Preliminary Programme

Renaissance courts are famous for their artistic masterpieces that reflect the splendour, the richness and power of the princes. The Gonzaga court in Mantova with its many palazzi is one of the most prominent examples of Renaissance art at its highest level. Names like Isabella d’Este speak for themselves.
But is it possible not just to look at the surface of these things, but rather to look behind them? Can things and objects tell us something about people’s lives, their dreams and expectations, their duties? About the parts they played in life, their different “personae”?
This contribution concentrates on female material culture, precisely on the bride’s treasure. The objects that are put together for the brides are looked at on different levels. First, they can be looked at as links to the bride’s family of origin; they tell about their wealth, their origins, their own “habitus” so to speak, and can thus be seen as a link to the bride’s past.
Secondly, however, they are also like a program for the future life of the bride, like the “luggage” for a life yet to live. They reflect the parts the women would have to play (through their clothing); they speak about sexuality and child bearing (through linens and related “underwear”); they speak about constant education (through their libraries), moral expectations (again through religious books but also through pious images) and about the activities in the women’s apartment (“Frauenzimmer”, in which we find objects for different sorts of handicrafts).
Moreover, since the bride’s treasure was displayed for the public to examine and marvel, it became a link between the “private” life of the bride and the public event of the marriage; through the showing of the most intimate clothes, one could say that the people interfered with the bride’s body, which thus became a political issue. This is to recall an idea that Norbert Elias exemplified for the absolutist courts, yet whose beginnings can be seen in Renaissance courts. This is condensed in the journey the bride and her treasure undertake, with golden carriages, a form of public “propaganda” which displays the bride’s and the family’s wealth all along the bride’s path to her husband. This is like a living tableau itself, a moving picture before the age of mass media.
The bride’s objects are thus read as a “social code”, following to some extent the example of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s well-known analysis of Florentine patrician families. Focus here will be given to the princely brides of the Gonzaga family of the 15th century, namely Barbara and Paula Gonzaga, and compared with the example of Bianca Maria Sforza of Milan. (Show less)

During the reign of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella (1598-1621) the Court of Brussels was a significant centre for diplomatic activity. The archdukes were related to the foremost royals of Europe and entertained friendly relations with a whole array of courts. Due to its strategic location in North Western Europe, their court attracted a considerable number of princes and nobles on their cavalier tour. It entertained a permanent diplomatic corps and was an important hub for information on the various international issues of the day. The attraction of the archducal court was not just a matter of location and information though. In many ways, it depended on the quality of the parting gifts that were distributed by the archdukes and on the possibility to use a journey or lengthier stay in the Southern Netherlands to shop around for objects of prestige, such as tapestries, paintings, high quality textiles and exotic wares. Albert and Isabella knew this and instrumentalized the goods at their disposal to state and further their political objectives, thereby giving a clear insight in the strategies of diplomatic gift exchange in the early seventeenth century. (Show less)

In the early modern French court, the “Menus Plaisirs” administration was in charge of organizing the ceremonies and festivals, and had to provide Versailles with all the necessary supplies for court theater as well as for princely funerals or coronations. As a matter of fact, this institution, part of the royal household, oversaw all of the material arrangements of the ceremonial that Louis XIV codified: its implication in all circumstances, sacred and profane, quotidian and exceptional, participated in the ritualization of the whole king’s life through the court system. Moreover, one cannot separate luxury goods provided to the king and his family from the goods provided to their servants and from the supplies needed to keep the administration running. Indeed, all of these are used in the name of the king, even if they constitute a large range of goods from the costumes and scenery to the office stationery, being mostly prosaic things, from clothes to daily necessities. From such a perspective, every object becomes significant, a medium between the king and his courtiers or his subjects. It is part of a material system reflecting the political and social order: fabrics, costs and quality depended on the users’ social position. Moreover, the supplying process – making in situ or buying in – depended also on these objects’ hierarchy and gave structure to a merchants and craftsmen hierarchy specific to the “Menus Plaisirs”.
Just as the early modern aristocrat had to spend his fortune to maintain his rank, the royal household’s consumption was supposed to make self-evident the nature of kingship by its magnificence. It could thus be considered as the ultimate expression of the status-consumption-ethos defined by Norbert Elias. To sustain the ritual performativity of the objects it was responsible for, the “Menus Plaisirs” administration mainly organized its consumption in a ritual way, “suivant l’usage”. Its accounts describe precisely an ever visible, never-ending materiality, registered so as to be controlled and reproduced from one year to the next. These accounts, whose capture in a database has enabled us to analyze the quality and value of these goods, therefore show the ever codifying logic the court administration intended to secure through its supplying and accounting practices. However, all these objects were also meant to circulate, to be lent, given, repaired or re-employed by all the members of the court system and during every kind of court events, which potentially altered their nature, quality and status. Faced with change – the growth of public opinion, a new political culture and the birth of consumer society –, the court administration tried to play with these practices to keep alive a ceremonial both worthy of the king and financially, socially, and politically sustainable by the monarchy. (Show less)

