UC Berkeley

This is a dissertation about tables. More specifically, it is an exploration of different ways in which tables came to play new and vital roles in Europe during the seventeenth century in relation to the articulation of political and territorial relationships. As objects, tables are often overlooked in two senses. On one hand, they are so commonplace that we scarcely take note of them. They have become part of an everyday landscape in which their surfaces seem to effortlessly cater to our (unconscious) needs. On the other hand, tables are literally overlooked in the sense that we generally look over and across them. In this regard, they provide a kind of contained almost cartographic landscape. The table can intensify the ways in which we perceive either the objects arranged upon it, or the faces seated around it since it isolates them and places them into sets of relationships that can be examined in a concentrated fashion. Tables, thus, offer a special kind of terrain — one that often escapes notice today precisely because it is so omnipresent.“On the Table” brings tables and their significance back into focus by examining the ways in which social and political changes in the early modern period manifested themselves in the form and materiality of three specific tables. Detailed case studies offer close readings of a table from Elizabethan England (1567), the table that features in Dutch painter Gerard Ter Borch’s seminal painting of the Treaty of Münster during the Westphalian peace conference of 1648, and a pietra dura table presented to Louis XIV in 1684 in order to examine different aspects of the formative roles that early modern tables played as spatial and political agents. In the English context, the dissertation examines one woman’s table and enquires into how her table played a role in staking a Tudor woman’s claims over space, place, and dynasty. Moving from the table as an instance of self-portraiture, the analysis shifts to reading the table as an agent for building a group portrait in the context of modern multinational peace conferences. The final chapter, at Versailles, interrogates what it meant to create a portrait of the state at the Sun King’s court. Along the way, shorter interludes explore table-culture further by examining, for instance, how tables brokered meetings across cultures (e.g. Habsburg-Ottoman negotiations) and how the rectangular table relinquished its hegemony to new, flexible round forms in the seventeenth century. This dissertation argues that tables did not simply reflect changing political and social imperatives, but participated actively in producing physical, social, and political realities. It further stakes a claim for attending to the vital roles that seemingly simple objects like tables have played historically – and continue to play – in shaping our lives.