Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts
Reassessing the Public and Private Divide, 1400-1800
9789463720076
304 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Grand, extravagant, magnificent, scandalous, corrupt, political, personal, fractious; these are terms often associated with the medieval and early modern courts. Moreover, the court constituted a forceful nexus in the social world, which was central to the legitimacy and authority of rulership. As such, courts shaped European politics and culture: architecture, art, fashion, patronage, and cultural exchanges were integral to the spectacle of European courts. Researchers have convincingly emphasised the public nature of courtly events, procedures, and ceremonies. Nevertheless, court life also involved pockets of privacy, which have yet to be systematically addressed. This edited collection addresses this lacuna and offers interpretations that urge us to reassesses the public nature of European courts. Thus, the proposed publication will fertilise the grounds for a discussion of the past and future of court studies. Indeed, the contributions make us reconsider present-day understandings of privacy as a stable and uncontestable notion.
Author Bio
Dustin M. Neighbors is the project coordinator and a postdoctoral researcher for the EU-Horizon funded project, Colour4CRAFTS at the University of Helsinki. His main area of research is on monarchy and court culture, with an emphasis on the performativity of gender, political and material culture, cultural practices and history (i.e., hunting) within sixteenth and seventeenth-century Northern Europe, and the employment of digital research methods.
Lars Cyril Nørgaard is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He was awarded an international postdoctoral fellowship from the Independent Research Foundation Denmark. His research interests include but are not limited to the tension between religious seclusion and societal engagement, the relationship between manuscript text, print, paratext and image, and the ambiguous nature of premodern privacy.
Elena Woodacre is Reader in Renaissance History at the University of Winchester. She is a specialist in queenship and royal studies and has published extensively in this area. She is the editor-in-chief of the Royal Studies Journal and two book series with Routledge and ARC Humanities Press. Her most recent monographs include a biography of Joan of Navarre (2022) and Queens and Queenship (2021).
