Early modern Sweden

This Bachelor's thesis explores sermons in Early Modern Sweden from 1611 to 1648 as an educational tool, a channel for news, and a propaganda instrument for the state. It studies how sermons legitimised sovereign action and modified political and social realities during Gustav II Adolf's rule to the end of the Thirty Years' War. The method followed is a socio-cultural historical analysis of the content of the sermons and how the sermon legitimises or supports Lutheran doctrines and societal structures. The main results show that the sermons constituted an influential factor in the process of national consolidation, using Lutheran doctrine as a coalescing factor, restating collective moral responsibilities to be a loyal Swedish subject and supporting the ambitions of political power. This contributes to understanding the religion politics-society interface in the Swedish Realm in this period.

Vid en renovering av Säby gård i Järfälla kommun på 1990-talet återfanns ett antal fragmentariska latinska citat målade på väggen ovanför huvuddörren i entréhallen, tillskrivna Säbys ägare, adelsmannen och ämbetsmannen Schering Rosenhane (1609–1663). Citaten rekonstrueras och tolkas här för första gången i sin helhet och placeras i sin litterära och kulturella kontext.

Great strides have been made in the study of labour in pre-industrial Europe, with growing recognition that unpaid work by women and children was socially and economically crucial. However, certain aspects of rural society are still neglected, particularly work with livestock in extensive pastoral regions. This article investigates who looked after cattle, sheep and goats in medieval northern Europe, with a focus on Ireland and Sweden. Often it is assumed that rural societies only became flexible about gender and status roles when external factors (post-Black Death labour shortages or early modern market demands) forced them to. This article demonstrates a longer history of flexibility around work in pastoral regions. Women of different status were not only milking dairy animals; they were also, along with men, helping to herd livestock in uplands and woodlands. Furthermore, dairying and herding required subtle landscape knowledge and skill in reading animal behaviour, raising questions about how useful the term ‘unskilled labour’ is. This pre-existing flexibility and savoir-faire forces us to reconsider the agency of ‘peripheral’ pastoral societies in the emergence of agrarian capitalism. Instead of responding to growing demands for dairy, meat and wool, such societies may have been ideally placed to tap into and fuel these markets.

The use of fashionable dress played an important part in early modern dynastic politics. In this paper, the diplomatic efforts to engineer a marriage between Erik XIV of Sweden and Elizabeth I of England are used as an example of the interrelations of textiles and diplomacy. Parallel to their negotiations in London, the Swedes organised the production of luxury goods and set up temporary workshops on the spot. The study looks at the Swedish embroidery workshop in London, using written records to investigate its organisation and production, and to discuss artisanal skills and the transnational element in employment in a royal workshop. It is suggested that the entire enterprise was a diplomatic practice, designed to enable the Swedes to draw attention to their presence in London and make their consumption visible on all possible levels.

Upper Dalarna, Sweden, offers through its folk art and folk costume traditions unusually rich sources for studying early modern Lutheran folk religiosity. From the early 17th century to the late 19th century, this area exhibited religious folk practices centred on the sacrament of Mass and in many respects dependent on universal literacy, which was established in the mid-17th century.
Mass was generally celebrated every Sunday in the parish churches of the region and an intense culture of confession and communion meant that church buildings had to adapt, with large communally oriented sacristies and sets of sacred vessels able to accommodate the many communicants. This religious practice was initially encouraged by bishops and priests in the 17th century. Much of local religious life was, however, developed by parishioners themselves without priestly encouragement or intervention. Local sartorial culture (»folk costume») followed the liturgical year and varied according to theological themes and various ritual roles that we wearer could take. The interior painting tradition of the region, which developed in the 18th century, relies heavily on the Bible and the hymnal as well as especially pre-pietist authors such as Johann Arndt and Heinrich Müller. The historical material culture of Upper Dalarna, today often understood in »regional» or »national» terms, is the result of and was part of an intense Lutheran folk religiosity that thrived for over 250 years among the rural laity.

