Rulers and Raptors

Rulers and Raptors argues that by studying animal biographies we gain a new perspective on early modern court society. Combining court studies and historical animal studies, it brings together two vibrant but rarely combined fields of research and shows how the presence of non-human creatures shaped everyday life and political representation in Europe's dynastic centres. Through an in-depth analysis of the symbolic and practical functions of birds of prey in courtly life, the book demonstrates that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, falconry was much more than a hunting technique: it served as a model for the mutual empowerment of the sovereign and his noble subjects—the essence of the Baroque style of government that gave rise to European court society. Weber pays close attention to the birds' life trajectories and thereby shines a spotlight on a large network of agents, including rural bird catchers, bourgeois animal traders, and noble falconers at court who made the aerial spectacles possible. Focusing on these peoples' interactions with the raptors, the book proposes to rethink early modern human-animal relations, showing that falcons escaped clear distinctions between wild and domestic, nature and civilization. The book thus simultaneously shows how early modern European rulers valued raptors as a key symbol of their power—and how this very symbol of monarchical sovereignty pointed to the limits of human control over the animal kingdom on the eve of the Anthropocene. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Nadir Weber is Associate Professor of History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. After receiving his PhD in 2013, his postdoctoral research took him to Munich, Paris, Constance, Lausanne, and Berlin, before he joined the University of Lucerne as an assistant professor from 2022 to 2024. He has published widely on the history of early modern diplomacy, republicanism, and human-animal relations. His academic awards include the Prix Jubilé of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. From 2019 to 2022, he was awarded an SNSF Ambizione Grant for his research project 'Falcons in Court Society', which enabled him to write this book.