Academic literature on the topic 'Europe – Court and courtiers – 17th century'

As John Adamson outlined in his voluminous comparative analysis of European court culture, „in the period between 1500 and 1750 a „Versailles model” of a court as a self-sufficient, situated in a free space, architectonically harmonious city-residency remote from the capital city, where the king’s household and administration was located, was an exception.” The Versailles conception and „model” both architectonically and in terms of practical functioning of the court was spread and secured in the 18th century, developing into a model of absolutism which was imitated to different extents. The spectrum of the adoption of the court of Louis XIV by material and intellectual culture reached from the grand ensembles of palaces of Carskoye Selo in Peterhof, Russia, Drottningholm in Sweden and Sanssouci in Germany to several small residences of the German princes’ realms in Weimar, Hanover, and elsewhere in Europe. Analyzing the works of several researchers about the transformation of the French aristocracy into court society, a common conclusion is the assurance of the symbolic autocratic power by Louis XIV to the detriment of the economic and political independence of the aristocracy. In this context, A. de Tocqueville points at the forfeiture of the power of the French aristocracy and its influence and a simultaneous self-isolation of the group, which he defines as a „caste with ideas, habits and barriers that they created in the nation.” Modern research, when revisiting the methods of the resarch on the aristocracy and when expanding the choice of sources, is still occupied with the problem defined in the beginning of the 19th century by A. de Tocqueville: The aristocracy lost its power and influence, and by the end of the 18th century also its economic basis for its dominance in French society. John Levron defines courtiers as functional mediators between the governor and society, calling them a „screen”.1 In turn, Ellery Schalk stated that in the time of Louis XIV the aristocracy was going through an elite identity crisis, when alongside the old aristocracy involved in military professions (noblesse d’épée), the governor allowed a new, so-called administrative aristocracy (noblesse de robe) to hold major positions and titles of honour. Along with the transformation of the traditional aristocratic hierarchy formed in the early Middle Ages, which John Lough described as an anachronism already back in the 17th century, also the status of governor and its symbolic place in the aristocratic hierarchy changed. It shall be noted that it is the question of a governor’s role in the political culture of absolutism by which the ideas of many researches can be distinguished. Norbert Elias thinks that an absolute monarch was a head of a family, which included the whole state and thereby turned into a governor’s „household”. Timothy Blanning, on the other hand, thinks that the court culture of Louis XIV was the expression of the governor’s insecurity and fears. This is a view which the researcher seems to derive from the traumatic experience of the Fronde (the aristocrats’ uprising against the mother of Louis XIV, regent Anna of Austria), which the culturologist K. Hofmane interpreted from a psychoanalytical point of view and defined Louis XIV as a conqueror of chaos and a despotic governor. In the wide spectrum of opinions, it is not the governor’s political principles which are postulated as a unifying element, but scenarios of the representation of power, their aims and various tools that are combined in the concept of court culture. N. Elias names symbolic activities in the court etiquette as the manifestation of power relations, whereas M. Yampolsky identifies a symbolic withdrawal of a governor’s body from the „circulation in society”, when a governor starts to represent himself, thereby alienating himself from society. George Gooch in this way reprimanded Louis XV as he thought this development would deprive the royal representation from the sacred. In turn, Jonathan Dewald in his famous work „European Aristocracy” noted that Louis XIV was not the first to use the phenomenon of the court for securing the personal authority of a governor, and refers to the courts during the late period of the Italian Renaissance as predecessors of French court culture. What role did the monarch’s closest „viewers” – the courtiers – play in this? K. Hofmane by means of comparison with the ancient Greek mythical monster Gorgon comes to conclusion that the court had to provide prey for the Gorgon (the king), who is both scared and fascinated by the terrific sight (of power and glory). The perception of the court as a collective observer implies the presence of the observed and worshiped object, the king. The public life of Louis XIV, which was subjected to the complicated etiquette, provided for the hierarchical access to the king’s public body. Let’s remember the „Memoirs” of Duc de Saint-Simon that gives a detailed description of the symbolic privileges granted to the courtiers, which along the material gifts (pensions, concessions and land plots) were tools for the formation of the identity and the status of a new aristocrat/courtier – along with the right to touch the king’s belongings, his attire, etc. The basis for securing the structure of the court’s hierarchy was provided by the governor’s body along the lines mentioned above, which according to the understanding of representation by M. Yampolsky was withdrawn from society and placed within the borders of the ensemble of the Versailles palace. There, by means of several tools, including dramatic works of art, the governor’s body was separated from its symbolic content and hidden behind the algorithms of ritualized activities. Blanning also speaks about a practice of hiding from the surrounding environment, thereby defining court culture as a hiding-place that a governor created around himself. It was possible to look at a governor and thereby be observed by him not only on particular festivals, when a governor was available mostly for court society, but also in different works of visual art, for example, on triumphal archs, in engravings, or during horse-racings.

