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City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe. Edited by BARBARA A. HANAWALT and
KATHRYN L. REYERSON. Medieval Studies at Minnesota 6. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. xx + 331 pp.
This book is a "patchwork quilt" of chapters, taken from papers given at the University of Minnesota in 1991. It promises "new insights regarding the quality of medieval urban life, the shared values and the relationship between urban ceremonial and . . . art, literary, and liturgical forms" (p. ix). The book is really about the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It focuses exclusively on western Europe (Britain, France, the Low Countries, Spain, and Italy) during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Some of the authors describe great civic spectacles as community-creating experiences. Lawrence Bryant, in his essay on Paris and London during the Hundred Years' War, assumes that a "correspondence between political realities and the symbolism of the spectacle [in Paris] enhanced their ritual and unifying function" (p. 24). Elizabeth Brown and Nancy Regalado in their essay on Philip the Fair's La grant feste ....