The aim of this book is an in-depth study, on the scale of a small country, of an historic problem which on many occasions is dealt with in a generic or essentially theoretical manner: the emergence of a specific social form, that is the court in Europe, prior to the nineteenth century. It is an attempt which concentrates systematic research of sources upon a defined period (between 1300 and 1450) while at the same time resorting to the widest possible comparison of the phenomena being studied within the larger sphere of the existence of the medieval courts.

The sociologist Norbert Elias, to whom we are indebted for a fundamental contribution towards the definition and study of the court as a social form of the past, did not consider its existence exclusively in the form of an absolutist court, although he mentions the growing importance which it assumed during the modern period of European history (between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries). Among the many passages of his writings which he dedicated to the problem, the book concerning the French court of Louis XIV, published for the first time in 1969, stands out, as do the important chapters on the emergence of the noble and royal courts during the medieval period contained within the ambitious construction of his work ‘on the process of civilisation’, which appeared in a number of versions across several decades (between 1930 and 1970).