Marc W. S. Jaffré
Dr Marc W. S. Jaffré is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) global fellow, a researcher at the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico (ISIG) of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, and a visiting researcher at International Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto (国際日本文化研究センター), also known as Nichibunken.
He is additionally an honorary fellow of Durham University (United Kingdom), a chercheur associé of the Centre Roland Mousnier (Sorbonne Université), and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of the monograph The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610–1643 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) and one of the editors of the forthcoming volume Marginalized Voices and Figures in French Festival Culture, 1500–1800 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2027). Marc is also the book reviews editor for The Court Historian.
Marc’s research is motivated by an interest in understanding how people experience the state and how culture is represented and performed. In the context of his first monograph on the court of Louis XIII of France, this has meant broadening out the historiography of princely courts beyond top-down perspectives to better understand how courtiers, merchants, and financiers constructed the world of the court—thereby demonstrating the agency people have in shaping the institutions which they inhabit.
His latest project, ‘HOST-FJ. Hospitality in Early Modern France and Tokugawa Japan: Concept and Practice’, funded by the European Commission through a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions global fellowship, is a comparative study of hospitality in early modern France and Tokugawa Japan. He is particularly interested both in how memory of civil war affects a society’s understanding of hospitality and in the reconstructing state’s attempts to control practices of hospitality. Aside from princely courts and hospitality, his research interests include civil war, the French Wars of Religion, reconciliation, peace building, diplomacy, and marginalization.
Marc has been a lecturer at Durham University, the University of Oxford (Balliol College), and the University of St Andrews (United Kingdom), and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). He holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews, and a MPhil and a MA from the University of Oxford (Merton College).
Publications
Marc W. S. Jaffré, ‘Dwarfism, Institutionalisation and Marginalisation at the Court in Early Bourbon France, 1589–1715’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2026).
Marc W. S. Jaffré, ‘Sociability and Diplomacy at Louis XIII’s Court, 1610–1643’, The English Historical Review, 141 (608) (2026), 79–109.
Marc W. S. Jaffré, The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610–1643 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).
Marc W. S. Jaffré, ‘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.
Marc W. S. Jaffré, ‘The Royal Court and Civil War at the Founding of the Bourbon Dynasty, 1589–95’, French History, 31 (1) (2017), 20–38.