Staff profile

My research is motivated by an interest in understanding the relationship between human experience and the state, and how culture is represented and performed. My forthcoming book on the court of Louis XIII of France examines the institutional, political, cultural, economic and military development of the French court. It emphasises the role played by courtiers, financiers and merchants within this development in a challenge to the more traditional top-down approach frequently used in court studies.

I have published and am in the process of writing a number of articles on the courts of Henri IV and Louis XIII and am currently coediting a volume on marginalised voices in French festival culture. I am, additionally, increasingly interested in conceptions and the practice of hospitality throughout the early modern world.

Before coming to Durham, I studied history as an undergraduate and as a masters' student at Merton College, Oxford, and I did my PhD at the University of St Andrews. After completing my doctorate, I held lectureships at the University of St Andrews and Balliol College, Oxford.

• Early Modern Diplomacy
• Festival Culture
• France c. 1500-1800
• Hospitality
• Princely Courts
• Violence

Chapter in book

• Jaffré, M. W. (2019). A Household Affair: Henri iv’s Royal Printers, 1589–1595. In A. S. Wilkinson, & G. J. Kemp (Eds.), Negotiating Conflict and Controversy in the Early Modern Book World (217-233). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004402522_014

Journal Article

• Jaffré, M. W. (2017). The royal court and civil war at the founding of the Bourbon dynasty, 1589–95. French History, 31(1), https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crx003