Author: Dustin M. Neighbors

As I mentioned in my previous post, between the 23rd and 28th of October, PRIVACY’s Dresden case team visited the Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden and the SLUB Dresden to finally engage with the manuscripts we were longing to explore. From day one we knew this would be a unique experience. Visiting new archives can lead to feelings of both anxiety and excitement. It was my first time visiting a German archive, and my limited German vocabulary could potentially make the archival visit difficult. Besides, this was a new experience for all of us, since it was the first time we visited an archive as an interdisciplinary team – for some of us, the first experience at an archive at all.

Now after our return to Copenhagen, I can say that this collective approach to archival research was more enriching than I could ever expect. My anxiety about the German language was counter-acted by being with colleagues that spoke German. Just by listening to their interactions with the staff of the archive, I could already feel my German vocabulary expanding. Furthermore, just engaging and examining the manuscripts that were often in German increased my knowledge of early modern German. By the end of the visit, I could actually look at the manuscripts and get a good sense of what information was contained within the sources. Fellow researchers facing manuscripts for the first time could count on my experience with paleography. We could rely on each other, share findings, and go through the materials more efficiently together. The experience conjured images of us as Marvel characters, each with particular superpowers that left us strong yet vulnerable, but together we were a powerhouse.

Working together as an interdisciplinary team also helped with how we looked at the manuscripts and how we could identify privacy within the materials. Coming from different historical fields, we had different approaches to the sources. Furthermore, employing our different specialism and backgrounds allowed each of us to examine the same source and identify different aspects of a particular manuscript: our legal historian would see something differently than our cultural historian, while our architectural historian would add nuance to the religious historian’s interest. This interdisciplinary approach allowed us to pull back the layers of a particular source to extract more details, revealing new ways of identifying privacy within that manuscript. These discussions would increase the value of the manuscript, making our argument more nuanced and well-rounded in the process.

During the course of our visit to Dresden, we did manage to explore the Residenzschloss, which was actually the residence for August and Anna of Saxony as seen in the picture below.

The entire week we had worked with letters and manuscript sources that examining architecture evident and material objects related to our case study helped illuminate a lot about the people and location that are the focus of our research. The visit was definitely illuminating as we saw objects that were part of the imagery and identity of August and Anna but were also part of the everyday living, which suggests a level of intimacy and therefore privacy. We also saw instruments that were used in the scientific and medical endeavours. These endeavours were a huge part of who August and Anna were, but it reveals who they were as private individuals.

 

 

We came away with some incredible manuscript material and images that would not have been possible if we had been working individually and only with a single disciplinary focus. Furthermore, the team dynamic was strengthened and thereby allowing us to collaborate and work together more confidently and efficiently. I would encourage scholars and institutions to consider the immense value of this approach. By engaging in archival research as an interdisciplinary team it saves time, money, and is good for an individual’s overall wellbeing, as well as strengthening research and knowledge development. In fact, the trip has already cultivated connections and a partnership, particularly with SLUB-Dresden, that has us envisioning a future exhibition featuring the work we have done collectively and individually. The potentiality of the exhibition would also highlight the value and importance of interdisciplinary research and working collaboratively.

With our archival research experience fresh in our minds, we returned to the PRIVACY headquarters for a brilliantly engaging seminar with Prof. Heide Wunder about family secrecy and privacy. The intersection of these two events resulted in even more knowledge and details that helped us to strengthen our argument. Serendipitously, the way the research seminar was conducted provided a rare opportunity to engage in discussions surrounding privacy within manuscripts and evidence. In my next post, I will explore Prof. Heide Wunder’s seminar and the pedagogical potential of collective reading of sources in the process of teaching privacy.

Upon my arrival at the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) last month (September 2019), I was frequently asked about my approach to and interest in privacy. The proposal that I had put together for my interview and for the Centre focused on privacy within European court culture, paying particular attention to the concept of political privacy and how it can be identified within court culture. In the course of conversations with my colleagues and the Centre director, the main question that arose was: how are you looking at political privacy? This fundamental question shifted my focus from the traditional view of court culture to one encompassing different heuristic zones of privacy. Thus, began my journey of exploring the pragmatics, semantics and conceptual understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘private/privacy’ and the formation of the concept of ‘political privacy’ within my own research.

