Hopes And Fears For The Future In Early Modern Sweden 1500 1800

Persons living in the old Estate society were expected to live according to their position, and to be content with the situation into which they were born. But people nonetheless harboured dreams and goals for a better future, and this sometimes led them to strive for a higher position than the one into which they were born. In the end, persons were not prisoners of their social status, and climbing higher on the social ladder was indeed possible. It required, however, careful strategising and the use of a variety of tactics, the study of which has been neglected in traditional history research. The use of such tactics sometimes allowed the actors to realise their hopes, but also left space for failure, which gave rise to very real fears. In this book fifteen scholars present their views on different aspects of Swedish society during the period 1500-1800. The book focuses on remarkable events and processes taking place in the Swedish realm during this era. Behind each event was a web of individual hopes and fears which motivated people's actions. The universal theme of hopes and fears has occupied persons of all eras, and this volume will interest scholars and students in cultural history, early modern studies, history of mentalities and political culture.

The discourse of political counsel in early modern Europe depended on the participation of men, as both counsellors and counselled. Women were often thought too irrational or imprudent to give or receive political advice—but they did in unprecedented numbers, as this volume shows. These essays trace the relationship between queenship and counsel through over three hundred years of history. Case studies span Europe, from Sweden and Poland-Lithuania via the Habsburg territories to England and France, and feature queens regnant, consort and regent, including Elizabeth I of England, Catherine Jagiellon of Sweden, Catherine de’ Medici and Anna of Denmark. They draw on a variety of innovative sources to recover evidence of queenly counsel, from treatises and letters to poetry, masques and architecture. For scholars of history, politics and literature in early modern Europe, this book enriches our understanding of royal women as political actors.

In Learning Law and Travelling Europe, Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen offers an account of the study journeys of Swedish lawyers in the early modern period, and their connection to the state-building process and the development of the Swedish legal profession.

In the seventeenth century, riots, rebellions, and revolts flared around Europe. Concerned about their internal stability, many states responded by closely observing the violent upheavals that plagued their neighbors. Rebellion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe investigates how in this struggle for intelligence about internal discord, diplomats emerged as key information brokers and interpreters of Europe’s tumultuous political landscape. The contributions in this volume uncover how diplomatic actors interacted with rulers, opposition leaders, informers, media entrepreneurs, and different audiences in their efforts to understand, communicate, and draw lessons from the insurrections in their time. Rebellion and Diplomacy also examines how diplomats actively tried to shape the course of internal conflicts by managing the dissemination of news, supporting political factions at their court of residence, and even instigating violence. Covering different European regions from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to the Carpathian Basin, the book will appeal to all students and researchers interested in early modern diplomacy, politics, and news cultures.

Internationally, the case of early modern Sweden is noteworthy because the state building process transformed a locally dispersed and sparsely populated area into a strongly centralized absolute monarchy and European empire at the beginning of the 17th century. This anthology provides fresh insights into the state-building process in Sweden. During this transitional period, many far-reaching administrative reforms were carried out, and the Swedish state developed into a prime example of the early modern ‘powerstate’. The contributors approach Sweden’s rise to greatness from the point of view of personal agency. In early modern studies, agency has long remained in the shadow of the study of structures and institutions. This novel approach enables us to expose the difficulties, setbacks and false steps that the administration had to deal with. State building was a more diversified and personalized process than has previously been assumed. Numerous individuals were also crucially important actors in the process, and that development itself was not straightforward progression at the macro-level but was intertwined with lower-level actors. Each chapter in this volume employs partially different methods depending on the source material and subject. This means that both qualitative and quantitative material is combined, different ways of making sense of it (i.e. research traditions) are brought together and a multi-method design is used in analyzing source material. One of the central methods is the systematic use of previous biographical research. We want to give the individuals and their actions under discussion a background that reflects the contemporary structures of individual life cycles. With the existing biographical research, it is possible to create a comprehensive set of data that provides the general outlines of individual lives or the career tracks of various estates or social groups, and even to construct collective biographies of certain groups.

This book aims to shed light on a global and complex phenomenon: migration. In order to grasp this vast and ambiguous issue, the book offers ten multi-layered case studies, each focussing on one aspect of migration. With this selection of articles, this collected volume builds a bridge between the past and the present and highlight the many sides of migration. The chapters will demonstrate how the questions of controlled migration, movement of labour, improvement of one’s life, and interaction of people of different origin have puzzled us in the course of the last five hundred years.

The formation of states in early modern Europe has long been an important topic for historical analysis. Traditionally, the political and military struggles of kings and rulers were the favoured object of study for academic historians. This book highlights new historical research from Europe’s northern frontier, bringing ‘the people’ back into the discussion of state politics, presenting alternative views of political and social relations in the Nordic countries before industrialisation. The early modern period was a time that witnessed initiatives from people from many groups formally excluded from political influence, operating outside the structures of central government, and this book returns to the subject of contentious politics and state building from below.

This book investigates the forms that the aggression and violence of peasant elites could take in early modern Fennoscandia, and their role within society. The contributors highlight the social stratification, inner divisions, contradictions and conflicts of the peasant communities, but also pay attention to the elite as leaders of resistance against the authorities. With the formation of more centralised states, the elites’ status and room for agency diminished, but regional and temporal variations were great in this relatively drawn-out process, and there still remained several favourable contexts for their agency. Even though the peasant elite was not a homogenous entity, the chapters in this collection present us one uniting feature – the peasant elites’ tendency to assert themselves with an active and aggressive agency, even if this led to very different outcomes.