Browsing by Subject "seventeenth century"

This dissertation, For God and King: Jesuit Ephemeral Spectacles in France Under the First Bourbons, examines the contributions of the French Jesuits to the production, staging, and commemoration of festivals in the Assistancy of France. Members of the Society of Jesus produced the spectacles in this study and were the authors of the festival books that commemorated the events for posterity. Beginning with the nuptial entry of Maria de’ Medici into Avignon in 1600, and ending with the death of Louis XIII in 1643, the festivals analyzed were instrumental for cultivating the relationship between the Society and the Bourbon monarchy at a time when both entities were experiencing a rise in power and influence before arriving at an apogee in the second half of the seventeenth century. Crucially, this dissertation interrogates the use of ephemeral architecture and other apparatuses as a means of manipulating and transforming existing architectural spaces in order to construct new spaces that were agents in the transmission of the multi-layered messages on display in the festival’s iconographic programs.

Scholarship on the early modern Jesuits, Jesuit theater, and early modern festivals is extensive. The concentration of the literature on the Jesuits in Italy, Germany, and their missions outside the European continent belies the importance of the kingdom of France to the history of the Society and misrepresents the importance of the Jesuits to France and the Bourbon monarchy. The emphasis on Jesuit theater outside of France, or on French Jesuit theater under Louis XIV, disregards the important role played by Jesuit theater and ephemeral spectacles in promoting Jesuit colleges and reinforcing the Society’s standing in the kingdom in the early part of the century. Similarly, the perceptible trend in festival scholarship to eschew the early seventeenth-century, and the reign of Louis XIII specifically, discounts the function of festivals in asserting Louis XIII’s power and in cultivating an environment in which the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV could take root. A significant portion of festival scholarship present studies that either: a) analyze only part of the festival; or, b) fail to consider the implications of the sites and the architectural history of the built environment occupied by the festival.

Adopting a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to the study and interrogation of early modern festivals and ephemeral spectacles that is reflective of the multifaceted, multimedia nature of the subject, this dissertation analyzes early modern festivals as complete, multimedia works of art using a combination of site-specific, textual, and visual analyses. It examines the Jesuit contributions to these festivals and redirects the attention of Jesuit and festival studies to the first half of the seventeenth-century in France.