Louis XIV’s court at Versailles was the largest and most splendid court in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Other rulers sought to imitate it, by building similar courts, and modern scholars lavished their attention on this institution. The court was a vital and multi-faceted institution in the political and cultural life of the early modern period. The ruler’s household and his personal life were organized around its rituals, but it was also the center for the bureaucratic hub of states that became ever more complex. Using Louis XIV’s Versailles as a case study, we shall examine how historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have examined the court. Drawing on the classical work by Norbert Elias, we shall see how we can connect localized study of a well-defined social site to the “grand theses” defining Western history.