Early Modern Court Research Articles

Violent Crimes and Retaliation in the European Criminal Justice System between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century

Early modern courts dealing with violent crimes constitute an exemplary field to study historical changes in the function and significance of retaliation as a measured reaction to criminal behavior. In pre-modern times, on the one hand, appropriate violence could be considered as a socially accepted behavior to react to violations of honor, body and property, as well as violent assaults could be compensated with a material recompense. On the other hand, penal justice partially followed the purpose of retaliation in the sense of retribution, and criminal courts punished manslaughter or murder with the death penalty. The ambivalence of retaliation with regard to violence was even more emphasized since the seventeenth century, because the emerging public criminal justice system followed more and more utilitarian purposes and punished violent crimes to maintain social control or to ‘discipline’ and ‘civilize’ perpetrators. Whereas the death penalty and retribution slowly decreased since the eighteenth century the purpose of private compensation and conflict settlement persisted to a certain degree, influencing court decision. If compensation between perpetrators and victims was achieved criminal courts could waive public punishment, but instead increasingly imposed punitive damages (Privatstrafe) and material public recompense. As a consequence, the function of retaliation and the relations between the different actors shifted from private compensation (perpetrators and victims) and public punishment (state and perpetrators) to ‘public compensation’ and ‘private punishment’ as an amalgamation of private and public retaliation which served for the interests of the state: fiscal recompense, the juridification (Verrechtlichung) of vindicatory violence as well as private retaliation, and the extension of social control through the criminal justice system. Commencing with the legal practice of the early modern criminal justice systems in Europe private and legal retaliation to violence significantly changed from legitimate vindicatory violence, private compensation and retributive public punishment to a system of formal social control and public retaliation that prevents violence, but impairs the interest of victims and prefers public compensation. Based on recent studies on violence in early modern Europe and exemplary court records this paper analyses the significance and the different functions of retaliation in the legal practice of European criminal justice systems responding to violent crimes.

Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets des nations

This article examines the form of early modern French court entertainment known as the ballet des nations , named for its insights into the emerging discourse on nations and national character in seventeenth-century Europe. The ballet of nations, in which costumed dancers impersonated stereotypical national types, was one of the most popular elements of the grand ballets performed at the French court from the 1570s through the end of Louis XIV's reign. This article analyzes how Frenchness is defined in the ballets through contrast with foreign national types, through exclusion of provincial identities, and through the conflation of behaviors marked as noble with those marked as French. Situating the ballets' presentation of French national character within the context of theoretical debates about the relative conventionality or naturalness of danced representations, this study also shows how the ballet of nations sets the stage for later discourses on nationhood.

Die Wolverdiente Ehren-Seule für Herzog Ernst I. von Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg als Medium höfischer Kommunikation

The funeral sermon of a deceased prince played a particular role within the system of communication of early modern courts. The Wohlverdiente Ehrenseule, printed in honour of Ernst I von Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg, and the Personalia which it contained, carried multiple meanings. In the first instance they served to communicate an unquestioned acceptance of the new ruler as guarantor of the existing order, in the context of the state ceremony of mourning. They acquired additional meaning as part of the ostentatious printed account of the funeral, where they worked to communicate the newly created image of Duke Ernst set up by his oldest son Friedrich in the context of the latter’s conflict with his brothers. It has become clear that such ostentatious funeral publications can only be evaluated with an understanding of both their political implications and the complete medial system of the relevant court, because the commemoration of the deceased prince was not the consequence of his qualities as a ruler but rather of the message that his successor wished to communicate.

Dance Rehearsal Practices in Early Modern Court Spectacles

While a thorough understanding of pre-production processes for early modern court spectacles is probably now not possible, there is enough surviving documentation from Italian, English, and French courts to shed light on important characteristics of the dance rehearsal process. We know the importance placed on dance rehearsals, the length of the rehearsal period, when dancers started practising onstage, whether costumes were worn for any rehearsals, and whether the rehearsals were private or public events or somewhere in between. Often the dance performers included members of the elite who placed their attendance at rehearsals ahead of other state duties. Yet the dynamics of rehearsals with elite dancers and non-elite singers and musicians in early modern Europe could not have been what is normally found in rehearsals today.

