Academic households and families in early modern Northern Europe: an introduction

During the Middle Ages, Christian scholars were expected to spend their lives unwed and instead focus on educating the young. However, a gradual easing of prohibitions against the marriage of scholars started taking place in different areas of Europe in the late fourteenth century, continuing into the following centuries. By the end of the sixteenth century, a great number of professors were men with families, leading to them establishing their own households, and this was especially the case in the German-speaking Protestant areas of Europe and the Swedish realm from the first half of the seventeenth century. Academic Households in Early Modern Northern Europe explores academic households in early modern (c. sixteenth- to eighteenth-century) Northern Europe, and more precisely in the Protestant areas of the Holy Roman Empire and the Swedish realm. The authors concentrate on universities that took on the changed idealised understanding of professors and other members of academic communities as married men, providing studies on early modern academic families and households. They analyse how the professors and other members of the academic communities viewed family and household, what academic family life was like, and how the members of the academic community utilised family and the household to (academic) self-fashioning and building networks. Furthermore, they pay special attention to the wives and widows of professors and other academics and discuss the agency of these women.