Vortragender: William O’Reilly (Cambridge)

Titel: The many bodies of the king. The roving court of Archduke Charles Habsburg, 1700-11.

Ort: ausschließlich digital

Tool: via Zoom, Gastlink: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/94186209332?pwd=YUJHS2MwcWVrT1lvOWZPQTVFd3hpdz09

Zeit: Mittwoch, 19.01.2022, 18:30

Moderation: Stephan Steiner

Abstract: In late 1703 the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I’s second son – the Habsburg archduke and self-styled Charles III of Spain, who would later become Emperor Charles VI – embarked on a laborious tour across Europe. The meandering spectacle of the Habsburg ceremonial was encouraged in a bid to secure the Spanish throne in the face of the rival Bourbon claimant. Travelling overland from the imperial residence Vienna to his new royal residence Barcelona, via London, this paper argues that Charles’s tour constituted a dynamic and potent roving ‘theatre of ceremony and precedence’ which outlined a rigid set of rules for the expression of socio-cultural rank through court etiquette. Charles’s travelling court was met with fanfare and fascination in most places, just as it was skeptically scrutinized and debated where it remained absent. The many bodies of the king, and this paper will focus on four, could not be permitted to exist simultaneously in the same place and at the same time, as this paper will argue.  The journey was perceived and resonated in a variety of spaces –courtly, religious, social and political,– some well-disposed to his cause, others repelling and refuting it, showing that although these bodies were detached and distant, they remained co-dependent at all times. The journey resulted in a Europe-wide debate about the public nature of legitimate rule and how different dynasties came to embody different kinds of government. Archduke Charles’s expedition was a formative experiment within an increasingly complex politics of precedence and ceremony, as well as a hitherto overlooked event of great personal import to the future Habsburg Emperor.

Lebenslauf: William O’Reilly, B.A., M.St. (Hist. Res.), D.Phil. (Oxon), FRHistS, FRSA, is Senior Lecturer in History and Associate Director at the University of Cambridge, Centre for History and Economics. His research is primarily in the field of early modern History and he publishes regularly in the history of migration, of colonialism, of trans-Atlantic relations and the social, cultural and economic history of Europe, 1500–1800.

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