ABSTRACT
Privacy at court is no technical term but rather involves incremental processes of boundary drawing. As an analytical lens, privacy invites us to focus on minute exchanges that could otherwise escape our attention. Moving beyond the public/private dichotomy, we engage with the obvious dangers of anachronism and opt for a model of thresholds that is inspired by Jeroen Duindam and further developed by reference to Helen Nissenbaum and the concept of contextual integrity. We propose that the study of early modern privacy at court cannot be based on a stable opposition between the private and the public. Instead, it is necessary to investigate the meaning of terms and experiences at thresholds, where patterns of sociability and, potentially, conflicting norms interacted at court.
