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Printing emerged more slowly in the Nordic region than in most parts of Europe. The first printing press in modern Latvia appeared in 1588; Estonia, Finland, and Norway would wait until the 1630s and 1640s for their first presses.[1] It was not until the seventeenth century that a provincial print trade of any significance would develop in Denmark and Sweden, the two main political powers that vied for supremacy in Scandinavia and the Baltic at the time. The seventeenth century can, in many respects, be considered an incunabula age for much of Nordic printing.

The chronology of the early spread of printing in the Nordic region is well established. The period between 1880 and 1950 saw the publication of national bibliographies and detailed book historical reference works for most Nordic countries.[2] These major studies are today still taken as the natural point of departure for Scandinavian book history, with the effect that the print culture of the Nordic region is often still approached through a national lens.[3] In this article, we propose to consider the development of printing throughout the entire Nordic region—Denmark, the Scandinavian peninsula, Iceland, Estonia, and Latvia—as a whole. This approach is motivated not least by the fact that in the early modern period, the Nordic region was effectively divided between the Crowns of Denmark‑Norway (which governed Iceland and parts of modern Sweden) and Sweden (which governed Finland, Estonia and, from 1621, most of modern Latvia). The Nordic region also shared a common position on the outer periphery of the European print world.[4] From the emergence of printing onwards, the heart of the European book trade was located in the great towns of the Holy Roman Empire, in Italy, Paris, Lyon, and the Low Countries. Some notable centres of print would decline over time (Venice) while others would rise (Amsterdam), but up to the end of the seventeenth century, it was still this zone on either side of the Rhine and Alps that set the standard for the development of print.[5]

The fact that the Nordic region was on the periphery of the European book trade does not mean that it should be regarded as a backwater, or as detached from developments at the European centre. On the contrary, close connections with other regions of Europe shaped the Nordic print world decisively. It is our aim in this article to chart the development of printing in the Nordic region along three lines, discussing what features it shared with all of Europe, what features were particular to peripheral regions of printing, and what features were uniquely Nordic. What emerges from this study is a clear picture of the universal characteristics of early printing, irrespective of geography, as well as a sense of the distinct combination of factors that united the print culture of Scandinavia and the Baltic. Altogether, this article makes a case for the importance of studying print culture from a comparative international perspective and offers broader conclusions on the critical interactions between print and periphery in early modern Europe.

Print and Patronage

The first printer of Latvia was the Fleming Nicolas Mollyn (c. 1550–1625). Active in Antwerp and Amsterdam during the turbulent years of the Dutch Revolt, Mollyn had a keen eye for opportunities abroad. He found one thanks to David Hilchen, the secretary of the city of Riga, who wished to establish a printing press in his city. With a formal invitation in hand, Mollyn arrived in Riga in the spring of 1588, where he would stay until his death in 1625.[6] In Riga, his career was entirely dependent on local institutions: the city council, the local church, and the school. After the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus conquered Riga in 1621, Mollyn served the new administration loyally too. Although these events took place in the late sixteenth century, almost a century‑and‑a‑half after the invention of the printing press, Mollyn’s story is characteristic of the spread of printing throughout Europe. From the days of Johannes Gutenberg onwards, the survival of print was based on the needs of institutional clients, while its geographical spread was reliant on the invitations and goodwill of elite patrons.

The rapid dissemination of the art of printing in the fifteenth century amazed contemporaries as much as later scholars.[7] Within 50 years, printing had appeared in over 200 locations in Europe. Listing these locations gives the misleading impression that the new industry was flourishing. The truth is that in most places that played host to a printing press in the fifteenth century, print was not sustainable; the standard experience of the pioneering generations of printers was bankruptcy. Itinerancy was more often a mark of failure than a mark of success. Printers moved on because they could not find the necessary critical mass of customers for their products. Itinerancy, in the first age of print, also reveals the widespread fascination with the new technology. Princes, bishops, monastic orders, town councils: none wished to miss out on the wonders of print. Setting up a local press was a question of prestige, rather than an attempt to run a prosperous commercial business. Many monasteries, including the Vadstena nunnery in Sweden, witnessed the foundation of a press in their grounds in the incunabula age for precisely this purpose.[8] None of the monastic presses lasted for many years.

