2Starting from the basic question of whether privacy can be said to have existed in premodern court cultures, the ten-chapter collection effectively brings together the field of privacy studies with that of early modern court studies, shedding new light on both the public-private distinction and on early modern royal and aristocratic courts as complex spaces of socio-political negotiation and cultural production. The combination is productive – in part because of its periodization. Early modern Europe takes up a crucial, if ambiguous, position in the development of public/private as a meaningful opposition. It forms an intermediary phase between the motley pluralism associated with the Middle Ages, in which Greco-Roman distinctions between polis and oikos and between sovereign state and private citizens lost much of their significance under conditions of feudalism, and the nineteenth-century crystallization of distinct “public” and “private” spheres in law, political thought, and daily life, and of “privacy” as a right. Understanding whether, when, and how privacy and the private came to be understood and experienced as something distinct from the public prior to the 1800s is therefore key for our insight into these larger developments, even if the authors and editors of this volume are reticent to draw any sweeping, trans-historical conclusions.

6Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger, in her chapter, identifies two fundamental strands through which the public/private dichotomy was used and understood in the early modern period: firstly, what is common or universal versus what is particular (e.g. public versus private interests or property), and secondly, what is visible or accessible versus what is hidden or restricted. It was common for these strands to contradict one another – at least from a modern point of view: public (i.e. common, political) affairs could be handled privately (i.e. in secret) and highly personal affairs (e.g. the monarchs’ birth, marriage, and death) were matters of public concern and scrutiny. To avoid conceptual confusion, Stollberg-Rillinger, therefore, proposes an alternative dichotomy, taken from Erwin Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology: front stage/back stage, denoting distinct times and spaces of varying degrees of formality, spectacle, and performative majesty. Dries Raeymaekers’ piece, like that of Bruun and Nørgaard, proposes adding nuance to the public/private distinction rather than doing away with the concept-pair. He does this by examining the negotiation of boundaries (in other words, of access) in the organization of space, the use of material culture, and with regards to the royal body. Raeymaekers thus treats privacy not as something fixed but as subject to changing practices and discourses, with different implications in different settings.

7The remaining seven chapters are grouped into four frequently invoked themes in court studies, some of which relate more directly to the various strands of the public-private divide than others: architecture, spaces, and access (Kägler; Persson), with Britta Kägler’s chapter on the Frauenzimmer at the Munich court shedding light on the gendered aspects of regulated courtly spaces; patronage, art, and literature (Rojewski; Wojtkowska-Maksymik); religion (Bruun and Nørgaard); and politics (Spangler; Neighbors and Woodacre). Throughout these contributions, the two strands of early modern privacy discourses identified by Stollberg-Rillinger – (in)accessibility/(in)visibility and particularity – come to the fore in various ways, sometimes favoring one or the other, sometimes showing their interconnections. A particularly prominent strand is access – to the monarch, to information, or specific spaces – and its corollary, withdrawal. Several of the authors successfully show that control over access was intricately linked to (political) power while simultaneously the intimacy that came with access to the ruler was linked to influence and prestige in complex ways: access to restricted royal spaces could be a great honor, as evidenced by the publicly scrutinized lists of people with access to the Swedish king’s chambers described in Fabian Persson’s chapter, or conversely be a sign of one’s status as a servant, as becomes clear in Oskar Rojewski’s chapter on court painters. This tension between intimacy, servitude, and hierarchy comes up in several places throughout the volume, but raises more questions still, to the point where it may well have been worthwhile to devote a chapter to servants and the spaces at court reserved for household staff.

8The individual contributions in the volume expertly weave together a rich tapestry of literary, archival, and visual sources from across early modern Europe, balancing creative engagement with the extensive literature on major Western-European royal courts (e.g. Versailles, Tudor England) with innovative empirical work on minor princely courts in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Taken together, the chapters offer keen new insights into both the complex development of privacy and the public sphere in the early modern period and the intricate workings of European royal and aristocratic courts. Lacking a synthesizing closing chapter that draws definitive conclusions about the development (or lack thereof) of privacy at early modern courts, the collection should primarily be seen as a successful showcase of what is possible when applying the PRIVACY perspective to court studies. A promising further avenue of research, to name an example, would be to compare privacy at the European courts to which the volume confines itself to courtly settings beyond Europe. As the volume makes abundantly clear, the debate around the meaning of privacy and its historical origins is far from settled.