MITTEILUNGEN DER RESIDENZEN-KOMMISSION DER ...

of speakers presenting their papers themselves, however, the respective section chairs summarized
and presented their findings. The speakers were then given an opportunity to clarify
their positions both in direct response to these summaries and in the course of the ensuing
general discussion (only in the first session was it necessary to revert to the traditional format
because of the chair’s last-minute cancellation). To give participants the opportunity to prepare
for the discussions, all papers were made available through the GHIL’s website before the
conference.
In his introductory lecture, ‚Hofkultur – Probleme und Perspektiven‘, Joachim Ehlers
(Berlin) gave an overview of the state of knowledge about the position of the court in the
political, social, cultural, and economic structure of the High Middle Ages. He emphasized
the practical significance of the deliberate creation of a courtly milieu, identified shortcomings
in previous research, and indicated directions that future research might take. The first
session, ‚Communal Action: Between Service, Feast, and Leisure‘, looked not only at how
the elevated courtly way of life was organized, but also at how it was experienced. In his
paper on ‚Hofämter und Hofkultur an Fürstenhöfen des Hochmittelalters‘ Werner Rösener
(Gießen) discussed the development and functionalization of court culture at a number of
specific princely courts in the Holy Roman Empire during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
concentrating in particular on court offices and court festivals. In the High Middle Ages,
he summed up, this cultural form was concentrated on the person of the ruler and served
primarily as a vehicle for his self-presentation and to increase his prestige among the circle of
his social equals. In addition, the princely court and its cultural forms, which were shaped by
the culture of the knights, served to bring together vassals and ministeriales from different
areas. The increased integration and centralization of rule to which this contributed compensated
for the decentralized power structures of the High Middle Ages. Court offices served
two main purposes: they could meet the practical needs of the court administration, or they
could have representative functions. For a long time, the royal court provided the model for
court organization and knightly cultural forms at the German princely courts of the High
Middle Ages. By contrast, the Polish-Lithuanian elective monarchy, established in 1572, had
only moderate financial resources and did not allow for a strong central power. Under these
conditions, the election and coronation ceremonies at the beginning of each new reign, as
well as the ceremonies surrounding the burial of the previous ruler, were of crucial importance
and integrated the whole of society, as Almut Bues (Warsaw) emphasized in her paper,
entitled ‚Le manque de couleurs & d’imagination pour y bien reüssir. The Integrative Power
and Political Use of Festival in an Elective Monarchy: Poland-Lithuania in the Sixteenth
Century‘. The keeping of these ancient dynastic traditions served to give Poland-Lithuania’s
elective monarchy the fiction of legitimacy, continuity, and stability.
In her paper ‚Les cours hors la cour: les manifestations du luxe aristocratique dans le royaume
de Louis XIV‘, Katia Béguin (Paris) expressly opposed the ‚Versaillo-centrism‘ which
dominates French research on the court. She spoke about the residences of the high aristocracy
that surrounded the royal court like satellites in the second half of the seventeenth century.
These did not, she suggested, represent mere fall-back positions for a politically emasculated
aristocracy. Although their presumed advantages over Versailles were celebrated, along with
the wealth, taste, and creativity of the lord of the manor, with the assistance of a festive culture
that was specific to these aristocratic seats, they did not express political opposition to the
monarch. Rather, these were deliberate attempts to enhance the prestige of one’s own residence
in the eyes of a foreign and domestic public, in open competition with one’s social
equals. Wolfgang Wüst (Erlangen-Nuremberg), however, speaking on ‚Luxus oder Sparzwang?
Höfisches Leben im frühmodernen süddeutschen Kleinstaat: Ansbach-Bayreuth
(Hohenzollern) und Augsburg-Dillingen (Bischöfe) im Vergleich‘, cast doubt on the notion
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