Moana Toteff

• C4: Ceremonies in Print: Intermediality and Representation in Early Modern Netherlandish Culture

The Festival Descriptions of Joannes Bochius

The research project works with Neo-Latin texts that were written and published in the early modern period by the humanist Joannes Bochius. Our corpus encompasses festival descriptions for Antwerp, epigrams, panegyric, poetry, and psalms. We focus on the festival books, however, which Joannes Bochius wrote as secretary of Antwerp. Because these texts were both politically and literarily motivated, they present a unique intersection of autological and heterological influence, which makes them ideal figures of aesthetic reflection. Our project plans to demonstrate the aesthetic potential of these books and how the performative acts of the processions are realized in the Latin text. The descriptive passages are accompanied by copper engravings, which illustrate the ephemeral architecture of triumph and thus create a direct and reciprocal relationship with the Latin descriptions. It is precisely this intermediality that we see as the instrument and vehicle of triumphal performativity. As part of the philological project, we therefore aim to formulate the textual elements of performative acts in correspondence or especially in divergence to the engravings.