ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the factors which shaped kingship and princely authority over the course of the early modern period and the various forms it took: elective kingship, the special nature of female rule or regencies, royal or imperial power in dynastic empires or multiple monarchies, the relationship between the ruler and noble elites. How did kings and rulers try to strengthen their legitimacy by projecting an image of power and by staging their claims to authority through rituals, symbolic communication and art? How did they meet the challenges which the confessional conflicts of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries present, and to what extent can the strengthening of royal power after about 1660 in many European countries adequately be described as absolutism? What was the specific role of the court in making monarchy work; for example, in regulating access to the monarch, as the centre of a patronage system, as a market place where claims to social status became the subject of negotiation and adjudication, and as a social and cultural system which constrained both nobility and ruler in their behaviour and shaped their mentalities?
