With illustrations by Marten de Vos. Ernest, Archduke of Austria,
son of the Emperor Maximilian II, was made Governor of Antwerp
after the death of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, in 1592. This
MS. is a presentation copy recording his Royal Entry into the City
of Antwerp on June 14th, 1594. The pageant stages and triumphal
arches were designed by Marten de Vos. The description was written
by the Municipal Secretary of Antwerp, a distinguished classical
scholar named Johannes Bochius (1555-1609). A printed account was
published in 1595 (after the death in February of that year of the
Archduke, whose funeral panegyric rounds off the volume) by the
famous printing house of Christopher Plantin: the drawings by De
Vos were engraved by Pieter Van der Borcht. This edition has been
reprinted in facsimile with an introduction by Hans Mielke by
Benjamin Blom, New York, 1970. The pageant stages as shown in this
MS. were also used as floats in the traditional ommegang (religious
procession) of Our Lady, which was paraded twice a year, on Trinity
Sunday in honour of the Circumcision, and on the Sunday after the
Assumption of Our Lady. This was originally a religious procession,
which, like the Corpus Christi processions in England, then
acquired floats showing Biblical scenes. In Antwerp they were from
the Joys and Sorrows of Our Lady: but the Antwerp ommegang also
included secular floats alluding to civic pretensions.
