MITTEILUNGEN DER RESIDENZEN-KOMMISSION DER ...

that a luxurious lifestyle, enormous material expenditure, and the performance of complicated
ceremonial were the only things furthering civilization. He put up for discussion the idea that
a lack of luxury might sometimes have produced integrative incentives. At the smaller and
middling courts a shortage of resources and the associated pressures to be thrifty could reduce
the social barriers between the court in the narrow sense – those who had free access to the
ruler – and the court in the wider sense. Scholars so far, he suggested, have not taken enough
account of improvisation at court which encouraged communication, or of co-operation between
the residence, town, and country which conserved resources.
Forms of payment used within and between courts were the subject of the second session:
‚Between Dotation, Salary, Symbolic and Real Capital.‘ The virtue of generosity (largesse)
was the thematic core of Frédérique Lachau’s (Paris) paper on ‚The Gift in the Culture of the
Court, with Special Reference to England and France, Twelfth to Thirteenth Centuries‘.
Chronicles and courtly romances, but also the files produced by the English royal court administration
provide insights into how this specifically courtly behavioural norm was translated
into practice. Lachaud discussed the leitmotivs in the contemporary normative discourse
about gift-giving as social practice, demonstrated that they derived from the philosophical
literature of Antiquity and the religious-didactic literature of the High Middle Ages, and
emphasized, in conclusion, that courtly-secular writers and clerical authors held strongly
contrasting views of the essence and the limits of largesse. In their paper entitled ‚A Waste of
Money? On the Social Function of Luxury Consumption‘, Ulf-Christian Ewert (Chemnitz)
and Jan Hirschbiegel (Kiel) showed that the production of luxury, ostentatious consumption,
and gift-giving at the late medieval court should be considered as profitable investments
which allowed princes to establish and maintain a balanced social system of personal relationships
enabling them to exert power. Furthermore, they argued that although efficient in
maintaining the social order at court, luxury consumption was, in a sense, a rational but presumably
non-efficient strategy with respect to competition for status and prestige. In her
paper on ‚„Weder Fisch noch Fleisch“ – wenn alle Gaben zwischen symbolischem und realem
Kapital schwanken‘, Beatrix Bastl (Vienna) looked at the qualities of the specifically
aristocratic belief system, and at the associated accumulation of symbolic and real capital.
Attempts were made in the early modern period to create a balance between the economic
power of the various aristocratic families through marriage contracts and wills in particular.
Exclusively aesthetic or craft-based criteria alone cannot do justice to the state-sponsored art
of the modern and Baroque periods, as Hans Ottomeyer (Berlin) pointed out in his paper,
‚Bernstein und Politik – Staatsgeschenke des preußischen Hofes bis 1713‘. In it he looked at
the use of objects of art as diplomatic gifts in Prussia’s contacts with Russia, Austria, Denmark,
and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Amber was the most suitable
material for a state gift intended to signal legitimate territorial claims. Only the Prussian
monarch could own amber, and in legal terms it was directly linked with his sovereignty.
Anyone who wanted to achieve anything within the court system and initiated material
transactions for this purpose had to find a balance between what was necessary and what was
possible. One extreme consisted of all the normative expectations of the ‚public‘, in particular,
the ‚selective, qualified public consisting of the men of power, without whom no prince
could achieve anything‘ (Werner Paravicini). The other extreme consisted of the available
material and cultural resources. In the third session, ‚Expenditure: Between Economics and
Honour‘, luxury and its intended effect were examined from the point of view of practical
good sense. Traditionally, there has been more interest in the income of English kings of the
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries than in their expenditure. In ‚The Kings of England and
their Neighbours in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries‘, John Gillingham (Brighton)
looked at the Crown’s expenditure between the Norman Conquest and the early 1220s, with
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