Professor Giora Sternberg
Associate Professor of Early Modern History
Hertford College
01865 (2)79430
I began my academic studies in Tel-Aviv University and came to Oxford for a DPhil in History in 2005. I was then a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2009 to 2012, when I took up my current position at the Faculty of History and at Hertford College.
Featured Publication
The Monseigneur and the grands seigneurs: Questions of Priority in Early Modern France (The English Historical Review, 2019)
Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV (Oxford, 2014; pbk ed. 2016)
Who preceded whom? Who wore what? Which form of address should one use? One of the most striking aspects of the early modern period is the crucial significance that contemporaries ascribed to such questions. In this hierarchical world, status symbols did not simply mirror a pre-defined social and political order; rather, they operated as a key tool for defining and redefining identities, relations, and power. Centuries later, scholars face the twofold challenge of
evaluating status interaction in an era where its open pursuit is no longer as widespread and legitimate, and of deciphering its highly sophisticated and often implicit codes.
Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV addresses this challenge by investigating status interaction - in dress as in address, in high ceremony and in everyday life - at one of its most important historical arenas: aristocratic society at the time of Louis XIV. By recovering actual practices on the ground based on a wide array of printed and manuscript sources, it transcends the simplistic view of a court revolving around the Sun King and reveals instead the multiple perspectives of contesting actors, stakes, and strategies. Demonstrating the wide-ranging implications of the phenomenon, macro-political as well as micro-political, this study provides a novel framework for understanding early modern action and agency.
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