Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Tracey Sowerby
The intermittent but frequent exchange of gifts was an integral part of early modern diplomatic practice. Work in this field to date has predominantly fallen into two categories: 1) those which focus on the generic type of the object given and its associations with luxury or rarity or both and 2) those which focus on the processes of gifting—i.e. they emphasize the onus to accept and reciprocate a gift that was proffered. Moreover, there is an assumption that gifts were either implicit bribes or simply a means to create amicable relations.
Using a series of mini case studies that predominantly involve gifts of animals, automata, and portraits across Eurasia, this paper will show how diplomatic gifts were important communicative tools and inherently dangerous. Many diplomatic gifts were innately performative and the performance was, in itself, a form of gift. Others were given and accepted in highly performative ways that utilised the gift in combination with other forms of communication to shape relations between princes and even negotiate specific issues in non-verbal ways. All these gifts held potential dangers. Exotic animals might die or worse still, attack their owners; other items were given to insult and provoke rather than create mutual understanding. Peril was inherent in the temporality of these gifts; due to their ongoing presence in royal displays their recipients (and their descendants) consciously or otherwise redefining the meaning of these gifts for their own ends.
Tracey Sowerby (University of Oxford) is the Director of the Europaeum Scholars Programme. Her research focuses primarily on the cultures and practices of early modern diplomacy and she is particularly interested in the ways in which gifts were used in pre-modern diplomatic practice. Her four co-edited volumes include The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age (2022).