As I mentioned in the post, “Why privacy studies?”, throughout my doctoral research the focus on public spectacles and the public nature of the monarchy ultimately led me to ask about the private nature of the monarch, privacy within the very public European courts, and privacy within public spectacles. The public/private divide and debate has been going on for decades now, maintaining the traditional notions about the public and political sphere and the public nature of monarchy, court, and politics. However, I want to re-examine and perhaps deconstruct the dominant nature of the public sphere and illuminate the extent to which privacy and the private played a significant role, notably by women, in challenging the centralization of government, influencing sociability, shaping political culture, and questioning royal authority. Studies, including Heide Wunder’s research, have highlighted that women “exercised authority and political power” within the household, marketplaces and within the court, as well as influencing politics, thus challenging the customary view of women’s limited participation and providing a basis for political privacy. (1) This political influence has relied heavily on early modern “personal relations” and personal communication, which is another expression that needs to be analysed. (2) Hence, the need to establish the pragmatics and semantics in developing the concept. It was recently pointed out that political privacy potentially encompasses three specific aspects: privacy as an intrinsic element within political systems, privacy of an individual/institution becomes a politicised matter, or private interactions that had political significance. Of course, examining these three aspects within a specific case study is a large undertaking. I would eventually like to examine all three aspects in different studies. However, for the moment, I am interested in the private interactions/situations that have public consequences. Therefore, I am viewing political privacy as the informal, unseen, unheard actions and interactions of monarchs, court agents, diplomats, and families that attempted to influence policies, encourage religious conformity, shape identity and perceptions, and transform political authority.

As a member of the interdisciplinary Dresden case team, I am using my expertise in court and political culture and the history of monarchy, combined with the site-based analysis approach of PRIVACY to examine the “notions of privacy at the interface of realm and household” within Dresden. (3) Additionally, I will examine this theme in a comparative study of the complex Holy Roman and German electoral court culture with the English royal court. It was during the initial phase of team discussions that my colleague and I identified parallel interests pertaining to Anna of Saxony. What we are trying to ascertain is whether the political and scientific networks forged through correspondence influenced the legal, cultural and political landscape within Dresden. Through applying the concept of political privacy, I have wondered if the extensive collection of correspondence and multiple interactions that Anna of Saxony had with other elite and royal women and men influenced political policies, strengthened or damaged foreign relations, and contributed to a civic, individual and rulership identity?

For example, in 1577 Elizabeth I of England sent letters to nine German princes, and one to Electress Anna of Saxony in Dresden. (4)

The discovery of the letter’s existence and the method of delivery illuminates its exceptional nature in that the Electress’ letter was sent among those designated for male ruling authorities in Germany. While it was not unusual for Elizabeth I to write to other noblewomen or consorts, the context surrounding the letter to Anna of Saxony are quite interesting. During the 1560s and 1570s, England and the Protestant territories in Europe were in discussions through ambassadors about the establishment of an alliance to combat conflict in the Netherlands and the French Wars of Religion. (5) August of Saxony, was at the centre of the “theological and political fracture” that threatened the Protestant alliance. The nine letters sent in 1577 included one sent to August of Saxony.

 

The original letter to Anna is based at the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv in Dresden, which my team members and I will be visiting in two weeks time, and I look forward to discovering its contents. However, based on my previous research on Elizabeth I and what I have been learning about the German electoral courts and Anna of Saxony, my hypothesis is that Elizabeth was writing Anna to seek help in persuading August to fall in line. Additionally, the uniqueness and informality of the letter could suggest a form of private communication that attempted to encourage religious conformity or unity.

The correspondence of Anna of Saxony is filled with possibilities to explore how private communication, especially between women, had political repercussions across Europe. I look forward to seeing what the archives will reveal next in my work on exploring political privacy. Furthermore, I welcome suggestions, feedback and ideas pertaining to the information provided herein. Please leave a comment below or feel free to send me an email.

