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Wednesday 23 April 2014 14.00 - 16.00
W-3 ELI19a Developing Distinction: Objects and Practices I
Hörsaal 50 second floor
Network: Elites and forerunners Chair: My Hellsing
Organizers: - Discussant: My Hellsing
Marko Hakanen, Ulla Koskinen : Noble Displays: Emerging Material Culture of the Swedish Aristocracy 1500-1700
The material life of the nobility in the early modern period has been little studied from the perspective of cultural meanings. What did the aristocracy seek to achieve through the use of specific objects? We approach the material culture of the aristocracy by examining why nobles procured the particular forms ... (Show more)
The material life of the nobility in the early modern period has been little studied from the perspective of cultural meanings. What did the aristocracy seek to achieve through the use of specific objects? We approach the material culture of the aristocracy by examining why nobles procured the particular forms of material wealth that they did, how their material culture changed over time and what these objects and buildings can tell us about the culture and everyday lives of the nobility.

The historical background of our examination is the state building process within the Swedish Empire. At the beginning of the 17th century, this process put considerable power into the hands of the high nobility (aristocracy). When the nobility was forced to open its ranks to accept capable commoners, the older nobility needed to find new means through which to express their social status. They did this through a new form of conspicuous consumption which surpassed the standards of the previous century and expressed not only their long pedigree but also their new refined sensibilities.

Using artefacts as well as written sources, we start with an overview of the types of objects that could be found in noble households in the 16th and 17th centuries and how they varied over time. We expand this to examine processes and rituals that were connected to these objects and to evaluate social meanings attached to them. Case studies of special objects serve here as clarifying examples. We conceptualize our presentation with methods from visual research and discuss, how they can be used to cover the agency of objects. Our source materials include findings from archaelogical excavations, collections of antiquities, private accounts, inventories and private correspondence. By combining the empirical material with spatial methods, it is even possible to make interpretations about the world view of the high nobility. (Show less)

Sophie Holm : Rank or Status? Foreign Envoys as Part of the Political Elite in Stockholm during the Diet of 1746–1747
In the middle of the 18th century, Sweden’s political system was characterized by a weakened royal power and an extended power of the Senate and the Diet consisting of four estates. Stockholm, as the center of the Swedish political life, grew noticeably at every Diet, when both official members of ... (Show more)
In the middle of the 18th century, Sweden’s political system was characterized by a weakened royal power and an extended power of the Senate and the Diet consisting of four estates. Stockholm, as the center of the Swedish political life, grew noticeably at every Diet, when both official members of the Estates and those only interested in the assemblies stayed in the capital.

This paper addresses the relation between foreign envoys in the city and the local political elite during a specific Diet when several great powers showed an increased interest in Sweden’s international relations. The envoys had an official role participating in ceremonies of the Diet, but in order to succeed they also needed to position themselves within the extra-parliamentary political, and social, life. Similarly, the envoys possessed a formal rank, which defined their place in the diplomatic hierarchy, but they also had an informal status on the local level. Important questions are how envoys with different backgrounds tried to secure their position in relation to the local elite: did noble and untitled envoys use different strategies? How did envoys with small resources compensate for the lack of a splendid representation? And vice versa, could material resources compensate for a low official rank? This paper argues that the informal status of foreign envoys was a combination of, among others, successful networks, social status within the estate system and representation.

Foreign envoys have traditionally been seen as middlemen and their role in the political life is not easily defined. They were absent from the politics of their home state, whereas their status abroad varied according to the system of the receiving state. The proposed paper aims at studying the diplomatic decision making process in Stockholm combining a traditional focus on foreign affairs with a modern broad view on diplomacy as part of a political culture. It represents a case study of diplomatic every-day life in the 18th century drawing on a rich collection of diplomatic correspondence, Diet records as well as private letters. (Show less)

