The Fabric of Power: Political Histories of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Court

The princely court is one of the most evocative subjects of premodern history, which in recent decades has attracted broad and enduring interest among historians and the wider public alike. The court and its society have been the topics on which the (often critical) discussion of ancien régime Europe has centred. Scandals and intrigues, personal vanity and consumption, as well as artistic and scientific endeavour gain an explosive dimension when they take place at court because of their perceived proximity to political decision-making processes, which might affect great numbers of people. This is true for how the court figures in historical research, as well as in popular imagination. ¹

When we ask about the political histories of the court, we find ourselves confronted with an odd problem. Practically all historical studies that treat an aspect of life at the premodern princely court make reference to how their subject matter relates to the ongoing political processes at court. Yet despite this rich scholarship, as of now, there is little discussion about how these various approaches relate to each other in terms of a unified understanding of the political history of the premodern princely court. Partly this is due to the complexity of the subject matter. And, it should be said at the outset, it is not our aim to simplify the entanglements between the systems of relationships that constituted the late medieval and early modern court and the political practices they produced. For this would result merely in an(other) abstract model of the aulic space that imposes a rigid taxonomy on fluid processes that continuously reinvented themselves throughout the premodern period. Nevertheless, it is crucial to push forward the conceptual investigation of the political histories of the court if we wish to avoid the sedimentation of new hierarchies of relevance and visibility, which, if considered closely, at times reproduce some unhelpful aspects of traditional scholarship.

This special issue proposes to focus on practices that helped to regulate, consolidate, and connect the various sets of relationships that made up the premodern court. Our approach is informed by a broadly inclusive understanding of the political that is firmly anchored within the period under investigation. Our timeframe includes the Late Middle Ages and the early modern era, as the traditional dividing line around 1500 makes little sense in a study of courtly culture. Starting from a focus on interpersonal relationships, we have asked the authors of this volume to explore practices that created and strengthened such relationships between courtly actors and were thus political. The articles published here give different accounts of what the fabric of power could look like at the premodern court, but they are united in their particular focus on relational politics. It is our hope that these perspectives might together provide some pointers on how the various ongoing investigations of courtly political processes can be viewed together in order to form one greater whole.

This introduction will illustrate our aims, before introducing our suggested flexible framework for the investigation of the political in these contexts. The final section will provide an overview of how the articles in this special issue relate to each other and to the overall aim of investigating what we term the fabric of power.

Models, Monarchs, and Men

Court studies and political history have a somewhat fraught relationship. Until well into the 1980s, political historians preferred to focus on the institutions that were deemed to have counterparts in the modern liberal state, such as parliaments and ministries, and on the rise of the middle classes. ² Yet, in the wake of Norbert Elias's seminal work The Court Society an increasing number of researchers began to flock to this topic, as it now appeared that the court was perhaps not merely an obstacle on the way to state formation, but also one of its tools. ³

Soon, however, Elias's view of the court and its increasingly rigid ceremonial as an instrument deployed by the ruler to discipline and subdue powerful elites came to be challenged. ⁴ The numerous empirical studies of European courts conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s found that systems of etiquette and ceremonial were not, in fact, controlled by a calculating monarch alone, but rather were appropriated by various actors for their own ends. ⁵ This allowed for the high aristocracy and other elites to maintain their crucial positions of influence, and it became increasingly doubtful whether we could view the cultural and scientific production of the aulic space as a mere means to the end of consolidating power. The early modern court thus no longer appeared as a ‘hub of decadence’, but as a rich space of interaction, allowing the researcher to observe and analyse a great number of cultural, social, and political practices of the time.

