The early modern Baltic Sea region was covered by established networks of commerce, learning and political power. Although the region as a whole was never under one political power, nor was it linguistically unified, it was tightly knit together by multilingual communication. The religious, cultural, political and social changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be separated from the deep communicative changes that took place at the time. Starting from the 1540s, print culture spread into the Baltics and Scandinavia. At the same time, the Reformation introduced the idea of creating a written language for various vernaculars, such as Estonian, Finnish, Sami, Latvian and Lithuanian.
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 volume 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.
The very first drafts of most of the chapters were presented at the conference ‘Networks, Poetics and Multilingual Society in the Early Modern Baltic Sea Region’ on 30–31 August 2018, where a range of historians, folklorists, literary scholars and linguists gathered to discuss the Reformation, book culture, letters, poems and manuscripts and the personal networks affecting these. We are grateful to the authors and other participants of the conference, who opened up new insights on the entanglements of elite and folk, ecclesiastical and secular and oral and literary cultures.
The current volume was edited as part of the project ‘Letters and Songs: Registers of Beliefs and Expressions in the Early Modern North’ led by Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and the postdoctoral project of Kati Kallio, both hosted by the Finnish Literature Society (SKS, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura) and funded by the Research Council of Finland 2015–2020. The project ‘Letters and Songs’ – researchers Eeva-Liisa Bastman, Kati Kallio, Anu Lahtinen, Ilkka Leskelä, and Ulla Koskinen – investigated cultural processes in the post- Reformation Baltic Sea region by analysing sociocultural networks and changes in registers of expression, renewing the understanding of the relationships between institutions of power and faith vis-á-vis local communities and belief systems. The core approach was the collaborative use of methods across the fields of cultural, social and economic history, folklore studies and ethnomusicology and literary studies. The scholars benefited from the use of diverse early modern source materials, such as collections of correspondence, early books and other prints, manuscripts, hymns and sermons in Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, German and Latin. The focus of the research was on the areas of modern Finland and Estonia although Sweden and other Baltic Sea regions were in various case studies and comparisons. The cultural nexus of elite and folk, ecclesiastical and secular and oral and literary cultures was analysed in a set of books and articles.1
E.g. Kati Kallio etc., Laulut ja kirjoitukset. Suullinen ja kirjallinen kulttuuri uuden ajan alun Suomessa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2017), https://doi.org./10.21435/skst.1427, see especially the English Summary, pp. 591–608. See also Chapter 1 in this volume.