“The Court of the Archdukes,” wrote Jonathan Israel in 2006, “was much larger and much more splendid than that of any of their predecessors or successors [in the Spanish Netherlands]”. Israel’s statement may well be true, and has been adopted as such by virtually every modern scholar who is acquainted with the history of the Court of Brussels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since its demise in 1621, the archducal Court has earned itself a reputation as a place of ostentatious luxury and unparalleled conspicuous consumption. Surprisingly however, this contention has never been looked at from an economical point of view. Rather than on actual numbers and figures, historiography on the subject tends to rely on the opinions and impressions of contemporaries like Guido Bentivoglio, the papal nuncio in Brussels, who reported that “la Corte degli Arciduchi (…) può contendere veramente con ogn’altra delle più fiorite, e più splendide, che siano in Christianità”. While there is no reason not to believe Bentivoglio and other commentators of the age, it would be interesting to learn exactly how the Court of Albert and Isabella lived up to its reputation, and why this was so. Starting from the original account books of the archducal household, this paper aims to investigate the spending pattern at the Court of Brussels, the political motivations behind it, and the financial and social consequences it entailed. (Show less)

One of the most interesting strands of new inquiry in historical research today is in the realms of the dispersal or sharing of the ‘absolute’ power of early modern monarchs and court cultures. Rather than the monolithic centralised political culture of former historiographical interpretations, this new approach recognises the importance of the satellites of the main court structures to the power of the whole. In France, for example, these multiple poles of political culture include that of the King, naturally, but also those of his wife, his brother, his son, his cousins, his legitimated offspring, his mistresses, his ministers. Each had their own ‘court’ in the broader sense of the word, and therefore each had their own trappings of a court society, including courtiers, clients, artists and administrators. Thus the age of Louis XIV was not merely the age of Versailles, but also of Saint-Cloud, the Luxembourg, Meudon, Sceaux, Champs, and so on.

As part of my on-going research on the princes étrangers resident in France in this period, principally the Lorraine-Guise, I propose to analyse the court of the Guise in Paris in the later seventeenth century, specifically through the medium of their material culture. The Hôtel de Guise was a recognised ‘court’ by contemporaries, complete with a staff of hundreds, ladies in waiting, composers, writers and poets in residence, and administrators whose remit covered estates in all corners of the kingdom. But there were other Guisard residences as well, and I plan to include information gleaned from inventories and bibliographic registers from the Hôtel d’Elbeuf, the Hôtel de Mayenne/Lillebonne and the Hôtel d’Armagnac as well, to best contrast the multiple branches of this powerful clan in their attempts to maintain their hold on power in Paris through visual display and public piety.

The Guise of the sixteenth century were renowned for the fanatical devotion they inspired, from the populace of Paris in particular. The last years of the reign of King Henry III demonstrated this without a doubt, through the ease with which this family ousted a king from his capital. By the late seventeenth century, the rules had shifted, however, but the Hôtel de Guise remained a centre for pomp and ceremony unrivalled by any private residence outside those of the king and the royal family. This paper will demonstrate how this was achieved by examining the collections of books held by the various Lorraine-Guise princes, the ceremonial and sacred treasures they kept on display, the numbers (and status) of their servants and staff, and the artists they patronised. As part of my wider thesis about the nature of power wielded by families like the Guise, this paper analysing their material culture will provide further support to the idea that the upper aristocracy had forged a new manner of behaving, in partnership rather than conflict with the Crown, which prolonged the life of absolute monarchy in France well into the start of the democratic age. (Show less)