Print and Pageantry as Early Modern Tools for Public Diplomacy: French-Language Pamphlets on the Habsburg-Bourbon Weddings (1614-1615) and Marie de Médicis's Tour of the Low Countries (1638)'

This article seeks to examine seventeenth-century public diplomacy through the combined lens of print and pageantry. Both are rarely discussed alongside each other in contributions on early modern diplomacy, news media, and correspondence networks. It will be shown that ceremonial rituals and theatrical entertainments were nonetheless oft-discussed subjects in French-language pamphlets of the seventeenth century on diplomatic events, policies, and debates. This study argues that such events could constitute the focus of a pamphlet or surface as an important theme or reference point on the basis of which authors could build arguments, introduce or defend diplomatic agendas, or propose new solutions to a political conflict or dilemma. Pamphlets on the Habsburg-Bourbon marriages of 1614–1615, held at Marsh’s Library in Dublin within the collection of the English theologian and scholar Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), and the tour of Marie de Médicis (1575–1642), the exiled Queen Mother of France, across the Low Countries in 1638, kept in the Bibliotheca Thysiana of the Leiden University Library, will be discussed as tools for the public diplomacy of a wide range of transnational stakeholders.