The study attempts to uncover individual allegorical components of their individual image and partly also the collective identity of the Habsburgs with the help of emblematic manuals and interpretive dictionaries of symbols using more than a dozen preserved occasional poems compiled on the occasion of Leopold I’s marriage to Margaret Theresa in 1666. In terms of genre, this occasional poetry was mainly a diverse range of printed and manuscript epithalamia, celebratory poems (encomia or laudatia), sonnets, odes, poetic genealogies and emblems. In conceiving them, the authors of the panegyric works sought inspiration in the biblical tradition and, above all, in the ancient heritage of Greek and Roman myths, which they ingeniously placed in the current cultural and political contexts.
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