Historisk Tidskrift. Utgiven av Svenska historiska föreningen
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Historisk tidskrift 133:2 • 2013

Innehåll (Contents) 2013:2

Uppsatser (Articles)

 

För Gud och kung, släkt och vänner. Folkliga föreställningar om svenskhet under tidigt 1600-tal

Jens Lerbom

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

For God and King, kindreds and friends. Popular perceptions of Swedishness in the early 17th century

This article investigates popular perceptions of Swedishness in early 17th century Sweden. The starting point is the well-known fact that ordinary people used concepts such as Swedes and Danes to describe themselves and others. The empirical basis of the survey is popular narratives recorded in protocols from six Swedish county courts bordering the kingdom of Denmark during the period 1600-1658. The overall question is whether these expressions reflected a political or imagined cultural (ethnic) community. The result of the survey shows that, besides being perceived politically and judicially, on an everyday popular level Swedishness was also imagined as a cultural community. The ethnic dimension of this was not religious, and probably not linguistic, but consisted of an imagined community of being native-born and having kin and friends in a common emotionally associated fatherland.

Keywords

Sweden, Denmark, 17th century, Ethnicity, National identities, imagined communities, peasant society

The article has been reviewed by two external reviewers under a double-blind peer review process.