x.x.x.x | Message modified by user Nellie January 12, 2013, 9:44 pm
This RCMB version of coronation history begins with lifting some sentences from a source I always enjoy exploring. My method here is not scholarly and probably not fair to the subject, but, this is a message board where almost everyone is in a rush to discover something urgently - with beautiful illustrations all the way, of course.
My source is The Crown Jewels, The History of the Coronation Regalia in the Jewel House of the Tower of London, in two volumes, General Editor: Claude Blair, The Stationery Office, 1998
I will call all that The Crown Jewels 1998.
So some snippets, very much at random, and with huge gaps.
“ The rite we know as coronation has an ancestry both pagan and Christian. Its roots are in the practice of electing kings and emperors, either on their merits, or because they belonged to a royal or imperial family, and though the ceremony of election has long since been lost to sight it was to influence the introduction of the rite and its subsequent development. In time the Roman Emperors came to wear a diadem in imitation of Hellenistic kings but there is no record of any prescribed ritual by which they assumed it.
“Coronation in the strict sense of inaugurating a ruler by placing a crown on his head belongs essentially to Christian time, and first appears in Byzantium. It was a rite inspired by oriental traditions, and notably by the Old Testament past of Christianity.
“For more than a hundred years the Byzantium coronation took place, not in a church, but in the Hippodrome or in the atrium of the Imperial Palace.
“The ceremonial of imperial coronation in the tenth century is known to us from Byzantine liturgical books and from the description in the Liber Ceremoniarum of the Emperor Constantine IX Porphyrogenitus, which seems to have been completed c. 959.
[This lengthy paragraph describes acclamation, homage, prayers, crowning, more acclamation, and with robes, mantle, dalmatic, and crown.]
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