¡ lf .re' ii'lìlÈ CHAPTER 4 An Ottoman imperial North The routes and roots of knowledge in the Age of TuliPs Ioøchim Ostlund This essay is a contribution to the debate about the interactions and circulation of knowledge between 'the East' and 'the West', using the example of an Ottom an sefâretnâme, a travel and embassy account, produced by the member of the Ottoman court in Istanbul, Mehmed Said, from his mission to Sweden in y33.' The purpose is to discuss Ottoman sefôretnâme as a form of world-making and as an expression of an imperial order of knowledge'' How was knowledge shaped into textual forms, andhow did those forms encode the relationships between Ottomans and Swedes, centre and periphery? The term'world-making' describes a process ofreshaping and renegotiating the understanding of the world, often in the face of global and political change'' Sefâretnâ.me are of interest because they are considered works that played a significant role in information gathering and sharing knowledge about Western technology and societY.a The sefaretnâm e that is the subject of this study was the first to describe Sweden. The question is how we are to understand Said's world-making in this case. As a member of the Ottoman Imperial elite, his knowledge of the world was shaped by cultural and religious traditions that differed from Africa, Asia, and Europe. As the author of the sefâretnâme, Said had to navigate between traditions-Arabic, Persian or Ottoman Turkish, Christian (Orthodox and Armenian), and ]ewish-which together were integral to Ottoman imperial culture. what were the ramifrcations of this cultural background when he envisaged Sweden? Knowledge also 73

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SAMVETE I SVERIGË "när frågan är om wissa meningar, hwaruti wederbörande sig på sin öfwertygelse, samt samwete beropa [.. . ] som den werdsliga regeringen uti ingen dehl röra [. .. ] då håller iag fore, at werdsligit straf och trug ej kan skäligen hafin¡a rum'l Citatet återfinns i BorgRR rZ¡+, del II, s. 527. En debattör i adelsståndet kommenterade saken enligt foljande: "samvetet låter inte tvingâ sig, och hvad i dag hãnde¡ dem kan en annan dag hända en annan, enãr han eij just âr af samma tancka med sin sochnepräst'l AdRR ry34, del I, s. r53. AdRP, rz¡s-¡g, deì IlI, s.365.

This article compares the Swedish government's legal practices to secure protection for its trade and shipping with the legal strategies for protection which circulated among sailors and consuls along the Swedish trade route to the Mediterranean in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. One major threat to Swedish commercial interests at the time were the 'Barbary corsairs', and the challenges when they captured ships and seized crews, whether Swedish sailors (many of them from Sweden's Baltic and German provinces) on foreign-flagged ships or foreign sailors on Swedish ships. Consuls and traders knew of the problems caused when sailors crossed legal borders and challenged the rules of state protection. To counter this a more international model of maritime security was tested by attempting to strengthen the presence of the state in ransoms affairs in northern Africa. This model was developed when the Swedish Levant Company was founded. The main idea was shared responsibility between nations to ransom sailors serving under foreign flags, culminating in 'reciprocal ransom agreements' in 1742. Even though reciprocal ransom agreements were short-lived, it shows two different modes to counter insecurity in the Mediterranean, one based on local customs and regional elite networks and the other on multinational agreements and the discourse of international law.

