Histories of reading and writing

The first three chapters deal with the shift in religious practices made possible by print in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Karen Skovgaard-Petersen makes Archbishop Erik Valkendorf (c. 1465–1522) a pivotal case of early transnational exchange in Norwegian print history by examining his two liturgical books from 1519, commissioned from abroad for distribution across Norway. However, his lasting reputation was due to a manuscript (an account of Finnmark sent to the Pope), and his effort to consolidate the country’s religious practices was soon obliterated following the 1537 Reformation.2 On the early attempts of the Church to consolidate worship practices through print, see E. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 173ff. It introduced Martin Luther’s Kleiner Katechismus (1529), which was to be translated, commented and reprinted several hundred times. In Denmark–Norway the Lutheran catechism made up the core curriculum for children to learn by heart for the next four hundred years.3 Cf. A. Pettegree, Brand Luther (New York, 2016) and Ch. Appel and M. Fink-Jensen (eds), Religious Reading in the Lutheran North (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011). Jon Haarberg argues the particularly strong impact this work had on education, literacy, printing practices and language in Norway. The positive consequences in these areas, neglected in Brad S. Gregory’s study of the Reformation, are remarkable.4 B. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge, MA, 2012). By contrast, Jonas Thorup Thomsen explores the conflict of old and new religious ideas at the threshold of the Enlightenment. The Dano-Norwegian theologian Johan Brunsmand’s best-selling book on demonic possessions, Køge Huskors (1674), engaged in a transnational and trans-confessional debate on the reality of demonic possession. It took centre stage in a court case against two Danish ‘possessed’, as late as in 1696. They were convicted of modelling their ‘possessions’ on stories from the book.

The seventeenth century saw the introduction of new media, print and reading practices in Denmark–Norway in the form of newspapers and periodicals. Following the publication of newspapers in prose and verse, in French, German and Danish, the first periodical (from 1720) was typically addressed to learned men: the literary review journal Nye Tidender om lærde Sager (Copenhagen). Jens Bjerring-Hansen discusses how Lübeck’s Nova literaria from around 1700, along with later literary journals – the multi-language Nordia from around 1800 and the Danish-language Det nittende Aarhundrede (The nineteenth century) from just before 1900 – aimed to form a pan-Scandinavian literary field. While facilitating intellectual and aesthetic exchange across regional borders, they had to navigate increasingly vernacular language systems.

The laws and regulations of the absolutist regime in the dual monarchy of Denmark–Norway naturally dominated the politics of printing. Ulrik Langen, Jonas Nordin and Frederik Stjernfelt explore the unprecedented (but short-lived) shift from pre-censorship to freedom of print in the 1760s and 1770s in both Sweden and Denmark–Norway. In spite of the similarities of these events, taking place at roughly the same time, there was a striking lack of interconnections between the two realms at the time. The media revolution that followed in both states had a profound impact on public discourse, the public sphere and the expansion of readerships.5 H. Horstbøll et al., Grov konfækt (Copenhagen, 2020); E. Krefting et al., En pokkers skrivesyge (Oslo, 2014). The two Scandinavian examples place other early experiences of freedom of the press in perspective, inviting new insights into their institutional and intellectual preconditions, the consequences for the public discourse and the effects on the market conditions of printers and publishers.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, reading communities and their material had broadened substantially in every way. Karin Kukkonen maps the multilingual book collections in Norway, from commercial lending libraries to school libraries and bourgeois reading societies. She discusses how they contributed to the circulation of books and ideas, for education and entertainment, and helped shape and cater to new literary citizens, what Reinhard Wittmann calls ‘the institutionalised reader’ of the bourgeoisie.6 R. Wittmann, ‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, in G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, 1999). A catalogue of these libraries’ holdings, compiled by K. Kukkonen and M. Sjelmo, is freely available for search: Literary Fiction in Norwegian Lending Libraries in the 18th Century, <www.nb.no/forskning/skjonnlitteratur-i-norske-bibliotek-pa-1700-tallet> (2019). Drawing on examples ranging from Richardson’s Pamela and Goethe’s Werther to the German ‘Geheimbundroman’, she demonstrates how the practises of reading and performance that emerged around these book collections contributed to the development of the public sphere in Norway and of modern Scandinavian literature. One of the most popular works amongst bourgeois readers was Jean-François Marmontel’s moral tales, Contes moraux (1761). Aina Nøding shows that the reception of Contes moraux followed two diverging paths in Denmark–Norway: one as oeuvre in French volumes, the other as individual stories, scattered in newspapers and periodicals in Danish and adapted to changing readerships and literary fashions. In identifying a French ‘pirate’ edition in Copen­hagen (previously thought to be British), she argues for rethinking the binary centre–periphery model of the book market in light of the transnational activities of a Dano-Swiss printer-bookseller.7 S. Shep. 2015. ‘Books in Global Perspectives’, in L. Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to History of the Book (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 53–70.

