1st Edition

Serving Aristocracy Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community

By Anna Nilsson Hammar, Svante Norrhem Copyright 2025
208 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

208 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Serving Aristocracy is the history of social negotiation and mobility in an early modern knowledge community, centred on the aristocratic De la Gardie family and their sphere of manors and estates in seventeenth-century Sweden. Focusing on underprivileged women and men and the knowledge community that shaped their interactions, social negotiations, and mobility, this book documents ordinary... Read more

Introduction

1 The De la Gardie sphere in context: Workplaces, palaces, and estates

2 Negotiating worth: Petitions, back pay, and benefits

3 Cogs in the wheel: Bureaucracy, administration, and the organization of knowledge

4 Know your place: Rules, resistance, and the materiality of hierarchies

5 For future betterment: Learning, expertise, and the art of planning

6 The mobility of servants: Networks and knowledge

7 Life in an early modern knowledge community: Concluding remarks

Biography

Anna Nilsson Hammar is Researcher in History at Lund University. She is the author and editor of several books and articles on the history of knowledge, early modern history, and everyday life, among them Servants as Creditors: Navigating the Moral Economy of an Early Modern Aristocratic Household (2022).

Svante Norrhem is Associate Professor of History at Lund University. He is the author of several books and articles on early modern gender history, diplomacy, and servants, among them Knowing How: Estate Management, Practical Knowledge, and Agency Among Aristocratic Women in Early Modern Sweden (2023).