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

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 people’s lives and work in an aristocratic sphere. It uses the De la Gardie bureaucracy’s meticulous records to full effect, charting servants’ experiences, learning, and agency. The unique collection of petitions provides an invaluable insight into how servants viewed their own backgrounds, personal predicaments, and hopes for the future, and how they negotiated their work and wage. It reveals the aristocratic estate organisation not only as a workplace, but also as a training ground where knowledge circulation was as fundamental as socialisation, social negotiation, and networking. At the same time, Serving Aristocracy exposes the flaws in the aristocratic mindset: the De la Gardies’ organisation was hierarchical, paternalistic, and feudal, and employees were forced to live at the mercy of their masters.

This is the ideal resource for students and scholars interested in knowledge, mobility, and agency in an early modern aristocratic work sphere.

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).