Gender and the Formalisation of Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

The article discusses the possibilities and problems of productively combining the history of diplomacy and gender history. It investigates the extent to which women were involved in early modern diplomacy and demonstrates that contemporaries mostly regarded them as very efficient ‘informal’ agents who used the non-official ways of influencing other courts or politicians. But the inclusion of the ambassadors’ wives in diplomatic ceremonial from the seventeenth century onwards also shows that this feminine role was subject to increasing formalisation. Above all, the formalisation process of diplomacy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries used, among other arguments, the distinction between women and men in order to define more clearly than before what was to be regarded as ‘official’ diplomacy. In a second step, the example of the Chevalier d’Éon and other actors is used to examine changing images of masculinity in early modern diplomacy. As diplomacy became increasingly male and formalised, the ideal diplomat was conspicuously non-gendered. Underlying this image of an unquestionably male diplomatic persona was a particular type of ‘unmarked’ masculinity which I call subcutaneous masculinity.