Volume 8 (2025)

The paper explores Louis XIV’s iconographic preferences, arguing that the selection of paintings within his broader Cabinet des Tableaux collection, as well as their arrangement in the Appartement du Roi, reveal a significant aspect of the French king’s private life. The research treats the Sun king’s extensive painting collection —931 works identified from inventories dated between 1671 and 1715— as a homogeneous source, focusing primarily on the iconographic content rather than their artistic value. The spatial context of the Appartement du Roi, is crucial as it housed the Cabinet des Tableaux, where paintings were displayed according to the king’s will. The analysis of the combination between iconography, placement, and movement of paintings within rooms of differing degree of access, allows for a nuanced reading of taste, and, therefore, privacy. The research employs a digital humanities methodology, compiling a detailed spreadsheet of the collection’s attributes, including provenance, production dates, artist nationality, size, and iconography coded through the Iconclass system —a comprehensive iconographic classification tool. By integrating digital analysis with architectural and iconographic study, this paper demonstrates that Louis XIV’s private taste was most conspicuously expressed through a curated biblical iconography within the intimacy of the Appartement du Roi, marking a critical intersection of privacy, power, and personal preference in the art patronage and collecting of the Sun King.

“This article examines the benefits and pitfalls of using topic modeling to analyze discursive changes in sixteenth- and eighteenth-century German midwifery books. These periods were marked by transformations in the perspectives of midwives’ knowledge and practices, providing important insight into how midwifery was discussed as a field between private practice and public legitimization. By highlighting topic changes in controlled corpora of midwifery writings from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the article provides an overview of elements historians must pay attention to for future endeavors on larger-scale studies and points out how specific topics hint at transformations in German midwifery as professionalization and medical oversight tried to establish tighter control over pregnancy management and delivery techniques.”

This article presents a pilot study at the intersection of history and computer science, focused on annotating “privacy” as a historical concept in runaway slave advertisements from the 18th and 19th centuries. We developed a semi-supervised natural language processing (NLP) framework for event extraction, combining limited expert-annotated data with larger unannotated corpora. Building on existing datasets and producing new multilingual annotations in English, French, Dutch, and Danish, we operationalized a working definition of privacy as the ability to regulate access to oneself or one’s belongings. Through this lens, we explored how enslaved people improvised strategies of privacy during escape, such as using clothing, blankets, or disguises to secure protection and anonymity. Our collaborative approach between historians and computer scientists addressed challenges including dataset scarcity, OCR errors, and the refinement of annotation categories. Preliminary findings suggest that acts of escape not only asserted claims to freedom but also constituted claims to privacy, highlighting the intertwined nature of autonomy, racial discourse, and material strategies across trans-imperial contexts. This work demonstrates both the methodological potential of semi-supervised NLP for historical inquiry and the value of framing privacy as a category of analysis in the study of freedom seekers.

Although the early modern French royal court was known for its relative accessibility to the monarch and his spaces, this accessibility has often been misinterpreted as a limited or even nonexistent privacy. King Henri III (1551-1589), in particular, envisioned a monarchy heightened by distance and sought to regulate such distance through court ordinances. This article examines Henri III’s 1585 court ordinance and applies network theory and access diagrams to reconstruct the spatiality of privacy within the French royal apartment. In addition to the usefulness of the applied method, the article demonstrates how Henri negotiated a balance between his personal need for privacy and the court’s expectation of access.

This paper explores the mobility, correspondence, and architectural legacy of Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648) through the application of digital humanities methodologies. Drawing on a corpus of 865 digitized and transcribed letters, we employ Named Entity Recognition, reconciliation with the World Historical Gazetteer, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map both the king’s itinerary and the spatial imaginary embedded in his writings. By visualizing metadata such as dates and places of sending, we reconstruct Christian IV’s movements across his extensive territories and highlight shifting focal points during key historical moments, including the Thirty Years’ War. Further analysis of place references within the letters reveals the king’s engagement with his building projects, uncovering details of design decisions and instructions for architectural interventions. This dual focus on geography and content demonstrates how correspondence can illuminate the intersection of personal agency, political necessity, and architectural ambition. More broadly, the study showcases how digital approaches can enrich the historical study of early modern epistolary practices, while also addressing the challenges of applying modern natural language processing tools to early modern multilingual sources.

“This paper explores the visual and kinaesthetic experience of traversing the domestic interior in fifteenth-century Florence, and the selective permeability of its physical and conceptual thresholds. The exploration is framed by an analysis of the composition and original architectural context of Filippo Lippi’s c.1450 Annunciation painting (now in the National Gallery, London), which was probably installed above one of the doorways on the piano nobile of the Palazzo Medici. Not only was the painting’s subject matter iconographically suitable to a liminal positioning, but the artist also made compositional choices specific to the rich domestic environment for which it was intended: the painted space of the Virgin’s private domain and the real space of the Palazzo Medic were visually and symbolically symbiotic. The paper concludes by considering the potential use of animated 3D digital models, as scholarly as well as public-facing tools, to activate the relationship between artwork, threshold and viewer-in-motion in the early modern home.”

When did American “isolationism,” more appropriately known as noninterventionism, become politically untenable in the middle years of the 20th century? It is a historical question that is being revisited in light of modern political turmoil and a lingering foreign policy hangover from the Global War on Terror. This article examines the persistence and eventual decline of Old Right noninterventionism within the GOP during the early Cold War, challenging narratives of its rapid marginalization in the 1950s. Using computational analysis of over 3,000 congressional roll call votes on military and diplomatic policy legislation, this study tracks voting patterns across parties, regions, chambers, and ideological wings. Results reveal that the remnants of the Old Right, particularly in the House, continued to maintain their opposition to key aspects of Cold War policy, particularly on foreign assistance and multilateral security agreements. This prolonged opposition suggests that a Republican shift toward an interventionist orthodoxy was not inevitable nor solely determined by events abroad, but rather evolved from internal party dynamics. The findings of this article challenge conventional histories of the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy and offer insights into the contingencies of American foreign policy thinking in Congress, and by extension, the electorate.