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Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence of individuals. In order to take a fresh look at the subject, this volume provides a broad discussion on the formation of dynastic identities in relationship to the lineage’s own history, other families within the social elite, and the ruling dynasty. Individual chapters consider the dynastic identity of a wide range of European aristocratic families including the CroÃs, Arenbergs and N...
Patrons of the Old Faith is the first full-length study on the Catholic nobility in the Dutch Republic. Based on a detailed prosopographical analysis and through the examination of their marriage strategies, interaction with Protestants, religiosity and contributions to the Holland Mission, Jaap Geraerts shows how the behaviour of the Catholic nobility was highly distinctive and differed from their co-religionists and Protestant peers as it was influenced by a specific set of noble and Catholic values. Due to the synthesis of their noble and confessional identities, the Dutch Catholic nobility in Utrecht and Guelders acted as patrons of their faith and were instrumental for the survival of Catholicism in the Dutch Republic.
"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.
In the early modern period the Holy Roman Empire, or Reich, was one of the oldest and largest European states. Its importance was magnified by its location at the heart of the continent, by the extensive international connections of its leading families, and by the involvement of foreign rulers in its governance. This book breaks new ground in its collective exploration of aspects of cross-border and transnational interaction, and of political and diplomatic, social and cultural relations. There are essays on important turning-points, especially 1648 and 1806; on the patterns of rulership of the emperors themselves; on areas which lay on the margin of the Reich; on neighbouring countries which interacted with the Empire; and on visual and material culture. Contributors are Wolfgang Burgdorf, Olivier Chaline, Heinz Duchhardt, Jeroen Duindam, Robert Evans, Sven Externbrink, Robert Frost, Lothar Höbelt, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Petr Mat'a, Nicolette Mout, Thomas Munck, Géza Pálffy, Jaroslav Pánek, Adam Perłakowski, Friedrich Polleroß, Blythe Alice Raviola. Peter Schröder, Kim Siebenhüner, Peter H. Wilson and Thomas Winkelbauer.
A vibrant and broad-ranging study of dynastic power in the late medieval and early modern world.
Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 explores the role of women as agents of diplomacy in the trans-Atlantic world since the early modern age. Despite increasing evidence of their involvement in political life across the centuries, the core historical narrative of international politics remains notably depleted of women. This collection challenges this perspective. Chapters cover a wide range of geographical contexts, including Europe, Russia, Britain and the United States, and trace the diversity of women’s activities and the significance of their contributions. Together these essays open up the field to include a broader interpretation of diplomatic work, such as the un...
Providing a novel research methodology for students and scholars with an interest in dynasties, at all levels, this book explores the Spanish Habsburg dynasty that ruled the Spanish monarchy between c. 1515 and 1700. Instead of focusing on the reigns of successive kings, the book focuses on the Habsburgs as a family group that was constructed in various ways: as a community of heirs, a genealogical narrative, a community of the dead and a ruling family group. These constructions reflect the fact that dynasties do not only exist in the present, as kings, queens or governors, but also in the past, in genealogies, and in the future, as a group of hypothetical heirs. This book analyses how dynas...
The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituted a central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. ...
This volume investigates the mechanisms (artworks, treatises, and other forms of cultural patronage) that the Marquises of Villena and their opponents used to operate in the cultural battlefield of the time with the aim of understanding how their conflicting historical memories were constructed and manipulated. Concentrating on the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the book examines these two aristocrats and demonstrates that political tensions led not only to military conflicts during this period but also to conflicts fought on cultural grounds, through the promotion of artistic, religious, and literary programmes. Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin investigates why the Marquises of Villena lost in both the military and cultural battlefields and explains how the negative historical memories forged by their opponents in the late fifteenth century managed to become the official historical truth that has remained unchallenged to this day. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural history, medieval studies, Renaissance studies, Iberian studies, literary studies, and patronage studies.
Exploiting the turbulence and strife of sixteenth-century France, the House of Guise arose from a provincial power base to establish themselves as dominant political players in France and indeed Europe, marrying within royal and princely circles and occupying the most important ecclesiastical and military positions. Propelled by ambitions derived from their position as cadets of a minor sovereign house, they represent a cadre of early modern elites who are difficult to categorise neatly: neither fully sovereign princes nor fully subject nobility. They might have spent most of their time in one state, France, but their interests were always ’trans-national’; contested spaces far from the ...