Karlsruhe--Friedenstein

Court studies has become virtually its own historical subfield. Although remnants of the old ‘gossip’ and ‘scandal’ histories still survive, most court studies today, such as those represented in The Society for Court Studies (www.courtstudies.org), are inter- and multidisciplinary in their perspectives. They cast their scholarly net quite widely to include a potpourri of histories that survey military, political and architectural achievements, evaluate rulers as connoisseurs and patrons of art, make gender analysis a prime focus, and unravel patronage and clientage networks, among other concerns. Veronika Bunk’s analysis of two medium-sized German courts fits this paradigm, indeed her chief objective is to investigate the amalgamation of culture and power at the Baden court in the latter half of the ‘long eighteenth century’ (p. 11). That sentence suggests exactly what is at stake in her decision to concentrate on one court and its ruling family. Her interpretations are revisionist in several ways. For example, she questions the validity of the Baden myth that portrays its ruler, Carl Frederic, as the heroic margrave who single-handedly lifted Baden into a new age of nineteenth-century German liberalism and whose astute reforms preserved Baden as a state at a time when many others experienced a mediatisation (Mediatisierung) that wiped them off the map as independent political entities. While she finds that apotheosis doubtful, and while she also questions the idea of a golden age presided over by Carl Frederic’s talented and charming wife, Caroline Louise of Hessen-Darmstadt, in the end, her work argues, if by no means in a hagiographic vein, for the central importance of both figures and especially that of the margrave.

Democracy · German · Political culture · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Legal Studies and Society · History · Law