Between 1650 and 1770 around 1,000 Swedish subjects involved in long-distance trade in the Mediterranean were captured by Muslim corsairs operating from North Africa. European-North African conflicts were commented on in Swedish newspapers, associated with alms collections for ransom and noted in academic literature. This chapter analyses attitudes towards the Barbary Coast and towards Ottoman slavery in different genres. It argues that information on North Africa was widespread in early modern Sweden and that the discourse on North Africa and Ottoman slavery was multi-faceted, both confirming and challenging European stereotypes of the "Orient". Throughout the 17th and until the beginning of the 19th century, Sweden's most controversial contact with Islamic cultures was with the so-called Barbary powers: Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, all regencies of the Ottoman empire and Morocco. Between 1650 and 1770 approximately 1,000 Swedish subjects were captured by corsairs roaming the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The large majority of the captives were civilians serving in the merchant fleet, and many of them ended up on slave markets in North Africa. Captivity in North Africa could mean a life spent chained to an oar, working in harbours, in private households or as servants in palaces. Compared to other Europeans, Swedish subjects represented only a small fraction of those held in North African captivity. The majority of captives were Spanish, but there were also French, Dutch, German, Portuguese and other Scandinavians. Approximately half of the captured Swedes made it back home. Captivity and potential death for those working in the merchant fleet was the price of the state enterprise to import salt directly from southern Europe-a commodity of vital importance for preserving food during the winter in Sweden. The Ottoman empire had long been "the Other" in the eyes of Europe, and vice versa. But between the two there was also a fascinating exchange of ideas and commodities, and personal encounters between individuals such as merchants, travellers, diplomats, consuls, soldiers and captives. Those who returned could tell stories about the other, narratives that often blended fact and fiction and fed the European imagination of the Turk and slavery on the Barbary Coast, as will be discussed in this chapter. European-North African encounters have become a vibrant field of research. 1 Relevant in this case is the question of what attitudes, images and debates emerged as the

In this chapter, the intersection of piracy with scholarly discourse and state policy is traced through a period of acute political crisis in Sweden in the early years of the eighteenth century. By focusing on one student dissertation presented at Uppsala University in 1716, it is argued here that Sweden's then precarious position necessitated a delicate navigation of piracy in both the Baltic and the Mediterranean. While the scholarly traditions of natural law provided ample resources to condemn pirates as mere sea robbers, this one dissertation illustrates how moral, philosophical, and historical arguments could be marshalled in defence of a more equivocal attitude to piracy, which also re ected the delicate balancing act performed by the Swedish state.

A painting by Herman Han dated 1616 in the church of Kläckeberga in Sweden shows the Annunciation to Mary. The painting is all that remains of a large, architectonically built altarpiece, originally containing five paintings by Han, that was taken as war booty in 1626 during King Gustav Adolf' s conquest of Braunsberg (Braniewo) in Prussia and in 1633 was installed on the high altar in Storkyrkan (St Nicholas Church) in Stockholm. After being replaced by another church altarpiece, from 1702 to c. 1820, it adorned the altar in Kungsholm Church (Ulrika Eleonora Church), Stockholm. In 1839, the largest of the altarpiece' s paintings, the Annunciation, was put up for sale and later donated to Kläckeberga. The painting, which has long attracted the attention of Polish and Swedish art historians alike, has hitherto only mainly been known to them 'second-hand'-through black and white photographs. However, thanks to some recently taken colour photos, the author of the present study has been able to identify some details that have escaped the attention of earlier writers on the subject, for example, that the Archangel Gabriel is wearing an episcopal outfit and not a pontifical one, as was hitherto surmised. Some objects denoting Mary' s domestic side have come to light through the colour photographs. They also show more clearly how Han used light to pinpoint the most important actors in the scene, the Dove of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the Archangel Gabriel. Of particular interest is how Han, by letting some of the light also fall on the archangel' s sandal-clad foot, directs the viewer' s eye there, perhaps referring to the winged sandals of the Greek messenger god Hermes, a subtle reminder of Gabriel being a messenger from God.

In this thesis, I set out to examine salmon fishing in Ragunda tithing, province of Jämtland, Sweden, based on economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s eight design principles for long enduring and stable common pool resources (CPRs). Using a microhistorical methodology, I analyze court records from the area dating from 1666 to 1690, attempting to say something about the larger theory based on my small-scale evidence. In addition, I look at the type of conflicts that emerged and how they were resolved. The sources show that two types of conflicts developed: regarding ownership rights and rights of use; and regarding the number of
fish that could be caught. These were resolved by four means: the law; immemorial rights; witnesses; and charters/letters. I conclude that salmon fishing in Ragunda seems to have met the conditions to be considered a stable and enduring CPR, although more research is needed to
confirm this.