Historians eager to improve on Elias's proposals increasingly see the various modes of interaction at court as the key to understanding the strategies of power associated with it. Patronage held no negative connotations in premodernity and indeed it has been identified as a central way in which contemporaries sought influence and distributed it across diverse, at times even unlikely, actors. ⁶ The crucial resource being traded by patrons and clients was that of access to the monarch or to other important stakeholders. ⁷ This dynamic did, however, generate controversy whenever specific favourites began to monopolize influence. Many studies have analysed the specific ways in which such actors engaged in the courtly political process and what advantages they were able to mobilize for themselves, as well as how power-holders themselves profited from an uneven distribution of their favour. ⁸

A second related branch of what might be termed the ‘New Court History’ ⁹ is concerned with how court actors worked out and influenced where they stood in the web of courtly honour and status relations. This focus on status interaction, which conducts political history with methods adapted from cultural and anthropological approaches, is now a dominant current in historical research. ¹⁰ Crucially, these studies have succeeded in showing that the enormous amounts of energy and time courtly actors invested in seemingly inane, highly performative aspects of court life­­ – such as where they were to stand (or sit!) during a particular ceremony, or how many horses they were able to take with them when attending a court festival – were entirely justified, since these circumstances and the struggle to attain such rights were in fact fully congruent with the practice of power. ¹¹

All of this research has triggered a paradigm shift within court studies. Where previously we saw the court as a model centred on one monarch who held the reins of power firmly within his grasp, we can now analyse the court as an arena offering the opportunity to trade honour, influence, and capital to extremely varied actors. Intimacy with the ruler was not limited to office holders of high aristocratic backgrounds, and these new analytical tools allow us to see that at times even servants of low birth could participate in the practice of power depending on their spatial and emotional proximity to members of the ruling family. ¹² Furthermore, it is also owing to this type of research that the living quarters of royal women, which were often spatially enclosed, have come into view as an important hub of interaction. ¹³ It emerges now that the distinct organization of these areas often facilitated alternative communicative pathways which could enable courtly actors to negotiate tentative alliances without losing face should these not come to fruition. ¹⁴ The court now emerges as a truly polycentric political entity. Finally, the shared modes of communication that organized patronage, ritual, and status interaction also helped to foster a certain cohesion among the extremely heterogeneous courtly actors: though many of them were engaged in confrontational competition, nevertheless they were all invested in the same marketplace and thus sustained it.

This work has been instrumental in facilitating our understanding of some of the most fundamental grammars of courtly interaction. Necessarily this scholarship has produced its own specific hierarchies of visibility and it is important to reflect on these. Firstly, while many of these studies have highlighted the important political contributions of women at court, the methodologies underlying this research do not easily accommodate gender as an analytical category. ¹⁵ It has thus been found that women, too, participated in the same interactions that constituted the practice of power as their male counterparts, but they were often subject to additional constraints, such as the need to cover their tracks when they acted as mediators in order to avoid the charge of gynocracy. ¹⁶ While such findings may be factually accurate, they are unsatisfactory, since further research suggests that the very specific nature of female agency within the practice of power constituted an important contribution towards dynastic rulership that is inadequately dealt with if it is merely benchmarked against a male model. ¹⁷ We need to be conscious of the fact that a side effect of focusing on the relational networks that have the monarch at their centre – even if he is not always the most powerful actor – is a sustained focus on male actors.

Furthermore, historians interested in the political processes of the premodern court have focused their attention on the interactions of members of the royal family and those in high court offices. Less readily apparent courtly actors such as wet nurses, astrologers, alchemists, artists, and non-noble servants are, however, increasingly coming into view. ¹⁸ They are usually studied from cultural and anthropological perspectives which rightly insist on the political influence of the subjects of their studies. Yet it is not at all evident how our current models for assessing political influence at court, relying on status interaction and patronage, can appropriately accommodate their findings. When we focus on access to the ‘inner’ courtly sphere a mistress and a ministerial favourite might be viewed in similar terms. That is, as individuals well-placed to develop significant political influence, all the while having to actively guard their precarious positions. ¹⁹ Nevertheless, the emotional registers that they tapped into and which were used to criticize and delegitimize them could differ significantly, as could the political relationship frameworks within which their influence unfolded. ²⁰

