From 1286 to 1583, the citizens of Florence staged a curious ritual to celebrate the installation of a new bishop. Played out over two days, the bishop's entry gave visual expression to his institutional power, announced his personal values as chief pastor and legitimised the sacrality of the local institutional church. Part of the rite's power stemmed from its dual nature. It was simultaneously a rite of adventus -the arrival of an apostolic emissary or temporal lord -and a rite of possesso -the taking of legitimate possession. Investiture ceremonies also touched the sacred, dramatising the institutionalised charisma from which the bishop drew his power. By making explicit reference to local miracles and charismatic sites, entry rites permitted bishops all over Europe to identify themselves with their illustrious predecessors, around whom rich deposits of legend, iconography and civic ritual had accumulated. 1 Probably no other type of procession in late medieval and early modern Europe demarcated the sacred topography of a city so clearly and kept its sacred legends as alive as episcopal entries did.However, these rites were not sacred in an otherworldly sense but were deeply enmeshed with power relations of various kinds. The installation of a new Florentine bishop helped map the shifting contours of power exercised by aristocratic families and the republican city government over the local church. In fact, Florentines used the rite itself as an instrument by which to balance familial and civic claims against those of the bishop. 2 These ceremonies thus offer an important index to the nature and tenor of church-state relations. Much of the documentation for Florentine episcopal entries stems from litigation surrounding these events, in contrast to the narrative sources describing similar rites elsewhere in Europe. Judging from the perennial quarrels that erupted, the installation ceremonies for Florentine bishops offered an important locus for the visible expression of power and for its public renegotiation throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.Within the Florentine rite, one episode stands out for the ways it linked gender constructions with political power and religious culture: the symbolic marriage (sposalizio) of the incoming bishop to the abbess of S. Pier Maggiore, the city's oldest Benedictine