This article compares German, English, and Swedish versions of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century religious memoirs. We study four Moravian memoirs with two key dimensions in view: firstly, the tension between individuality and community, and secondly, the effects of global interconnectedness. By analysing how these traits were negotiated when the memoirs were translated, we demonstrate how gender, class, and colonial relationships affected autobiographical writing around the turn of the nineteenth century. We identify an inherent tension in the Moravian memoirs between hierarchy and egalitarianism. European ambitions for world dominance were growing, and in their missions abroad, the Moravians had to fit their religious agenda into colonial frameworks. But regional inequalities within Europe also put their mark on the memoirs. Theologically, the Moravians regarded the world as divided into core settlements, diaspora, and missionary areas. The division mirrored a general pattern of dependence on German culture in the Nordics. The negotiation of meaning playing out when texts were transferred between languages illustrates the secondary status of Swedish Moravians compared to the German core, as well as European colonial notions of non-European people. Also, women and women’s agency were toned down or removed entirely in the process of editing and translation.

Under senare år har allt fler forskare intresserat sig för risker i det förflutna. Vi börjar få en någorlunda sammanhängande bild av de stora skeendena: klimatförändringarna, pandemierna och krigen. Men vilka hot mötte vanliga människor på daglig basis? Jag skulle vilja berätta om ett forskningsprojekt där vi just nu studerar risker, sårbarhet och resiliens i Göteborgs omland.

Vi fokuserar på Landvetters häradsallmänning, som donerades till staden vid dess grundande. Människorna här hade ett kluvet förhållande till staden. Å ena sidan exploaterade Göteborg områdets naturresurser; å andra sidan innebar närheten till Göteborg att det fanns fler arbetstillfällen. För att komma så nära vardagens risker och riskhanteringsstrategier som möjligt kombinerar vi tre olika källtyper. För det andra använder vi kyrkoarkivens uppgifter. För det andra analyserar vi religiösa självbiografier och framför allt de som sammanställdes av den herrnhutiska societeten i Göteborg. För det tredje använder vi ett material som historiker ofta förbigått, nämligen den stora kunskapsbank som byggts upp i samband med uppdragsarkeologi. Tillsammans ger källorna ny kunskap om människors livsvillkor under 1700-talet.

Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf is a multilayered text. Regarded as “social philosophy as best-seller” (Ward 1983), the novel is an interrogation of the dichotomy of civilization/savagery, served up as a thrilling sea romance. Beside this double act, it is also a story of male same-sex desire. By inserting metaphors, sudden chronological gaps, and other clues into the narrative, London opened the possibility to read into the novel a homosexual (and abusive) relationship between the main protagonists.

The gender-bending aspects of Jack London’s literary output have been studied by Anglophone scholars since at least the 1970s. But London’s popularity reached far beyond the English-speaking world, so what happened when the ’queer journey’ of The Sea-Wolf travelled between languages? What did translators make of the glowing descriptions of male beauty, for example, or the section in which the evil-but-attractive captain Wolf Larsen quotes Isolde’s words from Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse: ”Blest am I beyond women even herein, That beyond all born women is my sin, And perfect my transgression”?

In this paper, I investigate how the queerness of The Sea-Wolf was rendered in Swedish translations. Sweden was one of London’s biggest foreign markets during his lifetime and at least nine different translations of The Sea-Wolf have been published in Sweden to date. Sometimes, but not always, the translators defuse the queer potential of the novel, employing what B. J. Epstein has termed ‘eradicalizing’ translatorial strategies.

Crofters and cottagers, as subordinate groups, were integral to the rural societies of Norway and Sweden. Their numbers increased significantly during the 18th and 19th centuries, partly due to population growth and new opportunities to earn a livelihood through various auxiliary economies. Another contributing factor was the growing inequality within rural communities.

This paper investigates the role of crofters and cottagers in industrialized rural communities, specifically those associated with iron works, as well as rural communities dominated by large agricultural estates in Sweden and Norway respectively. Both iron works and agricultural estates provided opportunities for crofters and cottagers to increase their income through auxiliary economies. For instance, they engaged in diverse handicrafts such as shoemaking and carpentry, produced goods like charcoal and wood, and offered services such as transportation. During periods of growth, crofters and cottagers could potentially make substantial economic gains. However, these opportunities were heavily diminished during times of crises.

