6533b855fe1ef96bd12b14e5

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Warm Water in my Heart - The Meanings of Love among the Finnish Country Population in the Second Half of the 17th Century

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This article examines the meanings and contents given to the emotion called love in early modern Finnish culture. The study takes as its starting point three distinct love affairs found in the district court records. These cases violated the boundaries between the estates, for the women were of noble birth and the men came from peasant backgrounds. Historical love is here approached using the theories of Catherine A. Lutz, Carol & Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein. Following these scholars, love is seen as a cultural and social phenomenon, bound up with the culture and mentalities of the era. In early modern times marriage was the basis of society and promoted by both the state and the church. The church also set the norms for marital emotions: love meant the proper way to live in marriage; it was a metaphor of the marital relationship. The article concludes that the adoption of the Lutheran marriage ethic and its language were apparent in how the marital relationship was used as a goal and a measure of...