The Court

Over the early modern period, princely courts became dramatically bigger, more elaborate, and more influential as sites of fashionable behavior. Their influence on bodily practices was especially powerful, for by its nature court life challenged important components of European Christian belief. Court culture celebrated the body and its pleasures, and at least tolerated forms of sexual behavior that were repressed severely elsewhere in early modern society. Those freedoms applied to women as well as men, since the court's political effectiveness depended partly on its attractiveness to the socially eminent. At the same time, emphasis at court on beauty and elegance also generated new bodily anxieties. Men and women there were expected always to monitor their movements, for they could never entirely avoid others’ critical scrutiny, and the importance they attached to physical beauty encouraged attention to the forces that threatened it. Physical deformity and disease fascinated early modern courtiers, as did artificial means of enhancing one's own beauty and damaging others’; at court rumors circulated widely about poisonings, magic spells, and extreme beauty regimens.