New PRIVACY research article published in the Journal of Early Modern History

In a jointly written article, Centre Director Mette Birkedal Bruun, Michaël Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard investigate the epistolary network that surrounded the education of the future Dutch Stadtholders.The article, first, offers an analysis of the Instruction du Prince Chrétien (1642) authored by André Rivet (1572-1651). This treatise outlines an ideal for princely education: Rivet, who was the tutor of the future stadtholder Willem II (1627-1650), Prince of Orange, posits that the young prince is never private, because, in preparation to hold public office, his life within the household is entirely circumscribed by public interests. Against this theoretical foil, the article elucidates how princely education played out in epistolary practice. Working through a substantial part of the educational correspondence of the Orange-Nassau family, which is preserved at the Royal House Archives in The Hague, the article opens a window into the intimate moulding of the prince in private - that is, away from the public gaze. This private sphere, however, is neither an isolated microcosmos, nor the diametrically opposite of the public sphere. Within the household, the tutor secures that familial interactions abide by public standards: the surveyed letters speak to an experience of selfhood that is neither entirely personal nor entirely collective, but rather straddles the two spheres, aiming to shape the entire being of an early modern prince en privé et en public.

Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Mette Birkedal Bruun, “En privé & en public: The Epistolary Preparation of the Dutch Stadtholders”, Journal of Early Modern History 24/3 (2020) 253-279: https://brill.com/view/journals/jemh/24/3/article-p253_3.xml

Portrait of William II (engraving) by Jacob Houbraken, based on a painting by Gerard van Honthorst, no date. ©Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.