Networks, Poetics and Multilingual Society in the Early Modern Baltic Sea Region

What is it about?

The creation of literature in vernacular languages was a long and complex process, which took diverse forms in different regions. The book ”Networks, Poetics and Multilingual Societies in the Early Modern Baltic Sea Region” highlights the interaction of local social and cultural settings with wider political and confessional contexts. With rarely examined materials, such as prints, chapbooks, court protocols, letters and manuscripts in Latin and a range of vernacular languages, including Estonian, Finnish, German, Ingrian, Karelian, Latvian, Lenape, Sami languages and Swedish, the authors chart the social and literary developments of the area. Wide networks of learned men and officials but also the number of native speakers in the clergy defined the ways the poetic resources of transnational and local literary and oral cultures benefited the nascent literatures. The whole book is published open access and is available also as a hard copy.

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Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Conventionally, the early modern Baltic Sea region has been analysed from the standpoint of national histories and separate disciplines, each with its own source types and research questions. The present book crosses the boundaries of modern nations and scholarly traditions by concentrating on sources at the intersection of different social networks and registers of expression. The eleven chapters bring together thirteen authors examining book history, letters and correspondence, vernacular poetics and the interfaces of oral and literary cultures in a set of studies covering the Baltic Sea region from early modern Livonia to the Swedish realm, especially present-day Estonia and Finland but reaching to Sweden, northern Germany, Latvia, Karelia, Lapland and even North American Swedish colonies.

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