Networks, Poetics and Multilingual Society in the Early Modern Baltic Sea Region (Library of the Written Word)

The literarisation of the early modern Baltic Sea region was a long and complex process with varying trajectories for different vernacular languages. This volume highlights the interaction of local social and cultural settings with wider political and confessional contexts. Using rarely examined materials, such as prints, 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 thirteen 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.

Contributors include: Eeva-Liisa Bastman, Kati Kallio, Suvi-Päivi Koski, Ulla Koskinen, Miia Kuha, Anu Lahtinen, Tuija Laine, Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, Ilkka Leskelä, Aivar Põldvee, Sanna Raninen, Kristiina Ross, Taarna Valtonen, and Kristi Viiding.

Kati Kallio, PhD is an Academy Research Fellow at the Finnish Literature Society (SKS). Her research has focused on genres, poetics, intertextuality and performance of Finnic oral poetry in different regions and historical contexts.

Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen is Secretary General of the Finnish Literature Society (SKS). His recent research centres on the relationship between oral and literary cultures, and the vernacular and Latin languages in early modern Baltic Sea region.

Anu Lahtinen is Professor of Finnish and Nordic History at the University of Helsinki. Her fields of expertise include social history and gender history, especially in the sixteenth century.

Ilkka Leskelä is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. He studies the fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Swedish-Hanseatic trade networks and shipping in the Baltic Sea region, combining data from customs registers and entrepreneurial family histories.