From Coronation to Chari-Vari: The Many Uses of Ritual and Ceremony in the Early Modern World

A One Day Colloquium at Birkbeck, University of London

As part of Birkbeck's thriving research culture, this event will bring together scholars to discuss the purpose and reception of ritual and ceremony in the early modern period. Early modern life was shaped by ritual and ceremony.  These rites had many functions, such as marking time, denoting power, place and order, and defining the sacred.  Ritual could provide a temporary release from the hierarchically ordered world or mark an attempt to assert and confirm social categories which were otherwise potentially unstable. 

Thursday 23 September 2010, 6.30 pm, B03, 43 Gordon Sq, key-note address by Professor Jeroen Duindam, of Groningen University:

‘Exhilaration and Ossification: Ritual and Ceremony in the Early Modern World’.

Prof. Duindam is an expert on early modern rituals and has published Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe's Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 (Cambridge, 2003) and Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court (Amsterdam 1995).   At the moment he is co-editing Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Brill Leiden, 2010).  

This event is free to attend and open to all, and will be followed by drinks.

The colloquium then takes place on Friday 24 September, in room B04, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD.

This event is organised by Stephen Brogan and Anne Byrne, for more information please contact ritualandceremony@googlemail.com

This colloquium is generously sponsored by the Royal Historical Society, the Society for the Study of French History, and the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.