Lucas A. Marchante Aragón, Performing the King Divine. The Early Modern Spanish Aulic Festival, Kassel, Reichenberger (Estudios de Literatura 128), 2017; xii, 300 pp. Hardcover; 16,5 x 24 cm.; inglés.

ISBN: 978-3-944244-54-9 | 78,- €

Performing the King Divine proposes a framework for the systematic consideration of early modern festivals in the Spanish courts as a coherent phenomenon of ritual performance for the creation of a divine image of royal power using a historical, artistic, literary and anthropological approach. Starting with medieval examples that convey the ruler’s physical proximity to the divine, and ending with the identification of the ruler with the divine during the reign of the last Spanish Habsburg monarch Charles II, this study looks at the evolution of the discourse that represents the Habsburg dynasty’s divinely inspired imperial rights by means of performance within the cultural context of the productions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. 1. Self Fashioning through Performance: From Church to Palace
2. 2. Importing the Habsburgs’ Language of Empire: the Golden Age, Chivalry and Fabulous Genealogies
3. 3. Philip III’s Dynastic Performance of Habsburg Policy: The Masque of Valladolid 1605
4. 4. Court Actors and Court Stages under Philip III and Philip IV
5. 5. The Golden Age at the Court of the King of Spain
6. 6. Performing the King Divine

Conclusion

Works Cited

Index