HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 (HC): Royal Courts

This thoroughly interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the multi-faceted relationship between international politics, diplomacy and the visual arts that developed during the early seventeenth century. Ranging across Western Europe, from England to the Low Countries, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, these essays demonstrate conclusively the subtlety and complexity of visual communication within early baroque court societies, which enabled artists to convey complex political messages through paintings.

This exhibition catalog explores the remarkable theatrical designs of Italy's influential Bibiena family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their elaborate stage designs were used for operas, festivals, and courtly performances across Europe, from their native Italy to cities as far afield as Vienna, Prague, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Lisbon.

The essays in this volume provide a unique account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the 16th and 17th centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festivals in Italy, France, Austria, Scotland and German. The essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns.

From the Renaissance festivals ballet, opera and even the proscenium arch theatre are derived. Festivals are therefore a vital part of European cultural history. Here Roy Strong provides a guide to their origins and purpose, and their lasting influence.

This work of comparative history explores the array of ceremonies that Europeans performed to enact their taking possession of the New World. Frenchmen reproduced the grandeur of royal processions wherever possible, always ending in dialogue with the indigenous peoples. Spaniards made solemn speeches before launching military attacks. Dutchmen drew intensely detailed maps, scrutinizing harbors and coastlines as they disembarked. The Portuguese superimposed the grid of latitudes upon lands they were later to take by the sword. The English calmly laid out fences and hedges in the manner of their native shires. Through such activities each power considered itself to be creating imperial authority over the Americas; yet each failed to acknowledge the same significance in the ceremonies of other powers. This book develops the historic cultural contexts of these ceremonies and tackles the implications of these histories for contemporary nation-states of the postcolonial era.

The Civilizing Process stands as Norbert Elias's greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages, and showing how this was related to the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them.

In recent years scholars have increasingly challenged and reassessed the once established concept of the 'crisis of the nobility' in early-modern Europe. Offering a range of case studies from countries across Europe this collection further expands our understanding of just how the nobility adapted to the rapidly changing social, political, religious and cultural circumstances around them.

"This book presents the first detailed study of the ancestry of the modern artist and the ideological transformation by which the artist emerged from his position as a craftsman, acquiring a status comparable to that enjoyed by representatives of the liberal arts and engaging like them in an intellectual activity." "Central to the book is an analysis of the court and the artist's role within it. In the first part the author examines the rise of organized court culture and its relations with the cultural life of the cities during the Renaissance, and goes on to explore the emancipation of the artist, through patronage, from the artisan conditions imposed by the guilds. The second part studies the organization of art at the courts of western Europe: offices and functions, pay patronage, intercourt connections and the influence of the prince are all set in the context of the developing role of the modern artist." "The book makes an original contribution to the study of intellectual and cultural history and will be welcomed by all interested in western European art in its intellectual and historical context."--BOOK JACKET.

The classic study of the life of the nobility at the royal court of France, especially under Louis XIV.

"Throughout history rulers have used dress as a form of legitimisation and propaganda. While palaces, pictures and jewels might reflect the choice of a monarch's predecessors or advisers, clothes reflected the preferences of the monarch himself. Being both personal and visible, the right costume at the right time could transform and define a monarch's reputation. Many royal leaders have used dress as a weapon, from Louis XIV to Catherine the Great, and Napoleon I to Princess Diana." "This book explores how rulers have sought to control their image through their appearance. Mansel shows how individual styles of dress throw light on the personalities of particular monarchs, on their court system, and on their ambitions. He looks also at the economics of the costume industry, at patronage, at the etiquette involved in mourning dress, and at the act of dressing itself. Fascinating glimpses into the lives of European monarchs and contemporary potentates reveal the intimate connection between power and the way it is packaged."--BOOK JACKET.

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence of individuals. This volume provides a broad discussion on the formation of dynastic identities in relationship to the lineage's own history, other families within the social elite, and the ruling dynasty. Tied in with this broad international focus, the volume addressed a variety of related themes, including the expression of ambitions and aspirations through family history; the social and cultural means employed to enhance status; the legal, religious and political attitude toward sovereigns; the role of women in the formation and reproduction of (composite) dynastic identities; and the transition of aristocratic dynasties to royal dynasties.

