This dissertation explores representations of blackness in court festivals in the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) and Scandinavia from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, aiming to expand our understanding of the expressions and functions of blackness in early modern Europe beyond established interpretative frameworks. Court festivals were monarchical celebrations of important events, such as weddings and baptisms. Their main attraction was a public theatrical procession, followed by an equestrian tournament. For these events, noblemen frequently dressed in exoticized costumes and applied blackface to represent Africans. Despite the political significance and public character of the court festivals, representations of blackness in accounts from such events have been little explored in previous research.  

The source material consists primarily of illustrated festival books, commissioned by the courts and circulated among the social elite. Premodern Critical Race Studies constitutes the main theoretical point of departure, enabling a historically grounded analysis of early modern racial formation without reducing it to a pre-scientific precursor of modern racism. Performativity theory serves as a complementary framework, allowing the analysis to capture the theatrical, rhetorical, and symbolic dimensions of Baroque art.  

Previous research has often linked the enactment of racial blackness to state interests in the transatlantic slave trade. However, this dissertation demonstrates that representations of sub-Saharan Africans also served functions within an entirely different political project. In the highly tense situation between Catholic and Protestant states within the HRE preceding the Thirty Years’ War, the blackening of various out-groups had a unique function in making a joint Protestant identity. Blackness further worked as a sign for unwanted social elements relating to moral, class, and masculinity. The connection between outer blackness and inner vice was confirmed as well as contested, but the idea that blackness was unpleasant and unattractive persisted. These workings are dependent on a semiotic structure of blackness specific for sources from the HRE. A feature common to Sweden and the HRE states was the use of blackness in the shaping of a common Western European identity.

Although these characters were othered and often denigrated, they were acknowledged as having agency. In stark contrast, black characters in Swedish, Danish, and German sources portrayed as enslaved or in positions of servitude were consistently surrounded by a verbal silence, stripped of agency and personhood, producing a notion of the black person as socially dead. This was the case in tournament exercises where black characters were used as targets for deadly violence. The dissertation also gives special attention to paintings from the Danish court, where ideas of gender, violence, and absolutism served to assert an unlimited power over black bodies, in a time when the Danish state increased its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.  

By analyzing festival accounts produced in the HRE and Scandinavia, the dissertation provides new insights into how blackness was staged to articulate power, exclusion, social instability, and social death in the early modern period.