Fresh off the press and available as open access is Serving Aristocracy: Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community by Anna Nilsson Hammar and Svante Norrhem. Being one of the results of a three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), Serving Aristocracy is the history of social negotiation and mobility in an early modern knowledge community, centred on the aristocratic De la Gardie family and their sphere of manors and estates in seventeenth-century Sweden. Focusing on underprivileged women and men and the knowledge community that shaped their interactions, social negotiations, and mobility, this book documents ordinary people’s lives and work in an aristocratic sphere. It uses the De la Gardie bureaucracy’s meticulous records to full effect, charting servants’ experiences, learning, and agency. The unique collection of petitions provides an invaluable insight into how servants viewed their own backgrounds, personal predicaments, and hopes for the future, and how they negotiated their work and wage. It reveals the aristocratic estate organization not only as a workplace, but also as a training ground where knowledge circulation was as fundamental as socialization, social negotiation, and networking. At the same time, Serving Aristocracy exposes the flaws in the aristocratic mindset: the De la Gardies’ organization was hierarchical, paternalistic, and feudal, and employees were forced to live at the mercy of their masters.

The book has been published in the Routledge series Knowledge Societies in History (eds. Sven Dupré and Wijnand Mijnhardt).

Further publications from this project includes:

Nilsson Hammar, Anna & Norrhem, Svante, “The capacity to act: On phronetic knowledge among the less privileged in seventeenth-century Sweden”, in Östling, Larsson Heidenblad & Nilsson Hammar (eds.), Knowledge Actors: Revisiting Agency in the History of Knowledge (Nordic Academic Press, 2023).

Nilsson Hammar, Anna & Norrhem, Svante, ”Knowing how: Estate management, practical knowledge, and agency among aristocratic women in early modern Sweden”, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17:2 (2023), pp. 328-353. https://doi.org/10.1086/723377

Nilsson Hammar, Anna & Norrhem, Svante, ”Servants as Creditors: Navigating the moral economy of an early modern aristocratic household”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 47:4 (2022), pp. 490-516. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2022.2074096