Introduction

The chapter introduces the field of new dynastic studies as a confluence of scholarship on state formation, courts, gender and the family, positing that dynasties existed in symbiosis with states and that can be seen as family-based and gendered networks that took the shape of cohesive family groups in the early modern period. It examines, following Natalia Nowakowska, the uses of the term ‘dynasty’ in modern historiography as a synonym for early modern monarchy; as a succession regime and as a self-governing discourse. It proposes to combine these perspectives and study dynasties as a composite of constructions of a family group that exists in different temporal dimensions: genealogies and crypts construct and reflect its past and appointments and burials (and surely many other things) illuminate its contours in the present, while succession scenarios hypothesise its future.