DSS March 2026 - Marc Jaffré

‘Court Dwarfs, Physical Difference and Institutionalization at the Royal Court of Early Bourbon France, 1589–1715’

Marc W. S. Jaffré (University of Groningen)

It has long been known that dwarfs were employed at princely courts both in France, and across Europe, from Spain to Sweden. Despite this preponderance, surprisingly little has been written about the history of dwarfs or the roles they played at court. Historians have given court dwarfs in France particularly short shrift, lavishing far less attention onto them than on their Spanish, Italian, English and Polish counterparts. When they appear in studies of the court, they are rarely granted more than a paragraph, often as a passing curiosity along with the animals of the court’s menagerie. Despite this neglect, there were ten to fifteen dwarfs employed at the French court for much of the seventeenth century. Through a study of the men and women employed as dwarfs at the court, along with the varying offices and positions they held, this paper seeks to better understand why new offices of court dwarf were created by Henri IV and also why these offices were abolished during Louis XIV’s reign. In so doing, this paper emphasizes the court’s institutionalizing logic, challenges interpretations that rely too heavily on dwarfs as the monarch’s alter-ego to explain their presence at European courts, brings to the fore the activities and the agency of dwarfs themselves, and provides new insights on the processes of marginalization at early modern courts.

Short Bio

Marc W. S. Jaffré is a specialist of court culture, marginalization, hospitality and peacebuilding, especially during the seventeenth century. He is the author of the monograph, The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610–1643 (Oxford, 2025) and an editor of the volume Marginalized Voices and Figures in French Festival Culture, c.1550–c.1850forthcoming with Brepols this year. Marc has been a lecturer at the Universities of Oxford, St Andrews and Durham. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), an honorary fellow of Durham University, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Marc is also the deputy chair of the European Branch of the Society for Court Studies and book reviews editor for The Court Historian.

Publications

Monograph:

The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610–1643 (Oxford: OUP, 2025)

Edited Volume:

Marginalized Voices and Figures in French Festival Culture, c.1550–c.1850 (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming in 2026), edited with Bram van Leuveren and Alexander Robinson.

Articles and Book Chapters:

‘Sociability and Diplomacy at Louis XIII’s court’,The English Historical Review(2026), advance article.

Printing and Conflict, a Household Affair: Henri IV's Royal Printers, 1589–1595, in A. Wilkinson and G. Kemp (eds), Negotiating Conflict and Controversy in the Early Modern Book World (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 217–33.

‘The Royal Court and Civil War at the Founding of the Bourbon Dynasty, 1589–95’, French History, 31 (2017), 20–38.

Podcast Interviews

With JanaByarsfor New Books Network, May 2025: https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-courtiers-the-court-of-louis-xiii-1610-1643-2.

With Suzannah Lipscomb forNot Just the Tudors, January 2023:https://shows.acast.com/not-just-the-tudors/episodes/louis-xiii-cardinal-richelieu.