HI5038 - Early Modern Monarchies: Power and Representation, 1500-1750

You will learn on this module by attending lectures and seminars. The lectures will introduce you to the module’s core themes and key historiographical debates related to the subject area. You will be expected to prepare for the weekly seminars by undertaking the set reading (available via the electronic reading list), and will build on your independent reading by presenting your ideas and arguments in seminar discussions with your peers. Each week's class will involve both small group work and large group discussion, built around focused questions on themes and topics. Carefully selected primary sources will feed into these discussions. You will receive formative feedback throughout the learning process and summative assessment will match your learning against the learning outcomes for the module.

Your academic development will be supported through your module tutor, engagement with your peers, and through the programme leader. The module tutor will be accessible within publicised Feedback and Consultation hours and via email. Your peers will provide you with a collaborative learning environment, and your programme leader will guide you through the requirements and expectations of your degree programme, of which this module is part. You will also be supported through individual engagement with the academic literature, lectures, and resources available on the eLP. Formative feedback will be on-going through seminar activities and assessment tasks.

All modules at Northumbria include a range of reading materials that students are expected to engage with. Online reading lists (provided after enrolment) give you access to your reading material for your modules. The Library works in partnership with your module tutors to ensure you have access to the material that you need.

Knowledge & Understanding:
1. Knowledge and understanding of the history of early modern courts.
2. Understanding of a variety of methods for studying early modern royal courts.

Intellectual / Professional skills & abilities:
3. Demonstrate a range of transferable skills, including the ability to make independent critical judgements, to critically evaluate sources, to summarise the research of others, and to present arguments in a cogent and persuasive way.

Personal Values Attributes (Global / Cultural awareness, Ethics, Curiosity) (PVA):
4. Curiosity about the nature of evidence on which our knowledge of the past, and therefore our understandings of the present, depend.

2 x 2,500-word essays (MLOs 1–5)
These essays will be written in response to questions chosen from two thematic lists provided by the module tutor.



Formative feedback for each assessment will be provided in seminars. Verbal and written feedback will be given on all summative assessed work. Feedback on initial summative assessments will enable you to improve on later ones.

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This module comparatively explores the history of early modern monarchies between c. 1500 and 1750, including Louis XIV’s Versailles, the Jagiellonian court in Cracow and the Stuart court, among others. We will think about the day-to-day life at court, its politics, and the ways in which it was used as a vehicle for the monarch’s propaganda and representation. We will look at court intrigue, favourites and faction politics, gender and political agency, ceremony, entertainments, fashion and royal palaces, and diplomacy. We will think both about how elements of European royal culture were adapted to different styles of monarchy and court as well as looking at European royal houses as a connected network for transfer of people and ideas. Through reading and discussing a variety of texts – for example festival books, letters, chronicles, and household accounts – you will develop a range of transferrable skills such as building and supporting arguments, research and analytical skills.