ABSTRACT
This essay has a limited purpose: to encourage students of festivals, and specifically festivals associated with dynastic marriages, to pay attention to the human circumstances within which festivals were conceived, and in consequence to avoid over-estimating the place of consciously projected state propaganda in their motivation and delivery. To do this, the essay refers to two European courts in the last years of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth: the Medici court of Grand Duke Ferdinando of Tuscany and the Stuart court of Prince Henry, son and heir presumptive of James VI of Scotland and I of England.