The grand houses and gardens of William of Orange (1650–1702) and his courtiers in Britain and the Netherlands are strongly influenced by the French style, itself associated with Louis XIV, who was actually William’s arch-rival. This paper explores that paradox by probing ideas of power and friendship in 17th-century court culture.

The Court…, more accurately, the city where the Court resided, was a microcosm of the Monarchy that was governed from it. That was the case in Madrid. This paper deals with a little-known institution, the Hospital and the Church of the Italians, analysing above all its transformation in the 17th century through two important documents, the personal diary of a Neapolitan regent and a record of a conflict of powers between the Council of Italy and the nunciature in Madrid containing the hospital’s founding documents.

The article presents an attempt to reconstruct a communication network of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria). A lady at the court of Mary I of England and a wife of a Spanish grand, she was a powerful patroness of English Catholic exiles and helped them enter the Habsburg patronage network. The analysis of political activities of the Duchess of Feria (which included exchange of political information and patronage) compared with that of other women patronesses, first of all, Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland made it possible to define parameters of women’s patronage. It has been shown that connections to the court of Mary I of England that was partially integrated into the system of Habsburg courts made it easier for the former Marian courtiers to find patrons within transnational clientele of the Habsburgs

This article deals with miniatures of the Gospel from the collection of the Moscow Kremlin Museums, dated 1684. The author analyzes the iconography of the compositions, identifies the sources used as models for the masters who decorated the book, and also examines the circumstances associated with the order of the manuscript. The text touches on the issue of artistic connections between Russia and Western Europe in the field of book illustration of the 17th century and describes in detail the creative work of the court masters on the miniatures of the Gospel. The author discovers a Western European visual source that has never been associated with the range of Kremlin monuments before, which complements our vision of the iconographic lexicon of the court masters of the second half of the 17th century.

The article analyzes the historical experience of Madrid, which became the capital of Spain in 1561. The reasons for Philip II’s reluctance to establish the capital in Valladolid or Toledo, which previously often served as royal residences, are considered. The analysis of the ideas about Madrid in the texts of such authors of the 16th — early 17th centuries as Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, Lucio Marineo Siculo, Pedro de Medina shows that even before acquiring the capital status, it was a notable city of Castile, which had significant advantages, so that the choice in its favour was logical, although not predetermined. By the time the Court was transferred to Madrid, on the initiative of Philip II, a large-scale program of urban reforms was prepared, in which the features of Renaissance urbanism are clearly visible. The unusually rapid and uncontrolled growth of the city’s population after 1561 required the authorities to establish mechanisms for billeting courtiers and officials into the houses of Madrid residents and then standards for housing construction; the article analyzes the royal decree of 1567 dedicated to this matter. The most important tasks of the authorities were also to provide citizens with food, clean the streets and fight crime. The Royal decree of 1585 shows the attention of the authorities to these issues; the content and role of this decree are also discussed in the article. In general, the conceived program of urban reforms faced great difficulties, but the transformations that were carried out played an essential role in the history of Madrid.

In the article, based on the acts of Magdeburg Law and the court books of Magdeburgian cities, the issue of the death penalty in Magdeburgian cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is analysed. The most often imposed death penalties are discussed. There is an analysis of which crimes they were given for. Their use is compared with data from Poland and some Magdeburgian cities in Western Europe.

After the expeditions of wealthy merchants and Franciscan missionaries during the 14th century, the Chinese empire under Ming rule did not engage profusely with the European world, and vice versa. This period of artistic and intellectual silence and detachment was broken in the late 16th century when the Jesuit missionaries reconnected two worlds –Europe and China– reactivating previous medieval commercial, artistic, and intellectual routes. Silk –the product par excellence commercialized along the routes connecting China and Europe– was then accompanied by other precious products, including Chinese ceramics reaching various European courts and European paintings that reached the Ming court in Beijing. This paper addresses the complex and challenging popularization of Roman Catholicism through objects and images during the early modern era. In particular, it focuses on the diffusion of devotional images and objects used by Roman Catholic missionaries and the religious practices related to them.

AbstractTo what extent did secrecy emerge as the uncontested norm for international negotiations after the Renaissance? This article introduces six key negotiation practitioners from 17th century Europe, including some of the earliest writers on negotiation: Hotman, Mazarini, Wicquefort, Rousseau de Chamoy, Callières, and Pecquet. An analysis of their writings demonstrates that if an ambassador had to appear in the bright light of the royal court, he became constantly preoccupied by secrecy. He needed to find ways to protect his own secrets from third parties and uncover the secrets of others. These concerns from earlier times helped to establish secrecy as the paradigm for modern negotiation.