This publication brings together the papers submitted for the 45th symposium organised by ICOFOM under the general theme Taboos in museology: Difficult issues for museum theory, to be held in Prague and Brno (Czechia) 22-27 August 2022. The "Materials for a discussion" collection brings together, in an inclusive spirit, all the contributions selected for the symposium in the form of short articles, to prepare the ICOFOM Symposium. This publication has been made available before the symposium, in a very short time frame. In spite of the care given to the publication, some mistakes may remain. Las editoras agradecen a las siguientes personas que colaboraron en la selección y edición de esta colección:

The controversial historical figure of the Queen Christina of Sweden
attracted the attention of medical historiography mainly from an anthropological
perspective during the second half of the Twentieth century in
Sweden. Even though these first investigations were born in the cultural
context of historical revisionism of the Queen’s figure, they still represent
the essential point of departure to be considered by the medical historians.
The recent Italian studies focused on the Queen’s court physicians
opened new perspectives and new sources for a more objective medical
historical investigation.

Art on Demand: Objects, Knowledge and Ideas from the Low Countries in Sweden, 1500-1750. The Hague, RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, Thursday 16 May 2024.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the possible use of Dutch and Flemish prints and drawings by some of the immigrant portrait painters active in Sweden in the first part of the seventeenth century, a period when the demand for portraits was booming. Painters such as Jacob Heinrich Elbfas, born in Livonia and trained in Strasbourg; and Cornelius Arendtz, son of the Dutch immigrant painter Arendt Lamprechtz, painted portraits in a style that they repeated and copied from portrait to portrait. Other painters, most of them nameless to us today, were also contributing to the production of similar-looking portraits. The linear character of these portraits, as well as their similarity in terms of setting and poses, suggests a dependence on drawings, templates, and prints.

In his Kristinatidens måleri (1955), Karl Erik Steneberg labelled the portrait painters active in Sweden in the first half of the seventeenth Century as guild painters stuck in repeating a belated, derivative style, before Queen Christina came to power, and Horst Gerson (1942) wrote about Elbfas that ‘viel Abwechslung vermag er im allgemeinen nicht zu geben.‘ Steneberg’s and Gerson’s motivation was to point out a lack of originality and variation in early seventeenth-century painting in Sweden, allegedly caused by a lack of foreign impulses. However, the increased production of portraits in Sweden follows a similar market logic as the serial production that prospered in the workshops of the Low Countries at the same time (Jager 2020; van den Brink 2001), represented by the workshops of painters such as the portraitist Michiel van Mierewelt (Jansen, Ekkart & Verhave 2011). The style of the portraits painted in Sweden might have been belated, but the rationalised working methods for producing portraits were contemporary.

The article illustrates the importance of business diplomacy practised by free agents, who navigated and negotiated between northern European empires for widespread commercial, legal and administrative developments. Abraham Cabiljau’s career is an example from the early modern Swedish empire, which stands on the threshold of a new era. In the Swedish empire, Cabiljau was involved in several different sectors, from military recruitment to the development of state accounting and administration of international trade. He represents the Swedish empire’s vast economic relationships with international merchant networks operating in a broad spectrum of military and commercial arenas. The Swedish empire was economically dependent on the financial resources of the merchants in Amsterdam, and economic prosperity was not the sole contribution of these merchants. The education, knowledge and connections provided by Cabiljau greatly enhanced the administration and organisation of Sweden’s intern...

This dissertation is about war captivity in the early eighteenth century. It is also about the ways in which early modern local communities negotiated their boundaries towards the outside world. The resident populations’ interaction with prisoners of war (POWs) offers unique perspectives on how local communities handled wartime migrants. The dissertation studies three towns forced to receive POWs during the Great Northern War: Aarhus, in the kingdom of Denmark, Torgau in the electorate of Saxony and Uppsala in the kingdom of Sweden. It represents the first attempt to situate this conflict within the larger field of research on early modern war captivity. The dissertation uses a broad range of sources—including official correspondence, POW muster rolls, town council minutes and parish records—to reconstruct the movements and actions of individual POWs. These reconstructions show how their position in the community changed over time, a perspective that represents a distinctly new approach for studying early modern war captivity.

