Under the Habsburgs, the Spanish court was comprised of a number of royal households (casas reales) that corresponded to the different territorial possessions of the king: Castile, Aragon, Navarra, Naples, Burgundy, and Portugal. Of these, the Burgundian emerged preeminent, imposing — so the present volume argues — over the other royal households its distinct model of governance in terms of structure, decorum, and hierarchy. This ambitious and weighty volume, comprised of a set of essays from various scholars, offers an analysis of the Casa de Borgoña as it evolved over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to trace its influence over the Spanish court and determine the degree to which it defined the character and personality of the Spanish monarchy. As such, this represents a major work of reference, bringing together diverse strands of research to illuminate this aspect of the Spanish early modern court.

The volume is divided into three sections. The first, “The Evolution of the House of Burgundy,” is concerned generally with its defining characteristics, starting with the Burgundian-Habsburg court prior to its Hispanization under Charles V and the subsequent changes that occurred in the context of the Habsburg court’s presence in Spain. After a brief consideration from David Nogales Rincón of the “cultural reality” represented by the Burgundian court in fifteenth-century Castile, contributions from Jean-Marie Cauchies and Raymond Fagel offer an overview of the Burgundian court prior to 1517, emphasizing the composition and duties (Cauchies) and the importance of processional order and its reflection on the internal court’s hierarchical order (Fagel). A chapter from Carlos Javier de Carlos Morales examines the Burgundian household as an “economic institution,” detailing the relationship between the expenses of the casas reales and the particular Burgundian casa in the context of changing (mostly deteriorating) royal finances up to 1665. Two additional chapters round out the first section: a consideration of the “clear influence of Burgundy” (125) on the norms adopted by the Spanish court with the Etiquetas Generales de Palacio of 1651, and an evaluation of the reforms of the royal households in the context of dynastic change, namely those of the last Spanish Habsburg Charles II (1707) and the Bourbon Philip V (1761), the latter finally subsuming the different casas into a single royal household.

The second section delves into the different sections of the Casa de Borgoña. An interesting contribution from Rincón details the role of both the petite and grande chapelles of the Burgundian court in their Low Countries context and makes a spirited attempt to draw out the ways in which this “Flemish-Burgundian ideal model” influenced the development of the Castilian royal chapel (capilla real) in the sixteenth century. Together with Tess Knighton’s and Paulino Capdepón’s contributions, these three essays link together and draw attention to the important role that music and musical patronage played within the royal household via the private chapels. Six additional chapters complete this hefty middle section, and offer, sometimes in rather workaday fashion, a detailed look at the different sections of the household and patterns of reform or change in duties, composition, and the like over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The volume concludes with a set of five essays that discuss how a Burgundian-inflected Spanish model of monarchy influenced the structure and organization of courts elsewhere, including the infanta Catalina Micaela’s efforts to introduce Spanish-Burgundian custom to the Savoyard court at Turin. Perhaps the most interesting contribution in this final section comes from the editors themselves, whose introductory remarks on the coexistence of Castilian and Burgundian models of household serve to recapitulate in clear terms the core problematic of the work as a whole.

In sum, this collection represents a solid addition to the scholarship surrounding the early modern Spanish court, adducing a wealth of archival material in its comprehensive examination of the Casa de Borgoña. In places, however, the effort is dogged by one nagging issue, which is (to adapt a point made by one contributor) that it is often not possible “to perceive a direct, clear and unequivocal influence” (185) of the Burgundian court model on the household norms adopted by the Spanish Habsburgs. As such, this perhaps limits the degree to which one can support the assertion that the “Burgundian Household succeeded in transforming itself into the household of a Universal Monarchy, the Spanish, which then extended beyond its borders through matrimonial politics” (16). Nonetheless, satisfying this ambitious declaration is not necessary to the book’s value as a work of scholarly synthesis that expands our understanding of the inner workings of this important part of the Spanish royal court.