The Project

Objectives

The House of Habsburg, one of the most powerful ruling families in Europe, attributed an unparalleled symbolic value to the body as, in the Ancient Régime society, political power was a birthright and its transmission and continuation within the household required healthy bodies. The Habsburg family members were required to be in good health also to cover their roles as rulers and constructors of kinship, political, and economic ties, and to fulfil their functions as patrons of culture, sciences, and the fine arts. Furthermore, the male and female members of the imperial family left a conspicuous amount of private correspondence related to everyday family life, in which health-related themes were discussed with a variety of interlocutors, and great importance was attributed to medical advice and knowledge.

The project foresees four specific goals.

The first objective examines the relationship of the imperial family with the early modern medical marketplace, overcrowded with many different medical professionals and semi-professionals. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Habsburg family hired university-educated physicians for long periods, such as Matthias Cornax (1508–1564), Giulio Alessandrini (d. 1590), Cristoforo Guarinoni (d. 1604), Diomedes Cornarius (1535–1600), and Johann Wilhelm, Freiherr von Mannagetta (1588–1666). Many others were consulted on an occasional basis. The Habsburgs also turned to other providers of medical services according to their needs: surgeons, barbers, medical charlatans, merchants of pills, astrologers, empirics, and women experts on medicine were called in to court. Therefore, it is necessary to understand on which criteria the Habsburg relied to select medical professionals, what tasks these fulfilled, and what was their compensation.

The second objective analyses the role played by the Habsburg family members in managing both their health problems and those affecting their relatives. Some of the relevant questions in this respect are:

• Who charged physicians to attend to the health status of the family?

• What were women’s and men’s attitudes towards the attending physicians?

• To what extent did male and female patients influence the diagnostic process and the outcomes of medical visits?

• What room to manoeuvre did they have in negotiating cures?

The third objective aims to investigate how women conceptualized the physiological and pathological processes inherent to their body and what was their understanding of the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and delivery, and related potential problems. While we know how (male) physicians conceived of these aspects, the way in which women understood these bodily characteristics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has to be explained more clearly. In this context, the written and verbal sources that the Habsburg women relied on to acquire medical notions and their networks of contacts will be defined.

The fourth and final objective intends to reflect on how health-related issues shaped the self-image of the Habsburg family members, both as individuals and as a political collective body, and to define the impact of disease on their political power. In fact, in the early modern era, physical problems affected both dynastic interests and the stability of the ruling families, and an illness could undermine the ruler’s reputation, and encourage enemies.

Sources

Both physician-centred sources and documentation that reflects the (male and female) patients’ perspectives are examined. Particular attention is paid to the following documents: the medical consultation papers physicians drafted for the family members, the letters these doctors sent to and received from them, family correspondence, i.e., the letters exchanged between the family members, the collections of medical recipes assembled within the household, the court account books, and the inventories both of the books read by the family members, and of the objects used by the family for medical purposes. This material is chiefly but not exclusively kept at the State Archive of Vienna, the Austrian National Library of Vienna, the State Archive and the Civic Library of Trento, and the State Archive of Mantua.