Carolina Armenteros, Philippe Barthelet, and Andrew Thompson
Venue: University of Cambridge
Time: 8-9 January, 2019
Abstracts due 15 June 2018
Europe’s past is overwhelmingly monarchical, yet the monarchies that remained in place at the end of the Second World War hardly resembled those that governed Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Modernity transformed monarchy from a matter of fact into one of opinion, and enabled moving from a world where everything was sacred to one where all was profane. If words, then, remained the same – along with many of the families, their properties and places of residence – their meaning changed profoundly overtime and across countries. This is so much so that, along the centuries, European monarchy as an institution seems unrecognisable to any attentive observer. Even so, the present academic literature seldom measures the distance between monarchy’s various historical meanings and manifestations.
In theoretical and speculative disciplines, the lack of inquiry into monarchy’s significance is due partly to disciplinary divisions. Political theorists and intellectual historians rarely delve into the subject of monarchy, while historians of monarchy tend to focus on chronology and rarely ask questions pertaining to monarchy as a concept. Monarchism’s own nature Continue reading
