The research project ‘Early adopters of the Lutheran North. A new Nordic press history from the freedoms of print to the colporteur era, 1770–1860’, funded by the Ridderstad Foundation, covers the period from the early Nordic freedoms of press until the increasing freedom of religion established by the Danish liberal constitution of 1849 and the Swedish dissenter law of 1860. The study extends a larger research project in spe for the period 1700–1770 on ‘Generational Dissent’, which has emerged from archival findings over the years, and which has so-far taken form in a couple of pilot studies.
I argue that a generational perspective opens up to understand people who deviated from the official Lutheran faith – either by promoting alternative piety, or by disagreeing with faith, church, or religious authorities – in three new ways: 1) from their experiences of shifting conditions of being a dissenter, 2) from their perceptions of generational change, and 3) from their navigation of new media and its subsequent effects for forging social networks, both on a local level and across state borders. It thereby challenges three so-far dominating perspectives on religiously dissenting people: i) with point of departure in taxonomies coined by the established church authorities and not by the dissenters themselves (such as Pietists, Deists, Moravians, etc.); ii) with point of departure in distinctions deriving from sociology of religion of the late 19th and early 20th century – for example between movements and mystics – which neglects the vivid connections within early modern networks of religious dissenters across such divides, and iii) with point of departure in national frameworks, despite the transitive character of dissenting networks and communities.
My research within the history of religion is, for example, published in the volumes Religious Enlightenment in the Nordic Countries during the long eighteenth century. Reason and Orthodoxy (Lund/Manchester University Press, 2023), Samvete i Sverige. Om frihet och lydnad från medeltiden till idag (Nordic Academic Press, 2021), in two articles in the peer-review journal Pietismus und Neuzeit on Pietist conflicts (2021) and the pursuit of Dippelians (2024), as well as in my dissertation Toleransens gränser. Religionspolitiska dilemman i det tidiga 1700-talets Sverige och Europa (2017).
Claims on what is or should be private, and how it is violated or protected – by individuals, communities, laws, and institutions – is the essence of my second research branch.
While working on the limits of toleration for Pietist currents in 1720s Sweden, which leading politicians perceived as a threat to the unity of society, the many references to the private in these conflicts caught my attention. Pietist gatherings were called ‘private conventicles’, clergymen inspired by Pietist currents were accused of conducting ‘private teaching’, and Pietists’ deviant opinions were referred to as ‘private interpretation’. I was not satisfied with how current research explained these references as a collectivist stand against individualisation or pluralisation of spiritual life, even though this is part of the story. There was something else to go after here. Not least in the motivations to why something should be protected with reference to that it had taken place ‘in private’ or ‘privatim’. How could conversations be protected by being referred to as private, in this context and in the early modern period at large?
With this research approach I was recruited to a 3-year postdoc at the Centre of Excellence for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, in cooperation with the Danish Royal Academy – Architecture, Design, and Conservation. The Centre became my platform to conduct empirical research on early modern claims on what was private and how it should be protected. I have had the privilege to pursue this research in close collaboration with colleagues with expertise in architecture, legal history, theology, and computer science. The original idea to work on how private conversations were protected in early modern times resulted in the book chapter ”Talking in private – and keeping it private…” (Bloomsbury, 2022), as well as in the volume Tracing Private Conversations in Early Modern Europe… (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
My research indicates that people of early modern societies raised claims to protect notions of privacy without necessarily tying it to civil liberties or other terminological distinctions between the private and the public. Nevertheless – or perhaps therefore! – these examples put contemporary debates on privacy in perspective. My studies on the field promote the importance of some established forms to protect notions of privacy in early modern societies: norms about confidentiality in certain relations and settings, physical and psychosocial experiences of intrusion into the home, protection against exposure to the gaze of neighbours, and subsequently rumours, and the established norm that temptations and sins should remain private for the reason to maintain common morals. These motivations as to why notions of privacy should be protected may sound strange to us today. On the other hand, some of these aspects are today protected in legislations regulating privacy, drawing from the definitions that we have inherited from the implementations of the twelfth article of the UN Declaration on Human Rights (1948) and the eighth article of the European Convention (1950). These are links to a couple of my empirical case studies:
”The Establishment of the Police Office in mid-eighteenth-century Altona: new opportunities for privacy in transitional times?” (Urban History, 2023)
”Experiencing Intrusion: Smashed Windows as Violations of Privacy in the University Town of Helmstedt, 1684–1706” (Architectural Histories, 2023).
If we as historians want to influence how privacy policy is formed today, we need to contribute with meaningful definitions for how privacy is threatened. I have in different contexts argued that there is good reason to direct our gaze to the early modern period to discuss our contemporary issues on privacy. For decades – both in research and in society at large – the meaning of privacy has been formed by the strict distinctions between the public and the private that were normative in the post war era. Dominant theories by Jürgen Habermas (1962), Hannah Arendt (1951), Ernst Kantorowitz (1957), Erwin Goffman), Jürgen Habermas (1962) and Norbert Elias (1969) all presuppose a stable distinction between public and private spheres. Since the 1960s, however, these stable distinctions have been torn down by various forces such as political criticism, digitalization, and commercialization. To define situations where privacy is at stake today, legislators and policy-makers use more flexible concepts such as contextual integrity, rather than a clear-cut division between the public and the private. I have argued for how this nebulous situation shares something significant with early modern societies in a historiographical text that will be published in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Historical Privacy Studies (2025).
I am on the board of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Privacy Studies (DNRF138), with particular responsibility for the theme Urban Space. Since 2020 I am the editor-in-chief of the multidisciplinary journal 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I was review editor of Scandia: Journal for Historical Research from 2022:2 until 2025:1. In the fall of 2025, I am the guest editor of the Swedish Historisk Tidskrift, on the topic ‘Belief’.