One Foot in the Palace

In 1995, a reception at the Banqueting House on Whitehall marked the formal creation of the Society for Court Studies, the aim of which, perhaps tacitly, was to make the study of princely courts academically valued once again. For too long, it might have been said, court history was seen as irrelevant at best, and at worst elitist, a distraction from the ‘real’ histories of men and material, or of once-marginalised social and political groups. The Society—a registered charity, with branches both in Britain and North America—currently has an established journal and supports a series of seminars and conferences. It is now respectable to study the courts of the early modern period as systems that are recognised as having been central to social and political relations both within states and also on the international stage. Dries Raeymaeker’s book is in some ways a striking product of the historiographical shift that has taken place over the past two decades in particular. It is almost the distillation of court history as an academic enterprise. That much can be gleaned from the historians to whom the author is most clearly indebted, principal among them John Adamson (one of the Society’s founder members, whose edited book on the princely courts of early modern Europe remains a standard on the subject), Jeroen Duindam, and the author’s own mentor from Antwerp, Luc Duerloo, himself a leading expert on the Habsburgs. The result is a book rich with detail and thorough in its approach to dissecting the workings of one particular court, that of the Habsburg Archdukes Albert and Isabella, who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands as resident sovereigns during the first decades of the seventeenth century, from their marriage in 1598 until Albert’s death in 1621

Historiography · Political science · Politics · Reign · Subject (documents · Classics · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Scottish History and National Identity