Brown Andrew, Small Graeme. Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries c. 1420 - 1530

Manchester University Press, 2007. — 280 p. — (Manchester Medieval Sources).This volume examines the ceremonies and spectacles of society in the Low Countries. It is the first ever attempt to unite and translate some of the key texts which informed Johan Huizinga s famous study of the Burgundian court in The Waning of the Middle Ages, a work which has never gone out of print. However, it also combines these texts with sources that Huizinga did not consider, those that illuminate the wider civic world that the Burgundian court inhabited, and the dynamic interaction between court and city. By extending the chronological range into the period of Hapsburg rule after 1477, where Huizinga ended, it crosses the conventional divide between medieval and renaissance or early modern periods. Through these sources, and an introduction offering new perspectives on recent historiography, the book tests whether Huizinga s controversial vision of the period still stands. The book covers a wide range of ceremonial events: the spectacles and gargantuan banquets, like the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454, that made the Burgundian dukes the talk of Europe; the workings of the court, from its ideals to some of its sordid realities; the Order of the Golden Fleece within an urban context; the Entries of prince into town, ceremonies rich in symbolic meaning; the social and religious festivities of the towns jousting, archery and rhetoric competitions, processions and guilds. The book will appeal to students of late medieval and early modern Europe and to those with wider interests in court culture, ritual and ceremony.