Wet Trousers, Entrapment and Good Sports: The Wetting Trap Chair at Rosenborg Castle and Other Trap Chairs in Early Modern Europe

The wetting trap chair at Rosenborg Castle, Denmark, contains hidden mechanics, trapping and wetting the sitter and making a rude sound. Thought to date from the late seventeenth century, not much has been known about the chair’s specific use and origin. In this article, we track the chair’s provenance, arguing that it was part of an amusement culture offering a moment’s destabilisation from everyday life at Christian Vs court in Denmark while at the same time reiterating the underlying power structures of that court. The article also traces how the purposes of collecting and displaying, as exemplified by this Danish chair, shifted from cabinets of curiosities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the public museums of the nineteenth century. In addition to this, we compare the Danish wetting trap chair to other European examples of trap chairs, drawing parallels between their uses and desired effects. Contextualising the Danish chair as part of a wider European phenomenon of trap chairs, we argue that trap chairs across Europe held complex symbolic meanings, acting as both practical jokes and objects of fright and destabilisation.