---

(1) Heide Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, London: Harvard University Press, 1998, 162 & 166. 

(2) Florian Kühnel, “‘Minister-like cleverness, understanding, and influence on affairs’: Ambassadresses in Everyday Business and Courtly Ceremonies at the turn of the Eighteenth Century”, in Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800, eds. Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings, Abingdon: Routledge, 2017, 131. 

(3) From original Dresden case study description composed by Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun and core scholars of the Centre for Privacy Studies.

(4) David Gehring, “Elizabeth’s Correspondence with the Protestant Princes of the Empire, 1558-1586”, in Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics, eds. Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen and Jonathan Gibson, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 196.

(5) E. I. Kouri, England and the Attempts to Form a Protestant Alliance in the Late 1560s: A Case Study in European Diplomacy, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1981.

As a center of excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, the Centre for Privacy Studies gathers together interdisciplinary scholars to pursue notions of privacy within their respective fields. In September 2019, the Centre for Privacy Studies welcomed a new cohort of scholars from across the world to develop innovative research that furthers the field of privacy studies.

Four scholars from the PRIVACY team got together to discuss their research journey into notions of privacy. Natália da Silva Perez, who has been working as a postdoctoral researcher for a little over one year at the Centre for Privacy Studies, got together with new colleagues Frank Ejby Poulsen, Natacha Klein Käfer, and Dustin Neighbors to chat about each of their takes on privacy studies.

Frank Ejby Poulsen: For the most part, intellectual historians emphasize the written word as the source for their analysis; the field is mostly a text-based discipline. There are two main methods, the contextualist “Cambridge School” approach, or the Begriffsgeschichte approach. They both consider concepts from the perspective of the written language.  Notwithstanding, there has been a growing interest in including other types of sources; often, visual representations. Quentin Skinner is an example of this when he analyses Hobbes’s frontispieces for De Cive and Leviathan as summaries of the books’ arguments in one picture. Of course, he is not the first one to include sources that are not made of words as a source for intellectual history; e.g. Lucien Braun comes to mind, or Roland Barthes have worked on images in (the history of) philosophy.

Intellectual history, writ-large, focuses on productions of the mind–intellectual productions. The mind does not solely produce words. This is why I became interested in this project. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the “concept” of privacy had much more to do than the mere written theoretical concept “privacy.” It is much more than that, it deals with emotions, feelings, spatial, intimate cognitive processes. Intellectual history needs to expand in order to touch on these topics.

In my work, I examine interactions between intellectual productions and privacy, including the intellectual production of privacy. For example, at the University of Helmstedt (or Academia Julia), professors went from living the life of a bachelor to living in private households linked to the university. They were citizens of the city university inside the city of Helmsted. For me, it is interesting to have the opportunity to explore the relationships that were fostered by this environment. Professors gave public lectures under the university’s control, and private ones with little control for a fee. Paul Nelles has studied the teaching of historia litteraria in the 18th century. Professors recruited students through pamphlets and their wife and children were also involved in the recruitment. Practical knowledge and fashionable topics were taught in private. Professors’ households also offered lodging, meals, and other services for students-they were called “Bier, Brot und Küche” professors. Many “new sciences” were taught in private before they were taught in public. Can we talk of a market capitalization of knowledge? I hope to investigate that in my research here at PRIVACY.

Natacha Klein Käfer: I work in the field of charm studies and I was drawn to the idea of privacy studies because of the many methodological and theoretical challenges that these areas of inquiry share. Charm studies is a contentious discipline because our historical sources are always in between established categories: we study practical, everyday activities, like the use of amulets or short prayers, all of which were seen by their users as facilitating cures and helping with daily problems. This kind of popular knowledge is always in between religion and heresy, between medicine and superstition. Privacy Studies is similar: privacy is almost always defined as being in relation to something else, you know it when you see it, but it is difficult to define. I like that here at PRIVACY we work together to develop methods to identify historical notions of privacy in new ways. Privacy, in the sources and periods I study, most often depended on the practicalities of how people lived their lives. I focus a lot on local healers. These were keepers of private knowledge from people in their communities, and were often put in situations where they had to protect private information, like in the case of a witch trial.

