Biography

Anne Huijbers is Senior Lecturer in medieval history at the University of Fribourg (CH) and is especially interested in the different instruments used to create collective identities in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Her first monograph Zealots for Souls: Dominican Narratives of Self-Understanding during Observant Reforms, c. 1388-1517 (2018) showed how religious orders used narratives to create (reformed) identities in late medieval and early modern Europe. As NWO Rubicon Fellow at the École Française de Rome she has focused on the impact of empire in late medieval and Renaissance Italy and on the (unifying) functions of political rituals in Western Europe. Her postdoctoral work has resulted among others in the publication of the volume Emperors and Imperial Discourse in Italy, c. 1300-1500 (2022) which highlights the continuing importance of the imperial ideal throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century.

Project Summary

“Receive the sign of glory” (Accipe signum glorie) – with these words the pope placed the imperial crown on the head of the new emperor before the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. From Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 until 1452, twenty-seven emperors and at least sixteen empresses were created in the Eternal City. Celebrating the emperor as the bringer of justice, the establisher of peace and the supreme defender of the Christian world, the imperial coronations in Rome can be considered as perhaps the most remarkable examples of “supranational” collaboration in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Building on new approaches in the interdisciplinary fields of ritual and performance studies, this project approaches the tradition as a vivid and enduring cultural praxis and shows both the dynamics and the continuing appeal of a tradition that ritually performed a unifying political ideology and provided Western Europe with a supreme leader and a supreme capital. Whereas traditional scholarship privileged liturgical texts and used them as windows on an imagined static ritualistic reality, the present project contextualizes these coronation programs and compares them with other discourses that gave meaning to the imperial coronations. Performed in the monumental cityscape of Rome, these festive and public events carried attractive memories of ancient grandeur and were repeatedly described with the rhetoric of triumph.