While moral tales became the height of fashion, so did ‘immoral’ ones, as cloaks for addressing topics that were not to be approached publicly. Ellen Krefting presents the genre of ‘secret history’ as it was imported, read and practised in Denmark–Norway. These stories and anecdotes, circulating in manuscripts and print, claimed to present ‘alternative facts’ of both past and present political realities by focusing on the private conduct of royals and other people of influence rather than on public affairs.8 E. T. Bannet, ‘“Secret History” […]’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 68:1 (2005), 375–96; R. Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725 (London, 2009); R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, NY; London, 1996); S. Burrows, The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, vol. 2 (New York/London, 2018). The anti-absolutist discourse embedded in the genre helped shape literary citizenship and political discourse, Krefting argues, as the revelations of the ‘scandalous’ behaviour of people in power could serve to illustrate the weaknesses of absolute monarchy as a political system. While parallel media practices (of print, manuscript and orality) were of course common in the early days of print history (cf. Haarberg and Skovgaard-Petersen in this volume), they remained – and remain – strategies for effective circulation of texts and knowledge. Thor Inge Rørvik demonstrates this with regard to university lectures in philosophy held in Scandinavia 1790–1850. The period saw preferred teaching methods alternate between textbooks, lectures and dictates, the last of the three making the students’ comprehensive manuscripts their curriculum, suitable for circulation. This process of listening, writing, (re)reading and circulating played a crucial role in the students’ attainment of an academic literary citizenship.

While the cases presented here often discuss the import and adaptation of ideas, genres and technologies, Scandinavia as an object of interest in its own right or as a source of texts and inspiration is apparent throughout the period. The wide appeal of Valkendorf’s description of Finnmark or the international reception of Erik Pontoppidan’s The Natural History of Norway (1752/3) and its tales of mermaids and sea monsters are testament to a continuous interest in the nature and culture of the exotic North.9 See J. Raven’s chapter in the upcoming volume Exchanging Knowledge in the present series Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World. Moreover, Norwegian politics captured the interest of the world through numerous translations of its 1814 constitution, in Britain termed ‘the most democratic constitution in Europe’.10 R. G. Latham, Norway and the Norwegians (London, 1840). Ruth Hemstad shows how it became the most famous and broadly distributed Norwegian print for the better part of the century. In addition, it served as a political argument and inspiring model in several countries and regions, not least in German-speaking areas. At home the constitution remained the pivotal national document and symbol, printed in numerous versions and formats for domestic readers, thus fostering social and national identities. By mapping the geography of the printed Norwegian constitution, this chapter demonstrates how political ideas, even in the form of a legal text, could travel far beyond borders and time, in a variety of printed formats, and adapt to different political discourses – even from periphery to centre (see also Nøding’s chapter).11 K. Gammelgaard and E. Holmøyvik (eds), Writing Democracy: The Norwegian Constitution 1814–2014 (New York/Oxford, 2014); M. J. Prutsch, Making Sense of Constitutional Monarchism in Post-Napoleonic France (London, 2012), R. Hemstad (ed.), ‘Like a Herd of Cattle’. Parliamentary and Public Debates Regarding the Cession of Norway, 1813–1814 (Oslo, 2014).

The final two chapters centre on periodicals from the 1830s and 1840s and their significance in enabling various readerships to acquire know­ledge of distant lands and peoples, presented in texts and images. While Bjerring-Hansen in his chapter depicts the learned sphere of high-end cultural periodicals, Janicke S. Kaasa explores the staging of the child reader as part of a worldwide network of religious activity in Missionsblad for Børn (Missionary magazine for children, 1847–8), one of Norway’s first children’s magazines affiliated with Christian missionary work. Missionary periodicals made up a substantial part of reading material offered to children (see Haarberg’s chapter), drew both inspiration and actual material from foreign models, and forged an active and pragmatic role for the child reader as world citizen, heavenly citizen and literary citizen.12 See M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader (Cambridge, 2011). Similarly, Iver Tangen Stensrud’s chapter is devoted to the Norwegian illustrated press of the 1830s. Stensrud examines the transnational ‘social geography’13 A. Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998). of the periodical Skilling-Magazin, which was part of a network of European ‘Shilling/Penny magazines’. While tracing the exchange and adaptations of texts and images with contemporary magazines, Stensrud furthermore highlights Skilling-Magazin’s connections to earlier forms of publishing, placing it at a historical and geographical crossroads between Enlightenment and nineteenth-century mass publishing.

In his afterword, co-editor of the series Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World James Raven provides perspectives on the Scandinavian cases presented here. He places the volume and its findings within the larger context of modern book history and practices of ‘literary citizenship’, highlighting the academic potential of the term in this field. Due to linguistic barriers and perhaps the image of Scandinavia as mysterious and peripheral, the region’s texts and people have often remained inaccessible to foreign scholars with an interest in moving books and ideas. Since an international, comprehensive and openly shared platform for bibliography or online books and periodicals is still some way off, it takes the effort of scholars to connect the dots. This book is an attempt to do so, pointing to new ways of doing it, relevant beyond a Scandinavian context. We hope the windows opened here onto a few of the writers, readers and publications from Scandinavian hand presses will bring new perspectives and answers – as well as intriguing questions.