Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics c.1500-1800

Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics examines the role that foreign queens consort played at their marital courts between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, assesses the extent to which they brought a foreign culture with them, and whether they were agents of cultural transfer in their new territories.

This collection of essays analyses the part that these queens played in European politics, showing how hard and soft power, high politics and cultural influences, cannot be strictly separated. It shows that the root of these consorts’ power lay in their dynastic networks and the extent to which they cultivated them. The consorts studied in this book come from territories such as Austria, Braunschweig, Hanover, Poland, Portugal, Prussia and Saxony and travel for their marriages to, among other places, Britain, Naples, Russia, Spain and Sweden. The various chapters address different types of cultural manifestation, among them collecting, portraiture, panegyric poetry, libraries, theatre and festivals, learning, genealogical literature and architecture.

The volume significantly shifts the direction of scholarship by moving beyond a focus on individual historical women to consider ’queens consort’ as a category, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of early modern gender and political history.

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly is Professor of German Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Among her books are Court Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque (2002) and, most recently, Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (2010).

Adam Morton is Lecturer in British History at Newcastle University. He is the editor of Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (2011) and Illustrated Religious Texts in the North of Europe 1500-1800 (2014).