The Representation of Foreign Sovereigns in Portuguese Royal Festivals, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of sovereigns of distant peoples in various public festivals celebrated in Lisbon between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. If, on the one hand, the act of surrendering to Portuguese sovereignty and the Christian religion, often staged by a king or his representative, was supposed to signal the inferiority and subordination of the “others”, on the other hand there are many cases in which the staging of otherness at the festival exceeds or interrupts this function. Through the visual and auditory dimensions of the performance, we can see how the presence and bodily movements of the actors sometimes complicate the messages of inferiority and subordination.