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Crossing Borders : Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe
Bram Van Leuveren
Van Leuveren, Bram, « Crossing Borders : Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe », Arti dello Spettacolo / Performing Arts, Performance and Spectacle in Early Modern Europe, 2020.
Extrait de l’article
J. R. Mulryne well understood that in order to come to terms with the essentially international and interdisciplinary nature of early modernEuropean festival culture researchers are by definition prompted to cross borders. Those borders are both literal, dividing cities, regions, states, or entire continents, and metaphorical, distinguishing between scholarly disciplines such as anthropology, history of the arts (literature, music, theatre, fine arts), performance, fashion, and material culture studies, and diplomatic and political history. As a co-editor of the book series “European Festival Studies, 1450-1700”, which is now published by Brepols, Mulryne successfully brought together festival scholars who analysed the multiple and converging contexts in which court and civic festivals operated – cultural, economic, political, religious, social, and so on – through the lens of their own expertise. One of the last conferences that Mulryne helped organising for the Society for European Festivals Research, together with Richard Morris and Margaret Shewring, was aptly titled “Crossing Boundaries : Confessional, Political and Cultural Interactions in Early Modern Festivals and Diplomatic Encounters” (30 April-1 May 2018, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge). The focus of the conference on the transnational and transcultural dimensions of festival culture, such as transnational exchanges between rulers and ambassadors, who frequently travelled between territories to attend or participate in celebratory occasions, or transcultural exchanges between the international designers and participants of those occasions, was much indebted to Mulryne’s own research as a festival historian.
As an individual researcher, Mulryne pioneered border-crossing approaches to early modern festival culture. His work often examined aesthetic exchanges between national traditions of staging festivals. Mulryne’s contributions on the Medici festivals of the late sixteenth century and the celebrations for the 1613 wedding of the Palatine couple in London, Oppenheim, and Heidelberg, among others, have revealed how festival culture in early modern Europe was the product of both similar and dissimilar national concerns and influences (1992 ; 2012 ; [2013] 2016).
