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Cover -- Halftitle page -- Series page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Contributors -- Introduction -- Notes -- Part One Coronation and Enthronement -- 1 Where exactly is the throne? Locating sovereignty in sixteenth-century ottoman succession rituals -- Generic concept of enthronement -- The succession of 1566 -- Happily commencing a new reign? -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 2 Proclamations and coronations in Palermo (1700-1735): Performing kingship and celebrating civic power -- Four kings for one kingdom -- A Deo coronatus? -- A monarchic celebration or a civic festival? -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 3 The evolution of the British coronation rite, 1761-1953 -- Protestant Reformation -- Anglo-Catholic restoration -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Part Two Ceremonial of Royal Courts -- 4 The daily court ceremonial of the French queen in the reign of Henry III -- Salic Law and the limitation of the power of the queen -- The ceremonial of the court of the queen: tradition and infl uence -- Queenship in the regulations of Henry III, 1570s-1580s -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 5 Courtly and ceremonial spaces in Spanish royal sites: An evolution from the renaissance to the baroque -- Court space in the Spanish Monarchy during the Early Modern period -- Ceremonial customs and etiquette in the Spanish Monarchy: from Renaissance to Baroque -- Ceremonies and the transformation of court space in Spanish Royal Sites -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 6 Royal baptism in the Spanish court: Art and ritual from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century -- The establishment of an etiquette for royal baptism -- The centuries of Grandee pre-eminence: The participation of the nobles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- A change towards royal intimacy: Bourbon baptism ceremonies.

Historians have generally argued that the feudal system in the later Middle Ages in England had declined into obsolescence, at least as far as the aristocracy were concerned, and little has been written in the last half-century on the subject. Yet not only were the greater landowners assiduous in keeping records of tenants holding land from them by knight's service, serjeanty and socage, but evidence from these sources suggests that feudal rights and duties remained important. Revenues from feudal incidents (honorial courts, escheats, wardships and feudal aids) were fluctuating but often lucrative sources of income, though they had declined from thirteenth-century heights and were subject in the later fourteenth and fifteenth century to both political fluctuations and variability in quality of lordship. Lords also continued to insist on the personal performance of homage; the numbers involved, the high-status buildings in which the ceremony was performed (usually before important witnesses) and the solemnity of the ceremony itself suggest that homage was more important in the later Middle Ages than is generally acknowledged. Feudal tenants, indeed, played a significant part in aristocratic affinities. Defined in narrow terms as a system of relationships, feudalism was not moribund.