While ‘literary citizenship’ is a recent term, with a range of meanings and connotations, we apply it here as an analytical frame for exploring the historical use, development and impact of printed materials by and on individuals, communities and society as a whole. It helps us establish how religious books, from the Early Modern period, were used to forge various kinds of spiritual and cultural identities and communities, before and after the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. During the ‘reading revolution’ of the eighteenth century – when print travelled faster and became an essential component in ‘democratising’ information, enlightenment and understanding even in the northern parts of Europe – it fostered new individual and collective virtues and senses of belonging. Importantly, print was key to the emergence of a modern citizen consciousness.
The term ‘citizen’ (
borger) in the Dano-Norwegian context was used both in a narrow sense, designating an inhabitant of a particular town working as master merchant or artisan, as well as in a broader sense, signifying membership of a larger political community, referring for instance to ‘all the subjects in a state’, in the words of the Norwegian-born playwright and historian Ludvig Holberg (1683–1745).
1 ‘alle Undersaattere udi en Stad’; cf. the entry ‘Borger’ in the Holberg online dictionary, <www.holbergordbog.dk>. A growing number of publications, and periodicals in particular, framed the readers as ‘citizens’ and aimed to encourage ‘citizen virtues’.
2 See for instance the very first issue of the Copenhagen weekly Borger-Vennen (Citizen’s friend, 1788), declaring that it will ‘write about the concept of the citizen, civic ways of thinking and acting, civic virtue and diligence in various occupations, civic well-doing and its considerable effect on the happiness of the state’ [‘skrive om Borger-Navnet, borgerlig Tænke- og Handle-Maade, borgerlig Duelighed og Fliid i forskiellig Virkekreds, borgerlige Fortienester og deres betydelige Indflydelse i Statens Lyksalighed’]. Borger-Vennen, no. 3, (Copenhagen, 1788), p. 17. Ideals of good citizenship and public spiritedness (over private interest) were rooted in the dominant ideology in the Dano-Norwegian conglomerate state of the long eighteenth century, which was that of patriotism, not to be confused with nationalism.
3 J. Engelhardt, ‘Patriotism, Nationalism and Modernity: The Patriotic Societies in the Danish Conglomerate State, 1769–1814’, Nations and Nationalism, 13:2 (2007), 205–23. The frequent references to ‘patriot’ and ‘patriotic’ in titles, dedications and forewords of publications in Scandinavia during the period attest to the link between books, citizen virtues and patriotism. Reading and writing were essential to improve the public’s ability to participate as citizens in society and thereby contribute to the development and well-being of the entire state. Moreover, a growing number of publications sought to engage and educate new groups of readers to become active participants in the literary culture on different levels. Hence, the rise of religious as well as secular printed materials addressing women and child readers, for instance, impels investigations into new forms of literary citizenship. They include incorporating religious and moral models found in books and periodicals, improving sensibility through reading sentimental fiction or taking part in dramatic societies, or joining a local library to explore secret societies and sensationalist rumours from European courts. By applying transnational genres (such as the prose story, the novel, constitutions or secret histories) or shaping a local political discourse in pamphlet form, readers, booksellers and writers engaged in these new forms and networks, taking part in literary communities across borders and moulding them to better their own lives locally.
As these ‘citizenships’ were not limited to the book medium, the stories presented in this volume highlight the complex media relations of the period. Book history has traditionally left out many of the tangled relationships between media forms, a flaw international scholars have increasingly pointed to.
4 A. Briggs and P. Burke, A Social History of the Media (Cambridge, 2009); L. Brake, Print in Transition 1850–1910 (Basingstoke, 2001); A. Thomson et al. (eds), Cultural Transfer, SVEC, no. 4 (Oxford, 2010). Media convergences are not a recent phenomenon, but rather a continuous historical process: they are present from the liturgical books of the sixteenth century (with musical sheets and illustrations) to the serialised books in periodicals, the oral repetition or singing of religious texts, the international trade in illustrations, or university lectures circulated in manuscript. This wide range of materialities and reproductions illustrates what D. F. McKenzie famously referred to as ‘the sociology of texts’: the shift in meaning taking place depending on the material form and historical situation of texts and reading.
5 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Oxford, 1999 [1984]). Moreover, journals, bibliographies and pamphlets are intriguing sources that reveal how books and literature moved and shed light on the discussion of those movements, including questions of legislation and censorship. This shifting media landscape and its politics are transnational by nature, but adaptations are local and regional.
In this volume we explore interactions across media forms: books, manuscripts and periodicals, text and image, text and performance. Methodologically, the interactions of media forms here mean exploring and discussing the possibilities and limits of access to the physical objects versus the growing number of digital collections internationally, found in separate locations, languages and channels.
