This thesis examines the heritagisation of military flags captured as war trophies by the Swedish army in 1657. It investigates the capture, use, and preservation of captured flags by which the Great Armoury in Stockholm emerged as a museum in the seventeenth century. The focus is on analysing assemblages of practices, objects, and humans in which the agency of the flags was created and performed. The aim is to examine the role of Early Modern military flags as agents in political, social, and cultural performances. The thesis furthermore aims to contribute to the history of Swedish museums and the international research on arsenals and armouries as Early Modern museums. Thus, the study is positioned at the intersection of heritage studies and art anthropology.

The overarching research question concerns the agency of the materiality of flags understood as the relational interaction between flags and humans. How were flags used for producing, enacting, and transforming cultural meanings and how, in turn, did flags become constituents of these meanings? The question “how” focuses the embodied practices performed in these processes. A group of Danish flags captured by the Swedish army in 1657 serves as an example. A biographical method is used to identify socio-material practices in which flags were agential. The theoretical framework draws on anthropological works on the agency of objects, which is understood as situational and relational; engendered in performances and assemblages together with humans, spaces, and sounds. 

The first empirical chapter investigates the agency of the material and visual properties of military flags. It is argued that materials and decorative techniques were agential in creating military hierarchies. It is also suggested that flags bearing the royal insignia were considered as “second bodies” of the king. The second chapter explores the role of flags in military rituals. It is argued that the rituals created the flags as “sacred objects” giving them agency to create or dissolve a military unit. The chapter also analyses the representation of flag-waving as a body technique in seventeenth-century illustrated instruction books. It discusses the flag’s agency in performing civility and manly virtues. The third chapter focuses the transition between the flags’ original use and their use as signs of victory. It investigates the techniques for transforming captured flags into trophies such as rituals of surrender and triumphal processions and argues that the flags thus enacted changes in political power. The fourth chapter identifies the practices of heritagisation engendered by the influx of captured flags to the Great Armoury in Stockholm. Analyses are made of the techniques of administration, preservation and display used for the collection. The fifth chapter investigates how heritage was enacted through the transfer of the collection of captured flags from the military armoury to Riddarholmskyrkan in 1817. It shows how the Early Modern heritage practices affected the use of the flags in the transition to the Modern period.

This thesis argues that the agency of military flags became manifest in the rituals, regulations, and instructions governing their uses. It furthermore argues that the capture and heritagisation of the studied flags were practices aimed at controlling this agency. Military flags that had been made war trophies thus played an important role in forming heritage practices in Early Modern Sweden.