Privacy Scholar Oskar Jacek Rojewski guest edits The Court Historian
Art historian and PRIVACY scholar Oskar Jacek Rojewski has guest edited the newest volume of The Court Historian. We sat down with Oskar to discuss the benefits of bringing together privacy and court studies.
Congratulation on the special issue of The Court Historian!
Thank you! The Court Historian is an excellent journal for court studies, and the editorial board is comprised of widely recognised specialists, so it is an honour to publish with them.
How did the volume come about?
The volume is the result of many peoples’ work. I am thankful to Dustin Neighbors, who first came up with the idea to organise a workshop on early modern privacy at the Central European courts and to Mette Birkedal Bruun, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Maj Riis Poulsen, who believed in the project and helped organise the event. At the workshop in September 2021, we had five exciting presentations and a roundtable. It was just after the Pandemic, so the number of people in the room had to be limited, but we had an engaged online audience that interacted. They helped us improve the papers.
What is the greatest privacy insight in the special issue?
I was surprised when I talked to the participants at the workshop because they explained how Polish historians would usually say there was no privacy in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian courts. No one had attempted to analyse it before, and we got the sense that we were breaking new ground when we started talking about privacy and how we might approach it. We had a starting point – “no privacy” – but we found its notions in the end. I believe the five papers in the special issue are a great start that shows how productive the focus on privacy can be, and it is a work that can definitely be continued. That is the best part.
The special issue covers a range of approaches and sources, from ego-documents and wedding poems to letters and architectural floor plans. How has this worked out?
Yes, the scope is broad, but privacy is the focus of all five papers. They show the diverse meaning of privacy in early modern courts. The topic really works with different approaches and across heuristic zones. Privacy studies can bring various fields into conversation with each other and shed new light on diverse types of sources. I was especially surprised by what I learned about the inner circle of people at court and the sovereign’s body. I think the understanding of privacy is always tied to the historical context. You cannot explain its similarity for each case because sources and contexts are different. The privacy angle gives different results depending on the sources. And I think that is great, and it’s why this method has something to offer.
How has the focus on privacy informed your work?
For me, the Polish-Lithuanian courts were a new territory. I approached the household of Sigismund I and Sigismund II from the perspective of studies on festivities at the Habsburg courts. I observed some similarities between the banquets at the different courts and decided to research the wedding poems. This comparative approach became essential. The historiography of the Polish-Lithuanian Courts has always focused on how it differed from the Habsburgs and how they competed. In my own research, I break a little with this idea and begin to see the influence of the Habsburgs, especially in the period when both courts were very close.
Where do you go from here?
I am working on a biography of a travelling court artist. It is a somewhat different topic, but the privacy angle will be beneficial for me in understanding his life and his journeys between different courts. At each of the courts he visited, different sources require different approaches and offer diverse notions of privacy. For example, it sometimes has to do with personal ties and sometimes with private property. I look forward to further exploring how privacy was understood differently at different courts.