In other words, doing politics at the premodern court is not only about maintaining presence at court in order to engage with the market of resources such as honour and access (though that is of course a crucial part of it). For the manner in which actors (including subjects) forged their relationship with dynastic centres mattered, as did the systems of belief that they represented and mobilized. The political histories of the premodern court have to guard against imposing further (perhaps unintentional) hierarchies on the historical record that bring with them the risk of replacing the perspective of a lonely, yet intelligently scheming monarch with a view of many, equally scheming actors who all worked towards similar goals with the deployment of similar practices and tools. We need a radically cultural understanding of the political in order to avoid a reductive view of the actors of the past as driven by a type of rational-choice, transactional mentality that is perhaps more reflective of our own present-day categories of analysis than of the uncertain and open-ended struggles and frequent failures of contemporary courtly actors. ²¹

Cultural Histories of the Court

The court's curious dual purpose as centre of power and royal household meant that it fostered a wide range of social and cultural skills and practices, and the study of these has recently gained in urgency. Since medieval and early modern courts were centres of literacy and increasingly interested in record-keeping, historians have found vast stores of material to work with. Thanks to the richness of these sources, court music, dance, and visual art patronage came to be hotly discussed topics of investigation. ²² Moreover, it was discovered that many courts were hubs of knowledge production and (proto-)scientific development, which helped to overturn the ingrained image of the courtly environment as a space rigidly clinging to tradition with an aversion to innovation in any form. ²³ The strength of many of these investigations was rooted in their ability to link different fields of historical research in innovative ways. ²⁴ Taken together, investigations covering so wide a range of courtly practices as astrology, dress, medicine, and funerary rites (to name but a few), have radically nuanced our understanding of the court as a field of tension within which cultural, social, and political dynamics interacted continuously. ²⁵

Of course, this cultural history of the princely court is far broader than the very few studies we cite here, and many such investigations have no distinct interest in contributing to the political history of the court. Nevertheless, their impact on the broader enterprise of writing such a history is seminal. Simplifying for our current purposes, we can say that this contribution is at least threefold: firstly, such cultural histories bring home clearly that women and subaltern actors are a constitutive part of the practice of power. Secondly, they alert us to the fact that cultural practices need not be translated into anything else in order to be part of the political. They are a crucial counter-weight to seeing the court primarily as a discursive arena, and insist that materiality, corporeality, and even sounds carry political weight in their own right. ²⁶

As a result, they suggest, thirdly, a different and flexible conception of ‘the political’, ²⁷ which we understand to comprise any courtly practice, ephemeral or institutionalized, material or immaterial, which enables individuals or groups to influence collectively binding decisions and frameworks of order. ²⁸ The flipside of these multi-layered investigations and their (and our) heterogeneous understanding of the political sphere is an increasing internal fragmentation within court studies. Many premodern courts have produced plentiful source materials which can serve to support studies on extremely varied subjects of research. While this undoubtedly contributes to the richness of the field, it also brings with it the risk of losing a common denominator. For the crucial questions remain: what connects the histories of the court as a political entity? How can we meaningfully relate these to each other and integrate them into larger historiographical narratives such as the processes of state formation?

The Fabric of Power

Building on all the important work discussed here, we propose to complement the political histories of the court that investigate how courtly actors produced differences in status and honour with an increased focus on how different layers of the courtly relationship network were strengthened and consolidated. In order to do this, we ask about the various practices through which actors created and maintained relationships with other courtly actors, third-party stakeholders, and factional groups, as well as about the consequences these practices had for the court as a political entity. Investigating the fabric of power thus means to focus on connection beside contestation. Courtly actors were always bound into multiple relationship contexts demanding loyalty, and, while there were elements that caused friction, there were also practices that facilitated everyday life under such circumstances.

