BOB2020MIOT

On 11 May 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria, the youngest sister of Louis XIII of France. The match signalled Britain’s firm alignment with France against Habsburg Spain and promised well for future relations between the two countries. However, the union between a Protestant king and a Catholic princess was controversial from the start and the marriage celebrations were fraught with tensions. They were further disrupted by the sudden death of James I and an outbreak of the plague, which prevented large-scale public celebrations in London. The British weather also played its part. In fact, unlike other state occasions, the celebrations exposed weaknesses in the display of royal grandeur and national superiority. To a large extent they also failed to hide the tensions in the Stuart-Bourbon alliance. Instead they revealed the conflicting expectations of the two countries, each convinced of its own superiority and intent on furthering its own national interests. Less than two years later Britain was effectively in a state of war against France.

In this volume, leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore for the first time the marriage celebrations of 1625, with a view to uncovering the differences and misunderstandings beneath the outward celebration of union and concord. By taking into account the ceremonial, political, religious and international dimensions of the event, the collection paints a rounded portrait of a union that would become personally successful, but complicated by the various tensions played out in the marriage celebrations and discussed here.

Contributors: R. Malcolm Smuts, Lucinda H. S. Dean, J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne, Karen Britland, Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Erin Griffey, Margaret Shewring, Sara J. Wolfson, Sara Trevisan, Kevin Laam, Sydney Anglo, Margaret M. McGowan, John Peacock, Gordon Higgott, Ella Hawkins .

The early modern world was one of movement, contact, and exchange. Yet, this does not mean that it was borderless. On the contrary, connection existed only when people moved along and across the separations between polities, religions, and mentalities. So in order to understand early modern connections, one also needs to analyse the boundaries that accompanied them.In Transregional Territories, the early modern Low Countries are chosen as a ‘laboratory’ for studying border formation and border management through the lens of transregional history. Eight different cases highlight the impact of boundaries on the actions and strategies of individuals and governments. Crossing borders in early modern times was not merely an act of negating a territorial division, but rather a moment of intimate interaction with the separation itself. As such, this volume illustrates how borders forced historical actors to adapt their behaviour, and how historians can use a transregional vantage point to better understand these changes.The cases are presented by leading border specialists and scholars of the early modern Low Countries: Fernando Chavarría Múgica, Victor Enthoven, Raingard Esser, Yves Junot, Marie Kervyn, Christel Annemieke Romein, and Patricia Subirade.Bram De Ridder, Violet Soen, Werner Thomas, and Sophie Verreyken are all members of the Early Modern History Research Group of the KU Leuven. Together, they have published extensively on transregional history and the history of the early modern Low Countries, grouped under the label of transregionalhistory.eu.

This volume in honour of Guido Clemente collects essays by nearly 40 established and younger scholars from all over the world, who want to express their gratitude for prof. Clemente's direct or indirect teaching. While the essays included in the volume cover domains ranging from methodology and (the history of) historiography, over archaeology and epigraphy, to politics and religion, they all resort under the main theme of ‘the past as present’. This main theme is inspired by a prominent feature of Guido Clemente's scholarly work: the awareness that from the last centuries of the Roman Republic up until Late Antiquity, a sense of the past ‘as present’ marked the rhythm of everyday life and provided the key to understanding ongoing societal change.