Between Fight and Fun in 17th-century Denmark

I take as my starting point a chair from the time of Danish King Frederik III, which is designed to trap the unsuspecting person who sits in it and to empty water into their lap. A colleague and I are currently researching the chair to learn more about its history, and with that in mind, I will introduce it and place it in the context of a wider European court entertainment culture that seems to have always existed somewhere between carefree pleasure and the ever-present threat of future war or the memory of what happened in the past. I suggest that this duality is particularly characteristic of baroque celebrations – two contradictions folded into one another.