Competent to Rule?: Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato and a Secular View of Politics in Habsburg Dynastic History

This article deals with an early modern court historian's judgments concerning the political competence and incompetence of his contemporaries. Although the phrase “political competence” may seem anachronistic when referring to the second half of the seventeenth century, hardly any historian today would deny that, at least since the late medieval period, European intellectuals belonging to political elites had developed their own understanding of what constitutes effective statesmanship. That understanding was not always normative, or based on exempla of the classical past—it could be practical and expressed through evaluations of current events. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the future Habsburg court historian Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato wrote about Oliver Cromwell: “And let it be noted from his extraordinary example, that not the nobility of birth, nor riches . . . qualify one for high office, as it usually solely happens, but that it is the opportunity that . . . wakes up the spirits, and sharpens the minds.” This article will deal with Priorato's judgments of political competence (and incompetence) in the works that he wrote while in the service of the Austrian Habsburgs.

The comparative Study on the child care culture in early modern korea-japan royal court

The comparative Study on the child care culture in early modern korea-japan royal court

Tara Nummedal . Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2007 . Pp. xvii, 260. $37.50.

Alchemy has become an important area of investigation for historians of medieval and early modern science, who have recognized its centrality to topics as diverse as matter theory, the development of laboratories, and attitudes toward art and nature. The alchemical thought of well-known figures such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton has been researched extensively. This fine study builds on that work, but also takes it in a new direction. Tara Nummedal investigates mostly obscure figures who called themselves alchemists in the Holy Roman Empire. She asks how they defined themselves, what exactly their practices were, how they negotiated with their patrons, what their patrons believed they were getting from them, how they succeeded, and how they failed. The result is a carefully researched social history of alchemists and their patrons that illuminates the cultural meanings and practices of alchemy in latesixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe. These “entrepreneurial alchemists” practiced not only for their own edification, but also for social and economic benefits. A significant presence in early modern courts and cities, they heretofore have been little studied. Nummedal argues that these practitioners, most of whom were not Latin-educated scholars, transformed traditional alchemy, creating practical technologies that addressed the economic needs of early modern states, especially relevant in German areas where the related activities of mining and assaying occupied a central place in state economies.

Medical Expertise, Bodies, and the Law in Early Modern Courts

Abstract Going beyond Enlightenment critiques of ancien regime justice, historians are now exploring its distinctive procedures; courtrooms have become a fundamental site for recapturing early modern political and social dynamics. Historians of science and medicine can benefit too. Serving as expert witnesses was prominent among the activities of medical practitioners; and, especially in Continental Europe, natural and medical knowledge was routinely presented and contested in tribunals. This essay aims to promote further research on the resulting wealth of manuscript and printed sources that give access to crucial social and epistemological issues. The voices of different actors, preserved in trial records, can extend our histories of the body. The relations among medical practitioners, and with the legal authorities, provide a hitherto neglected context within which to understand contemporary epistemological debates, from claims and challenges to expertise to the definition and production of evidence, i...

COURT STUDIES AND THE COURTS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE

A court in exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. By Edward Corp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+386. ISBN 0-521-58462-0. £55.00.Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550–1780. By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+349. ISBN 0-521-82262-9. £60.00.Intrigue and treason: the Tudor court, 1547–1558. By David Loades. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Pp. x+326. ISBN 0-582-77226-5. £19.99.Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: the role of the consort. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+419. ISBN 0-521-81422-7. £60.00.Court culture in Dresden: from Renaissance to Baroque. By Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv+310. ISBN 0-333-98448-X. £47.50.Over the last three decades, the royal or princely court has become an established feature of the historiographical landscape of early modern Europe. The subject of a forest of monographs and theses, the theme of a plethora of university undergraduate courses, it has even gained an Anglo-American academic society (and accompanying journal) dedicated to ‘court studies’. While the first wave of Anglophone court historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, considered it necessary to state explicitly, as David Starkey did in his introduction to the seminal The English court, that the study of the early modern court was a legitimate historical activity, such a stance is no longer necessary. Indeed, few political historians would now omit the court from their narratives, even if their principal focus was directed elsewhere. In The English court, Starkey presented his enterprise, and that of his co-contributors, as part of a broader process of historical revisionism. But, by the late 1990s, court studies had itself become subject to its own internal forces of revisionism. The books reviewed here not only illustrate the diversity of projects undertaken by scholars of the court; they also critique the interpretations and approaches of an earlier generation of court historians.

