Can a silk glove be an expression of power? In this carefully curated volume, internationally renowned historians have come together to explore the interconnected perspectives of gender, materiality, and politics. As the authors elaborate on these topics, the volume offers contributions covering a period from the sixteenth century to the present day, investigating political culture and diplomacy, women’s work and assets, sexuality and queer perspectives, and the role of materiality and objects.

The volume is dedicated to the historian Svante Norrhem, who has published extensively on these topics and contributed invaluable empirical findings and methodological advances throughout his career. In his work, as in this volume, the detail of power is teased out through groundbreaking ideas and innovative research.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Women, work, and assets
  • 1. ‘Seamen, wives, and children who wished to go to Vaxholm’
    • What the Vasa sources can tell us about naval seamen’s wives in seventeenth-century society
  • 2. Hope for sale
    • Four women’s healing stories
  • 3. Revisiting Eva De la Gardie in the context of historical women’s agripreneurship
  • 4. Women’s work in Oxford and its invisibility, 1860–1914
  • 5. The wealth of the Swedish nobility
    • The case of never-married women, 1850–1910
  • 6. The emergence of women’s history
• Part II Sexuality and queer perspectives
  • 7. ‘Begetting offspring’
    • Marital duty and ambiguous gender in the early eighteenth century
  • 8. Into the wild and back again
    • Pornographic discourse and sexual liberation in Sweden, 1954–1986
• Part III Materiality in context
  • 9. Representing the Protestant International
    • The possessions of Jean Hoeufft, merchant banker
  • 10. Books and bookkeeping
    • Anna Margareta Wrangel and the Wrangel household in context
  • 11. The early modern glove, gender, and emotional objects
  • 12. The Swedish Men’s Fashion Council and ambivalence about fluctuations in fashion
• Part IV Diplomacy and political culture
  • 13. Women’s power in the creation of a European court
    • Duchess Anna of Courland
  • 14. Foreign information operations in Sweden, c.1725–1750
    • A media system approach
  • 15. A spy, a murder, and a portrait
  • 16. A good reputation, deep pockets, and the King’s subject
    • The qualities prized by a Swedish consul in the eighteenth century
  • 17. Between Britain and Prussia
    • Victoria, Princess Royal, German Empress and Queen of Prussia
  • 18. Subsidy treaties and troop contracts
    • A study in Europe’s transnational political culture
• Svante Norrhem, Skarhult Castle, and the power in disguise
• About the authors
• Tabula Gratulatoria