Preliminary Programme

I will be discussing the importance of the informal network of the Norwegian Anker-family and
their relation to the state centre of Denmark-Norway and the neighbour
states, England and Sweden. The period in question is 1780-1820 when
several different incidents between the states mentioned occured, both
concerning politics and commerce. Representatives of the Anker-family were
represented in different offices in Copenhagen in addition to their top
elite situation in Christiania, Norway, mainly based on their wast wealth
of the timber commerce. They also had a wide network of informal links to
politicians and merchants in London, Gothenburg and Stockholm and used the
information gathered from this network to put pressure on Dano-Norwegian
authorities in several cases. I will discuss how this affected their own
concept of loyalty and identity - to the state, the nation, the region,
the trade and the family itself. (Show less)

At the end of the 18th century, it was obvious to most Swedish noblemen that a traditional noble identity with feudal characteristics could not any longer be seen as legitimate. Somewhat of an identity crisis followed.

The Swedish nobility adapted well to the dynamic growth and changing social conditions of the new bourgeois society, in a process of interchanging acculturation. The self-identities of noblemen were obviously influence by this process, but not in any uniform way; instead, four separate identities of a somewhat typical nature may be presented as representative of various families and groups within the 19th century Swedish aristocracy.

Though their social identity clearly was subjected to change, noble families in general preserved a sense of difference, and of superiority and dominance, through the whole of the 19th, and well into the 20th century. (Show less)

The internecine conflict between Jansenism and the Jesuit society, culminating in the dissolution of the Jesuits in 1773, was epitomized by a dispute over the validity of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. During the eighteenth-century, the Jesuits and the papacy embraced this particular form of piety, claiming that the Sacred Heart supported a distinctly hierarchical form of Catholicism. Jansenists, known for a more austere form of piety, rejected the Cult of the Sacred Heart, partly because of its particularly Baroque manifestations and partly due to the ultramontanist implications of the cult that clashed with Jansenist conciliarism.
The theological and ecclesiological disputes between Jansenists and Jesuits were also disputes about the Church as a “society of the faithful” that, in the Jansenist version, believed that individuals could discern truths from the dictates of their own hearts. Thus, eighteenth-century Jansenists created a Catholic theology of sociability in which the clergy acted as a cultural elite, mediating within the social body of the Church, rather than sitting as a hierarchical elite that dictated from a lofted position. The model for this type of religious sociability was that established by the “Little Church of Utrecht” in which the native Dutch clergy rejected the authority of the Papacy to interfere with the affairs of the local Dutch church.
This paper addresses the shifting identity of the clergy, from a hierarchical to a cultural elite, within eighteenth-century Jansenism. This cultural shift occurred within the milieu of an international Jansenist community centered in the Dutch city of Utrecht that dedicated itself to creating a form of religious sociability that became entirely compatible with the eighteenth-century public sphere. (Show less)

Periodical studies is a sub discipline that has its origins in literary studies and cultural history. As a consequence, research on this subject has mainly focused on either the poetical or the material aspect of the Journal, Bibliothèque, or Spectator. Recently, the Pierre Bayle Institute, a research group at the Radboud University Nijmegen, has undertaken a project of studying periodicals and editors from a network perspective. As this project is drawing to a close, some first conclusions can be given. It appears that the periodical press ‘breathes’ network in every step in its life cycle. From the editor’s desk to the coffee house where it is read, cultural networks are continuously being established. In my contribution to the ESSHC conference, I will present a picture of the eighteenth-century continental periodical press from a network-perspective. The main conclusions are:

1>> The content of any periodical publication is determined by the network from which it originates.
2>> The content of a periodical must likewise be understood as an attempt to establish or maintain a network among its intended audience.
3>> The success of a periodical depends on the editor’succes at activating a network.
4>> Around an editorial board or editor, circles of varying density can be descried, each helping the making of the periodical in a different way. The outer circle usually consists of the readers.
5>> In making a periodical, episode to episode, the editor(s) continuously stress the importance of the network towards their correspondents.
6>> In the journal itself, the readers are frequently reminded of being part of the network established by the journal.
7>> For the readers as well as for the journalists and editors, the ‘membership’ of the network is at least as important as the exchange of ideas that takes place in the periodical. (Show less)