HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 - Louis XIV (HC)

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.

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. Many royal leaders have used dress as a weapon, from Louis XIV to Catherine the Great, and Napoleon I to Princess Diana.

Originally published in 1957, this classic work traces the historical problem posed by the "King's two bodies"--the body natural and the body politic--back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates, by placing the concept in its proper setting of medieval thought and political theory, how the early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a "political theology.'" The King's Two Bodies is a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.

This contribution to the long-running debate about 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. For information on Louis XIV, see in particular this essay: "The New Monarchy in France, the Social Elites and the Society of Princes."

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 France and Spain.

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. Through such activities the European 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.

As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism.

In this book on diplomacy, Hennings explores the relationship between European powers and Russia from the Peace of Westphalia to the reign of Peter the Great. He examines how, at a moment of new departure in both Europe and Russia, the norms shaping diplomatic practice emerged from the complex relations and direct encounters within the world of princely courts rather than from incompatible political cultures.

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "Great Century" and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de La Sablière and its encounter with the traveler and philosopher François Bernier, this book resurrects the conversations about India inspired by Bernier's travels and inscribed in his influential texts produced in collaboration with La Sablière's salon.