Paola Nestola puts her hands and under the eyes of the readers a comprehensive study to reflect on the ceremonial as a field of construction of religious identity, highlighting the archaeological and archetypal features of an important ceremony of the modern era: the solemn entrance of the bishops into the diocese. In recent decades much has been published about political rituality, both in Portugal and in other countries with deep Christian roots. The book, based on written and visual documents, fits into this scientific context, with the purpose of analysing a little knowne thereal corpus of ceremonial representations but with a strong symbolic and emotional charge. Starting from the unpublished biographical stages of the Archbishop of Braga, Fr. Agostinho de Jesus (1588-1609), will it be possible to approach an incursion into this episcopal ceremony and its archetypal origins? Is it possible to reflect on the imaginative and contemplative experience unleashed on the protagonists of this liturgy? Is it possible to reconstruct the perception that has arisen, in its contemporaries, of the power and jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Braga? Throughout the 17th-18th centuries the solemn ceremony changed following a cultural, religious, political, theological and liturgical change that also took into account the reflections of the Protestant Reformation. For this |