From Page to Public Opinion: Sweden in Commonwealth Print Culture

Föreläsningen ges på engelska.

Before newspapers and “breaking news,' people in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth learned about the world through print and through the habit of collecting knowledge at home. This talk looks at how Sweden appeared in that information landscape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how readers turned what they read into material they could share, discuss, and keep.

We'll encounter Sweden in well-known works such as Marcin Bielski's chronicles (1564), which offered readers broad frameworks for understanding northern kingdoms and politics. We'll also consider more immediate, event-driven writing from crisis years, including much les known Jan Kraiński's pamphlet printed in London (1661), which shows how Commonwealth affairs could be presented for audiences far beyond the Baltic region. Finally, we'll look at the domestic archives of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where noble households kept silva rerum notebooks - compilations that copied, excerpted, and reorganised texts from many sources, including sermons, letters, reports, poems, and printed books.

The emphasis is less on individual authors and more on publishing and reading practices: who had access to these texts, how they circulated, how they were read and re-used, and how compiling and re-copying helped certain narratives persist.