Historisk tidskrift

Att kasta ut barnet med badvattnet

Arne Jarrick — 2024-11-27

1600-talets skolsystem tar form

Örjan Simonson — 2024-11-27

Om det administrativa arbetet bakom professuren i ekonomisk historia vid Stockholms högskola

Sven Hellroth — 2024-11-27

Kungarna på racketbanan

Isak Lidström — 2024-11-27

The kings of the early modern tennis court: Ball games, status, and early modern sportification in Sweden

In Sweden, the history of sport is a discipline that mainly focuses on the modern era. Sporting life in earlier times has mainly been studied by ethnologists interested in the popular games and competitions of agrarian society. This article focuses instead on real tennis, which was evidently aristocratic in nature and known for its importance in establishing the status of the royals and elites. From an international perspective, tennis under the Vasa dynasty in Sweden (1523–1654) was a peripheral offshoot of an early modern European sports culture. It was introduced at the Swedish royal court in the mid sixteenth century, at a time when Europe’s urban tennis culture had already reached its peak in Central Europe. Tennis’s emergence and development in Sweden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is described here in terms of an exclusionary process of sportification. It took the form of the institutionalisation of ball games associated with the royal court: the construction of special sports facilities, commercialisation, royal sportswear, and the introduction of sports-related occupations. In other words, it was a process of sportification for the absolute elite of society. Tennis culture in Sweden under the Vasa dynasty was not about the rationalisation of activities or involving as many people as possible to select talent and optimise sporting performance, as is the credo of modern sport. Rather, its driving force was to emphasise both the elites’ difference from their subjects and their affinity with similar elites elsewhere in Europe, achieved using consumption, exclusive habits, and codes of conduct.

The transition from agrarian society’s traditional sporting life to a modern culture of sport, which has been studied extensively in previous research, is not the whole answer when interpreting the tennis playing of the Vasa kings. Typologies of sport history tend to identify a number of characteristics of modern sport against which older forms of sport are measured. The result is history written backwards, with the sporting life of earlier times assumed to be a rudimentary form of modern sport, which in turn is the predetermined end point in the history of sport. This was not the case with tennis in early modern Sweden. This study shows that sporting life in the past must instead be studied in its particular sociocultural context, which was clearly different from that of modern society. It is also misleading to see sportification as a continual development from the Renaissance on, as the literature suggests. In fact, there were two separate processes of sportification, driven independently by different conditions in two distinct periods.

Fideikommiss som kulturarv

Magnus Bergman — 2024-11-27

Fideikommiss as cultural heritage: Arguments for prolonging Swedish fideikommiss, 1995–2006

Sweden is the only country in the world where the institution of fideikommiss, a form of entail, still exists. Like its equivalents elsewhere, the purpose of the Swedish fideikommiss was to keep a given property undivided by limiting its inheritance to a single heir in perpetuity. It has survived, despite coming under political attack in the nineteenth century and a law for its complete abolishment being in effect since 1964. One reason for its continued existence is five cases, between 1995 and 2006, where the validity of certain fideikommiss was extended by the government with reference to the protection of cultural heritage. It was deemed that to avoid an undesirable division of the properties in question, each of the five fideikommiss could be prolonged by one generation.

This article examines how the Swedish fideikommiss came to be regarded primarily as cultural heritage. What circumstances meant the fideikommiss could be considered cultural heritage? The background of the institution is outlined, followed by an examination of the legislative developments regarding the fideikommiss, the field of cultural heritage conservation, and the relationship between the two. This is followed by the particulars of how the fideikommiss was constructed as cultural heritage during the process of prolongation.

The connection between the fideikommiss and cultural heritage is shown to follow on the wider adoption of the concept in the late twentieth century, to the extent that the abolition of the fideikommiss itself came to be seen as problematic. The return to normal succession, and consequent inheritance by multiple heirs, risked splitting up large estates, which, from a cultural heritage point of view, were thought more valuable if kept intact. The prolongations of the fideikommiss were the result of a strong consensus about cultural heritage, an official heritage discourse, and the institution itself. Stakeholders generally agreed that the properties in question, their buildings, collections, and land, were cultural heritage of great significance, and the continued validity of the fideikommiss was an effective way to preserve them.