Due to their subordinate status, limited or complete lack of access to various resources, and dependence on landowners, crofters and cottagers developed different strategies in response to expansion and crises within agricultural estates and iron works. These strategies often involved changes in resource utilization and auxiliary economies, encompassing social and gendered agencies.

The research on European ballad prints is currently entering into a very exciting phase. For years, these ephemeral yet long-lived leaflets have been lying uncatalogued in the dustiest corners of the archives. Now, collections of ballad prints are being digitized in country after country, and the volume of researchis growing. For the field to really take off, however, we must publish in English. This is one reason why the anthology Czech Broadside Ballads is such a welcomework of scholarship.

In 21 chapters written by 27 authors, the anthology deals with topics ranging from the sixteenth-century origins of printed ballads to the cordel prints of twentieth-century Brazil. It is not possible to do justice to all of the texts in a single review, but I attempt to identify the volume’s most significant results, point out a few weaknesses, and discuss the implications for further research. My perspective is that of a historian specializing in Scandinavian printed ballads (in Swedish, skillingtryck).

In this paper, I would like to discuss how formulaic language can be understood in the light of Walter Ong’s theory of oral culture and Daniel Dennett’s 2006 concept of memes.

As empirical example, I use a corpus of 3.500 nationalistic songs from Norway, Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland, spanning the years 1770 to 1920. These song lyrics demonstrate the establishment and replication of numerous set expressions, tropes and clichés within a specific ideological context. This ”formulaic language of nationalism” encompasses recurring rhymes (e.g., land – hand – strand [Sw. shore]), central concepts (”the people”, ”freedom”, ”honour”), and themes (e.g., the nation as a family of fathers, a mother/virgin country, and her sons/lovers). These elements are still distinctly recognizable in contemporary nationalist discourse across the Western world.

According to Walter Ong, formulaic language functions as a mnemonic aid in oral cultures – indeed, the only way of transmitting information in a traditional society is to ”think thoughts that can be remembered”. Daniel Dennett, in his work Breaking the Spell (2006), builds upon this concept (although he does not directly reference Ong). Dennett suggests that easily memorisable words and actions might even accumulate more characteristics that promote replication, in effect mimicking natural selection. I propose that our understanding of formulaic language, not only within the realm of nationalist rhetoric but in a broader context, can be improved by considering the ”mechanistic” explanations put forth by Ong and Dennett.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the mixed church choir and the Swedish Association of Church Choirs (Svenska Kyrkosångsförbundet, SKSF) in the social and musicological context of Sweden c. 1900–1950. Questions asked are why the mixed choir became the dominant form of choir singing in the Church of Sweden, what stance SKSF’s leaders took in response to women, and how they regarded mixed choirs compared to boys’ and men’s choirs. The main source used is the organisation’s periodical, Kyrkosångsförbundet.

A literature review reveals that the establishment of mixed church choirs was boosted by several factors around the turn of the 20th century. The evangelical revival movement, especially the Baptists, had long featured mixed choirs. Towards the end of the 19th century, a new interest for liturgy emerged within the Church of Sweden, and choral singing was officially sanctioned as part of the service. But above all, women as a collective were ready and able to participate. During the first decades of the 20th century, societal reforms and a simultaneous plunge in childbearing rates gave women more opportunities than ever before to play an active part as citizens.

Lutheran Germany exerted a strong influence on Swedish church music, and the tenets of die neue Sachlichkeit in music were embraced by many of SKSF’s leading men. Several of them wrote with enthusiasm of a restored Lutheran music, purged of sentimentality and brought back to the austere purity of the Reformation era. Some offered up the opinion that the voices of girls and women lacked the ”chaste” clarity needed for such a music, and that, in a perfect choir, they would all be replaced by boys. This dream was rudely shattered as scores of basses and tenors left to man the Swedish borders during WWII. The SKSF instead turned to the task of keeping choir singing in church going with the help of second altos, three-part settings and compositions for female and children’s choirs.

Although SKSF’s leadership and its periodical completely ignored the ‘woman question’ so prominent in early 20th-century secular discourse, the mixed church choir contributed to the democratisation of the Church of Sweden, and so of Swedish society as a whole. Women were heard as singers, choir leaders and members of choir boards, and the mixed choir provided a context where women and men could meet on an equal footing.