The Tsar's Happy Occasion

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Through this in-depth but beautifully written study, we gain a new appreciation of the importance of ceremony and ritual in creating and promoting visions of how the world does and should work at specific points in time.

(New Books Network) Martin's work offers an intensive and impressive examination of political ritual and the ways in which it supported first the Daniilovichi and then the Romanovs at court in the 16th-early 18th centuries.

(Kritika) Russell E. Martin has produced an impressive study of early modern weddings among Russia's ruling family. He has written a book that is fun to read.

(Slavic Review) The Tsar's Happy Occasion on "the tsar's happiest occasions" is an excellent contribution to comparative research on wedding practice as well as to the understanding of mechanisms of securing power during the Muscovite and early Petrine eras in Russian history.

(Canadian-American Slavic Studies) The Tsar's Happy Occasion is superb, and its erudition, argument, and clarity are of a high caliber that transcends our historical moment.

(The Russian Review) Martin has ferreted sources out from Russian archives and analyzed their composition and evolution with great skill. The result is a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the Russian court and hence the state over three centuries.

(Journal of Modern History)