Extrait de l’article

Early modern courts created bodies that were as specific to their environment as they were political. The princely body stood at the center of many complex corporeal practices charged with meaning, but the ruler also inhabited a continuum with princely peers and noble courtiers. Members of the court mediated, produced, and represented differences in status continuously everywhere they went. Clothing and ornament, posture, beauty, health, and physiognomy at different times and to varying degrees played crucial roles in this process. Yet the courtly body did not merely assist the production of hierarchical order at court. It also lived and breathed a life of its own, often disrupting and destabilizing dynastic strategies with its unpredictable agency. From this perspective, bodies and corporeality reveal themselves to be an integral part of all political interactions at court. The systematic study of political bodies, however, is a complex undertaking that can point in many distinct directions.
Our introductory article to this collection reflects on the challenges and opportunities of a historiography of courtly, political bodies, and in it we have two distinct aims. The first is one of synthesis. We consider here the broad historiography on courts and dynastic power in its French, English, and German dimensions, with a focus on what the lens of body history has thus far contributed to the field. Since quite a lot of work has been done in each of these three traditions on our subject, we hope that this article will offer some steps toward a closer integration of these approaches and provide some vital work of translation. The second objective is an analytical one. We wish to take stock of previous developments and to propose avenues for further research that seem the most promising from our point of view.