The main purpose of the project was to promote study of the economic history of French spectacle in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, opening a new line of research in a largely unexplored field of study, that of the costs of court and civic festivals, developing a research method that distinguished between “real” expenses (documented through accounting records) and “fictitious” expenditures (spread by the propaganda of official descriptions or the gossip of epistolary accounts). Normally, real expenditures are considerably lower than fictitious ones. The purpose of this project was to verify, through a survey of French accounting archives, whether the same phenomenon (already found at the Medici court in Florence) existed beyond the Alps.
The other objective was to highlight some historiographical problems (such as the methods of financing civic and court performances, and finally the motivations behind these productions) and bring them to the attention of the scholarly European community of all possible disciplinary fields involved in the study of Renaissance and Early Modern spectacles, including theater historians, musicologists, economic historians, art historians, historians of the medieval and modern ages, and literary scholars. Succeeding in the stated objective would have brought with it another consequence: namely, to stimulate interest in and the study of the economic management of the performing arts in the period in question, investigating other fundamental aspects, such as the processes of production and modes of consumption (and thus the relationship between financing bodies and their ‘audiences’), and finally on the birth and evolution of the professions related to the performing arts.
