Diary-writing at European courts at the end of the Old Regime: Concepts of person, ritual and gender (Teilbereich I: Ritualisierte Lebensweisen)

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This project aims to collect, explore, contextualise and analyse diaries written at European courts in the second half of the 18th century, both as texts, and as historical sources. At the early modern courts personal relations were determined by hierarchy and etiquette, and public life took prominence over private life. By the middle of the 18th century legitimacy of rank by birth and of the high costs of a ceremonial court was being eroded, both from the inside and the outside. There was also an increasing production of egodocuments, which has usually been interpreted as a sign of growing introspection and self-questioning, and connected with the "birth of the individual". Amongst key questions addressed in the project are to what extent the writing of a private diary at court was used to solve tensions between public and private and to create a separate persona? Was this persona, and in a wider sense the concept of person, inner-directed, or relational, that is determined by the place of the author within the court-hierarchy and family? To what extent was is shaped by the rituals of his or her environment? To what extent was it gendered? During the first two years the research will concentrate on the Dutch Stadholderate court. In the second stage the scope will be widened to the Prussian and Habsburg courts, to compare the results and test the hypotheses based on the Dutch case-study. Central to the project will be an in-depth comparison between three extensive court diaries, written in The Hague (Hardenbroek, 1759-1787), in Berlin (Lehndorff, 1750-1775) and in Vienna (Khevenhüller-Metsch, 1742-1776).