This volume presents a comprehensive collection of carefully edited source texts describing the wedding of Duke Georg of Bavaria and the Jagellonian princess Hedwig of Poland, held in Landshut in 1475. For scholars of court studies, the editors provide a wealth of material for the first time in a single volume. They present reliable documents, including ones first published in outdated editions, as well as three entirely new sources that add details of the festivities and contribute new perspectives on this dynastic match. Additionally, the commentaries provide rich context, including, for example, identifying the nearly two thousand named persons, and thus can likely serve as a compact who's who for future scholars of this region. The wedding between Bavaria and Poland-Lithuania was intended to shore up Central European political relations against the Ottoman Turks, and therefore is also of interest to political historians.
While readers of this journal will appreciate the detailed editorial work involved in opening up another avenue in court studies and regional history, and in early modern dynastic relations and marriage politics, modernists will appreciate the volume for the historical context it provides for one of Germany's most enduring modern festivals, the so-called Landshuter Hochzeit. Since 1903, now every four years, the citizens of Landshut stage a reenactment of this dynastic wedding in front of an enormous international public. It is one of the largest medieval pageants in the whole of Europe. Thus, the volume presents the opportunity to study the historical event, the rise of the pageant in the context of the establishment of the second Reich in 1871, its qualities as a specific form of German popular culture, and the anthropology of the festival. The volume is multivalent, looking backward and pointing forward.
The goal of the volume is to present all known documents about the wedding in a form that allows a detailed reconstruction of its many events in an accurate fashion. The presentation is meant to invite a comparison of the documents as well. The three newly discovered documents are the diplomatic report by Johann Gensbein, the court clerk from Katzenellenbogen; one by an Alsatian knight named Hans von Hungerstein; and one by a university teacher from Rostock named Johannes Weise. Their reports allow scholars to see the wedding more fully embedded in imperial politics and to analyze it together with other important imperial events, such as Reichsversammlungen (legislative parliaments) and imperial councils.
To understand the dynastic politics more fully, it is important to know that Duke Georg of Bavaria, like two of his predecessors, was known as “the Rich.” Rich in the sense of wealthy and, not totally unrelated, in the sense of power. The brother of the bride, King Vladislav of Poland, was also king of Bohemia, whose geopolitical importance for Bavaria was significant. Thus the Wittelsbachs received an enormous increase in prestige through this marriage. The Landshut wedding served as a template for further dynastic weddings, when in quick succession Hedwig's sisters made similar matches: Sophie married Friedrich, son of the Brandenburg elector Albrecht Achilles, and Barbara married Duke Georg of Sachsen. Thus the volume offers concrete documentation of a splendid, multi-day event that can serve comparative purposes.
The volume presents the accounts by Hans Seibolt, Veit Arnpeck, Johannes Aventinus, Jan Dlugosz, Hans von Hungerstein, Johann Gensbein, Johannes Weise, and Hans Oringen, as well as an account from the Nürnberger Jahrbücher and civic reports kept by the city of Nürnberg, which had sent its own representatives to the wedding. The format and presentation of the documents is consistent, which makes for easy access: a brief introduction to the person or source is followed by the edition of the source itself. The Latin texts are presented in columns with the German translation. Extensive footnotes identify persons, places, arcane usages, and events. The volume includes a comparative synopsis of all events as presented in the various sources, followed by indexes for names and places. It concludes with nine well-produced facsimile pages from the reports by Seibolt, Arnpeck, Aventinus, the Nürnberger Jahrbücher, Johann Gensbein, Johannes Weise, and Hans Oringen.
The 1475 wedding was splendid by all accounts, and the present volume allows both scholars and modern medievalists to enjoy the event.