In an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the work of William Dobson entitled “The Royalists at War,” one portrait among the Cavalier soldiers and commanders was that of Sir Thomas Aylesbury. Aylesbury holds in his hand a document that begins, “To the King's most Excellent Majesty The Humble Petition.” By posing in his official black robes that evoke the solemnity of the law and by giving the petition prominence, Aylesbury celebrates his position as a master of requests. As a master of requests even at Oxford in the 1640s, it was his role to present petitions to the king asking for redress of grievances or for personal advancement, in short, asking for royal bounty. As Dobson's portrait signifies, such petitions were not merely the seedy clamorings of early Stuart courtiers but an open and important link between the monarch and the subject, one suitable for commemoration in portraiture. The painting makes concrete, even in the midst of civil war, the king's traditional role as guarantor of justice and giver of favor. While the king's promise of justice goes back to early Anglo-Saxon dooms and tenth-century coronation oaths, his giving of largesse had expanded with the Renaissance monarchy of the Tudors.Historians of early modern Europe have become interested in court patronage as they have analyzed politics and political elites. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, from the work of MacFarlane to Namier, the study of relationships between patrons and clients has been at the forefront of modern historiography.

This thesis examines the culture and practice of dance in Denmark in the seventeenth century, focussing on the performance practice within festivals, the pervading French influence and philosophical discourse of dance. The repertoire of staged court dance in Denmark comprises ballets and plays performed in conjunction with festival events such as coronations, weddings, and christenings. Typical is the 1634 festival in honour of Prince-Elect Christian and Magdalena Sibylla�s wedding in Copenhagen, a celebration of international significance. Subsequent celebrations during the reigns of Frederik III and Christian V followed similar models. The festival of 1655 in homage of Prince Christian, for example, gave rise to performances of the ballet Unterschiedliche Oracula, and the German-language opera Arion. The programmes from these performances, along with other contemporary descriptions, provide evidence of aspects of the ballet genre, stage construction, machinery, characters, allegory and political themes. The Danish productions, which also include an equestrian ballet, are in many respects comparable to French court ballets produced from the beginning of the century. Evidence that French choreographies were known in Denmark is clearly provided by choreographies in the publication Maître de Danse (Glückstadt 1705) and the Danish manuscript of violin dance tunes Additamenta 396 4�. Evidence that the Danish aristocracy actively sought and coveted French culture can be found as early as the wedding festival in 1634 and well into the eighteenth century. French acculturation is evident elsewhere too, such as in Ludvig Holberg�s comedy Jean de France (1722), in a translation of French dance etiquette for youth, in contemporary accounts of French clothing and language, and by the employment of French musicians and dancing masters at the Danish court. Included is an examination of Andreas Schroder�s treatise De Saltatoribus (Flensburg 1622) and Thomas Bartholin�s dance chapter in his book Qu�stiones Nuptialis (Copenhagen 1670) as significant Danish primary sources. These sources are placed in contrast with contemporary European dance manuals such as Arbeau, De Lauze, Esquivel de Navarro, Caroso and Negri. Danish and other European authors differ in their views on the morality of dance, although they cite many of the same Ancient and Biblical sources for their persuasive arguments. Just as Denmark was connected to other countries of northern Europe in a complex political web, so too did these courts share artistic and cultural traditions, which are reflected in the sources related to dance. Danish dance practices can especially be demonstrated to be akin to those of neighbouring German courts, which, like Denmark, imitated the dance fashions of France.

The representation of a Stuttgart court festival in a fascinating book of prints has received no art historical attention. The cultural production of German lands in a complex and obscure time described by one historian as being particularly bereft of "textbook facts", has not elicited much scholarly interest. In the seventeenth century before confessional disputes within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation turned into armed conflict, small German territorial courts modelled themselves on and assumed the courtly style of the larger European courts. The Stuttgart baptism of 1616 presents an interesting case study of the use of a courtly spectacle by a secondary court at a time of great instability. The baptism festival served as a stage to display an alliance of some German Protestant princes that held a promise of international support for the Protestant cause. The Wurttemberg court commissioned lengthy texts and a large number of engravings to represent the event. This study will address the contributions made by printed images to the festival program. The key documents for this study are the texts which complement and at times diverge from the visual representation. The differences between the visual and textual material will serve to locate the function of the visual representation of a festival held at a time of impending conflict. The triumphal procession format of the engravings discloses a strategy of disenfranchisement of a powerful parliament while it serves to assert the rank of the court within and outside the German empire. The complex amalgams of imagery that are interspersed in the paper procession allude, I suggest, to the problems presented to the Wurttemberg court by an uneasy alliance of Protestant courts within the empire. The engravings served to encode references to problematic issues such as the survival of the Holy Roman Empire, the rights of Protestant territorial princes to form an alliance and the hopes for outside help for the Protestant cause.
Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
Graduate

Defence date: 5 July 1996
Examining Board: Prof. Dr. Dominique Julia, Paris/Florenz (Supervisor) ; Prof. Dr. Winfried Schulze, München (Supervisor) ; Prof. Dr. Michael Müller, Florenz ; Prof. Dr. Michael Herbsmeier, Odense ; Prof. Dr. Marcello Verga, Florenz
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Defence Date: 29/06/2009
Examining Board: Bartolomé Yun Casalilla EUI- Supervisor; Giovanni Levi ( U Ca’Foscari); Antonella Romano (EUI)); Irving Alexander Anthony Thompson (U Keele)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
No abstract available

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.