Beyond Sovereign Courts
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Book Series
Courts and Courtiers in a Global Context, vol. 4
The Embodied Court in the Premodern World
Understanding the Physicality, Performativity and Lifecycle of Bodies at Court in Europe and Beyond, 1400-1800
Janet Dickinson, Diana Lucía Gómez-Chacón (eds)
- Pages: approx. 300 p.
- Size:178 x 254 mm
- Illustrations:25 b/w, 1 tables b/w.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2026
- € 96,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61608-7
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Mar/26)
- € 96,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61609-4
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- Forthcoming
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This interdisciplinary volume connects multiple scholarly approaches and expands the significance of court studies and its corollary disciplines (such as gender studies, cultural heritage, literary studies, and medical history).
Subject(s)
BIO
Janet Dickinson Janet Dickinson is Departmental Lecturer in History at Oxford University, Department of Continuing Education, and Lecturer at NYU in London. Her research and publications focus on the Tudor nobility and the global history of the early modern court. Janet is a convenor of the Tudor & Stuart seminar at the Institute of Historical Research; a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Court Studies; she sits on the steering committee of the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation.
Diana Lucía Gómez-Chacón is Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History of the Complutense University of Madrid. Her main lines of research focus on the artistic and spiritual patronage of late medieval queens, and the distinctive role of royal dress in the Castilian court.
Summary
The study of bodies and their various functions, including emotions, sexualities, and health has become a key area of scholarship in recent years, though has until now remained peripheral to court studies. This interdisciplinary volume of essays represents an important intensification of focus, picking up the increased attention paid to the individual bodies that made up premodern royal and princely courts. It focuses on the ways in which the courtly environment shaped the corporal experiences of everyone involved. Contributors address the physicality of the court in four key categories from across the lifecycle: bodily experiences, identity and emotions; performativity, gendered bodies, and sexuality; health, sickness and disabled bodies, and corpses, the politics of death and memory. These common experiences were not one-size-fits-all, but took on particular political, social, and cultural consequence in the charged atmosphere of the court, which they in turn helped define. This volume therefore offers a new approach to royal and court studies, from a broad chronological and geographical perspective, which will open new lines of research on the physicality of courtly environments and the corporeality of power.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction (Janet Dickinson, Dustin M. Neighbors and Diana Lucía Gómez-Chacón)
Chapter 1: Architecture, Gender, and the Private Sphere: The Spatial and Bodily Experiences of Women within Early Modern Court Residences (Barbara Arciszewska, Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw)
Chapter 2: Embodied Manifestations of Queenship and Bodily Experiences of Swedish Queens in the Vasa Period (Anu Lahtinen and Pihla Pekonen, University of Helsinki)
Chapter 3: Beyond the Realm of the Haram: The Case of the Mughal Administrator I‘timād Khān Khwājasarā (Shreejita Basak, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Chapter 4: “You have poisoned the most beautiful day of my life”: A Drama at the Swedish Court, 1775-1782 (Merit Laine, Uppsala University)
Chapter 5: Horns and Helms: Gendered Headdresses and the Frontiers of the Medieval Body (Clémentine Girault, University of Paris)
Chapter 6: Dianas of Court: The Bodiliness, Performativity, and Culture of Female Hunting in Northern Europe, 1500-1700 (Dustin M. Neighbors, University of Helsinki)
Chapter 7: The Performance of Power Relations: Early Henrician Courtly Dance (Kristen Vitale, University of Connecticut)
Chapter 8: Gendering the Royal Body: Fashion, Sexuality, and Scandal in the Castilian Court at the end of the Middle Ages (Diana Lucía Gómez-Chacón, Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Chapter 9: Royalty and Disability. Strategies for Coping and Concealment at Early Modern Courts (Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, University of Oxford)
Chapter 10: The Spectacle of the Abject: Louis XIII’s Suffering Body (Marie Claude Canova-Green, Goldsmith’s, University of London)
Chapter 11: Physicians, Barber Surgeons, Midwives, Herbalists, and Traditional Healers. Medicine at Women’s Courts in XVIII Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Bożena Popiołek and Anna Penkała-Jastrzęska, Pedagogical University of Cracow)
Chapter 12: The Three Burials of Gaston de Foix: Corpses and Courts, Milan, 1512-22 (Philippa Woodcock, University of the Highlands and Islands)
Chapter 13: “The riddle of the world is dead”: Murder, Memory, and the Duke of Buckingham’s Body (Megan Shaw, University of Auckland)
Chapter 14: I’m still here (Fabian Persson, Linnæus University)
