Stockholm university
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Karin Sennefelt

About me

I am a cultural and social historian of early modern Europe with an emphasis on the history of the everyday, spatial practices, material culture and the body. To this I am interested in cultural and social theory and the development of historical methodology.

My recent work studies the significance of corporeal religious experience for understanding how the early modern world worked. Forthcoming in 2025 are two monographs: The Word made Flesh: Lutheran Bodies, 1600–1720 (Routledge) and Existenstialism för 1600-talsmänniskor (Existentialism for seventeenth-century people, Natur & Kultur).

In 2016-2018, I was coordinator of the Faculty of Humanties Doctoral School on Corporeality in Theory and Practice.

In 2017-2019, I chaired the Swedish Research Council's review panel HS-I for Historical disciplines and archaeology.

Starting in 2022, I am member of the Scientific Council for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Swedish Research Council.

Member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities since 2023.

In previous projects I have studied visual culture of the Swedish estate society, protest, masculinity and political culture in eighteenth-century Sweden, and the social processes of identification in Sweden and early America c. 1650–1850.

Research

The Word made Flesh: the Body in Protestant Culture, c. 1600–1750

The purpose of the project is to study the connection between religion and the lived-in-body between 1600 and 1750. We intend to examine how the early modern religious world-view influenced the body, and how the body in turn shaped religious experience. The body was involved in all kinds of existential conflicts in religious life: between good and evil, life and death, the body could be fallen or redeemed. Through three separate case studies on the influence of the word of God on the body, on the somatic and emotional reactions to sin, and on the body as the teller of truth, it will be possible to reach an understanding of a lay embodiment of Protestantism. Our focus on the living body leads to an investigation of sources of power, as they were utilized by ordinary people: bodies laid claims to truth, spiritual connectedness and transcendence in a way that words did not. In so doing, corporeal experience shaped not only religious and emotional practice, but understanding of the world and how it worked.

 

2016-2019, funded by the Swedish Research Council

Karin Sennefelt (PI), Department of History, Stockholm University

Anton Runesson, Department of History, Stockholm University

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Profetisk politik i Sverige 1600-1720

    2021. Sennefelt Karin. Historisk Tidskrift (S) 141 (2), 202-234

    Article

    Uppsatsen tar ett samlat grepp om en forskningsinriktning som tidigare tenderat att belysa enskilda personer, nämligen de politiska budskap som kom till uttryck i profetiska utsagor och andlig kommunikation i Sverige mellan 1600 och 1720. Den belyser särskilt den folkliga religiositetens politiska anspråk, och visar hur oro för krig, kritik mot adeln och stöd för de fattiga var viktiga element. Genom en kartläggning av dessa fenomen under perioden framgår hur det andligas närvaro och påverkan på världen, såsom den uppfattades i sin samtid, varierat över tid och i samverkan med existentiella kriser som utspelat sig på jorden. Tillsammans gör detta att det sakrala fick en starkt samhällskritisk potential.

    Read more about Profetisk politik i Sverige 1600-1720

  • A Pathology of Sacral Kinghsip

    2020. Sennefelt Karin. Past & Present

    Article

    This article uses the ailing body of King Charles XI of Sweden (1655–97) to explore how the king’s physicality was intimately connected not only with the nature of his kingship, its sacredness and legitimacy, but also with his personal faith. It shows that, while Charles’s body was exceptional in that it was the body of the king, at the same time it was reacting to illness and sin like any other Lutheran body. It also projected the body’s capabilities on a larger scale. In particular, the lethal putrefaction inside his belly came to play an important part in interpreting his kingship. These ideas had an impact that extended from his own stomach pains, via the anxiety of his suffering people, to the ending of absolute rule. By following the analogies that contemporaries drew from the king’s autopsy and his physicians’ notes, from sermons, official proclamations, diaries, weather reports, poetry, correspondence and prophecies, this article uncovers the powerful resemblances that connected Charles’s body with nature, his people, the realm and the divine. In the end it was the gathering of the cosmos into Charles’s body that paved the way for direct criticism of absolutism itself.

    Read more about A Pathology of Sacral Kinghsip

  • Absent Men and Tainted Houses

    2019. Karin Sennefelt. Gendering Spaces in European Towns, 1500-1914, 168-183

    Chapter

    The chapter delves into an exceptional court case about the pulling down of 13 houses in Stockholm in 1719 to explore the multifaceted interpretations of space within a local community. Through a gendered notion of place, crowd attacks on the homes of ‘suspicious women’ were made possible: the space of a house was equated with those who dwelled within it and husbandless women perceived as immoral tainted a whole house. The crowd’s entrance into these spaces functioned as a form of reinstating of patriarchal authority in the dwellings of suspicious women.

    Of interest here are the reactions of the women attacked during the riots. Just as the crowd ransacked houses of personal possessions, the victims made great attempts to regain their possessions as a way of recreating their positions within the local community. Objects built narratives of good housekeepers, dutiful wives and mothers, and self-sufficient members of society. The virtue of these women was placed in their possessions; a looting crowd had displaced it. Taking things back was a way of replacing virtue. Metaphorically, by means of sheets, pots and tables, notions of identity came full circle and returned to the women.

    Read more about Absent Men and Tainted Houses

  • Young man, find your fortune

    2019. Karin Sennefelt. Scandinavian Journal of History

    Article

    This article uses social practices to better understand the interrelations between a social ideology that decried aspiration and the practices of the young men bettering their lot in life when entering the Stockholm guilds. The path into guild membership is investigated regarding the inclusion of would-be members, their social networks, the materiality of documentation and the ideas, symbols and aspirations expressed in the process. The article shows that transition from one social position to another was laden with positive value and symbolism, and that this was underscored with the help of scores of participants apart from the would-be apprentice himself. These young men held a liminal position in society, but one that was understood as largely positive. They were deeply embedded within a local community, but with a direction in life, unmarried, skilled or wanting to acquire skill. While practices of social mobility opened paths for these young men, they also contained social order and the mobility of others.

    Read more about Young man, find your fortune

  • A discerning eye

    2015. Karin Sennefelt. Cultural and social history 12 (2), 179-195

    Article

    Starting from the significance of the visual for the creation of distinction in early modern Europe, the article investigates the everyday practices of eyeing, inspecting and scrutinizing other people's dress and personal possessions. In that, it addresses the ways of seeing (rather than the ways of displaying) that were at the root of managing appearances and that formed a significant part of the urban experience. Cases are drawn from everyday visual practices among the lower orders in early modern Stockholm. The article argues that a discerning eye that inspected people and their material goods played an integral part in distinguishing respectability and honour in the city a way of seeing that was very different from the overview and order sought by city authorities. Therefore, these visual and material practices were part of ordering the social in the city.

    Read more about A discerning eye

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