"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects' practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs' premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers' corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family's mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.

Autorentext

Tom Tölle, University of Hamburg.

Zusammenfassung
"It raises some interesting questions, provides food for
thought, and ultimately demonstrates the potential of an integrative
model that brings together different theoretical, methodological, and
disciplinary approaches. At all events, the angle set out programmatically
in the title of the introduction, 'Rethinking the Body Politic',
proves to be a productive approach to a phase in European history
in which the 'société des princes' was repeatedly shaken up by the
uncertainties of human life and experience." Michael Rohrschneider in:
German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 2023/2