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

Time: 08.-09.09.2022
Venue: University of Innsbruck

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.

The organizers 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. Read more and source … (Web)

Panels

• Gender Politics
• Visual Representations
• Changing Europe