From Communal Ritual to Royal Spectacle: Some Observations on the Staging of Royal Entries (1450–1600)1

Professors Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin’s excellent introduction to the seven articles in this collection, ‘The Multilayered Production of Meaning in Sixteenth-Century French Ceremonial Entries,’ leaves little to say about each article’s specific topic. These articles, along with the productions of the Canadian Groupe de Recherche sur les Entrées Solennelles (GRES) and other recent studies and bibliographies, indicate that the Renaissance entry has secured its essential place in the study of French culture and politics. 2 On the one hand, from medieval processions and ceremonies and Renaissance imitations and adaptations of classical styles and practices, we see that entries served as a sort of sixteenth-century equivalent to modern expositions, such as twentieth-century world fairs, that seek to display cultural, intellectual, and political aspirations, if not actual accomplishments. On the other hand, we discover the sixteenth-century French people’s vastly different and exotic ways of conceptualizing and representing their world from those ways and worlds which we know. Particularly under the influence of printing and the rise of the book, the records of the entry are recalibrated so that the entry’s original concentration on hierarchical listings of the ranks and status of participants in processions with kings is greatly outweighed by the decorative programs, artistic displays, and propaganda surrounding (and overshadowing) the traditional processional core. In considering the great variety of subjects covered in this collection, Professors Russell and Visentin view the ‘entry’ as a singular form and established practice that over time developed in its ‘tripartite nature as a rite, an event, and a text.’ Since most of the articles in the collection look at the aspects of events or texts, we find little attention being given to the oldest and foundational part of entries, their rituals, from which various entries into cities gave rise to a kingdom-wide French royal entry tradition. I deeply appreciate the opportunity the editors have given me to contribute to this collection, which I do by first exploring some fifteenth-century factors that secured royal entries as a popular historical and royal practice, that is, the ritual core of the communal procession from the city to greet the ruler and the king and his entourage’s progress through the city to the major church or cathedral. By using this processional ritual as a point of departure, I look at the articles of this collection in a new light, one that sees the rise of a royal aesthetic and the printed program books as signs of the sixteenth-century dislocation of the entry’s original base in popular and communal ritual.

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