The Embodied Court in the Premodern World

Understanding the Physicality, Performativity and Lifecycle of Bodies at Court in Europe and Beyond, 1400-1800

Dickinson, Janet (ed.)
Gómez-Chacón, Diana Lucía (ed.)

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.