This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art takes as its theme festivals, spectacles and rituals of court, city and state. A burgeoning, modern interest in the role of such events in early-modern Netherlandish society first found full expression in Johan Huizinga´s landmark Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen of 1919. Huizinga understood the brilliant pageantry of the Burgundian court, and its analogue within civic culture, to be empty of intellectual or spiritual content, opposing these to the substantive richness of religious spectacle, despite the similarity of form and even content between the three arenas. Indeed, this scepticism regarding the value and significance of spectacle and ritual at least in part accounts for Huizinga´s choice of volume, which characterizes the period as one of culmination or even decline.
This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art takes as its theme festivals, spectacles and rituals of court, city and state. A burgeoning, modern interest in the role of such events in early-modern Netherlandish society first found full expression in Johan Huizinga´s landmark Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen of 1919. Huizinga understood the brilliant pageantry of the Burgundian court, and its analogue within civic culture, to be empty of intellectual or spiritual content, opposing these to the substantive richness of religious spectacle, despite the similarity of form and even content between the three arenas. Indeed, this scepticism regarding the value and significance of spectacle and ritual at least in part accounts for Huizinga´s choice of volume, which characterizes the period as one of culmination or even decline.
