Abstract
Zusammenfassung
So far, the history of the nobility has mainly focused on the biographies of the lucky few who were rich and left behind large archives. It may, however, gain new insights by searching for fragmentary evidence of the many lesser nobles that did not leave behind a trail of sources, but whose lives can only be traced through various scattered sources. This material directs our attention towards situations in which the meaning of being a noble was constantly negotiated and re-negotiated. This article concentrates on two such situations: first, on banquets involving nobles and non-nobles that spiralled out of control, and second, on acts of self-ennoblement that sometime worked and sometimes failed. As these examples show, the estate-based society, at least in Prussia, was multi-faceted and malleable before 1800 and continued to be so throughout the 19th century. The material further highlights that more such fragments are needed in order to analyse the changes of the Prussian nobility from the inside and downside.
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