There is no shortage of recent studies on festivals during the early modern period. Margaret M. McGowan's new book builds on this growing body of scholarship. In Festival and Violence, she examines the ubiquitous ceremonial entries that princes made into European cities within the contexts of frequent war and routine violence. She contends that triumphal arches and other art created for these festivals depicted war and suffering as both a manifestation of the obsession of princes with mythmaking and as a tool to “counterbalance the turbulence which constantly threatened the order of court and city life” (28). McGowan also provides ample evidence that scholars should treat ephemeral art as important and worthy of study in its own right.

McGowan's focus on the importance of troops and martial elements in entries leads her to discuss a number of Roman precedents that artists and authors depicted in books, engravings, and paintings. Her discussions of the widespread artistic expression of imperial dominance and the ways that art encouraged continued acts of imperialism are interesting and well argued. As an extension of this examination, McGowan also looks at depictions of victory and of the conquered. Her chapters on the adaptability of mythmaking and the ways texts explained and elaborated on the symbols used in princely entries contain a number of intriguing insights about the ways that planners adapted symbols to immediate political contexts. The final chapter and epilogue concentrate on the nature of hyperbole as a rhetorical strategy and how the independent goals of planners, princes, and participants might make for unintended outcomes in the reception of images or even opportunities for disorder.

Festival and Violence is a study that moves thematically and crosses national boundaries. It does not adhere to any strict chronology in its use of examples, which some readers may find frustrating at times. It is not entirely clear why 1635 marks the endpoint of her study. There were princely entries in the latter half of the seventeenth century that feature many of the same elements that she investigates in the decades prior. The book builds on the body of work that McGowan has produced on ceremonies, myths, and the visual arts over the course of her career. As in much of that other work, McGowan has the most to say about princely entries in early modern France, and it is in these examples that she is on the firmest ground and with them that she tends to provide richer analysis and ampler context. Given her attempt to write a transnational history of these festival phenomena, it is odd that she does not engage with the important scholarship on festivals undertaken by Marie Tanner, Lisa Voigt, and José Jaime García Bernal, among others, who are working on the Habsburg monarchy.

Although other scholars have examined a number of the themes taken up in Festival and Violence, the author makes a solid case that more attention needs to be paid to the martial aspects of festivals. She points out that these were violent times, and there was a market for graphic images of the kind that these events produced. As she puts it, “war was a kind of perpetual festival,” and reenactments and military parades and drills became ever more regular due to the growing size of armies (84–85). McGowan focuses on such celebratory and propagandistic violence solely within the context of princely entries and only rarely discusses entries by proxy. The understandably limited scope of the book means that future scholarship will be needed to examine the influence of belligerence and the real and symbolic presence of troops during the many other types of festivals that took place in European towns and cities during the Renaissance. McGowan's book is lavishly illustrated and contains a helpful list of princely entries from the period. Art historians, scholars of early modern political culture, and those interested in monarchy studies will find this book well worth their time.