The results underline that the local community played a crucial role in organising war captivity and, consequently, how the situation of the POWs became closely intertwined with other challenges facing the community at the time. The state strove to delegate costs and administrative responsibilities associated with housing, supporting and guarding POWs. These attempts were a forceful claim on local resources. Thus, the administration of war captivity was part of an ongoing negotiation regarding the relationship between the local community and the state.

At the same time, the everyday interactions of war captivity were shaped by the fact that the status of POW lacked distinct social and legal meaning in the local context. The state showed little interest in regulating the POWs’ relationship to local institutions, such as the congregation and the legal system, leaving such questions to be negotiated on the local level. With little or no previous experience of interacting with POWs, the local community treated these people much the same as well-known and already established social groups, such as billeted soldiers and servants. The POWs’ position in the community was therefore not a great deal different from that of other groups of migrants, and the level of local belonging which POWs were able to achieve depended fundamentally on their individual ability to live up to local social norms. Of particular importance was the fact that POWs were employed in local households as servants, which provided them with a widely accepted social position in the community. However, building up a local social network, cultivating relationships with influential local patrons and marrying a local woman were processes that took time, generally requiring that the POW was able to remain in the community for several years.

The experience of war captivity in Aarhus, Torgau and Uppsala demonstrates how a stranger could relatively easily achieve a basic degree of belonging in early modern towns. The threshold to full belonging, however, was steep. The dissertation argues that, particularly in Aarhus and Uppsala, the war served as an engine of social integration. Wartime mobilisation of economic and human resources destabilised these communities, creating vacant social and economic niches which some POWs were able to fill.

Nach den guttern wie sie einbringen undt nach eines jeden Vermuegen. Jacob Steinb[erg]: Von sein Eigenthumb undt nach eines jeden Lohn undt Lehnung. Lov. De Geer: Nao den paorden iss wol gutt maor beter nao Vermoegenheit. Jörgen Schildt: Nach dem Rossdienst undt nach jeder Marck so er verrossdiensten muss. Joh. Appelg[ren]: Effter rosstiensten och marketals förmedelst samma verderingh. Oluf Rosemsch[öld]. Effter rosstiensten och dess verderingh. Class Plantting samma meening. And. Swensche samma manier. Casp. Liliencron blifver vid Louis de Geers mening … (Riksdagsprotokoll, 1904:295f.

This essay analyses the way patriotic rhetoric was used in the court case against Baron Jörgen Krabbe, who was executed on the charge of high treason in 1678. Krabbe was a native Dane who swore allegiance to the Swedish king when the Scanian provinces were ceded to Sweden. During the Scanian War, Krabbe was arrested and accused of crimen laesae maiestatis and of having proved himself Danish. Krabbe adhered to traditional codes of noble honour that left little space for the kind of early modern patriotism that his opponents represented. The Swedish prosecutors claimed that Krabbe was the leader of the 'Scanian nation' and that all Scanians were possessed by an illicit love for denmark. Krabbe's defendants retorted that the Swedes all nurtured an inborn hatred of all people of Danish descent. According to them this kind of 'national hatred' meant that Scanian noblemen were excluded from career opportunities and that the peasantry was oppressed. Both sides agreed that the danish and the Swedish 'nations' were characterised by particular traits that could not be combined within the same person. It is consequently a confusing picture that emerges from the sources - a picture that attests to various ways of thinking that were present at one and the same time.

