was produced in an edition of seven hundred copies for distribution to friendly cities and princes. It was intended to be hand-coloured and then pasted to a wall. Traditional tableau themes, including a large genealogy, and many figures of Virtues, are complemented by scenes of Maximilian’s life and military victories. Maximilian was wary of entries in person, having been locked up by his loyal subjects in Bruges in 1488 for eleven weeks, until he could pay the bills from his stay.
An early meeting between the festival book with travel literature is the account of the visit in 1530 of the future Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, then King of Hungary and Bohemia, to Constantinople.
C’est la deduction du sumpteux order plaisantz spectacles et magnifiques theatres dresses, about entry into Rouen of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici, 1550
Feste nelle nozze del serenissimo Don Francesco Medici Gran Duca di Toscana, commemorating marriage of Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany to Bianca Cappello, 1578.
Descrizione delle feste fatte in Firenze, commemorating wedding of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1630s. Festivities included horse ballet.
Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi Austriaci Hispaniarum Infantis in Urbem Antwerpen, describing Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria’s entry into Antwerp, 1635; illustrated by Peter Paul Rubens.
Pompa funeral honras y exequias en la muerte dela muy alta y Catolica Señora Doña Isabel, on occasion of 1644 funeral of queen Isabel de Borbon of Spain
Courses de testes et de bague, on occasion of 1662 tournament in Paris, with engravings by Israel Silvestre and François Chauveau
Relation de la feste de Versailles, regarding Louis XIV’s party in 1668 for Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, with premiere of Molière’s George Dandin
Narrazione delle solenni reali feste, events in Naples for 1747 birth of Infante Philip
Sacre et Couronnement de Louis XVI, commemorating coronation of Louis XVI of France, 1775
Example at Borough level A True Representation of the Triumphal car, pulled by four horses, which conveyed Sir Francis Burdett to the Crown and Anchor Tavern, Strand, 29 June 1807 (after his election as MP for Westminster).