Over the last sixty years, from the three volumes edited by Jean Jacquot and Elia Konigson entitled Les fêtes de la Renaissance (1956–75), to the two volumes edited by J. R. Mulyne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelley, and Margaret Shewring in Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (2004), and onto the present, studies of festivals, rituals, and ceremonies have received attention from scholars in the social sciences, as well as in literary, religious, art historical, and historical studies. Although efforts have been made, no leitmotiv or core concept has bound such ceremonial studies into pieces of a grand narrative. Rather, various archival and printed textual accounts and pictorial representations of large-scale performances, in which hundreds and often thousands of medieval and early modern populations participated, have been approached by scholars from many perspectives, generalizations, and methods. Such variety is particularly true of royal and ducal entries into cities and towns, whose study has been greatly advanced by the work of the Groupe de recheche sur les entreés solennelle (GRES). Members of the group and other researchers into entries originally presented papers in December 2007 at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in London. In her preface to this collection, Marie-Claude Canova-Green notes that the papers aim “to explore an hitherto little-studied aspect of the subject, namely not only the status of the printed text as a record of the entry, but also the nature and the uses of its appropriations by a variety of literary and polemic works” (xvii–xviii). These twenty articles primarily look at French entries but also include those staged in Mexico City, Northern Italy and Florence, Antwerp, Madrid, Berlin, and London from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Over these extensive places and times, one finds less foundations for generalizations on entries and texts than informed mixes of similarities and dissimilarities.

The first article — “The Material Form and the Function of Printed Accounts of Henri II’s Triumphal Entries (1547–51)” by Hélène Visentin — demonstrates the varieties of printed accounts of mid-sixteenth-century entries and the rise of French festival books as replacements for commemorative manuscripts and brief printed news leaflets. In inventorying and comparing seventeen printed texts with official municipal records, she concludes that the printed book represents “the conscious exercise of political power” whose “goal is to mediatize not the event, but the image of the king” (19). All that is missing in the article is attention to the political, juridical, and aesthetic tensions that may lurk in parts of different titles: notably, somptueux Ordre, triumphe, joyeuse entrée, and joyeulux advenement du Roy. The long flourishing of the entry book in Europe is attested to by Sara Smart’s account, “The Return of the Elector as King: Johann von Besser’s Record of the Berlin Entry in May 1701 of Elector Friedrich III as Friedrich I, King in Prussia” (203–23). Smart offers a microhistory of this Hohenzollern’s quest for a crown and, when obtaining the aberrant title of “King in Prussia,” his and his subjects’ efforts to represent his legitimacy and exalted status. Johann von Besser, court poet and master of ceremonies, published an account of ninety-five pages supplemented with a hundred pages of firework displays and triumphal arches on the journey from Berlin to the coronation in Konigsberg and the entry reception on Friedrich’s return to Berlin. A century and a half of entry books underlay Friedrich’s instant invention of his new royal tradition, which included enumeration of the royal cavalcade of gendarmes; courtiers; carriages with the queen and court ladies; “a company of cuirassiers raised by the butchers’ guild”; “the King, in majestic splendour”; and the guilds of Berlin’s placement of thirty-nine companies of soldiers in varying uniforms (204).

Variations on entries and printed accounts to perform, legitimize, and exhibit the right order of state inform the articles of Alexander Samson on Philip and Mary in 1554 London (113–28), Sara Mamone and Caterina Pagnini on Archduke Leopold V of Austria in Florence (129–52), Jean Andrews on the 1680 viceregal entry in Mexico City (177–200), and Elizabeth Goldring on translating to English the Duke of Anjou’s 1582 entry into Antwerp (225–44). In other articles, Margaret M. McGowan expertly studies the tension residing in the multipurpose of entries in service to royal ideology and to truthful historical rendering in “A Question of Authenticity: Pierre Matthieu, Creator of Entries and Historiographer Royal” (245–55). Entry books offered appropriate and transcendent images and memorials rather than forthright truth, as she finds in de Thou’s notion that “the great are too sensitive for me to please them by speaking the truth” (254). This sentiment binds the seventeenth-century form and design of the entry book in their classicizing of iconography and inscriptions, or even the imagining of them, as in Marie-France Wagner’s analysis of Antoine de Laval’s account written before Henry IV’s Moulins entry occurred (31–51).

After 1540, entry books turned from civic themes to dynastic absolutism. They adapted antiquarian decors, as explored by Richard Cooper (153–76), or emblem books’ themes and imagery, as in Claudie Balavoine’s critique of La Perrière’s well-known publication (281–303). Other articles demonstrate general familiarity with the entry as frames for literary and satirical genres. In 403 pages, the articles cover so much that it may be merely quibbling to note that the importance of performing and printing entries resulted from their heightened status as one of the four grand royal ceremonies of France and, therefore, required duties for legitimate rulers and subjects. Also, the lack of reference in a study of writing the Renaissance entry to the magnificent early printed representation of the Emperor Maximillian’s Triumphs, published in 1526, and the impressive publication of Andrea Andreani’s Le triompe de Jules César, is at the least curious. Finally, the exemplary notations at the bottom of the pages, the individual bibliographies, and the index add greatly to the usefulness of this collection to anyone interested in the culture and texts of Renaissance entries.