| In this dissertation, I examine how Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) participated in the ongoing negotiations of her royal status during the period after her abdication of the Swedish throne and conversion to Catholicism by consciously staging her embodied presence at social and cultural events in Papal Rome. I particularly emphasize how Queen Christina used the rich vocabulary of etiquette and social protocol available in this period in exacting, and often creative, ways. I reframe Christina as an active agent in the formulation and production of her unique interpretation of the monarchical role, an agent who skillfully employed the range of embodied practices and techniques for self-visualization through which people at the time shaped and lived their social identities.;In the history and historiography of Queen Christina, the topos of her body figures prominently. While scholarly discussion has long revolved around the visual appearance of Christina's physical body, I propose that in Christina's own lifetime what her body did --- rather than how it looked --- mattered far more. Drawing on the way that Christina's long residency in Rome is described in a range of contemporary documents, my study constitutes a shift in the discourse on Christina from her figure to her figuring : from analysis of her body as a static entity to be studied in isolation, to an exploration of ways in which Christina's active and embodied presence and participation in public space enabled her to make powerful and effective statements about her royal status.;In Part One of the dissertation I describe and theorize the active role the body played in the dynamic processes through which Early Modern social status was represented and its currency negotiated. In Part Two, I present several case studies focusing on Queen Christina to demonstrate how the body's capacity to perform and represent, taken together with the ways that the shaping of architectural and urban space facilitated and accommodated the display and movements of the body, illuminate the potency of a politics of representation located at the intersection of body and art in seventeenth-century Europe. |
