The past twenty years have seen an increased interest in Early Modern and Enlightenment studies as well as studies in book and media history in both Denmark and Norway. Tore Rem’s edited volume
Bokhistorie (2003) marked a starting point for book history in the modern sense in Norway. Along with the Danish volume
Boghistorie (J. Bjerring-Hansen and T. Jelsbak (eds), 2010), it has served as a staple introduction to the field in Scandinavia. While the focus on literary sociology and the study of the book as a physical artefact have dominated book history studies in Sweden, the research in Denmark and Norway tends to focus more on the preconditions (censorship, education and religion) and histories of circulation (trade, reading and reception, collections and bibliography). This
histoire du livre approach coupled with the influence of Anglo-American bibliography are evident from the chapters presented in this volume, too. Coming from literary studies, Rem and others have advocated the importance of combining literary analysis with insights into their historical and material situatedness.
1 Rem, Bokhistorie, p. 19. Cf. J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, 1991); R. Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the 14th and 18th Centuries (Stanford, CA, 1994 [1992]); L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London, 1997 [1958]). Today book historians in Scandinavia come from a range of disciplines, in particular literature, history, history of ideas and cultural history.
However, there are few books on Dano-Norwegian and Scandinavian material available to an international readership.
2 An overview in English of book history in Norway (by A. Nøding) and Denmark (by A. Toftgaard) can be found in S. van Voorst et al., Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenies (Nijmegen/Leiden, 2013), pp. 141–52 and 163–86. See also Ch. Appel and K. Skovgaard-Petersen, ‘The History of the Book in the Nordic Countries’, in M. F. Suarez (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford, 2010), pp. 240–7. Those taking on broader perspectives and a varied number of cases, materials and media are even fewer. Furthermore, there are few studies connecting and comparing Dano-Norwegian and Swedish book historical developments. This volume seeks to remedy all three points by providing the latest studies in English covering the hand press period, dedicated to uncovering the interactions on the transnational book market while approaching the material with a shared interest in methods and theory specifically aimed at tracing moving texts.
Among available studies in English are Gina Dahl’s presentation of
Books in Early Modern Norway (2011), which gives an overview of the country’s book market, its idiosyncrasies and transnational connections included. Her book
Libraries and Enlightenment (2014) examines how distant regions were presented in Norwegian libraries and travelogues. A central study in the history of reading is
Religious Reading in the Lutheran North, edited by
Charlotte Appel and Morten Fink-Jensen (2011). A special issue in English and French on Scandinavian book history was published in 2022, presenting cross-sections of the field today.
3 The journal Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture featured an issue on The Book in the Northern Countries in the autumn of 2022, with a collection of new articles (13:1, H. Hansen and M. Simonsen (eds); French/English). Furthermore, a volume on German-Scandinavian book and library history, edited by Marie-Theres Federhofer and Sabine Meyer, examines some of the parallels, differences and interactions in publishing, collections, reading and writing between the two regions, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
4 M. T. Federhofer and S. Meyer (eds), Mit dem Buch in der Hand. Beiträge zur deutsch-skandinavischen Buch- und Bibliotheksgeschichte/A Book in Hand. German-Scandinavian Book and Library History (Berlin, 2022).In media history, Eighteenth-Century Periodicals as Agents of Change (E. Krefting et al. (eds), 2015) explores Northern European journals’ and newspapers’ contributions to changes in freedom of speech and dissemination of texts and ideas. Two articles provide overviews of serial fiction (A. Nøding, 2017) and the history of the inherently transnational publication form that was the moral weekly (Krefting and Nøding, 2020), both regarding Denmark and Norway. Censorship, freedom of the press and citizenship have attracted many interdisciplinary studies, of which the volume Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution (P. Ihalainen et al. (eds), 2011) is an excellent example. Ulrik Langen and Frederik Stjernfelt have adapted their monumental achievement, the two-volume study Grov konfækt (2020), into an international edition: The World’s First Full Press Freedom. The Radical Experiment of Denmark‒Norway 1770‒73 (2022). Moreover, Thomas Munck has made important contributions on this topic, combining it with media, print and political history in Denmark and most recently across major parts of Europe (Conflict and Enlightenment, 2019).
Among works in Scandinavian languages, an edited volume on Scandinavian book history is currently in-press and will be presenting a cross-section of the field today.
5 M. Simonsen et al.(eds), Boghistorie i Skandinavien, will be published in Aarhus in 2023. A similar collection of articles covering the period 1500–1985 was published in the yearbook
Lýchnos (K. Lundblad and H. Horstbøll (eds), 2010). The most recent volume covering the hand press period in Norway (and to some extent Scandinavia) is
Litterære verdensborgere: Transnasjonale perspektiver på norsk bokhistorie 1519–1850 (A. M. B. Bjørkøy
et al. (eds), 2019). The thematic scope and period, as well as a handful of the contributors, correspond with the present volume, but the chapters are on other cases and sources.
The studies mentioned above present a wide range of understudied publications and writers and unveil the important complexities of a widening, loud, theatrical, engaged, entertaining and academic public sphere, constantly negotiating the political, technological and economic framework of its reading and writing. New online bibliographies and digitised material enable further studies of these topics and allow for easy access to the material at home and abroad (see ‘Recommended online resources’ in the Bibliography). As editors, we are delighted to add to this scholarship by presenting twelve chapters and an afterword, written by fifteen contributors in four countries, collectively changing the image by shedding new light on and exploring the complexities of print and reading from lesser-known points of view.