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Introduction

The festivals holdings of the Warburg Institute Library span the period 1450-1800, focusing mainly on Italian festivities, with smaller sections on other countries. The section on festivals comes after the sections on theatre and music. The festival books collection is part of a wider of sources on Chivalry, Banqueting, Hunting, Falconry, Tournaments , Fencing and Wrestling, Dancing. The sources on festivals cover the Italian towns and regions of Venice, Padua, Verona, Treviso, Bergamo, Milan, Turin, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Perugia, Liguria, Urbino, Rome, Naples and Sicily. These are followed by the larger topographical divisions of France, Germany, Low-Countries, and England. The material already digitised covers a wide range of secular and sacred festivities: births, marriages, funerals, carnivals and other seasonal entertainments.

The collection was initially assembled by Aby Warburg and reflects his research on Florentine festivities, especially the Intermezzi of 1589 (link). Although Warburg’s study was published in 1895 he continued collecting material on festivals throughout his life. The set of pamphlets and engraving describing the 1608 wedding of Cosino de' Medici and Maria Magdalena of Austria were in fact acquired in 1929, shortly before his untimely death. Click here for list of digitised Florentine festival books.

Warburg's interest in festivals is another facet of his life-long fascination with the persistence of classical antiquity. While other sections of the Library enable researchers to trace the survival of the pagan gods in fields as varied as art (link), astrology (link) or fortune telling books (link), the festivals section provides records of numerous early modern triumphal chariots, processions and plays in which participants paraded as the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons.

After the Library moved to the United Kingdom in 1933 further acquisitions were prompted by the research of various scholars and doctoral students associated with the Institute, with a particular focus on French and Netherlandish festivals. The digital collections include a series of pamphlets printed on the occasion of Henri III entries in Italy (click to access texts) and further Netherlandish festival books will be soon accessible online.

The aim of these digital collections is to make out-of-print source material on medieval and Renaissance studies freely available online. Books are scanned, printed out on archival paper, bound and placed on the shelves. The originals are kept in the Reserve Books Room. A low resolution version of the pdf file is placed on the web and made available through the catalogue of the University of London Research Library Services. The record of each book contains a link to its pdf file.

Downloading may take from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the size of the file, as well as the age and connection speed of your computer.
You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these files.
Click here to download it for free.

Project Coordinator: François Quiviger
(François Quiviger@sas.ac.uk)

Links

Warburg Institute Library Holdings
Digitised Editions of Early Modern Festival books from the Warburg Institute

Digitised Editions of Early Modern Festival Books from the British Library
Festival Culture Online - 17th Century German Imprints of Baroque Festival Culture

Scans of Renaissance classic cookery books
From the University of Barcelona

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz , Drôle de pensée
From ABU. On public entertainment in Paris in 1675.

RESEARCH GROUPS

Europa Triumphans
From the University of Warwick

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