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.

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.

The historical value of Moravian autobiographies, Lebenläufe, has been debated among researchers. One question is how we should interpret the obvious genre dependency of the texts. The Lebensläufe follows a clear structure and often contains quotations or other references to the Bible, various hymns or other religious texts. These intertextual references can be interpreted as having a spiritual function, illustrating the writer’s journey through the temporal world towards spiritual awakening. However, I propose the use of quotations might also be seen in the light of Walter Ong’s thoughts on orality and literacy. The Lebensläufe are structured very much in accordance with the principles of an oral culture, as described by Ong. Indeed, both the texts themselves and the context in which they originate are situated at a crossroads between oral and literary cultures. To relate to the theme of the conference: the Moravians and their autobiographies repeatedly travelled back and forth between oral and literary spheres. A further exploration of the intersection between orality and literacy in Moravian Lebensläufe might therefore be a fruitful task for further research.