This thesis deals with the language and image of late Swedish absolutism. The sources used are royal medals and royal speeches and ceremonies at the Diets. The images are analysed as linguistic constructions, made up by a framework of concepts articulated in words, symbols and ceremonies around the kings.

The essential argument is that during the late eighteenth century, European absolute monarchy suffered a severe legitimation crisis that had its origins at a discursive level. The political discourse changed: old conceptions and attitudes were revised, and new ones were established. Faced with these changing prerequisites for legitimacy, the absolute monarchs had increasing difficulty to master the political vocabulary; as traditional political concepts successively lost their potential to legitimise, the new concepts increasingly challenged the existing political order.

The investigation consists of three analytical parts. The first part focuses on the language and image of Gustaf III. The second part focuses on the reception of the royal images and the discursive expressions among the subjects during the entire period (1772–1809). Attention is also paid to the repressive machinery of Gustavian absolutism as an important part of the struggle for discursive authority. The third part focuses on the language and image of Gustaf IV Adolf.

The results show fundamental changes over time in the struggles for legitimacy, referred to as a movement from a primarily communicative strategy during the reign of Gustaf III, to a primarily repressive strategy during the reign of Gustaf IV Adolf. These changes are connected to the escalating discursive conflicts shown in the intermediate part, and are essential for the understanding of the final fall of Swedish absolutism in 1809.

This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish RoyalPatriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantagesand disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design andrealization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social orderand sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as thetrappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surroundingearly modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readilyvisualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiationidentified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notionsof hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making thesocial order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

In this volume, three researchers engage with the practices of gender and the making of difference between men and women, between the feminine and the masculine, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Sweden. Economic historian Hedvig Widmalm studies the intricate relationship between gender ideals as they were phrased in conduct books and the performative realities of every-day-life as they appear in the correspondences between husbands and wives. Historian Jessica Karlsson approaches work and the performative practices of time-use in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century gentry households. Who did what? Women or men? Young or old? High or low? Married or unmarried? Finally, textile historian Hanna Bäckström enters into the world of handiwork among mid-nineteenth century Swedish gentry women, and the performative nature of knitting, shaping ideals of social status as well as notions of feminine virtues.

The three masters’ theses upon which the three chapters presented in this volume are based, were all written within the Faculty funded masters’ research node Early Modern Cultural History at Uppsala University.

The interplay between clothes and social order in early modern societies is well known. Differences in dress and hierarchies of appearances coincided with and structured social hierarchies and notions of difference. However, clothes did not merely reproduce set social patterns. They were agents of change, actively used by individuals and groups to make claims and transgress formal boundaries. This was not least the case for the revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth century, the period in focus of this book. Unlike previous studies on sumptuary laws and other legal actions taken by governments and formal power holders, this book offers a broader and more everyday perspective on late eighteenth-century sartorial discourse. In 1773, there was a publicly announced prize competition on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress in Sweden. Departing from the submitted replies, the study opens a window onto the sartorial world. Several fields of cultural history are brought together: social culture in terms of order, hierarchies, and notions of difference; sartorial culture with contemporary views on dress and moral aspects of sartorial practices; and visual culture in terms of sartorial means of making a difference and the emphasis on the necessity of a legible social order.

“In the beginning”, states the author of an essay that was submitted to the Royal Patriotic Society in Stockholm in 1773, “clothes were used for two reasons: to cover the body, and to keep the body from cold and heat”. With time, “and the propagation of mankind”, a third reason was added: “to ornate the body” according to needs, means and function. Some “performed rougher and heavier work”, others had less heavy, less rough work, and others still “were set to advise and rule” the rest. All was well. But as societies continued to grow, “Amor Sclereratus habendi” – the accursed love of possessing – took hold of mankind, and an additional two, previously unknown, reasons for the use of clothes came into being: “Pride and Self-Indulgence”. Everything changed; everything once “natural” was perverted by the omnipresent desire for “all things foreign”, for “more”, for “tastier”, for “grander”.

The tone is righteous, the address is condemnatory, and the rhetoric is almost Biblical, with a familiar narrative of a Genesis, an original Sin, and a Fall. The author provides a condensed outline of the sartorial practices: the basic instrumentality of dress (to cover and keep warm), but also the social aspects with the interaction between social creatures, presenting themselves and making claims through decorations, and the resulting complexity and conflicts between the regulating norms and the communicative practices at play, with people making claims and forming the self through consumption and sartorial practices.

The essay was one of 70 of its kind submitted in response to the question on the “advantages and disadvantages” of a national dress posed by the Royal Patriotic Society earlier that year, inviting the public to submit their replies, promising a gold medal of 30 ducats’ weight to the winner. Departing from these essays, and the rather unique insights into early modern sartorial practices that they provide, my paper focuses on the views of “correctness” and “incorrectness” in sartorial matters, and – more specifically – the different “morals” in play, structuring and governing the sartorial proposals in the essays, such as economic morals (state finances, domestic production), social morals (to dress according to station, and the fear of social confusion), religious morals (with the divine scheme, and godly versus ungodly behaviour), and national morals (with a Swedish way of things, contrasted to foreign models).