More than Mere Spectacle

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More than Mere Spectacle is written by Klaas Van Gelder and published by Berghahn Books. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 183695364X (ISBN 10) and 9781836953647 (ISBN 13).

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.