Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500–1800

http://www.marryingcultures.eu/

Figure 1.

Quatrains in Mary Stuart's Book of Hours: http://hri.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/da/index.php?content=hours.

The extremely attractive website for Marrying Cultures elegantly fulfills two key purposes of the academic website: it informs readers about the team's research activities, events, and news, and, even more importantly, it provides a scholarly web resource in its own right. The project centers on early modern royal women and possesses several useful scholarly features.

Marrying Cultures, a three-year project that concluded in 2016, analyzes the role of royal women as agents of cultural transfer in Europe from 1500 to 1800. Funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), the project is a cooperative endeavor bringing together literary scholars, historians, an art historian, and a musicologist. Led by Helen Watanabe O'Kelly, Oxford University, as Principal Investigator (PI), its co-PIs included Jill Bepler, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; Almut Bues, German Historical Institute, Warsaw; and Svante Norrhem, Lund University. These senior members paired with postdoctoral scholars Ewa Kociszewska and Adam Morton (Oxford); Elise Dermineur (Lund); and doctoral researchers Maria Skiba (Wolfenbüttel) and Urszula Zachara-Zwianzek (Warsaw), thereby providing invaluable research experience to the next scholarly generation. The list of institutional partners is also impressive: Kensington Palace, the Livrustkammaren, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Polish History. The range of competencies and collections distinguished the project in several respects; the collaboration of university scholars with researchers working at museums, archives, and libraries has been very productive, attaining a high standard of scholarly results that are interdisciplinary as well as comparative. The research outcomes are equally impressive: conferences, concerts, public outreach, books, and articles.

By focusing on dynastic women who left their homes to marry into new courts, Marrying Cultures takes cultural transfer as its point of departure for all its interrogations. The case studies involve women from the whole of Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries: the Polish princesses Katarzyna Jagiellonka, who became Duchess of Finland and Queen of Sweden (1526–83), and Zofia Jagiellonka, Duchess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1464–1512); Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, Queen of Sweden (1636–1715); Charlotte Amalie of Hessen-Kassel, Queen of Denmark (1650–1714); the Portuguese princess Catarina of Braganza, Queen of England, Scotland, and Great Britain (1638–1705); Maria Amalia of Saxony, Queen of the Two Sicilies and Queen of Spain (1724–60); and Louise Ulrike of Prussia, Queen of Sweden (1720–82). These women often never returned to their parental courts, yet one of their many duties as consort was to represent their birth dynasty for the rest of their lives. They frequently moved to very different environments, strange to them not only in terms of language and geography, but also with very different expectations for women. Marrying Cultures has thus opened entirely new avenues for research concerning many aspects of royal women's lives and their roles at the highest levels of European culture that can be found on the website.

The Marrying Cultures web site is attractive and rich in information. The homepage features a banner carousel with recent color photos of the Palazzo Reale in Naples, the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples, and two interior views of German palaces. The images are of high quality and provide an immediate sense of place and dynasty—the Saxon bride who married to Naples or the Prussian bride who married to Sweden. At first glance, viewers gain insight into the complex cultural relationships that Marrying Cultures addresses. Directly under the banner are the usual horizontal menu items: home, about, news, events, research, people, and contact.

The homepage can be roughly divided into three sections. In the upper third, three images—a queen, a splendid Baroque library interior, and a map—provide access to three different kinds of information. Clicking on the image of the queen leads to the "about" information (which can also be accessed simply by clicking "about" in the horizontal menu...