Bringing together distinguished scholars in honor of Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, this volume presents original and innovative research on the critical and uneasy relationship between authority and spectacle in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, focusing on Spain, the Mediterranean and Latin America. Cultural scholars such as Professor Ruiz and his colleagues have challenged the notion that authority is elided with high politics, an approach that tends to be monolithic and disregards the uneven application and experience of power by elite and non-elite groups in society by highlighting the significance of spectacle. Taking such forms as ceremonies, rituals, festivals, and customs, spectacle is a medium to project and render visible power, yet it is also an ambiguous and contested setting, where participants exercise the roles of both actor and audience. Chapters in this collection consider topics such as monarchy, wealth and poverty, medieval cuisine and diet and textual and visual sources. The individual contributions in this volume collectively represent a timely re-examination of authority that brings in the insights of cultural theory, ultimately highlighting the importance of representation and projection, negotiation and ambivalence.

Bringing together distinguished scholars in honor of Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, this volume presents original and innovative research on the critical and uneasy relationship between authority and spectacle in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, focusing on Spain, the Mediterranean and Latin America. Cultural scholars such as Professor Ruiz and his colleagues have challenged the notion that authority is elided with high politics, an approach that tends to be monolithic and disregards the uneven application and experience of power by elite and non-elite groups in society by highlighting the significance of spectacle. Taking such forms as ceremonies, rituals, festivals, and customs, spectacle is a medium to project and render visible power, yet it is also an ambiguous and contested setting, where participants exercise the roles of both actor and audience. Chapters in this collection consider topics such as monarchy, wealth and poverty, medieval cuisine and diet and textual and visual sources. The individual contributions in this volume collectively represent a timely re-examination of authority that brings in the insights of cultural theory, ultimately highlighting the importance of representation and projection, negotiation and ambivalence.

Sport and spectacle in the ancient world has become a vital area of broad new exploration over the last few decades. This Handbook brings together the latest research on Greek and Roman manifestations of these pastimes to explore current approaches and open exciting new avenues of inquiry. It discusses historical perspectives, contest forms, contest-related texts, civic and social aspects, and use and meaning of the individual body. Greek and Roman topics are interwoven to simulate contest-like tensions and complementarities, juxtaposing, for example, violence in Greek athletics and Roman gladiatorial events, Greek and Roman chariot events, architectural frameworks for contests and games in the two cultures, and contrasting views of religion, bodily regimens, and judicial classification related to both cultures. It examines the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. The volume also considers other directing forces in the ancient Mediterranean, such as Bronze Age Egypt and the Near East, Etruria, and early Christianity. It addresses important themes common to both antiquity and modern society, such as issues of class, gender, and health, as well as the popular culture of the modern Olympics and gladiators in cinema. With innovative perspectives from authoratative scholars on a wide range of topics, this Handbook will appeal to both students and researchers interested in ancient history, literature, sports, and games.

Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, material objects, literary texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge within cultural, political, and theological contexts. In considering new methods to examine the process of beholding violence and the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: How does the process of beholding function in different aesthetic conditions? Can we speak of such a thing as the 'period eye' or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze, or does it risk universalizing perception? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?

This volume is an attempt to discuss the ways in which themes of authority and gender can be traced in the writing of chronicles and chronicle-like writings from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With major contributions by fourteen authors, each of them specialists in the field, this study spans full across the compass of medieval and early modern Europe, from England and Scandinavia, to Byzantium and the Crusader Kingdoms; embraces a variety of media and methods; and touches evidence from diverse branches of learning such as language and literature, history and art, to name just a few. This is an important collection which will be of the highest utility for students and scholars of language, literature, and history for many years to come.

Fresh insights into the development of the tournament as an opportunity for social display.

In a fresh examination of the French ceremonial entry, Neil Murphy considers the role these events played in the negotiation between urban elites and the Valois monarchy for rights and liberties. Moving away from the customary focus on the pageantry, this book focuses on how urban governments used these ceremonies to offer the ruler (or his representatives) petitions regarding their rights, liberties and customs. Drawing on extensive research, he shows that ceremonial entries lay at the heart of how the state functioned in later medieval and Renaissance France.

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

Picturing Punishment examines representations of criminal bodies as they moved in, through, and out of publicly accessible spaces in the city during punishment rituals in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Once put to death, the criminal cadaver did not come to rest. Its movement through public spaces indicated the potent afterlife of the deviant body, especially its ability to transform civic life. Focusing on material culture associated with key sites of punishment, Anuradha Gobin argues that the circulation of visual media related to criminal punishments was a particularly effective means of generating discourse and formulating public opinion, especially regarding the efficacy of civic authority. Certain types of objects related to criminal punishments served a key role in asserting republican ideals and demonstrating the ability of officials to maintain order and control. Conversely, the circulation of other types of images, such as inexpensive paintings and prints, had the potential to subvert official messages. As Gobin shows, visual culture thus facilitated a space in which potentially dissenting positions could be formulated while also bringing together seemingly disparate groups of people in a quest for new knowledge. Combining a diverse array of sources including architecture, paintings, prints, anatomical illustrations, and preserved body parts, Picturing Punishment demonstrates how the criminal corpse was reactivated, reanimated, and in many ways reintegrated into society.

What use is it to be given authority over men and lands if others do not know about it? Furthermore, what use is that authority if those who know about it do not respect it or recognise its jurisdiction? And what strategies and 'language' -written and spoken, visual and auditory, material, cultural and political - did those in authority throughout the medieval and early modern era use to project and make known their power? These questions have been crucial since regulations for governance entered society and are found at the core of this volume. In order to address these issues from an historical perspective, this collection of essays considers representations of authority made by a cross-section of society within the British Isles. Arranged in thematic sections, the 14 essays in the collection bridge the divide between medieval and early modern to build up understanding of the developments and continuities that can be followed across the centuries in question. Whether crown or noble, government or church, burgh or merchant; all desired power and influence, but their means of representing authority were very different. These essays encompass a myriad of methods demonstrating power and disseminating the image of authority, including: material culture, art, literature, architecture and landscapes, saintly cults, speeches and propaganda, martial posturing and strategic alliances, music, liturgy and ceremonial display. Thus, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates the variable forms in which authority was presented by key individuals and institutions in Scotland and the British Isles. By placing these within the context of the European powers with whom they interacted, this volume also underlines the unique relationships developed between the people and those who exercised authority over them.