«Performing the King Divine» proposes a framework for the systematic consideration of early modern festivals in the Spanish courts as a coherent phenomenon of ritual performance for the creation of a divine image of royal power using a historical, artistic, literary and anthropological approach. Starting with medieval examples that convey the ruler’s physical proximity to the divine, and ending with the identification of the ruler with the divine during the reign of the last Spanish Habsburg monarch Charles II, this study looks at the evolution of the discourse that represents the Habsburg dynasty’s divinely inspired imperial rights by means of performance within the cultural context of the productions.
