CfP: Gender, Society, and Networks between 1750 and 1820: Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily (Event, 09/2022, Innsbruck); by: 30.04.2022

Ellinor Forster, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften und Europäische Ethnologie, Univ. Innsbruck (Web)

Time: 08.-09.09.2022
Venue: Innsbruck
Proposals by: 30.04.2022

The Habsburg queen of Naples-Sicily, Maria Carolina (1752-1814), navigated a life marred by revolutionary social upheaval, geopolitical restructuring, dynastic competition, and concurrent personal tragedies and triumphs. As a foreign consort to the Bourbon monarch of Naples-Sicily, she encountered xenophobic hostility and countless challenges to her influence at court. As a reform-minded individual, she helped to enact wide-ranging alterations to society and state in southern Italian world. As a thrice-exiled figurehead, she experienced first-hand the harsh difficulties of political instability and contested legitimacy. And, as a queen she employed her position as a power to shape the fortunes and paths of dynasties across Europe. More than a mere ‘arch rival’ to Napoleon Bonaparte, Maria Carolina represents the myriad experiences of a female ruler during a period of dynamism and irrevocable change.

We see Queen Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily as a prism, or more precisely as an intersection of overlapping crossovers that enables us to contextualise broadly defined social, economic, and political developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This crossover should be analysed both vertically – through social hierarchies – as well as horizontally across geographic regions throughout Europe in this period. In this context, Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily serves as a primary starting point and as a model for wider considerations of rulership, gender, societal change, familial status, and political participation as well as geopolitical shifts and dynastic integration and competition. The organizers therefore seek to address the following themes and questions:

Gender

  • To what extent did the reformist efforts of Maria Carolina and Ferdinand IV reflect the wider application of enlightened ideals within European states? In what ways did social structures in the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily alter between 1750 and 1820? How much of this change should be attributed to the ruling elites and monarchs themselves both in Naples-Sicily and, comparatively, across Europe?
  • In terms of pace such industrialisation or revolutionary waves … read more and souce Web.