Ranging in date from Elias's teenage years before the First World War To The 1930s, The writings in this volume were previously unpublished in English.

Frans Pourbus le Jeune, Flamand naturalisé français à la fin de sa vie et dernier d'une dynastie de peintres, fut le plus réputé des portraitistes des princes au début du XVIIe siècle. En France, c'est surtout à travers ses tableaux que l'on connaît Henri IV, Marie de Médicis mais aussi le jeune Louis XIII. Cet ouvrage, le premier jamais consacré au peintre, présente l'ensemble de ses oeuvres aujourd'hui identifiées comme telles, dont plusieurs inédites : les très nombreuses illustrations mettent en regard les portraits peints par Pourbus et des oeuvres de ses contemporains (Rubens, Tintoret fils, Caravage...) comme des maîtres de la Renaissance. Le livre se veut, autant qu'une somme sur le peintre, une introduction au portrait princier du VIIe siècle.

This website supports sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400-1750).
This collection of studies, Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450-1700) (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) was edited by the website's co-founder. See the college icons above for the Tripod catalog book records.

The appearance of automaton clocks during the Renaissance was made possible by technical advances that allowed small mechanical figures to be created. Thus, miniature and portable versions could be produced of the large mechanical figures that had adorned grottos and gardens since the the time of Alexander the Great. Important discoveries, as well as the development of commercial relations with Asia and America, stirred up a new fascination for exoticism with mechanical versions of elephants and lions becoming popular.

This decisive contribution to the long-running debate about the dynamics of state formation and elite transformation in early modern Europe examines the new monarchies that emerged during the course of the 'long seventeenth century'. It argues that the players surviving the power struggles of this period were not 'states' in any modern sense, but primarily princely dynasties pursuing not only dynastic ambitions and princely prestige but the consequences of dynastic chance.

In the early modern period, rulers demonstrated their power and influence through carefully curated "display"--their presence in court ceremonies, their palaces and their contents, and their portraits. Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), queen consort of King Charles I of England, embraced these opportunities for display with particular flair. This richly illustrated book develops a powerful picture not just of the images, fashions, interiors, and buildings shaped by the queen's directorial influence but also of the political and religious factors that governed her choices and policies of court display. Erin Griffey analyzes the full spectacle of the queen's represented image, not only through the well-known portraits by Sir Anthony van Dyck but also through her rich bed ensembles, tapestries, jewelry, clothing, and devotional goods--the objects that embodied and conveyed her royal power.

"This interdisciplinary study examines painted portraiture as a defining metaphor of elite self-representation in early modern culture. Beginning with Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), the most influential early modern account of the formation of elite identity, the argument traces a path across the ensuing century towards the images of courtiers and nobles by the most persuasive of European portrait painters, Van Dyck, especially those produced in London during the 1630s." -- Provided by publisher

This book explores the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century. Born in 1626 into a bourgeois family in Pistoia, Italy, Atto Melani was castrated to preserve his singing voice and soon rose to both artistic and social prominence. His extant letters not only depict the musical activities of several European centers, they reveal the real-life context of music and the musician: how a singer related to patrons and colleagues, what he thought about his profession, and the role music played in his life. Whether Atto was singing, spying, having sex, composing, or even rejecting his art, his life illustrates how music-making was always also a negotiation for power. Providing a rare glimpse of the social and political contexts of seventeenth-century music, Roger Freitas sheds light on the mechanisms that generated meaning for music, clarifying what music at this time actually was.

"Discussing monarchies throughout Europe, from Britain to Russia, Monod tells how sixteenth-century kings and queens were thought to heal the sick with a touch, were mediators between divine authority and the Christian self in quasi-religious ceremonies, and were seen as ideal mirrors of human identity. By 1715, the sacred authority of the monarchy had been supplanted by an ideology fusing internal moral responsibility with external obedience to an abstract political authority. Subjects were expected to identify not with a sacred king but with the natural person of the ruler. No longer divine, the kings and queens of the Enlightenment took up a new, more human place in the hearts and minds of their subjects."--BOOK JACKET.

The Power of Place explores the nature of power--the power of kings, emperors, and popes--through the places that these rulers created or developed, including palaces, cities, landscapes, holy places, inauguration sites, and burial places. Ranging across all of Europe from the first to the sixteenth centuries--from Prague and Seville to Palermo and the Oslo Fjord--David Rollason examines how these places conveyed messages of power and what those messages were. Rollason draws on the latest research in a range of disciplines--principally archaeology, and the histories of art, architecture, and landscape, as well as historical and literary studies--to investigate what the power of rulers consisted of.

