Introduction: Historians and the Trouble of Defining Aristocracy

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Introduction: Historians and the Trouble of Defining Aristocracy

Journal Title: Royal Studies Journal - Year 2024, Vol 11, Issue 1

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue Defining Aristocracy eases the reader slowly into the various troubles historians have in defining aristocracy. It argues for embracing the fuzziness of the term, and building research from there. The introduction also gives an overview of the special issue, and a short summary of the articles. The trouble historians have of defining aristocracy is discussed and contextualised within the broader historiography, but, based on the four articles on eighteenth-century Geneva, modern Swedish historiography discussing early modern aristocracy, nineteenth-century Habsburg, and finally Tudor England, a way forward is offered. Despite the trouble of actually defining aristocracy, speaking about it, thinking about it, and trying to elucidate it is indeed meaningful and fruitful for research.

Authors and Affiliations

Cathleen Sarti

Keywords

Defining the Aristocrat: From Geneva to Revolutionary France

In the political and social language of the early modern period, aristocracy did not denote a social class, but a form of state or government. At the dawn of the revolutionary age, however, the concept of aristocracy sud...

Aristocrats and Refined Peasants: The Concept of Aristocracy in Swedish Historiography

This article investigates the evolution of aristocracy as a concept in Swedish historiography from the early nineteenth century to the present. In the political climate of the early 1800s, aristocracy became an increasin...

Noblewomen, Court Service, and Crossing Borders: England c. 1500-1550

There are significant difficulties in defining aristocracy when it comes to women in sixteenth-century England, because women were so often agents of social mobility and might in theory move between social classes by din...

The Nobility in State and Society: Administrative and Public Ways of Defining and Conceptualising the Nobility in the Late Habsburg Empire (1849–1914)

This study deals with the definition of the aristocracy in the late Habsburg Monarchy (1848-1916). It attempts to grasp this phenomenon in the “bourgeois age” from two perspectives: firstly, it is assumed that the state...

Introduction: Historians and the Trouble of Defining Aristocracy

EP ID EP752240
DOI 10.21039/rsj.465
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