ABSTRACT
This book focuses on the queen consort as an important mediator of cultural transfer, and the various chapters examine a range of examples from the mid-16th to the 18th century.1 What this Afterword attempts to do is to place these and other individual cases into a broader context in order to distil some general principles about the role of the queen consort. It does so in three stages: first, by asking how a consort was chosen and what her place in the dynastic system was; second, by discussing what made for successful consortship, as the necessary precondition for a queen to exert cultural influence; third, what factors, peculiar to court culture, influenced cultural transfer in that environment.
