A king travels provides a useful survey of the history of Spanish festive traditions and their social, cultural and political significance from the end of the medieval period to that of Habsburg rule. Teo Ruiz adopts a thematic approach to his study which covers a wide range of royal festivals, including entries, tournaments, jousts, births, weddings and funerals, as well as popular events such as Carnival, Corpus Christi and autos de fe. The book focuses primarily on the travels of Philip ii, notably his journeys to the kingdom of Aragón in 1585–6 and 1592, based on the narrative accounts of Henry Cock. Ruiz sets the events in the context of the instabilities that reigned in the eastern kingdoms and the continued resistance of the Aragonese to any Castilian encroachment on their liberties. The first of these voyages to Zaragoza, Barcelona, Monzón and Valencia, was designed to reinforce the social bonds that tied the people to the crown through the spectacle of royalty on parade, while also reiterating, through symbolic rituals, elaborate display and strict hierarchical organisation, the distance between the monarch and his subjects. At Monzón Philip attended the opening of the Cortes where his reception was muted in an atmosphere of anti-Castilian resentment among the deputies. On his second visit to Aragón in 1592, to attend the Cortes at Tarazona, Philip chose to respect Aragonese laws and avoid further confrontation. It was to be the king's last public entry. Ruiz points to the increasing centralisation of power through performance in the transition from the medieval to early modern period, binding society together in traditions of inclusion and exclusion. In this process, popular festivals such as Carnival, rather than being sites of dialogue and potential subversion, came to be carefully regulated and choreographed from above. Carnival gave way to the celebration of Corpus Christi, an affirmation of the redemptive power of the holy host that ritualised the Church–State alliance and Counter-Reformation teachings in elaborate ceremonial processions. Ruiz points to a gradual ‘privatisation’ of festivals as they withdrew from public to private spaces in accordance with the distancing of the Habsburg monarchy from its subjects in an attempt to assert its authority over them. Although relegated to the side lines, most notably in the auto de fe, which by the seventeenth century had become highly choreographed displays of rank and order in society, the populace nevertheless played an important role in validating the performance and its inherent articulation of power. The text includes a very useful bibliography of primary source material for further study of the history of festivals.