The Female Consort as Intercessor in Sixteenth-Century Saxony

During the past ten to fifteen years the research interest in queens, female regents and consorts has grown rapidly. Continuing the approach advocated by gender and court historians alike, the analyses of women at the early modern courts have generally focused on informal forms of power. Although the increased emphasis on informal power has proved immensely productive in many respects, it has also resulted in oversimplifications and misleading anal-ogies; for example, in one study the agency of the female consort is reduced to a function of her marital relation and another historian concludes that the position of the female consort resem-bled that of the maîtresse or the court favorite. These conclusions also represent a conceptual – and highly political – problem because power is defined as access to the ruler. This implies that the ruler and other decision-makers are viewed as the “real” authorities. Unwittingly, the narrow view of politics and authority that gender historians persistently have striven to chal-lenge is thereby reconfirmed.

Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593-1680

This article concentrates on the way ordinary people in English communities in East Anglia and New England represented male witches and male witchcraft when they accused men of criminal magic. I begin by examining the data from the indictments of male witches in early modern Essex courts in order to demonstrate some of the ways English male witchcraft was distinct from the larger prosecution of female witches. The remainder of the paper is devoted to four case histories of individual men and demonstrates how early modern ideas of manhood shaped the witchcraft beliefs of accusers. I argue that, because they were men, these witches had had very different relationships to the legal, cultural, social and economic institutions of their day, and that this must be considered in any analysis. Throughout, I am concerned with how application of masculinity as a category of analysis reconfigures historiographical ideas of early modern witchcraft

Splendid Cruelty: the Turk in Early Modern Court Entertainment in The Netherlands and France

Splendid Cruelty: the Turk in Early Modern Court Entertainment in The Netherlands and France

Litigation and locality: the Cambridge university courts, 1560–1640

The importance of legal institutions as mediators of social relations in early modern towns has long been recognized. However, opinion differs over the extent to which early modern courts generated social conflict or resolved it through promoting consensus. This article brings to light a neglected jurisdiction and argues that while the university courts inevitably generated conflict when pursuing their regulative agenda, they nonetheless offered Cambridge inhabitants a considerable resource which was used extensively in both the speedy resolution and the vexatious prolongation of a wide range of disputes which tended to cut across rather than deepen town–gown hostilities.

State Ceremonial, Court Culture and Political Power in Early Modern Denmark, 1536-1746

In early modern Europe the court of a prince was many things: the household of a prince, a point of contact between the ruler and the elites, a cultural trendsetter, a focal point of patronage and an important institution of regional and international politics. In short, the court had many functions. In this article the focus is on the main lines of development in the court culture of early modern Denmark, from the Reformation (1536) until early Absolutism. Certain structural changes are highlighted and an attempt is made to explain them in political terms. As a prelude, I offer some theoretical reflections on the meaning of court culture in general and ceremonial culture in particular. Let me say from the outset that I have found my inspiration mainly in German and American historical scholarship, which for the past twenty years or so has witnessed a continuous and fruitful debate on the early modern court.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE EARLY MODERN COURT

(2000). REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE EARLY MODERN COURT. The Court Historian: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 1-13.

Servants of Fortune: The Swedish Court between 1598 and 1721

In what has been seen as an age of increasing bureaucratisation, did it matter who was close to the monarch? Since the monarch embodied supreme wordly power, the way in which daily life at court was organised was of great importance. One function of the early modern court was, in the words of Geoffrey Elton, to act as a point of contact between monarch and elite. I have chosen to test this hypothesis with a prosopographical analysis of more than 1,900 noblemen and noblewomen known to have served at the Swedish court between 1598 and 1721. The opportunities that the court provided are shown to have had far-reaching consequences, and it was also possible for women and men of low birth to wield informal political influence. Although few had really spectacular careers, if times were good the salaries and a plethora of perks were attractive. Royal personality put its stamp on the court. The distant kingship exercised by Caroline rulers meant that they used their courts in a different way than the more outgoing Vasas. Court organisation, however, went mostly unaltered, and shared many common characteristics with other, especially German, courts. During the seventeenth century, the Swedish court was militarised in the sense that individual military and court careers often overlapped, and indeed could run simultaneously, while the court as a whole could still be expected to accompany the king into battle. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the nobility of the Baltic provinces of Estonia and Livonia were well represented at court. However, in the second half of the seventeenth century the court was gradually Swedified and demilitarised, and as the court became increasingly inbred, court offices were transformed from springboards for aristocratic youths to life-time jobs. There are obvious similarities between the Swedish court and other contemporary European courts, the foremost being that the Swedish court took its structure from neighbouring German courts. Sweden also shared the important shift from a peripatetic court to a sedentary one. A difference, however, was the more militaristic nature of the Swedish court, which to an extent was shared by the Prussian and Danish courts. After the mid-seventeenth century these three countries developed smallish, top-light courts that were, generally speaking, cheap and heavily militarised. I have characterised them as the martial courts of the Baltic. (Less)

