ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the events surrounding Gladman’s procession in 1443 to determine the way in which rhetoric and symbols were deployed to evoke notions of community and common good and essay the extent to which their usage were indicative of a truly popular protest, or whether they had been appropriated and deployed by civic elites to further their own goals. The wealth of documentation surrounding the procession has led to it being studied before in some detail. 4 However, no work to date has attempted to explore the way in which their usage and navigation of the city’s symbolic landscape framed a vision for communal relations, or the way in which jurisdictional anxieties were manifested in that same landscape. This dearth seems especially puzzling given the signifi cant lengths to which the participants went to ensure that the procession was resonant of both festive pageantry and civic processions: appropriating and juxtaposing the symbolic language of both to form something that was wholly neither.