More than Mere Spectacle: Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries(31 Austrian and Habsburg Studies)

Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to understanding modern governance—an idea that this volume challenges through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon over time.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Place Names Introduction: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy: Why Do They Matter? Klaas Van Gelder Chapter 1. The Care of Thrones: A Plethora of Investitures in the Habsburg Composite Monarchy and Beyond from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century Petr Maťa Chapter 2. Meaningless Spectacles? Eighteenth-Century Imperial Coronations in the Holy Roman Empire Reconsidered Harriet Rudolph Chapter 3. The Hungarian Coronations of Charles VI and Leopold II and the Representation of Political Compromise Fanni Hende Chapter 4. Maria Theresa, the Habsburgs and the Hungarian Coronations in the Light of the Coronation Medals, 1687–1741 Werner Telesko Chapter 5. The Bohemian Coronation of Charles VI and Its Hidden Message Petra Vokáčová Chapter 6. Inaugurations in the Austrian Netherlands: Flexible Formats at the Interface between Constitution, Political Negotiation, and Representation Klaas Van Gelder Chapter 7. Conditioning Sovereignty in the Austrian Netherlands: The Joyous Entry Charter and the Inauguration of Maria Theresa in Brabant Thomas Cambrelin Chapter 8. Shaping a New Habsburg Territory: The 1773 Lemberg Act of Homage and the Galician Polish Nobility Miloš Řezník Chapter 9. Pageantry in the Revolutionary Age: Inaugural Rites in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790–1848 William D. Godsey Chapter 10. After 1848: The Heightened Constitutional Importance of the Habsburg Coronation in Hungary Judit Beke-Martos Afterword: The Last Habsburg Coronation and What it Means to Be Anointed Helen Watanabe O’Kelly Index

About the Author :
Klaas Van Gelder is a postdoctoral researcher at the State Archives in Ghent and at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Regime Change at a Distance: Austria and the Southern Netherlands following the War of the Spanish Succession (1716–1725) (Leuven, 2016).

Review :
“…excellent research by a younger cadre of historians, for it testifies that they lay the important groundwork for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of culture and power. These prospects will also be possible thanks to the visual reproductions, the index, and the general care by the editor and publisher, as each essay closes with meticulous notes and a bibliography.” • Journal of Austrian Studies “A significant and welcome contribution to the literature on political symbols and ritual that argues for their continued relevance through the early modern era and into the nineteenth century and, by implication, beyond.” • Hugh Agnew, The George Washington University “This is an interesting, coherent, and important collection. It provides broad geographic coverage (from the Low Countries to Galicia) of a topic and an era that has heretofore been relatively understudied.” • Nancy M. Wingfield, Northern Illinois University