Serving Aristocracy: Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community

Serving Aristocracy is the history of social negotiation and mobility in an early modern knowledge community, centred on the aristocratic De la Gardie family and their sphere of manors and estates in seventeenth-century Sweden.

Focusing on underprivileged women and men and the knowledge community that shaped their interactions, social negotiations, and mobility, this book documents ordinary people’s lives and work in an aristocratic sphere. It uses the De la Gardie bureaucracy’s meticulous r...