The Triumph of Temperance: Power, Negotiation, and Resistance in Royal Entries in Portugal, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

This chapter consists of an analysis of royal entries held in Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focusing on their potential as sites of negotiation, dispute, and resistance. By stirring a confrontation between the representational framework of the crown and the court, on the one hand, and the ceremonial customs that materialized the dignity of the cities, on the other, these occasions created three fronts of tension among participants: attempts to escape or negotiate financial burdens imposed by their staging, encounters between a protocol that was open to petitionary discourses and the king’s idealized stance as an attentive spectator, and the uncertain behavior of crowds, which could shift the meaning of the ritual. Articulated around these tensions, the programs of the entries were necessarily open to the presentation of claims by local institutions and permeable to acts of resistance.