This article examines the various ways in which emotions were thought to influence cases of illness, thus demonstrating the complex role of emotions in experiences of illness in early modern Sweden. It argues that the early modern medical precept whereby emotions were active agents in causing illness must be understood in relation to the social context in which illness occurred in individual cases. This aspect of illness causation has been underexplored in previous research on early modern experiences of illness. The present article uses an extensive collection of Swedish letters spanning over 45 years in order to trace how experiences of illness were formed through one particular individual’s social relationships, advancing age and their increasing numbers of encounters with ill health. In so doing, the article lays bare the complex understanding of emotional illness causation gained over the course of a lifetime.

The understanding of what health is and how it can be maintained has changed through history. Questions like who can perform healing? and what sort of bodies are considered healthy? have elicited widely divergent responses in different societies. This volume explores how health was understood and practiced in the early modern Nordic region, with a focus on Sweden, including Finland. The chapters examine topics such as the dyslexia of Charles XI, lay perceptions of bodily and mental variability, and the health benefits attributed to using the sauna. Together, the essays give a holistic view of how practices of health evolved in close symmetry with societal institutions and localised worldviews. As such, the volume is a timely intervention into the social history of medicine, contributing to the historicisation of health as a concept and shedding light on developments in the Nordic world.

This introduction outlines a conceptual framework for analysing the historically situated nature of ‘health.’ While previous historical research has elucidated conceptions of illness as changeable over time, it is our contention that the meaning of health is often taken for granted. We examine the semantic field of ‘health’ (Swe. hälsa) and associated terms as they were used in early modern Sweden, showing health as a multifaceted concept with connotations to bodily and mental well-being, prosperity, politics, and religion alike. The individual chapters of the volume are situated in the broader account of early modern medicine, which highlights how a focus on a contextual understanding of health can inform the history of medicine and the broader account of early modern history.

In this article we are concerned with how faith was embodied in the non-normative body and ultimately what constituted early modern Protestant faith. We address how deaf people in early modern Sweden expressed their religious faith in such way as they were considered pious and included in the community of believers. Listening to sermons has long been considered central in the church history and cultural history of the Lutheran Reformations and Protestant religious culture. Ordinary Christians were seen as an audience above all else, and a sense of hearing was the most important of all the senses in religious practice. New research in cultural history and the history of the senses has nuanced this understanding by arguing that other senses and embodied practices remained important to Protestantism. However, the focus has been the normative body, while historians of disability have shown the precarious situation of deaf people in the religious milieus of early modern Protestantism. In this article we examine a series of court cases and other sources from early modern Sweden, charting how deaf people's religious beliefs and practices were treated in local contexts. The study finds that deafness was considered a troublesome affliction, not only because of the inability to hear, but also because it was considered to impair people's cognitive and possibly spiritual capacities. This understanding seems to have brought with it an acceptance that deaf people were unlikely to benefit from an intellectual understanding of religious education. Despite the prejudice, however, deaf people were included in religious practice and accepted as true Christians. The deaf Christians' animated participation in religious rituals such as the Eucharist or divine Service, along with embodied practices such as sighing or kneeling to pray, were seen as genuine displays of faith, physically and emotionally. Moreover, there seems to have been a general consensus that deaf people performed their faith in ways that suited them best, often expressed as `in one's own way'. These findings indicate that the early modern Protestant faith was indeed embodied and emotional, but it could be performed and expressed in many ways, depending on each Christian's personal circumstances.

Bodily sensations are paramount to experiencing, as has been argued by Willemijn Ruberg.[1] The phenomenological approach that inspires the history of experience for Ruberg enriches our understanding of how the body was perceived and experienced, especially in the premodern past.[2] To arrive at how perceptions and sensations become experiences through the body in historical contexts, this entry will argue that we need to go beyond individual bodies and consider bodies in interaction.