Marjorie Meiss-Even : Some Conclusions on Aristocratic Material Culture in Renaissance France
This paper aims to present some of the main conclusions of my PhD thesis on the material culture of the Guise family, one of the most powerful aristocratic houses in 16th century France. This PhD dissertation was defended in 2010 at the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (université de ... (Show more)
This paper aims to present some of the main conclusions of my PhD thesis on the material culture of the Guise family, one of the most powerful aristocratic houses in 16th century France. This PhD dissertation was defended in 2010 at the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (université de Tours) and is about to be published by the Presses universitaires de Rennes (2013). The paper will therefore provide us with an opportunity to take stock on French research on the issue of material culture during the early modern times.
Using mostly accounting archives and domestic letters, I tried and answered a few simple questions: what kind of goods did an aristocratic French family purchase ? How did they go about it ? Why these goods and not other ones ? Using which human, logistical and financial means ? Who decided what was worthy of a great noble family ? Did material culture have an impact on what it meant to be an aristocratic man or woman in 16th century France ?
Beyond a semiotic approach of objects as signs and social language, the research shows that clothes and other garments, fooding habits, house architecture as well as furniture shaped bodies and minds fitted for social domination and helped also the Guise family fitting an ever more culturally-refined ideal of nobility. Another important result is the involvement of a large range of experts, buyers and other intermediaries in the consumption process : needed by a house who bought products all around France, Europe and the Mediterranean area and whose social status made it impossible to go personally shopping, intermediaries were able to influence ducal consumption, giving pieces of advice to their masters or being reluctant to acquisitions they judged unworthy. Aristocratic appearances were therefore a social co-construction, which means that the grounds of social domination and its forms of expression were in fact agreed upon and defined by a broad part of early modern society. (Show less)

Konstantinos Raptis : Mobile Elites: Moving High Nobles and Aristocratic Travelling Culture in Central Europe from the Late 19th Century into the Interwar Period
Drawing mainly on the rich archives of the Counts Harrach, a family belonging to the Habsburg court nobility, the paper deals with theirs and other high noble Austrian families’ travels and constant changing of residence from one place to another, as a consistuent element of the aristocratic way of life ... (Show more)
Drawing mainly on the rich archives of the Counts Harrach, a family belonging to the Habsburg court nobility, the paper deals with theirs and other high noble Austrian families’ travels and constant changing of residence from one place to another, as a consistuent element of the aristocratic way of life in Central Europe. High nobles appear to have been a particularly mobile social group within the huge geographical space of the Habsburg Empire (the second largest European state at the turn of the last century). Depending on the season they settled at different residences, moving from their city palaces in Vienna to their mansions in the provinces of their estates and vice-versa, they stayed for considerable or less considerable periods of time at palaces of relatives and noble friends where they were invited for hunting, balls, dinners or parties, they travelled for medical reasons to famous spas and generally to resorts within the borders of the Monarchy as well as abroad.
The paper argues that such social practices functioned as means of distinction and forms of retaining social status and cultural capital for a social group whose political and economic primacy had been gradually decreasing in the course of the early 20th century and especially after the end of the First World War. Frequency and duration of their travelling and staying in particular places, with specific residential characteristics, as well as who travelled (his/her position within the family structure, gender and age) are dealt with. Thus we gain valuable insights into Austrian nobility’s specific lifestyles and self perceptions.
(Show less)

Charlotta Wolff : Cosmopolitan opera, politics and popular taste: French opéra-comique in Northern Europe, ca. 1760-??1800
Opera belongs to the forms of art that are the most strongly associated with elite culture. However, in the age of Viennese Classicism, the most widely appreciated operatic genres were not the serious and aristocratic ones, but comic opera that appealed to both high and low. This paper will take ... (Show more)
Opera belongs to the forms of art that are the most strongly associated with elite culture. However, in the age of Viennese Classicism, the most widely appreciated operatic genres were not the serious and aristocratic ones, but comic opera that appealed to both high and low. This paper will take a look at French comic opera or opéra-comique as an example of how a genre that had developed from popular culture was promoted by the political, literary, dramatic and musical elites to become one of the most appreciated forms of entertainment of its time. Today rather rarely performed, French eighteenth-century opéra-comique, which can be described as musical theatre or comic opera with spoken dialogue, united a popular musical tradition with bestselling modern literature appealing to a cosmopolitan urban taste. In the form of translations, it attained broad audiences all over Europe and contributed to the diffusion and vulgarisation of civic ideals, social representations and political concepts that would mark urban identities in Europe during the centuries to come. By emphasising music as a universal idiom above linguistic barriers and the role of comic opera in the popularisation of political themes, the paper aims at a new dimension of the history of the public sphere. Focusing less on the compositions than on the interplay between the artistic sphere and the power elite, it examines how French comic opera was used and manipulated for political purposes as well as for the definition and redefinition of identity and taste.
It also argues that the fusion of genres and adaptability that contributed to the easy? and universally pleasing character of French comic opera was the result of a complex production process that involved playwrights, composers and performers collaborating with a cosmopolitan literary establishment and with aristocratic patrons and diplomats? - sometimes even royals -?? participating to the definition of taste at a European level.
(Show less)



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