It is interesting for me to see historical instances of what happens when the secrets of the community go out and reach the ears of authorities. When I look at my sources, when I examine healers involved in witch trials, for example, I see that there is a concern about who is entitled to have or share certain private information, not only among the elite, but also among the common folk. The concern over private data being shared predates the idea of privacy as a right. So in my analyses, I am drawn to the consequences of privacy and also the negotiation of privacy between individuals and communities.

Natália da Silva Perez: During my PhD work, I realized something curious about the three women playwrights in whose work I focused: none of them had children. For instance, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz says in a famous autobiographical letter that she had no inclination to marriage… that is why she decided to become a nun. But being a nun was also what enabled her to become a prolific writer, with several volumes of prose, poetry and drama published within her lifetime in Spain and New Spain. Perhaps counter-intuitively for us nowadays, the cloister was precisely what gave her the freedom to cultivate her mind. Another case is that of Lady Jane Lumley, a noblewoman whose father was close to the royal circle in England. She was not what we would recognize as a professional writer, but she was definitely a scholar, a researcher, and someone with a curious mind, and a very privileged education. In the privacy of her father’s household, she and her siblings received an erudite humanist education. They lived in an environment that fostered intellectual development… they had the best resources available for their learning… And them I also have the example of Madame de Villedieu, who was the first female playwright to have one of her plays featured at the court of Louis XIV. She spent many years of her life longing for the love of a man who did not love her back, so she didn’t have any family, nor did she get married until quite late in her life. These three women were from the elite (sure, Lady Lumley was at a much higher status than Sor Juana or Mme. de Villedieu, but even these two were not from lower echelons of their society; they had connections). The fact that they were privileged enabled them to study and write (helped perhaps by the fact that they ended up not raising children). Then, at the end of my PhD, my question was: how was it for women of lower strata of early modern societies? How did they conciliate their need to provide for themselves with their obligations of motherhood? What if they did not want to have children? That is why I decided to study sexual privacy for poor women.

Dustin Neighbors: Coming from the USA via the UK, I did not grow up with a cultural connection to royal history and monarchs. As a historian of monarchy and court culture, I have always been curious and interested in the unspoken loyalty and the magnificence of rulers of the past, and the interactions between rulers and their people. Throughout my doctoral research, I focused on the details and points of contact through public royal spectacles, ceremonies, public events, and itinerant monarchies, which afforded agency and authority to rulers. Public processions and itinerant monarchies were what instigated the idea of political privacy. Consequently, the question that I arrived to at the end of my doctoral research was: if rulers were so public, did they have privacy or have private moments? Private moments, for someone like Elizabeth I of England, had larger public consequences, as well as impacting early modern sociability and political culture.

For instance, during a hunting excursion in 1564, Elizabeth I engaged two French diplomats in a political discussion surrounding the possession of territory in France, that once belonged to England. This private moment highlights the discussion of political issues and its eventual public consequence of further damaging foreign relations with France. However, private was not just about the unseen and unheard but also about the designation of private spaces. Hunting was a public event, but with no one else involved in the hunting excursion except the Queen and the diplomats, the act of hunting and its environs became private spaces. The private exchanges that dealt with politics (broadly speaking) is why I want to study and develop the notion of political privacy. Is this a thing? Is it visible within the evidence? By expanding my research to examine the European royal and electoral courts, I am able to explore the similarities and differences that privacy had in shaping royal power, foreign relations, political and court culture in the early modern period.

So what will this blog be? Just as we began this discussion, this blog will be the home for notes during our respective research journeys… Here, we will jet down our unfinished (or even polished) thoughts, as we explore notions of privacy as they emerge in our work. We look forward to contributing to the dialogue on privacy studies and to fostering interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities and beyond.