Family networks of scholarly households in Turku during the turn of the eighteenth-century

In this chapter, Robin Engblom studies early modern scholarly networks from a household and family perspective by exploring how knowledge, resources, and duties were distributed within and between households in scholarly families. Relying on correspondence as source material, Engblom's case study focuses on the family and household of the Swedish Bishop and Professor, Johannes Gezelius junior, with an emphasis on cooperation between households within larger family networks. The study employs the notion of the family university to explore what impact households had on shaping the social networks of scholarly families, how scholarly families employed their networks, and what explicit benefits the networks provided for the households of scholarly families. The chapter concludes that many of the features that characterised the family university, such as strategic marriages between professors' families and the forming of reciprocal relationships, were conceived within scholarly households. The household members thus played an important role in strengthening the ties between families. Social networks were often utilised, as within noble families, through cultural kinship to gain economic benefits or increase influence within professional institutions.