Gender and ritual: Crowning empresses in the holy roman empire

Abstract

That queens and empresses were crowned in the Holy Roman Empire from the High Middle Ages on, beginning with Adelheid in 962, is well established. The how and when of such coronations and also their contexts have tended to be relegated, however, to the marginalia of both older and more recent investigations of the history of the early modern Empire. Neither the lately intensified research on the early modern Holy Roman Empire nor the research efforts of gender history have shown great interest in the six coronations of empresses in the Empire during the early modern period. This article draws our attention explicitly to such coronations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning with a brief description of the sequence of acts they comprised. The description illustrates that every coronation signified not just the sacralization of rule but also a ritual enactment of the gender hierarchy, a circumstance that has hitherto not been investigated by research on rituals of rule. The fact of this enactment is asserted in this article, as is the fact that it was a general characteristic of all European coronation rituals.