Royal courts are often associated with ritualised aristocratic life and ceremonial spectacles. As such, they were an essential component in European royal absolutism; they enhanced the majestic aura, and through them, the idea of the king as the centre of power was effectively visualised and performed. But the court was more than a stage for royal pomp and circumstance. In itself, a court was a cross-section of early modern societies, from the very highest down through its many middling and lower echelons: from noble marshals of court and ladies of state via officials such as secretaries and lawyers, medical doctors and priests, further down to cupbearers and guards, bakers and chambermaids, all the way down to the lowliest groom and cleaning woman. In addition, early modern courts were urban phenomena. Kings and their courts typically resided in capitals, adjacent to governmental administrations and other state institutions. The courts were thus part of an urban context, where courtiers interacted daily with the city’s inhabitants.
This broader understanding of the court, with its array of individuals in everyday life beyond pomp and ceremony, is the subject of this project. Departing from the proceedings of the judicature of the royal court (Borgrätterna)—at which all legal cases involving people employed at court, regardless of the other party’s judicial, economic, or social abode—the social interactions at and around the Gustavian court in late eighteenth-century Stockholm appear. By looking closer at the proceedings from one year—1780—patterns of interaction are chartered, and the events of individual cases with interacting defendants and plaintiffs are pursued. The focus is on three primary interactions: between the high and the low regarding social standing, between women and men, and—not least—between court people and town people.
