Heirs of Flesh and Paper : : A European History of Dynastic Knowledge around 1700 / / Tom Tölle.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2022 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Tölle, Tom,
• Place / Publishing House: München ;, Wien : : De Gruyter Oldenbourg, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History : Wissenskulturen und ihre Praktiken , 11
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XV, 322 p.)

"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Illustrations -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Rethinking the Body Politic -- Chapter 1 Seeing: Royal Frailty at the Court of Charles II of Spain (1690s–1700) -- Chapter 2 Healing: Stuart Princely Ailments and the Politics of Medical Opinion (1700–1714) -- Chapter 3 Writing: The British Succession Question in the Holy Roman Empire (1701) -- Chapter 4 Interacting: Contagion in Bourbon France and the Making of Dynastic Crisis (1711/2–1716) -- Chapter 5 Feeling: The Health of Habsburg Heirs, and the Emotional Empire (1692–1716) -- Conclusion: Destiny, Disease, and Dynasty -- Works and Sources Cited -- Appendices -- Index of Persons