6 See for instance L. Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, The American Historical Review, 121:2 (April 2016), 377–402. Furthermore, we study how changing legal frameworks affected the production, import and circulation of books and formed and changed literary citizenship. In Denmark–Norway the introduction of absolutism in 1660 brought strict censorship laws and procedures with profound effects on the shape and development of the media landscape and book market. Until 1770 domestic publications as well as imported theological books needed approbation by a government official, an appointed censor at the University (Denmark) or the local bishop (Norway). Violators of the laws could face torture, execution or exile. To prevent heterodoxy and opposition to royal authority, censorship mainly targeted texts on religion, politics and economics, and news. Satire and slander were also prohibited. The censorship practice was however marked by what Edoardo Tortarolo has called ‘functional ambiguity’, allowing for public or semi-public negotiations between authors, censors and readers.
7 E. Tortarolo, ‘La censure à Berlin au XVIIIe siècle’, La Lettre Clandestine, 6 (1997). Moreover, while most of the censorship practices actually targeted the dissemination of undesirable print material among the broader population in particular, the learned classes could freely purchase uncensored books or import foreign literature.
8 J. Jakobsen, Uanstændige, utilladelige og unyttige skrifter (Copenhagen, 2017). In some cases repressive legislation seems to have had productive effects. The detailed control of the news press following the official censorship ‘rescript’ of 1701, explicitly prohibiting the blending of ‘news’ with ‘opinion’, opened a favourable space for the medium of journals, thriving on the exchange of opinions, especially on moral and social issues.
9 E. Krefting, ‘News versus Opinion: The State, the Press, and the Northern Enlightenment’, in S. G. Brandtzæg, P. Goring and Chr. Watson (eds), Travelling Chronicles: News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 2018), pp. 299–318; E. Krefting et al., En pokkers skrivesyge. 1700-tallets dansk-norske tidsskrifter mellom sensur og ytringsfrihet (Oslo, 2014).The first freedom of the press act in the world was enacted in Sweden in 1766, lasting until 1772. Even briefer was the similar experiment in Denmark–Norway, with the first – and still unprecedented – declaration of unlimited freedom of the press made in 1770 before being abolished in 1773. Both resulted in an explosion of publications (cf. Langen, Nordin and Stjernfelt in this volume).
10 H. Horstbøll et al., Grov konfækt (Copenhagen, 2020). In Denmark–Norway pre-censorship was not reintroduced but replaced with post-publication censorship by the police. The conditions for writing and publishing in Denmark–Norway were further curtailed by the regulation on the boundaries of press freedom in 1799.
11 L. Björne, ‘Freedom of Expression in the Nordic Countries 1815–1914: Theory and Practice’, Scandinavica, 58:2 (2019), 12–28. While Denmark retained its absolutist regime until 1848/49, new constitutions, in Sweden in 1809 and in the re-established Norway in 1814, constitutionally secured freedom of the press.
Foreign-language literature was subject to double standards in terms of censorship and regulations. For the most part, only the upper strata of society read languages other than Danish in Denmark and Norway, so imported or locally produced texts in foreign languages usually received lenient treatment by the authorities as they were not considered ‘dangerous’ for the educated to read while being out of reach for the commoner. Goethe’s
Werther, for instance, was sold and read in German but was not allowed to be printed in a Danish translation. Nevertheless, translations represented a substantial part of the Dano-Norwegian book market across media forms and genres: broadsheet ballads and romances, travelogues and scientific accounts, periodicals and pamphlets, schoolbooks and religious works, fairy tales and moral fiction etc. Furthermore, translations remained an entry point to the book market for women writers well versed in modern languages as translators of drama, poetry, history or hymns. From a self-censorship perspective of both sexes, it was considered safer for a writer to hide behind the political opinions of foreign authors as a translator than to advertise their own. In leading academic and literary circles,
good translations were considered a means of strengthening the domestic literature by displaying the range of the Danish language, thus providing budding writers with good examples of texts in all genres. Nevertheless, translations (and reprints) first and foremost remained good business for printers at a time before international copyright.
12 A. Nøding, ‘Syndfloden kommer: redaktøren som internasjonal formidler’ in E. Krefting et al., En pokkers skrivesyge (Oslo, 2014), pp. 204–23; ‘The Editor as Scout: The Rapid Mediation of International Texts in Provincial Journals’, in E. Krefting et al. (eds), Eighteenth-Century Periodicals as Agents of Change (Leiden, 2015), pp. 62–76; ‘Periodical Fiction in Denmark and Norway Before 1900’, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature (New York, 2017), <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.293>. Translations
from Danish into major European languages were often initiated from Denmark–Norway to (self-)market an author abroad, provide printers and booksellers with tradable goods at the book fair in Leipzig, or encourage international knowledge of the kingdom’s past, its society or natural resources (cf. chapters by Thomsen; Langen, Nordin and Stjernfelt; Nøding; Hemstad).
13 See also A. Eriksen, ‘Fedrelandskjærlighet i oversettelse. Ove Mallings Store og gode Handlinger af Danske, Norske og Holstenere’, in A. M. Bjørkøy et al., Litterære verdensborgere (Oslo, 2019), pp. 357–76.