Giora Sternberg - Böcker

Who preceded whom? Who wore what? Which form of address should one use? One of the most striking aspects of the early modern period is the crucial significance that contemporaries ascribed to such questions. In this hierarchical world, status symbols did not simply mirror a pre-defined social and political order; rather, they operated as a key tool for defining and redefining identities, relations, and power. Centuries later, scholars face the twofold challenge of evaluating status interaction in an era where its open pursuit is no longer as widespread and legitimate, and of deciphering its highly sophisticated and often implicit codes. Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV addresses this challenge by investigating status interaction - in dress as in address, in high ceremony and in everyday life - at one of its most important historical arenas: aristocratic society at the time of Louis XIV. By recovering actual practices on the ground based on a wide array of printed and manuscript sources, it transcends the simplistic view of a court revolving around the Sun King and reveals instead the multiple perspectives of contesting actors, stakes, and strategies. Demonstrating the wide-ranging implications of the phenomenon, macro-political as well as micro-political, this study provides a novel framework for understanding early modern action and agency.

Writing was part of the fabric of the early modern European world, and remains an indispensable source for its historians. But what gave writings their power in the past, and how should this shape our engagement with them in the present? Going beyond the familiar themes and narratives of the printed public sphere or the rise of the information state, Writing Acts examines the direct impact of manuscript documents on the lives and struggles of the Ancien Régime. The study of writing acts, Giora Sternberg argues, illuminates fundamental aspects of early modern agency that cut across typical divides of historical inquiry, relating macro and micro, elites and commoners, centre and periphery.Writing Acts develops a framework for reconstituting early modern sources as the forms of action they once were. It considers documents in their fullness, as material objects as well as verbal texts, and follows their life-course from drafting on writers' desks, through filing in early modern knowledge-bases, to activation on council tables. Writing acts involved a far broader range of producers and protagonists than those familiar from more literary genres. They enabled parties across the social spectrum to subvert all forms of power dynamics: between rulers and subjects, superiors and inferiors, parents and children. Rethinking the relations among writing, action, and power, Writing Acts casts the Ancien Régime in a new light and offers a guide for anyone trying to make sense of its documents.