The aim of my project is to analyse the diplomatic and cultural role of the imperial ambassadresses in the court of Madrid, along with the impact of their posts upon their subsequent lives in the court of Vienna. The chosen time frame is the second half of the seventeenth century, an interim period in which the foreign relations between the Spanish Monarchy and the empire were marked by the so-called “question of succession”.
The new diplomatic history dedicated to the modern age has paid little attention to the wives of the ambassadors, despite the fact that in the seventeenth century these women received the meaningful title of “ambassadresses”, a title which denotes acknowledgement on the part of the courts where their husbands carried out their embassies. The ambassadresses supported their husbands’ networks of power, and initiated diplomatic strategies such as patronage, clientelism or mediation; furthermore, they acted as cultural agents, exporting from their courts of origin works of art, books and artefacts, but also lifestyles, body culture and sociability. Nevertheless, current historiography continues to view the diplomatic activities of these women as the exception and not the rule. With this project I hope to demonstrate the opposite: the wives of the ambassadors, although without holding the official post of ambassador, carried out diplomatic activities similar to those of their husbands in the European counts of the Early Modern Period.
To illustrate the diplomatic and cultural importance of the ambassadresses, I will analyse the social, political and cultural profiles of these wives of the empire’s ambassadors in the court of Madrid between 1650 and 1700, paying particular attention to the analytical category of gender. As a starting point I will use a broad concept of diplomatic activity, analysing its least-known informal elements, which will augment our understanding of how the interpretation of diplomatic work has changed over time. To this end, I will take special note of the material turn undergone by historiography in the year 2000, exploring bodies and spaces and interpreting gestures, artefacts and works of art.
Our research will create new narratives of continuity and discontinuity in the new diplomatic history and will serve as a launch pad for future gender studies in the field of foreign relations.