The Identity of Natural Philosophy. a Response To Edward Grant

The editors of Early Science and Medicine have kindly invited me to reply in the pages of this journal to an extended critique of my views by Professor Edward Grant which was published last year in a Festschrift volume dedicated to John D. North.' The issue on which my position is currently under attack is the one I have used as the title to the present piece: the identity of natural philosophy. This issue is, I would hope, highly relevant to the readership of the present journal. For natural philosophy was the intellectual domain, the discipline, or the group of disciplines, under which Nature was usually discussed and studied among medieval and early modern men of religion, in the medieval and early modern university, and in the early modern court. Natural philosophy was practised in Europe, in one form or another, from the early thirteenth to the early nineteenth century. Natural philosophy subsumed or included some or all of the studies that we historians would customarily want to include under the title of 'medieval and early modern science'. And yet, as far as my researches have gone over more than a dozen years of interest in this topic, I have only found one historian in the 191 or 20th century who has tried to define what natural philosophy was, or to distinguish it clearly from (modern) science.2 For historians of science today simply act as if natural philosophy was just (modern) science under an earlier name and at an earlier stage in its development,

Martin Warnke, The Court Artist. On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Martin Warnke's book, The Court Artist, first published in German in 1985, could well be subtitled, “How the Bourgeoisie Stole Credit for the Liberation of Art from Craft,” for the author sets out to redress what he sees as an injustice wrought by the middle-class against history. According to Warnke, contrary to common opinion, the origins of the “autonomous consciousness of art and artists” lie not in the world of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commune but, rather, in that of the late medieval and early modern court. He suggests that the current misconceptions about the origins of “modern” attitudes towards art and artists derive from late eighteenth-century anti-monarchical sentiments which, building on an enduring middle-class suspicion of courtly culture, condemned that world as corrupt and repressive and therefore antithetical to the emergence of a truly free, creative artist. This position was philosophically reinforced in the nineteenth century by the creation of the concept of a Zeitgeist. It was argued that the emancipation of the artist could not have come from the perverse, retrograde world of the aristocracy but must have arisen from the people who were participating in a Renaissance spirit of optimistic freedom which was reflected in the revival of humanistic forms and the creation of a liberating culture.

Secrets, Symbols, and Systems: Parallels between Cryptanalysis and Algebra, 1580-1700

Codebreaking was an important secret of state in early modern courts. Its practitioners included several important figures in the history of mathematics, particularly Francois Viete, whose innovations in method and symbolism were crucial for modern algebra. Viete formulated an infallible rule for decryption that uses concepts of symbol and system similar to those of his new algebra. As the Book of Nature began to be read in new ways, the example of codebreaking was noted by Bacon, Descartes, and Boyle. Leibniz considered cryptology to be a model for his universal and pressed John Wallis to disclose the general rules of cryptanalysis, citing the analogy with the methods of mathematics. The parallels between algebra and cryptanalysis illuminate the symbolism and methodical procedure characteristic of both activities.

Henry VIII's Greeting of Anne of Cleves and Early Modern Court Protocol

The elaborate pageantry and festivities of grand public processions have proven to be of great interest to historians writing on late medieval and early modern Europe. The more limited ceremonies and protocol at court have attracted somewhat less attention, although on occasion they have been adopted as evidence of a monarch's personal feelings about his attendants and family members. A study of royal protocol and the social and political framework in which rulers fulfilled their roles as sovereigns is timely, for it will surely lead to a new and fuller understanding of how monarchs's public roles, such as those of the Tudors, related to their private motivations.Greeting ceremonies, which were one aspect of the “law of hospitality,” require special attention, because they offer insights into the interactions of people of varying status who were of fundamental importance to the hierarchical communities of Europe. As Esther Goody points out, “Greeting becomes a mode of entering upon or manipulating a relationship in order to achieve a specific result.” How monarchs privately greeted their brides, the topic of this essay, not only offers insights into the complexity of the relationship of individuals who were wed by proxy before they had become acquainted, but also offers evidence of how the greeting ritual performed by monarchs differed from that enacted by their royal and noble relatives.