How can transnational and global perspectives on the Enlightenment and approaches that take gender as a standpoint fertilise each other? This volume aims at doing so by exploring women’s contributions to cultural mediation and the ways in which notions of gender circulated and were transformed, hybridised and creatively appropriated in contextualised and material forms. The introduction considers previous scholarship on eighteenth-century travel, translation and cultural circulation, and on women’s participation in intellectual and cultural life, to propose new avenues for research that expand the geography of Enlightenment to cover Southern Europe and the Hispanic world. It also highlights how examining debates about women’s “nature” from Madrid and Paris to Mexico and Peru (and the other way round), and looking at the roles of women of letters, travellers, translators, readers, owners of books and agents in multilingual epistolary networks provide fresh knowledge on the workings of transnational and transoceanic exchanges, and the obstacles and limits to circulation and mobility.

By naming "The Power of Museums" as the theme for its 26th General Conference in Prague (Czechia), the International Council of Museums (ICOM) gave its members, national committees, international committees and regional alliances the opportunity to develop themes highlighting the role of museums to counter the world's major upheavals. After the intervening three years of pandemic and dissension, it was a rich and varied program signalling the resilience of the museum sector. Yet the theme chosen by ICOFOM (the International Committee for Museology) for its meetings questioned this "power" by discussing "how museums and museology could also have the potential to take power away, to disempower, by preventing the discussion of sensitive subjects" (ICOFOM, 2022). In other words, ICOFOM's symposium invited participants to discuss Taboos in Museology.

Queen Christina of Sweden was a prolific collector both as ruler of Sweden and as abdicated queen in Rome. Working for decades to build nearly autonomous antiquities collections in Stockholm and Rome, Christina employed a robust network of art acquisition agents. Correspondence and travel notes between these agents, artists, their associates, and Christina, provide insight into the queen’s reach, ambition, and limitations. This essay takes an intersectional approach to women’s mobility in the early modern antiquities market, illuminating the impact of religion, location, gender, and status on the ancient marble trade across Europe and the transnational networks Christina utilized.

Gustav III, who ascended the Swedish throne in 1771 and whose reign tragically ended with his assassination in 1792, is generally portrayed as a typical representative of the Enlightenment. Described as an 'enlightened' monarch, he introduced several reforms, for example a liberalization of criminal justice and religious legislation, liberal economic reforms and measures geared to strengthening the position of the lower Estates; and he was one of the first heads of state to establish relations with the United States of America. In his younger years he corresponded with leading philosophes such as Voltaire, and he promoted art and culture, among other things by founding the Swedish Academy and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. Through a coup d'état in 1772, he established a new constitution, increasing the Crown's power at the expense of the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag. This development towards royal autocracy was completed with the Union and Security Act of 1789, which at the same time reduced the privileges of the nobility and opened new career paths for bourgeois commoners in the state bureaucracy. 1 Sweden was a Protestant country, based on the Lutheran Augsburg confession, with a previously severe religious legislation. As part of the 'enlightened' reform activity, Gustav III issued an Edict of Tolerance for 'foreign believers' on 24 January 1781. This law allowed Catholic immigrants to practise their religion publicly. The members of the Reformed communities had already been granted the same rights, and in 1782 Jewish immigration was permitted,

f or rese ar Ch on historical landscapes and settlements, Sweden holds two comprehensive source materials: the cadastral registers from the sixteenth century and the large-scale maps from the seventeenth century. These sources describe and depict hamlets and farms during the early modern period but are also invaluable for tracing medieval landscapes. For several years work has been going on at the National Archives in Stockholm to make them available for research. A digital and spatial entrance to these sources has now been created called TORA: Topographical Register at the National Archives (Riksarkivet). 1 The core of this register consists of 26,000 geo-referenced historical settlement units to which other data are linked, above all 15,000 digitized historical maps. The work has been coordinated by the National Archives of Sweden, which is also responsible for the data created within the project. Coordinates are assigned using geographical information system (GIS) technologies, and web applications have been created using linked open data (LOD) techniques. With a map search, it is possible to acquire an overview of historical settlements and see their locations on today's modern map. This chapter addresses the methods, choices, and experiences gained from the TORA project (2015-2019). Above all, the question of how large-scale historical maps can form the basis for a historical GIS (HGIS) is discussed. A further discussion relates to questions on how to model historical data as linked data.