Roundtable Feature: Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts

In this episode, we have a roundtable with the lead editor and three contributors to the new collection, Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts: Reassessing the Public and Private Divide, 1400-1800 (AUP, 2024). We discuss whether the term 'privacy' is problematic in terms of early modern court life and what expectations monarchs themselves might have had of privacy. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the link above--the book is freely available in Open Access thanks to the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Guest Bios:

Dustin M. Neighbors is the project coordinator and a postdoctoral researcher for the EU-Horizon project, Colour4CRAFTS,  at the University of Helsinki. His main areas of research are monarchy and court culture, with an emphasis on the performativity of gender, political and material culture, cultural practices and history (i.e., hunting) within sixteenth- and seventeenth century Northern Europe, and the employment of digital research methods.

Dries Raeymaekers is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). He specializes in the political culture of the early modern period, with particular attention for the history of monarchy, dynastic history, and the history of the court in Western Europe. He has published widely on princely favourites, ladies-in-waiting, and the 'politics of access' at early modern courts, including One Foot in the Palace: the Habsburg Court of Brussels and the Politics of Access in the Reign of Albert and Isabella, 1598-1621 (Leuven UP, 2013),  A Constellation of Courts: The Households of Habsburg Europe, 1555-1665 (Leuven UP, 2014) and The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1450-1750 (Brill, 2016).

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is Professor Emerita of Early Modern History at the University of Muenster. Since 2018, she has been Rector of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. Her main areas of research include: the political culture of the Holy Roman Empire; social and political symbols, metaphors, rituals, and procedures of the early modern period; and the history of ideas.

Oskar J. Rojewski is an assistant professor at the University of Silesia and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Privacy Studies of the University of Copenhagen and the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He studies fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish art and European court rituals, particularly the status of artists, their migration, networks, and relationships with sovereigns.