Monarchy & Money Episode on Employment Conditions in Early Modern Courts: Interview with Dries Raeymaekers (Radboud) and Marc W. S. Jaffré (Kyoto/Trento)

The mini series within the Royal Studies Podcast on Monarchy & Money is hosted by Charlotte Backerra from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and Cathleen Sarti from the University of Oxford in the UK. In the Monarchy & Money episodes, they are talking with scholars on why economic questions are important to understand monarchical rule, and how royals are interacting with the economies of their kingdoms and beyond their territories. They are also always happy to hear about research into economic, financial, and business activities of monarchies and dynastic rulers of all kind.

Social Media: facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky: @cathleen-sarti.bsky.social 

Guest Bio: 

Dries Raeymaekers  teaches Early Modern History at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). His research explores the political culture of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on the history of monarchy, dynastic politics, and court society in the Western European context. 

He has held a Fulbright Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Historical Research (London), the Centre Roland Mousnier (Paris-Sorbonne), and the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles. In 2025, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

Dries is the author of a prize-winning dissertation on the court of Brussels in the early 17th century, which has been published as One Foot in the Palace: The Habsburg Court of Brussels and the Politics of Access in the Reign of Albert and Isabella, 1598–1621 (Leuven University Press, 2013). He is also the co-editor, with René Vermeir and José Eloy Hortal, of A Constellation of Courts: The Households of Habsburg Europe, 1555–1665 (Leuven University Press, 2014), and, with Sebastiaan Derks, of The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1450–1750 (Brill, 2016). 

Together with Liesbeth Geevers, he is co-editing the early modern volume in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Monarchy series. With Marc Jaffré, he is currently preparing an edited volume on working conditions at early modern courts.

Bluesky: @driesraey.bsky.social 

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Marc W. S. Jaffré is a historian specialising in the histories of princely courts, peace building and hospitality in early modern France and Tokugawa Japan. He is an honorary fellow of Durham University, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a chercheur associé of the Centre Roland Mousnier (Sorbonne Université), and the Deputy Chair of the European Branch of the Society for Court Studies. He is the author of The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610–1643 (Oxford, 2025) and the co-editor of Marginalized Voices and Figures in French Festival Culture, forthcoming with Brepols in 2027. He has been awarded a Marie Curie (MSCA) global postdoctoral fellowship by the European Commission for the project 'HOST-FJ. Hospitality in Early Modern France and Tokugawa Japan: Concept and Practice'. The project will start in September and is co-hosted by the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento and Nichibunken in Kyoto. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen on the project 'Building Peace: Transitional Justice in Early Modern France' and a lecturer at Durham University, the University of Oxford (Balliol College) and the University of St Andrews.

Previous Episodes of the Monarchy & Money series:

02 January 2026: Katia Wright (Winchester) on The Queen’s Lands – English Queens of the 14th Century
16 January 2026: Veronika Hyden-Hanscho (Klagenfurt) on Revenues of Habsburg Nobility in the Long 18th Century
30 January 2026: Fabian Persson (Linnaeus University, Kalmar and Växjö) on Court Economy in Sweden