Printers soon realized that their only chance of survival was in numbers, and they began to concentrate in the commercial metropolises of Europe that had previously been important centres of the manuscript book trade. Great cities like Paris, Venice, and Augsburg soon provided a competitive commercial marketplace, yet here, too, the most successful printers were those who catered to the church, the secular authorities, and universities. Institutional patronage remained the major driver of print throughout all of Europe. With the onset of the Reformation, this relationship was strengthened, as oversight over the press was tightened on all sides of the ecclesiastical divide; there was little chance of a printer setting up shop in a town without some involvement by the local bishop or council. To printers, however, this was not a disadvantage: greater oversight was often paired with more active patronage, which could only be beneficial for business. This was a period in which many authorities were making increased use of the press for their administration, while they were also sponsoring the publication of religious and pedagogical literature. Such sponsorship brought with it a number of economic benefits, which enabled printers to support themselves, even in towns that had previously been without a press, or that lacked the large populations of Europe’s great cities. In 1635, Peder Erickson Wald set up his print shop in Västerås, where he worked on behalf of the local bishop and gymnasium. In return for his services, he was granted free housing, exemption from tax, and 30 barrels of grain annually.[9] Similar bonuses were awarded in the Low Countries, Germany, France, and elsewhere in Scandinavia; often they included exemption from service in the militia, exemption from excise duties, and an annual salary, like the 50 thalers Christopher Reusner received as first printer of Tallinn (Reval).[10]

It is difficult to find an early press in the Nordic region that was not encouraged and sustained by patronage. The first presses of Estonia (Tartu/Dorpat, 1632) and Finland (Turku/Åbo, 1642) were associated with the newly founded Swedish universities in both cities. Riga’s second printing house (1675) was established by Johann Fischer, superintendent of Swedish Livonia; the second Finnish press in Turku (1669) was owned by Bishop Johannes Gezelius; and the third press, at Viborg (1689), was an initiative of Bishop Petrus Bång. In Norway, the first press (Christiania, 1643) arrived only at the urging of the minister Christen Steffensen Bang, who wished to have his multi‑volume Lutheran postil printed locally. The sole Icelandic press was set up and managed by local bishops well into the eighteenth century. In Sweden, the arrival of a printing press in virtually all towns was preceded by a formal invitation to the prospective printer from patrons or institutions, generally a local bishop or superintendent, or the town council. This was the case in Malmö, Västerås, Strängnäs, Kalmar, Linköping, Gothenburg, Lund, Visingborg, and Jönköping.

Even in Stockholm, which by the middle of the seventeenth century offered the same opportunities as a larger commercial market, the arrival of printers was closely tied to great patrons. All of the prominent Stockholm firms were invited to settle there by the Swedish monarch or figures associated with the court: Andreas Gutterwitz was invited over by King John III; Olufsson Helsing and Christopher Reusner by King Charles IX; Amund Grefwe by the prolific author and royal translator, Eric Schröder; Peter von Selow by Gustavus Adolphus; and Johannes Janssonius by Queen Christina. The situation in Denmark was nearly identical. Many of the early Danish printers arrived at the invitation of political, religious, or academic patrons, to produce specific works on commission. This remained the case outside of Copenhagen throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when presses appeared in Uraniborg, Ribe, Sorø, Schleswig, Odense, Aarhus, and Glückstadt.

The close relationship between the press and its patrons was reflected in the output of Europe’s printing houses. All over Europe, we can identify three major sectors of the print trade that underpinned its viability: printing for the church, printing for the state, and printing for educational institutions.[11] The reason that printers enjoyed taking on such work is no mystery: it was safe, often paid for up front, and represented a rapid return on investment. Printing schoolbooks, catechisms, or academic dissertations may not have been the most prestigious work, but it paid the bills. Crucially, it was this type of work that allowed printers to diversify their assets and expand their market share. Some of the most famous publishers of the age, like Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, did not abandon seemingly mundane print commissions like municipal broadsheets when their business flourished.[12] Instead, they cultivated close bonds with ecclesiastical, secular, and academic institutions to safeguard their commercial interests.

