In the project, we study the professoriate of the Royal Academy of Turku as a family network during the 17th century.
The Academy was established in 1640 in Turku on the southeastern coast of what is now Finland. Turku was one of Sweden’s largest and most significant towns in the 17th century. It engaged in international trade and was the centre of ecclesiastical, judicial, and secular power in the eastern part of the Swedish realm.
The Academy’s founding also led to a new group emerging within the town’s clergy: the professoriate. During the 17th century, the Academy’s disciples and those linked to the academic community by family ties dominated the professoriate. The Royal Academy of Turku was not an anomaly, for nepotism was common in early modern academic communities.
The project focuses on the concepts of family and family life that prevailed among the professoriate and familial networks within the Academy. We also study the role(s) of the professors’ spouses within the household, family networks, and, more generally, in the university town and prebend congregations the professors held not far from Turku. This project examines the academic community from the perspective of family history, while previous research has primarily focused on the history of sciences and ideas.
Research themes
Professors’ households, theoretical conceptions of the family, and family networks are studied from three viewpoints, which are as follows:
1) What kinds of conceptions the academic dissertations and other learned texts held about family and family relations? How did these conceptions manifest in the professoriate’s daily lives?
2) What were the broader family ties based on reciprocal assistance and aid (patron-client relationships)? How were these relationships created among family members? What effect did these networks have on the families and the Academy?
3) What position did professors’ wives have in the families and household? What role(s) did they play in establishing and sustaining the family connections?
The Jalmari Finne Foundation is funding and Ph.D. Mari Välimäki is leading this two-year project. MA Minna Vesa (University of Helsinki) and MA Robin Engblom (Åbo Akademi) are the researchers.
Academic Households in Early Modern Northern Europe
Projects main publication, Academic Households in Early Modern Northern Europe has been published by Routledge in the series Routledge Research in Early Modern History. You can order the edited volume here and read the chapter abstracts here.
Table of Contents
1. Academic Households and Families in Early Modern Northern Europe: An Introduction
Mari Välimäki, Minna Vesa, & Robin Engblom
Part 1: Family Ideals and Practices
2. Dissertations on Family and Marriage in the Seventeenth-Century Swedish Realm
Minna Vesa
3. Martin Luther’s Emotional Practices and Family Life in the Sixteenth-Century Wittenberg
Sini Mikkola
4. The Multifaceted Agency of Professors’ Wives in the Seventeenth-Century Turku
Mari Välimäki
5. The Agency of Lecturers’ Widows in the Late Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Vyborg
Miia Kuha
Part 2: Family Networks
6. Transfer and Management of Property in Marburg Professors’ Families in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Christina Stehling
7. Family Networks of Scholarly Households in Turku during the turn of the Eighteenth-Century
Robin Engblom
8. Godparenthood in Professorial Households in the Eighteenth-Century Uppsala
Gudrun Andersson
Part 3: Written and Material Self-Fashioning
9. Representing Family Relations through Occasional Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Turku
Eeva-Liisa Bastman & Sari Kivistö
10. Identity and Materiality in the Linnaeus Household in the Eighteenth-Century Uppsala
Annika Windahl Pontén
11. Objectified Cultural Capital and Self-fashioning in the Ekerman-Aurivillius Professorial Dynasty in Uppsala during the turn of the Nineteenth-Century
Hannes Eriksson