In the period between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, the court was paramount in European political and cultural life. It was not only the princes' place of residence, it functioned as the seat of government, the stage for factional and dynastic rivalries, and often as a major source of artistic patronage. Explore twelve of the great European courts. Learn how these households were run, how the architecture of their palaces and gardens was adapted to the routines of courtly life, what role the courts played in the princes' relations with the wider community of the realm, and how magnificence and ritual were deployed to political ends.

The V&A has one of the world's greatest collections of 17th- and 18th-century European decorative art. Eighty masterpieces from this magnificent collection, acquired and used by rulers of power, wealth, and taste, provide the focus of this book. Each is contextualized in one of five thematic sections that highlight an important aspect of European courtly life: the importance of war; the role of religion; the peaceful arts of the domestic interior; and the magnificence of personal adornment. Superb new photography reveals a broad range of objects, including paintings and sculpture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and furniture, textiles and dress, prints and drawings.

This book contains thirteen essays on European princes and princely culture between 1450 and 1650. Many products of medieval and renaissance culture literature, music, political ideology, social and governmental structures, the fine arts, and even forms of devotional practice found their best expression in the context of the courts of greater and lesser princes.

France and England are often seen as monarchies standing at opposite ends of the spectrum of seventeenth-century European political culture. On the one hand the Bourbon monarchy took the high road to absolutism, while on the other the Stuarts never quite recovered from the diminution of their royal authority following the regicide of Charles I in 1649.nbsp; However, both monarchies shared a common medieval heritage of sacral kingship, and their histories remained deeply entangled throughout the century. This study focuses on the interaction between ideas of monarchy and images of power in the two countries between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the Glorious Revolution.

For women at the early modern courts, clothing and jewellery were essential elements in their political arsenal, enabling them to signal their dynastic value, to promote loyalty to their marital court and to advance political agendas. This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends. Essays encompass women from courts in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Habsburg Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

This collection of essays concerns issues involving clothing at royal courts 1400 to 1815. Authors address the connections between clothing and politics, the images that kings and queens crafted through their wardrobes, court styles and fashion, and the life of court clothing on the stage, in film, and in fashion designs. Essays in English analyze court dress in 18th century England, Emperor Rudolph II, Charles II, and representations of Empress Josephine.

The author examines not only regal paraphernalia such as crowns, scepters, thrones, and orbs, but also the painted portraits, sculptures, tapestries, carved ivories, jewelry, coins, armor, and, eventually, photographs created to display their owner’s sovereign power, a vast collection of works that now forms a significant portion of the cultural heritage of Western civilization.

Voices of Conscience analyzes how the link between politics and conscience was articulated and shaped throughout the seventeenth century by confessors who acted as counsellors to monarchs. Against the backdrop of the momentous intellectual, theological, and political shifts that marked thisperiod, the study examines comparatively how the ethical challenges of political action were confronted in Spain and France and how questions of conscience became a major argument in the hegemonic struggle between the two competing Catholic powers.

The concluding volume of Francis Oakley's authoritative trilogy moves on to engage the political thinkers of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Reformation and religious wars, and the era that produced the Divine Right Theory of Kingship. Oakley's ground-breaking study probes the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern modes of political thinking and dwells at length on the roots and nature of those contract theories that sought to legitimate political authority by grounding it in the consent of the governed.

"Observers in England, Spain, France and many other European states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew increasingly alarmed by the growing influence of favourites, or minister-favourites. These individuals appeared to be usurping powers and duties normally exercised by monarchs. In this pioneering book, a team of international scholars considers the emergence of favourites in Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Zenith of European Monarchy and its Elites: The Politics of Culture, 1650-1750 focuses on a previously neglected key elite bonding strategy; explains how a common identity was forged by erecting cultural defences against outsiders; and demonstrates how the power and prestige of the ruling classes rose to unprecedented heights." "Essential reading for students and scholars of early modern European history, this fascinating new study shows how the period 1650-1750 gains a new coherence - as the pinnacle of Europe's monarchies and their elites."--BOOK JACKET.