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Gordon Kipling. Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 393. $85.00.
The medieval civic triumph has usually been studied from the vantage of the Renaissance and as a result it has continued to be regarded as the primitive, derivative, and inept show that Withington and Chambers described in the early part of the twentieth century, lacking the coherent imagery and sophisticated political purpose of its neoclassical successor. In his Enter the King, Gordon Kipling seeks to correct this misunderstanding by taking the medieval triumph in northern Europe as a subject worthy of full-length study in its own right and by explaining its artistry and purpose. Kipling begins with the mid-fourteenth century when pageants first appear in civic triumphs, transforming them into theatrical rituals by converting cities into stages and sovereigns and their subjects into actors in dramas of inauguration, and concludes with the sixteenth century...
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