International Conference on Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700

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Our international conference at the Jagiellonian University brought together scholars from across Europe and the USA to discuss a new approach to parliaments, diets, cortes, estates, sejms, etc. in the early modern period. The overarching theme was how to take institutions which have predominantly been studied from a bureaucratic or nation-building perspective and better understand the way they functioned through applying cultural and transnational approaches.  

The keynote lecture was given by Dr Paul Seaward from The History of Parliament Trust, exploring the notion of a cohesive parliamentary culture in early modern Europe. Other members of the project team gave papers on topics including parliamentary diaries, parliament and the royal succession, and diplomacy and the circulation of parliamentary knowledge.  

Nine thematic panels tackled different aspects of parliamentary culture and addressed assemblies in Bohemia, the Dutch Republic, England, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, Ireland, Poland-Lithuania, Scotland, the Spanish Atlantic, and Transylvania. One panel highlighted new tends in the historiography on early modern parliamentary assemblies with reference to current collaborative projects while another questioned what was ‘early modern’ about assemblies in our period by exploring aspects of continuity and change.  

Several panels tackled aspects of the discursive culture of parliaments, whether by examining the diaries, journals, and speeches their meetings produced, or by analysing the images, tropes and metaphors that permeated their representation. The role of the historical culture of assemblies in their contemporary politics, and the interplay between parliamentary business, foreign relations, and the transnational knowledge of representative assemblies respectively were also the focus of panels. 

No discussion of parliamentary culture would be complete without considering how legal and political culture merged in the assemblies. Complementing that panel was another that tackled two other key aspects of parliamentary culture: the place of the assemblies in the political imagination and the place of constitutionalism in political culture. 

The conference concluded with a roundtable featuring project members Prof. Steven Gunn (University of Oxford), Prof. Paulina Kewes (University of Oxford) and Prof. Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves (Jagiellonian University) who were joined by Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin) and Robert Frost (University of Aberdeen).  As the conference showed, by analysing these bodies’ material culture, spatial layout, rituals, and histories, as well as the discursive strategies used by their members we can gain new insights into the decisions these bodies made and their role in the early modern political imagination. 

Read what students thought of the conference here. 

Read the conference programme. 

The conference was supported by the Jagiellonian University Excellence Initiative-Research University and by the Europaeum, a network of leading European universities.  

Organizing Committee: 

• Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves, Jagiellonian University in Krakow 
• Paulina Kewes, Jesus College, Oxford 
• Tracey Sowerby, the Europaeum 

• Jim van der Meulen, University of Oxford