Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated
with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that
symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many
historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to
understanding modern governance--an idea that this volume challenges
through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these
events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore
important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural
significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon
over time.