Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as the editors of the Scandinavian Journal of History for their work and patience with our questions. This Special Issue has grown from an interdisciplinary workshop held at the University of Umeå in May 2013. In Sweden, we wish to thank the Umeå Graduate Centre for Gender Studies and the Umeå Group for Pre-Modern Studies for their financial support to make this workshop happen and to provide Jacqueline Van Gent with an ideal intellectual environment during her fellowship in Umeå to work on questions of emotions and gender. In Finland, we thank the Finnish Academy Center of Excellence in Historical Research, ‘Re-thinking Finland 1400–2000’, for support and encouragement to experiment with different approaches in historical research. In Australia, we thank the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions (1100–1800) and in particular its late Director Prof. Philippa Maddern (1954–2014), who saw the great potential for exploring emotions, gender and materiality from a historical perspective. This collection is devoted to Philippa’s memory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As the enthusiastic responses to Bynum, Christian Materiality, have demonstrated. See also Harvey, History and Material Culture; Findlen, Early Modern Things; Ago, Gusto for Things.

2 Scandinavian museums have had traditionally strong research departments, which makes such fruitful collaborations with university-based research easier. Recent collaborations include, for example, the conference ‘Visualising Difference: Objects, Space and Practice in Early Modern Europe’, held at Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, 10–12 October 2014. In 2012, a workshop on ‘Emotions and Material Objects’ was organized by Karin Sidén in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Passioner’ at the Nationalmuseum Stockholm.

3 Naum and Nordin, Scandinavian Colonialism.

4 Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.

5 See, for example, Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury; Buchli, The Material Culture Reader; Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods; Bennett and Joyce, Material Powers.

6 The classical study on early modern gift giving remains; Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. For a more recent work, see Heal, ‘Food Gifts’; Heal, The Power of Gifts.

7 On masculine self-fashioning in the Fugger family and material culture, see Rublack, ‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’.

8 See, for example, Bandlien, Strategies of Passion; Kietäväinen-Siren, Erityinen ystävyys; Liliequist, A History of Emotions, 1200–1800; and Salmi’s many pioneering works, e.g., Suudelma. There has also been a considerable interest on emotion in the context of the 20th-century wars; for example, Kivimäki and Tepora, ‘War of Hearts’; Ljunggren, Känslornas krig; Meinander, Suomi 1944.

9 Broomhall and Van Gent, ‘Material Culture as Power’.

10 Broomhall and Van Gent, Dynastic Colonialism.