Arne Jarrick och sanningen

Johan Östling — 2024-11-27

Svar på genmälet till min kritiska granskning av kunskapshistoria

Arne Jarrick — 2024-11-27

Är svensk-judisk historieforskning fjättrad vid det förflutna?

Jens Carlesson Magalhães — 2024-11-27

Perspektiv på SVT:s Historien om Sverige

Anne Berg — 2024-11-27

Nationalism i Historien om Sverige

Samuel Edquist — 2024-11-27

Klass och sociala skillnader i Historien om Sverige

Emma Hilborn — 2024-11-27

Globala perspektiv på Historien om Sverige

Hanna Hodacs — 2024-11-27

Medan männen skapar en stormakt föder kvinnorna barn

Karin Hassan Jansson — 2024-11-27

Diskussionen om Historien om Sverige på Flashback

Jonas Lindström — 2024-11-27

Historien om Sverige för barn

Joel Rudnert — 2024-11-27

Historien om Sverige i skolan

Martin Stolare — 2024-11-27

Historien om Sverige – en historia i tiden?

Ulf Zander — 2024-11-27

Historiska förklaringar i Historien om Sverige

Andreas Åkerlund — 2024-11-27

Historien om Sverige – att förmedla tusentals år av historia i bokform

Emma Severinsson — 2024-11-27

Johan Stenfeldt, En global ideologihistoria: Från Konfucius till historiens slut (Lund: Studentlitteratur 2023). 163 s.

Nils Andersson — 2024-11-27

Bo Persson, En periferi i norr: En historia om Sverige från istid till tjugohundratal (Lund: Studentlitteratur 2023). 609 s.

Peter Olausson — 2024-11-27

Klas Wikström af Edholm, Människooffer i myt och minne: En studie av offerpraktiker i fornnordisk religion utifrån källtexter och arkeologiskt material (diss.), 474 s., och Klas Wikström af Edholm, Vikingatidens människooffer, 229 s.

Henrik Janson — 2024-11-27

Erik Pettersson, Drottning Margaretas dröm (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur 2023). 356 s.

Caroline Wilhelmsson — 2024-11-27

Ann-Catherine Lichtblau, Die Karl-Gustav-Kriege: Diskurs und Rezeption in der zeitgenössischen Publizistik (1657–1660) (Berlin: Lit Verlag 2023). 377 s.

Dorothée Goetze — 2024-11-27

My Hellsing & Johanna Ilmakunnas (red.), Shopping i Stockholm: Sociala praktiker på gatunivå, 1700–1850 (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag 2023). 382 s.

Hedvig Widmalm — 2024-11-27

Eleonor Marcussen, Acts of aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022). 363 s.

Therese Boje Mortensen — 2024-11-27

Henrik Berggren, Landet utanför: Sverige och kriget 1939–1940 (2018) 484 s; Landet utanför: Sverige och kriget 1940–1942 (2022) 486 s.; Landet utanför: Sverige och kriget 1943–1945 (2023) 455 s.

Magnus P. S. Persson — 2024-11-27

Li Bennich-Björkman, Bakom och bortom järnridån: De sovjetiska åren och frigörelsen i Baltikum och Ukraina (Stockholm: Appell förlag 2023). 446 s.

Yuliya Yurchuk — 2024-11-27

Mattis Bergwall, Per Wallin & Fredrik Hagelin, Rysslands militära fuck-ups (Stockholm: Bookmark förlag 2024). 327 s.

Måns Ahlstedt Åberg — 2024-11-27

Mattias Frihammar, Fredrik Krohn Andersson, Maria Wendt & Cecilia Åse, I kalla krigets spår: Hot, våld och skydd som kulturarv (Stockholm & Göteborg: Makadam 2023). 244 s.

Marie Cronqvist — 2024-11-27

Anmälan av böcker utgivna 2022

Bo Eriksson — 2024-11-27

Fientlig gästvänlighet

Wojtek Jezierski — 2024-11-27

Vilka frågor brottas historiker med?

Anne Berg — 2024-11-27