More Than Mere Spectacle

Reviewed by: More Than Mere Spectacle: Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries ed. by Klaas Van Gelder Peter Höyng Klaas Van Gelder, ed., More Than Mere Spectacle: Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Berghahn, 2021. 326 pp. Klaas Van Gelder’s new edited volume offers a first-rate exploration of what its subtitle announces: “Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century.” After an effective and valuable introduction, Van Gelder provides ten individual chapters by mostly younger historians from Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Germany, Belgium, and England. Senior colleague Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly rounds off the book in her afterword by summarily emphasizing the differences between the contractual Huldigung (inauguration) and the Krönung (coronation), the latter being a religious ceremony in which the Salbung (anointing) transformed the ruler into God’s representative on earth (4, 303). In regard to the latter’s enactment of a Gottesgnadentum one can, of course, still rely on Ernst Kantorowicz’s magisterial investigation in his 1957 study on the French monarchy, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Maybe because this concept of a theologically founded monarchial society is from a bygone era, and the long-ruling Habsburg dynasty ceased to exist more than a century ago, older literature claimed that by the eighteenth century, inaugural rites turned into nothing but spectacles. This book convincingly corrects this reductive notion, instead stressing that “these performances were not merely dazzling trivialities; they carried constitutional, political, and social meaning” (1). Since I am not an expert on this given topic, I cannot verify to what extent there is an upsurge of research on inaugural rituals in premodern times, as Van Gelder credibly outlines. Likewise, I trust the editor’s judgment that despite this renewed interest in the subject matter by historians and art historians alike, the Habsburg monarchy has been “largely neglected” (2). This is all the more surprising given that the composite monarchy participated in more inaugural rites than any other dynasty—“a rough estimation yields some one hundred of them between 1700 and 1848” (2)—the latter year marking a caesura for these public rites of empowerment since the estates-based society formally ended in 1848. In the first chapter, Petr Mata substantiates in a chronological overview the major ceremonies that secured Habsburg power over its multiple estates. The ensuing chapters show the specific roles for each of the major ceremonies in the different lands and estates of the Habsburg monarchy. [End Page 120] Whereas Leopold I and even more so Joseph II forewent many of the investiture rites and thereby demonstrated their independence as absolute sovereigns over their vast estates, it did not signify their elimination—far from it, as Emperor Francis II/I’s long rulership (1792–1835) shows. In his case, the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars led to a revival of such rituals, as William D. Godsey shows. And Milos Reznik’s essay even explains the significance of such political and social events for the Galician inauguration in 1772: since it had no ceremonial precursor, the adoption of such a ritual act was even more necessary in order to integrate the new territory into the Austrian state system. What becomes obvious in these essays is how much different political groups and subjects used the enthronements as a way to represent and enact their privileges vis-à-vis the Habsburg king/emperor, such that Van Gelder can summarize: “The extent to which groups of subjects had a say in the organization varied considerably from one region to another” (10). Petra Vokáčová, for example, elaborates how Charles VI’s Bohemian coronation in 1723 was a top-down event, whereas Klaas van Gelder and Thomas Cambrelin explain in their respective essays how the estates of the Austrian Netherlands swore the oath of homage only after lengthy negotiations with the Habsburg monarchs. The latter participatory power relations also apply for the Hungarian Estates, as Fanni Hende details. Each of these essays outlining individual circumstances in the vast conglomerate of the Habsburg empire appears comprehensive to a novice such as myself

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