More than Mere Spectacle

Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Buch | Softcover

338 Seiten

2025
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
978-1-83695-365-4 (ISBN)

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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.

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).

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

Erscheinungsdatum	16.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Austrian and Habsburg Studies
Zusatzinfo	20 Illustrations
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	1-83695-365-8 / 1836953658
ISBN-13	978-1-83695-365-4 / 9781836953654
Zustand	Neuware