Book excerpt: This book demonstrates the evolution of resilience and recovery as a concept by applying it to a new context, that of courts and monarchies. These were remarkably resilient institutions, with a strength and malleability that allowed them to 'bounce back' time and again. This volume highlights the different forms of resilience displayed in European courts during the medieval and early modern periods. Drawing on rarely published sources, it demonstrates different models of monarchical resilience, ranging from the survival of sovereign authority in political crisis, to the royal response to pandemic challenges, to other strategies for resisting internal or external threats. Resilience and Recovery illustrates how symbolic legitimacy and effective power were strongly intertwined, creating a distinct collective memory that shaped the defence of monarchical authority over many centuries. Fabian Persson is a Lecturer and Associate Professor in History at Linnaeus University in Sweden and specialises in the Swedish court with a particular interest in women and power. Munro Price is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Bradford, UK, and specializes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century French political and diplomatic history. Cinzia Recca is senior lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Catania, Italy, in the Department of Education. Her main field of research includes the European Enlightenment, especially with regard to court studies and women's roles.