Lovely aticel

               Abstract

This article examines the meanings and contents given to the emotion called love in early modern Finnish culture. The study takes as its starting point three distinct love affairs found in the district court records. These cases violated the boundaries between the estates, for the women were of noble birth and the men came from peasant backgrounds. Historical love is here approached using the theories of Catherine A. Lutz, Carol & Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein. Following these scholars, love is seen as a cultural and social phenomenon, bound up with the culture and mentalities of the era. In early modern times marriage was the basis of society and promoted by both the state and the church. The church also set the norms for marital emotions: love meant the proper way to live in marriage; it was a metaphor of the marital relationship. The article concludes that the adoption of the Lutheran marriage ethic and its language were apparent in how the marital relationship was used as a goal and a measure of love between a man and a woman in extramarital affairs as well. Through religious views and images, love could also take on very noble connotations as a preordained fate or providence. However, alongside with these religious expressions there also existed a more secular and popular culture or discourse of love, which was composed of words, sexual congress and expressions of tenderness, gifts, the desire to be together and to take care of the well-being of the loved one. These discourses were shared at all levels of society, among nobles and servants, men and women, and they also connected Finland to the wider European context.

☆ This article is based on the writer's ongoing dissertation research “Peasant love. Marriage, the marital relationship and the meanings of love in the late-17th-century Finnish countryside”.article examines the meanings and contents given to the emotion called love in early modern Finnish culture. The study takes as its starting point three distinct love affairs found in the district court records. These cases violated the boundaries between the estates, for the women were of noble birth and the men came from peasant backgrounds. Historical love is here approached using the theories of Catherine A. Lutz, Carol & Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein. Following these scholars, love is seen as a cultural and social phenomenon, bound up with the culture and mentalities of the era. In early modern times marriage was the basis of society and promoted by both the state and the church. The church also set the norms for marital emotions: love meant the proper way to live in marriage; it was a metaphor of the marital relationship. The article concludes that the adoption of the Lutheran marriage ethic and its language were apparent in how the marital relationship was used as a goal and a measure of love between a man and a woman in extramarital affairs as well. Through religious views and images, love could also take on very noble connotations as a preordained fate or providence. However, alongside with these religious expressions there also existed a more secular and popular culture or discourse of love, which was composed of words, sexual congress and expressions of tenderness, gifts, the desire to be together and to take care of the well-being of the loved one. These discourses were shared at all levels of society, among nobles and servants, men and women, and they also connected Finland to the wider European context.

☆ This article is based on the writer's ongoing dissertation research “Peasant love. Marriage, the marital relationship and the meanings of love in the late-17th-century Finnish countryside”.