This special issue presents five case studies that illustrate how a wide variety of actors and cultural practices shaped the fabric of power of the late medieval and early modern court and what ties bound the people of the court together. Without claiming to be exhaustive, the aim of this collection is to give a sense of the range of contexts in which the political culture of the court was moulded. The first three articles deal with different groups of agents in the courtly power structure, while the following two analyse the significance of key cultural practices.

To emphasize how the fabric of power manifests itself at all hierarchical levels of the court, this collection opens with an article by Nadine Amsler, in which she analyses The Work of Many Bodies in the social space of the princely nurseries at the courts of Vienna, Munich, and Stuttgart. Her incisive analysis examines both normative texts on infant rearing and the practices that tied together wet nurses, doctors, and courtiers in the decisively political endeavour of ensuring the continuity of the ruling dynasty. Amsler's work demonstrates that the bodily labour of wet nurses could allow them to forge lasting connections with the monarch that were rooted in the contemporary understanding of the properties of breast milk.

The management, maintenance, and regulation of hierarchical relationships was of fundamental importance not only for the well-researched mechanisms of patronage among the noble elites, but also for the ministerial administrators gaining in importance in the political landscape. ²⁹ Leonhard Horowski focuses in his article on the shifts and changes in the practices of elite integration with respect to the older chivalric and the newer judicial nobilities at the courts of France and of Brandenburg-Prussia in the context of the formation of ministerial bureaucracy. Horowski shows that ancien régime states could not be ruled without the collaboration of their aristocratic elites, and that newcomers did not try to replace the aristocracy, but instead strove to join it by way of the preferred means of marriage.

In recent years, religion at court has rightly been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. ³⁰ Yet much remains to be investigated about the complex relationship between the church and the princely court, and it is of paramount importance that we choose approaches which take seriously the profound religiosity of premodern European societies. Lana Martysheva takes some further steps along that path in her study, which examines the roles of Catholic court clerics who vouched for the confessional stance and thus for the legitimacy of the French king Henry IV. This clerical recognition was all the more substantial as the first Bourbon king famously ascended to the throne while still a Protestant. Martysheva's case study illuminates for the first time how these court clerics shifted purposefully between different levels of public visibility in order to uphold both their confessional authority and their support of the King of France in the uncertain times of the French Wars of Religion.

Elisabeth Natour centres music as a cultural practice in her investigation of courtly power. She reveals the specific capacity of music to embed heterogeneous – even antagonistic – courtly actors in an artistic invention that made room for their idiosyncrasies, but also asserted the supremacy of the artist monarch. Natour demonstrates the importance of monarchical soundscapes especially in times of crisis by comparing and contrasting the musical programmes at the courts of Charles I of England and of Louis XIII of France.

The role of historiography at court and in the wider dynastic context is the subject of Karl Kügle's article. Kügle offers an insightful reinterpretation of the damnatio memoriae of the fifteenth-century ducal couple of Anne de Lusignan and Louis de Savoy, which can be traced back to the late-fifteenth-century Chronica Latina Sabaudiae. The origin of this chronicle points to the close personal intersections of leading courtly and clerical actors. Kügle argues that the overwhelmingly negative historiographical assessment of the ducal couple, enriched with misogynistic and xenophobic lines of argumentation, which prevailed from the nineteenth century onwards, can be traced back to the highly idiosyncratic position of its author within dynastic politics. His analysis thus shines a spotlight on courtly relationship management as practised by historiographers after the fact, and, in doing so, it provides a fitting and thought-provoking end point to our series of articles.

The special issue concludes with an epilogue written by Jeroen Duindam, which revisits the main themes of the issue and discusses them from a comparative perspective. Duindam assigns the contributions of the special issue to the categories ‘family and lifecycle’, ‘politics and contestation’, ‘performing and remembering’, and ‘world views’, which allow him to transcend the European courtly context and make transcultural comparisons. This approach opens up a perspective on the rich cultural nuances of the global dimension of the fabric of power, which consolidated and shaped pre-modern dynastic rulership.