Perceptions of the body in the premodern Western past share a striking feature with contemporary neuroscientific ideas: the mind and body are intrinsically interlinked and dependent on each other.[3] In premodern terms, this meant that sensual impressions and emotional sensations were physical because they were created through bodily practices and were experienced through bodily processes. Neuroscience emphasises that the human brain is malleable and changes as a result of bodily practices in cultural surroundings. This means that feelings and sensations are relational to the cultural context in which the body is situated.

Physical impairment was arguably an all-too-common reality of human life in premodern societies. Because of insufficient health care, the omnipresence of common illnesses without effective cures, and different forms of manual labour being the daily outcome for a vast majority of society, most people presumably encountered impairing injuries and long-lasting illness during their life courses, even if they were born with healthy and normative bodies. The ensuing omnipresence of bodily variety that would come from it suggests that it might have been experienced in other ways in the premodern period compared to today, and that this variety might give interesting insights into experiencing life in the premodernity.

The study of the body has gained increased focus in branches of history aimed at human emotion, sense and experience2. It is largely agreed upon that the body is historically changeable, and that people’s experiences change accordingly3. This gives incentive to study the variety of human bodies within historical communities as well. How one’s body functioned affected how one saw oneself and interacted with other people. Variety in human bodies is therefore crucial to understand experience in any given society.

Two texts from early modern Sweden might serve as examples of how we can encounter the variety of bodies in premodern sources. The first is an undated letter to the Justitiekollegium written sometime during the middle of the 17th century, in which a woman named Ingrid Håkansdotter pleaded for poor relief from the city of Stockholm. She (or someone she had asked for help to write) described her physical ailments in detail. She wrote that her whole body was swollen, which caused severe pain, and that she could not walk without crutches. The pain was so intense that she could not lie down, which meant that she needed to sit upright in bed and therefore had had no rest neither night nor day for five years.

The second example is a foreword to a Swedish devotional book printed in 1601, in which the publisher Petrus Johannis Gothus recounted his physical ailments over a number of pages. According to the foreword, he had been incapacitated from the age of 14, when he fell ill with a plague. This condition worsened during the course of his life, so that he in his mature age was haunted by constant pain and unable to use his right leg. Like the woman of the previous case, he stressed that this had led to chronic lack of sleep and rest, as well as to financial problems.

In this article, I will discuss how we can make sense of these texts as expressions of bodily experiences in premodern times. I will argue that the research field of dis/ability history places focus on important aspects of the body in historical societies, but that inspiration from the history of emotions could add essential insights into how the body was experienced6. Finally, I will suggest that the budding research field of history of experience could provide a framework for analysing the lived experiences of the dis/abled body.

The history of emotions has become prominent within historical disci­plines in the last decade. This is evident from the abundance of research that has been published, the steady stream of introductions to and hand­books describing the field,1 and the research infrastructure that currently exists to promote it. In pace with this establishment of the history of emotion as a perspective in history and as a research field, its own histo­riography and genealogy has become increasingly distinct. At the same time, providing overviews of the current developments within the field and prophesying about the future become ever more challenging as the field grows.

This thesis explores how the Reformation in Sweden was experienced by 16^th century people through an examination of emotional practices. It argues that religious texts such as prayer books, sermon collections and instruction manuals were formative for the religious setting of the 16^th century and that the use of these texts would therefore involve emotional practices for the 16^thcentury Christian, thus creating an emotional experience of the Reformation for the Christian who used these texts.

The thesis has shown that religious texts from the early Reformation, ca 1526–1571, were abundantly emotional but that the emotions they would create in the Christian who used them would vary both depending on the type of emotional practice that the texts would entail and depending on when during the period examined the texts were from. There was a greater span of different emotions in the earlier texts examined, while the emotions in the later texts examined were more uniform, thus possibly creating a more forceful emotional experience of the Reformation.

The results of this thesis question the view in previous research that the Reformation in Sweden lead to an intellectualisation of religion. It shows that emotions were central in 16^thcentury religious experience, which concurs with recent research on the Reformations around Europe, in which the spatial, social, corporal, material and emotional aspects of religious experience in the 16^th century have been highlighted.