Cultural Baggage: Queens, Mobility and Court Performance between Paris, Vienna, and Madrid (1612-1673)

Abstract

This dissertation explores the role of mobility—of queens, performers, repertoires, and ideas—in shaping cultural life across early modern Europe. Focusing on seventeenth-century queens of Habsburg origin, whether residing within Habsburg domains or integrated into the French court, it argues that these women and their entourages were central agents of political expression and cultural production. Their movements activated networks of performance and diplomacy, where artistic practice functioned not only as entertainment but as a language of negotiation, allegiance, and identity. The concept of cultural baggage, which gives the dissertation its title, refers to the visible and invisible content carried by these figures: songs, gestures, musical forms, theatrical traditions, courtly protocols, and embodied habits. Rather than viewing culture as something rooted and stable, the project highlights circulation, translation, and adaptability as defining features of court life. Queens did not travel alone—they brought with them singers, comediantes, instrumentalists, and playwrights who reshaped local practices and contributed to new hybrid aesthetics at the courts they entered. The dissertation is organized in two interrelated parts. The first focuses on the royal bridal journey as a theatrical and political phenomenon. It interrogates how these transnational ceremonial itineraries—from Madrid to Vienna or Paris, and vice versa—functioned as extended spectacles of dynastic identity. Drawing on chronicles, letters, and visual records, the chapters examine how queens became protagonists of a mobile, ritualized performance across cities and borders. At the same time, they explore how the queens’ own presence and preferences shaped artistic programming, revealing moments of female agency within these meticulously scripted events. The royal journey emerges not merely as a diplomatic protocol, but as a trans-European stage for enacting political alliances and performing contested national identities. The second part shifts from movement to residence, following what happened once the journey ended and court life began. It traces how performers who traveled with queens—musicians, comediantes, ladies-in-waiting—settled and participated in the cultural life of Paris, Vienna, and Madrid. These figures not only adapted to their new settings but helped redefine them, particularly in France, where the continued presence of Spanish theater companies complicated local aesthetics and institutions. The performance of “Spanishness” became a recurring trope in court spectacle, at times stylized, at times challenged by the reality of Spanish performers onstage. These dynamics offer insight into how national identities were constructed, embodied, and contested through court entertainment. This study is based on archival research across Spain, France, Italy, and Austria, drawing on diplomatic correspondence, performance records, payment books, and private letters. While these documents rarely narrate the lives of women or performers directly, they offer glimpses—often fragmentary—into the systems of representation and exchange at work. The methodological challenge lies in reading these materials not only for what they record, but also for how they reflect power, omission, and perspective. Finally, this research foregrounds the feminist and historiographical stakes of re-centering queens and female spaces. It challenges narratives that marginalize women's courts and treats queens not as symbolic adjuncts but as cultural interlocutors. Their movements and preferences shaped repertoires, influenced ceremonial forms, and contributed to the political and aesthetic vocabularies of their time. By recovering their presence, the dissertation also recovers the labor of those who moved with them: performers, servants, chroniclers, and musicians—voices often faint in the archive, but fundamental to the spectacle of power.