This book presents the first comprehensive study of Louis XIII’s court. The book charts the evolutions of the French court at a key-stage in its development, before the elaboration of Louis XIV’s Versailles model. Its chapters cover the court’s institutional development, politics at the court, ceremonial, entertainment, and the court’s itinerancy, but also topics less usually associated with the court, such as court finance, the merchants and artisans of the court, and how the court functioned when the king went to war. Throughout the book, the political, cultural, and material investment of courtiers (ranging from lowly coat-bearers to the most powerful princes) in the court as an institution is brought to the fore, proving just how central the court was to Louis XIII’s France. The delegitimizing and destabilizing role played by Cardinal Richelieu as minister-favourite is an important theme running through the book, providing new perspectives on the function of royal favourites within the early modern state. Through its study of Louis XIII’s court, this monograph demonstrates the agency people have in shaping the institutions in which they act and that are important to them. The monograph does this by emphasizing the role that courtiers, artisans, merchants, and financiers played in shaping the institutional, political, cultural, economic, and military framework of Louis’s court. In challenging the top-down paradigm prevalent in court studies, this monograph provides crucial correctives to the existing narrative that Louis XIII’s court was weak or unimportant and simultaneously revises how early modern courts and their development have been understood historiographically.

Sommaire

Part I Court Institutions
1 ‘Confusion from the Kitchens to the Cabinet’ : The Royal Household Indoors
2 ‘In One Word, the Disorder is Universal’ : Horses, Hounds, and Security

Part II Court Culture
3 ‘This Crown is like a Vacant Abbey’ : Favour, Faction, and Politics
4 ‘Maintained in the Rank in Which he Belongs’ : The Court, Courtiers, and the Development of Royal Ceremonial
5 ‘Without a Suite, Without a Court, Without Power’ ? Entertainment, Court, and the

Part III Court Business
6 ‘In Bravery, Diet, and Furniture, They Exceed the Greatest of the Noblesse’ : Finance and Financiers
7 ‘From Shoemaker I Could Become Councillor’ : Merchant Courtiers’ Strategies and Ambitions

Part IV Court Travel
8 ‘The God of the Race’ : Louis XIII and his Itinerant Court
9 ‘We Could See the Battle from the King’s Lodgings’ : The Court at War
Conclusion