Seventeenth-century Swedish sailors and their personal letters: evidence from the Prize Papers

Speaker: Margaret Hunt (Uppsala University)

IHR Seminar Series: British History in the Long 18th Century

Much has been written on sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century personal letters and their significance, especially for the history of emotions. However, a major problem for scholars is the fact that most extant personal letters from the early modern period, whatever the country or language, were penned or dictated by elites or sub-elites. Other people’s letters, if they ever existed, are now long gone. This presentation, by contrast, is based on approximately three dozen letters from non-elite Swedish sailors written or dictated in January of 1696 and recently discovered unopened in the records of the British High Court of Admiralty prize courts. Almost all the letters are addressed to family members, primarily wives (68% of the total), and they exhibit an extravagantly emotional style that suggests that strong marital affection was normative among seventeenth-century Swedish sailors, and quite likely other Swedish non-elites as well.

That having been said, while these letter-senders emphasize their love and affection for their wives, many of them devote much of their attention and, in some cases, the majority of the letter, to two other tasks: 1. conveying greetings to other friends, family members and notables; and 2. Sending greetings on behalf of other crew-members, most often, again, to these men’s wives. Taken together, well over one hundred additional people –or at least additional names-- jostle for emotional space in these letters ostensibly meant to be between a husband and his wife. This presentation asks a series of questions about what all this means. Why were these greetings accorded so much significance and what was their larger social or
political function if any? What do the letters tell us about the work of wives – given that most of these greetings were supposed to be delivered orally and in person by the woman who was the primary addressee of the letter? Are these letters best understood as part of an emotional regime (Reddy, 2001), an emotional community (Rosenwein, 2002), a feeling community (Pernau, 2017) or something else entirely? and finally, to what extent is the
Swedish case – with Sweden being a high-literacy, Protestant country with a significant seafaring tradition – generalizable to other parts of Northern and Northwestern Europe, including the British Isles?

• Margrit Pernau, ‘Feeling Communities: Introduction’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review 54, no. 1 (1 January 2017): 1–20.
• William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–45.