Theater of Diplomacy

Ellen R. Welch is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction.

• IntroductionChapter 1. Orchestrating Dissonant Concord in the Bayonne Entertainments (1565)Chapter 2. The Ambassador's Point of View, from London to Paris (1608-9)Chapter 3. National Actors on the Ballet Stage (1620s-30s)Chapter 4. Richelieu's Allegories of War (1639-42)Chapter 5. Ballet Diplomacy at the Congress of Westphalia (1645-49)Chapter 6. Entertaining Personalities at Louis XIV's Court (1653-69)Chapter 7. Exotic Audiences (1668-1715)Chapter 8. Diplomacy on the Public Stage (1697-1714)ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments

"This book offers a series of important and fascinating studies about the interaction between the performing arts and diplomacy. Diplomats are often described as actors on a stage; more concretely their presence was important in court festivities; such forms of entertainment could accompany diplomatic practices. Ellen Welch chooses precise examples, especially ballets, from the end of the sixteenth century up to Louis XIV's reign to feed a remarkable reflection about the art (and arts) of peace." (Renaissance Quarterly) "Deftly situated at the crossroads of cultural, political, and aesthetic history, A Theater of Diplomacy bridges the thriving fields of performance studies and the history and theory of international relations. No single book in this arena of early modern Europe has undertaken the kind of ambitiously comprehensive synthesis, stretching across two centuries, that Welch has created here." (Larry F. Norman, author of The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France) "Ellen Welch brings to life a world that has become almost completely foreign, while taking care to note the influence of early modern diplomacy on the spectacular statecraft of our own time. A Theater of Diplomacy is a quiet invitation to consider the importance of art and spectacle for the expression of difference and the constitution of community." (Ellen McClure, University of Illinois at Chicago)