Svensk bröllopsdiktning under 1600- och 1700-talen. Renässansrepertoarernas framväxt, blomstring och tillbakagång

Abstract

The production of printed marriage poems (epithalamia) in 17th and 18th century Sweden was a comprehensive, and for almost a century also a highly esteemed, poetical activity. To date these Swedish epitha¬lamia have not attracted much scholarly attention, and that is why the study, after due intro¬ductions, instead of directly addressing the central questions, begins by featuring the genre’s quantitative as well as qualitative characteristics in the six periods selected for investigation: the years 1600-1660, the 1670’s, 1690’s, 1720’s, 1750’s and 1790’s; the number of printed epithalamia being respectively 150, 287, 417, 1.126, 983 and 149 in the main collection of casual poetry in the Uni–versity Library in Uppsala. Until 1660 most Swedish epithalamia were written in Latin, but around the middle of the century the ones written in the Swedish language began to increase. Now the poets also began to use the reper¬toires of the Neo-Latin epithalamia (from antique as well as from renaissance literature) instead of ones garnered from the Bible, previously seen as the only legitimate sources for poetry in the Swedish language. The present investigation targets these broadened repertoires, defined as a common heritage and shared property of all those having received the requisite education, repertoires which they—at least in the seventeenth century—so to say had on hand in their own mental larder. The principal interest of the investigation concerns these repertoires’ beginnings, heydays and declines, studied primarily by means of literary ana¬lyses and summing-ups of such analyses, focusing upon the changes in literary taste from Renaissance to Romanticism as, primarily, an effect of the gradual lapse of an oral orientation as well as the increasing attention being paid to the literacy of literature. Some of the new orientations can be observed as early as in the material from the 1690’s, but the greatest changes occur in the 1720’s, when old repertoires and new inventions are employed side by side. In the 1750’s, the repertoires of the old kinds are only sparsely taken in use, and in the 1790’s the authors of wedding poems in Sweden have seemingly altogether laid the old repertoires to rest.