”Astrilds wäsend/ Fröije slögder”

Om svensk bröllopsdiktning under 1600- och 1700-talen

Abstract

Swedish Epithalamia of the 17th and 18th Centuries

The background is my new book, Svensk bröllopsdiktning under 1600- och 1700-talen. Renässansrepertoarernas framväxt, blomstring och tillbakagång (Swedish Epithalamia of the 17th and 18th Centuries: The Rise, Flowering and Decline of the Renaissance Poetic Repertoires), Göteborg 2011 (LIR. Skrifter 1), 526 pp., the result of a research project which examines the adaptations of the repertoires of Neo-Latin Renaissance poetry in Swedish-language marriage poems. The principal interest of the investigation as a whole as well as of the present article resides in the use made of these repertoires, defined as the common heritage and shared property of all educated people in the period in question, repertoires to which everyone – at least in the seventeenth century – with a formal education had easy access. The transformations of the marriage poem as a genre during the transition from the Renaissance to Romanticism are sketched, and seen as the effect of the gradual lapse of the previous oral orientation as well as of the increasing attention paid to print and literacy. A crucial position is occupied by the 1720s when the prestigious old repertoires and various new inventions were employed side by side. By the middle of the 18th century the old repertoires were only rarely made use of; and by the end of the century the authors of Swedish-language marriage poems seem to have abandoned the old repertoires entirely.