ABSTRACT
Early modern court festivals certified and celebrated the recognized high points of rulers’ dynastic and territorial achievements, such as birth, coming of age, marriage, diplomatic or military acquisition, death and succession. Their characteristic union of religious ceremony, cultural performance and martial arts put court physicians right at their centre. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly distinguishes between two types of court festival: ceremony and spectacle.1 Ceremonies – such as baptisms, coronations, formal entries, progresses and weddings, or the Royal Touch – are actual enactments by unique protagonists, of legally binding building blocks in the creation of political power structures, formally witnessed by their spectators. Spectacles stage repeatable plays, operas, firework displays, dances or other theatrical events, acted by interchangeable performers. They can manipulate but not create power structures, and their audience has no legal witnessing role. Whether staging spectacle with or without ceremony, court festivals are typically an expression of political power and a celebration of sovereignty, often enhanced by showcasing their ruler’s quasi-ceremonial victory over supernatural forces of demonic enchantment, in plots of the type that received their highest literary expression in the works of Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso and Edmund Spenser.2 Their scope for uniting cultural and martial arts, in displays based on the values, skills and literature of classical imperialism and medieval chivalry, made tournaments the early modern court festival spectacle of first choice. Ever more elaborate and showy tournament variations took advantage of sophisticated advances in theatrical technology, but could not eliminate the inherent physical danger of their defining feature, the deployment of the weapons and skills of warfare.
