The Representation of Royal Majesty in Ceremonies at the Early Modern Habsburg Courts

Abstract

Understanding the court ceremonial of early modern times is one of the basic prerequisites for an understanding of the meaning of the existence of the institution of the imperial court, the hierarchical arrangement of the court as an organism and the ranking of its members, with the sovereign at their head. The present study therefore maps the development of research on the courts of the Habsburg emperors in the 16th-18th centuries from the perspective of Czech and Central European historiography. In the first part, the authors attempt to provide a general definition of ceremonial on the threshold of modern times. They devote special attention to the semantic significance of period terms associated with ceremonial, and note the contemporary typology of celebrations at the court of the sovereign. They go on to analyse the historiographic development of research into the imperial court and the ceremonies closely associated with it at the early modern courts of the Habsburgs, especially in the last two decades