jack

While I was admiring the Habsburg women's hats a while back I noticed Elisabeth of Guelders, with her haute hat couture, and that she was described as an abbess. Long time readers might remember that I'm interested in the European "princess-abbesses" who held their religious offices heading various monastic institutions simultaneously with their secular lives and titles. AFAIK this Elisabeth with the good hat wasn't that sort of abbess, although wikipedia might know more than me, but plenty of her posh relatives were.

When you imagine a portrait of an abbess you might think of somebody like this lady, who wikipedia claims was an abbess from 1796 to 1808 (warning for skull as memento mori): Mother Abbess Kunigunde Schilling von Hintschingen.

You probably aren't thinking of Maria Elisabeth of Austria in this 1781 portrait specifically of her as a princess-abbess with crozier.

And you might not expect an abbess to have her official portrait for her religious office painted featuring an enslaved boy.

Here's another later official abbessly portrait with an enslaved (or ex-enslaved) man.

But all this must've stopped a long time ago and definitely wasn't still a thing in 1918, no? No.
Princess Abbess, 1918.

And I'm sure an abbess wouldn't find herself at a high society horse racing event.

In conclusion: Princess-abbess was a thing until surprisingly recently.... something something.... IDEK.

Note: (ex-)enslaved men, often used as subjects of social experiments, were also occasionally held in these courts as servants e.g. Mmadi Make / Angelo Soliman and Couchi / Gustav Badin. How "free" they actually were legally or in daily life is open to many unanswerable historical questions. And in a different court with differing customs Abram Petrovich Gannibal was the Ethiopian/Eritrean Russian ancestor of the current Duke of Westminster. And then there's Zamor whose evidence against his "owner" helped make the case for her legal execution.