The Politics of Female Households ─ Ladies-in-Waiting Across Early Modern Europe

This multi-disciplinary collection of essays is the first cohesive attempt to integrate ladies-in-waiting into the master narrative of court studies. It provides evidence for the multitudinous ways in which ‘women above stairs’ influenced the politics and culture of their times.

Dr Nadine Akkerman is a Postdoctoral researcher and Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and an Associate of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) in London. She is the editor of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (Oxford University Press, 3 volumes, of which the first appeared in August 2011), for which her prize-winning Ph.D. (2008) serves as the groundwork. She has been solicited to write a biography of Elizabeth.Dr Birgit Houben received her PhD from Ghent University in 2009 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Netherlands History (The Hague) in 2010. She specializes in the politics of access at the Spanish Habsburg courts and households, and has worked closely with the Madrilenian IULCE group (Instituto Universitario de La Corte en Europa). At the University of Antwerp she is responsible for the organisation of the research assessment exercises and the corresponding bibliometry.