The weather was part of the material world that human bodies encountered and engaged. Human bodies did not occupy the world, they were vulnerable organisms who inhabited it, and their way of being in the world was distinguished by heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to an environment that was always in flux. Starting from almanac annotations, parish registers, hymnals, and theological tracts from Sweden, the article explores the challenges that seventeenth-century weather afforded people in the North and what they can tell us of what it meant to be a Lutheran human being. The earth they walked upon, the skies they gazed at, and the rivers and lakes they crossed were active and constantly changing, and human bodies were required to adjust and anticipate. Clergymen’s reports and annotations in almanacs, therefore, attempted to reconcile the order of nature, providential theology, and human existence in the world. Life in post-lapsarian Creation offered lessons in everyday inconveniences, lessons that were highly corporeal and emotional. Fortifying body and soul, the weather instilled an acute sense of vulnerability and complete reliance on a power much greater than any on earth.

Tror gör man i kyrkan. Det är ett uttryck som har visst fog för sig. Sedan åtminstone tidigt 200-tal har trosbekännelsen, credo, efter latinets ”jag tror”, deklamerats i samband med kristna dop. Generationer av luther-ska åhörare har i predikningar och katekesförhör dessutom fått höra att människan kan frälsas genom sola fide, tron allena. I 1900-talets idé-debatter kontrasterades denna upptagenhet vid tro i den kyrkliga sfären mot vetande och vetenskap. Tro finns alltså lite varstans i historiens landskap, både empiriskt och teoretiskt. Men vad betyder tro i dessa olika sammanhang?

The article argues that medical responses to plague were a cause of the ‘psychoactive revolution’ during the long seventeenth century. Focusing on four metropoles in the Baltic and North Sea region, it shows that the commodification of sugar, opiates and tobacco during the last century of the Second Great Pandemic correlates both with outbreaks of plague in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm and with the intra-regional prescription of these intoxicants in popular and authorized plague physic. In so doing, it argues for the importance of household consumption practices in driving the psychoactive revolution and points to the importance of women as well as men in the popularization of intoxicants. By tracing the popularization of sugar, tobacco and opium from c.1600 rather than c.1800 and considering their dietary uptake in relation to material changes in plague physic, it identifies an under-appreciated set of consumer motives informing household consumption practices: not least the need to allay fear, pain and bodily and mental disorder. The article concludes by introducing the concept of ‘accustomization’ as the way in which contemporary observers explained how reactive consumption in the face of epidemics could become habitual, recreational and forms of dependency over time.

From children’s visions of angels to the cancerous belly of a king, this book shows how the body was at the centre of religious experience in seventeenth-century Lutheran culture. It explores what it was like to live in a body that was situated between the heavenly and earthly realms in the century following the Reformations, how faith shaped the experience of the body, and how the body shaped religious experience. Lutherans fasted and fortified their bodies through asceticism or exposure to harsh conditions. People of all types could feel the Holy Spirit entering their bodies and follow its movement within. Early modern Lutherans used their bodies to understand the complexities of their world, and by knowing about their physiology we come closer to grasping it.

Based on a varied set of sources from the expansive Swedish empire, with connections from Lapland to the North American colonies, this book shows how spiritual experience played out in relation to gender and age, revealing the powerful resemblances that connected bodies spiritually, politically, socially and emotionally. This book challenges received notions that Lutheranism implied a removed corporeality, mediated by an abstracted faith, and offers new insights into studying early modern corporeality.

The Word Made Flesh will be of interest to scholars and students in history, religion, history of medicine, gender and body studies.

This article uses the ailing body of King Charles XI of Sweden (1655–97) to explore how the king’s physicality was intimately connected not only with the nature of his kingship, its sacredness and legitimacy, but also with his personal faith. It shows that, while Charles’s body was exceptional in that it was the body of the king, at the same time it was reacting to illness and sin like any other Lutheran body. It also projected the body’s capabilities on a larger scale. In particular, the lethal putrefaction inside his belly came to play an important part in interpreting his kingship. These ideas had an impact that extended from his own stomach pains, via the anxiety of his suffering people, to the ending of absolute rule. By following the analogies that contemporaries drew from the king’s autopsy and his physicians’ notes, from sermons, official proclamations, diaries, weather reports, poetry, correspondence and prophecies, this article uncovers the powerful resemblances that connected Charles’s body with nature, his people, the realm and the divine. In the end it was the gathering of the cosmos into Charles’s body that paved the way for direct criticism of absolutism itself.

Uppsatsen tar ett samlat grepp om en forskningsinriktning som tidigare tenderat att belysa enskilda personer, nämligen de politiska budskap som kom till uttryck i profetiska utsagor och andlig kommunikation i Sverige mellan 1600 och 1720. Den belyser särskilt den folkliga religiositetens politiska anspråk, och visar hur oro för krig, kritik mot adeln och stöd för de fattiga var viktiga element. Genom en kartläggning av dessa fenomen under perioden framgår hur det andligas närvaro och påverkan på världen, såsom den uppfattades i sin samtid, varierat över tid och i samverkan med existentiella kriser som utspelat sig på jorden. Tillsammans gör detta att det sakrala fick en starkt samhällskritisk potential.

The chapter delves into an exceptional court case about the pulling down of 13 houses in Stockholm in 1719 to explore the multifaceted interpretations of space within a local community. Through a gendered notion of place, crowd attacks on the homes of ‘suspicious women’ were made possible: the space of a house was equated with those who dwelled within it and husbandless women perceived as immoral tainted a whole house. The crowd’s entrance into these spaces functioned as a form of reinstating of patriarchal authority in the dwellings of suspicious women.

Of interest here are the reactions of the women attacked during the riots. Just as the crowd ransacked houses of personal possessions, the victims made great attempts to regain their possessions as a way of recreating their positions within the local community. Objects built narratives of good housekeepers, dutiful wives and mothers, and self-sufficient members of society. The virtue of these women was placed in their possessions; a looting crowd had displaced it. Taking things back was a way of replacing virtue. Metaphorically, by means of sheets, pots and tables, notions of identity came full circle and returned to the women.