Festival book

Festival books (Dutch: feestboeken, Spanish: libros de festivos) are books, often illustrated, that commemorate a notable event such as a royal entry, coronation or wedding. Funerals were also commemorated in similar fashion. The genre thrived in Renaissance and early modern Europe, where rulers utilized the form to both document and embellish displays of wealth and power.

Large numbers were produced, often surviving in very few copies; the largest collection, in the British Library, has over 2000 examples. Originally manuscripts, often illustrated, compiled for prince or city, with the arrival of print they were frequently published, varying in form from short pamphlets describing the order of events, and perhaps recording speeches, to lavish books illustrated with woodcuts or engravings showing the various tableaux, often including a fold-out panorama of the procession, curling to and fro across the page. The pamphlets were ephemera; a printed description of two leaves describing the entry of Ferdinand II of Aragon into Valladolid, 1513, survives in a single copy (at Harvard) because it was bound with another text. A lost description of the ceremonious reception given by Louis XII to Ferdinand at Savona (June 1507) is only known from a purchase receipt of Ferdinand Columbus.

These livrets are not always to be trusted as literal records; some were compiled beforehand from the plans, and others after the event from fading memories. The authors or artists engaged in producing the books had by no means always seen the entry themselves. Roy Strong finds that they are "an idealization of an event, often quite distant from its reality as experienced by the average onlooker. One of the objects of such publications was to reinforce by means of word and image the central ideas that motivated those who conceived the programme."Philip II of Spain's ceremonial entry into Antwerp in 1549 was all but called off because of torrential rain, but the book shows it as it should have been.Thomas Dekker, the playwright and author of the book on The Magnificent Entertainment for James I of England is refreshingly frank:

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