Ordines Coronationis Europa

This project, “Ordines Coronationis Europa,” examines French royal inauguration from the mid-eighth to the late sixteenth century through a digital corpus of coronation ordines, manuscript images, and spatial-ritual evidence. Built on the Ordines Coronationis Europae database and extending Richard A. Jackson’s edition of the Ordines Coronationis Franciae, it combines TEI-encoded liturgical texts with IIIF-linked manuscript images in order to study how royal legitimacy was constructed, transmitted, and reinterpreted across different witnesses.The project argues that French coronation ritual encoded a long-lasting structure of double legitimacy. Kingship was represented as sacred, hereditary, and biblically grounded through unction, dynastic blood, and theological language; yet it was also shaped by election formulae, oath clauses, peer support, public acclamation, and the visible participation of the political community. Rather than treating these elements as merely ceremonial, the project shows how text, image, and ritual space jointly organized the relationship between God, the Church, the royal line, the peers, and the people.Its purpose is both historical and methodological: to reassess the medieval origins of divine-right kingship, and to demonstrate how digital encoding can reveal patterns of political meaning without flattening the individuality of each manuscript witness.