New book: Serving Aristocracy; Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community
The manor Mariedal Slott was built in 1666. The commissioner was Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (1622–1686). This engraving by Willem Swidde from 1694 shows the courtyard populated by nobles as well as servants.
Serving Aristocracy by Anna Nilsson Hammar and Svante Norrhem 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 is available as open access here: Serving Aristocracy; Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community
Anna Nilsson Hammar is Researcher in History at Lund University. She is the author and editor of several books and articles on the history of knowledge, early modern history, and everyday life, among them Servants as Creditors: Navigating the Moral Economy of an Early Modern Aristocratic Household (2022).
Svante Norrhem is Associate Professor of History at Lund University. He is the author
of several books and articles on early modern gender history, diplomacy, and servants, among them Knowing How: Estate Management, Practical Knowledge, and
Agency Among Aristocratic Women in Early Modern Sweden (2023)