It is therefore no surprise that in all European printing domains, books for the church, government, and academies represented the largest portion of total print output.[13] This was no different in the Nordic region. The press of Iceland was wholly dedicated to printing works of Lutheran theology in the Icelandic language. Most were written by members of the local clergy, for other clergymen and for parishioners. Catechisms, sermons, funeral orations, psalm books, and Bibles were also a mainstay of the press elsewhere in the Nordic region and represented the most common genre of printing in Denmark and Sweden. After the Reformation, the production of religious books was often heavily subsidized by the state to consolidate the new church. The first complete Swedish (1540–1541) and Danish (1550) Bibles were financed entirely by the respective Crowns of both countries.[14] The Swedish Crown also paid for the printing of the first complete Finnish Bible (Stockholm, 1642), in a print run of 1,200 copies.[15] The Crown sought to recoup the costs by forcing every consistory in Finland to buy a copy. A similar tactic was undertaken by the Danish Crown, which financed the publication of the first complete Icelandic Bible (Hólar, 1584).[16] Later in the seventeenth century, the Swedish Crown also paid for the publication of the first Estonian New Testament (Riga, 1686).[17]

Figure 1

The title page of the 1644 Icelandic folio Bible, one of only two folios to be printed in Iceland before the eighteenth century. Major projects like this could only be undertaken with guaranteed funding from powerful backers (in most cases, the Crown).

Source: National and University Library of Iceland

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The development of printing in the Nordic region can also be tied closely to the production of government ordinances. During the sixteenth century, the mainstay of the sole Stockholm press (the royal printing house) was the printing of royal proclamations. The number of ordinances published grew steadily over time, and in the realms of Denmark and Sweden, the Crown was able to make use of an expanding network of printing firms to aid the dissemination of their placards.[18] The most common products of the presses at Christiania and Riga were government ordinances. It is likely that government printing also played a prominent role among the activities of other provincial presses in Sweden and Denmark, but it is a genre bedevilled by very low survival rates.[19] Reconstructing a representative corpus of texts is also problematic, as older bibliographies sometimes exclude government print.[20]

The development of academic institutions (universities and gymnasia) was the final motor of growth for the Nordic printing industry. Universities were founded at Uppsala and Copenhagen in the fifteenth century, but both declined during the sixteenth century and temporarily shut their doors. They experienced a resurgence during the seventeenth century, however, a period that also saw the establishment of multiple gymnasia throughout the Nordic region and additional Swedish universities at Turku, Tartu, and Lund. These academic institutions all attracted printers, who were in turn entirely reliant on their academic patrons. Eighty percent of the output of the Tartu printing house was made up of academic disputations and dissertations undertaken by students of the university, or other academic publications, including orations, funeral sermons, wedding pamphlets, and gratulatory poetry written by professors and students. The Turku press, responsible for almost 4,000 editions by the end of the seventeenth century, had a similar profile.[21] The print runs of academic publications were probably no higher than around 250 copies.[22] Yet in a flourishing academic community, printers could sustain themselves with limitless jobs of this sort. The University of Copenhagen appointed a second university printer in 1631, because the single university printer could not keep up with the demands made by the institution and the academic community on the services of his print shop. Eskil Matsson’s press at Uppsala was responsible for a rich variety of academic ephemera: placards and flyers issued by the university or by its student body, announcing forthcoming orations, ceremonies, and funerals. These flyers were so ubiquitous in Uppsala that in 1643 the senate of the university had to forbid faculty and students from distributing them to one another in church before the preacher had ended his sermon.[23]

Figure 2

One of thousands of academic dissertations printed in Sweden during the seventeenth century. Academic publishing was a staple of the Nordic print trade, and played an essential role in the growth of the industry.

Source: Private collection, Arthur der Weduwen

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The production of institutional ephemera was a widespread European phenomenon, but it remains an understudied topic precisely because so much of this material is now lost. The three major drivers of the early modern European book trade described here are therefore often underrepresented in bibliographical statistics.[24] Yet it is undeniable that European print culture shared a dependency on the production of cheap and popular print, much of it commissioned or sponsored by institutions.

Peripheral Values

A common feature of print culture on the periphery of the European book world was a reliance on the book markets at the European core for the supply of books and printers.[25] It is important to note that this relationship was not necessarily a disadvantageous one for those active in the book trade in the peripheral markets. Periphery does not indicate poverty, and neither does the absence of printing mean the absence of books. Indeed, the slower spread of the printing press in the Nordic region is partially due to the fact that the region was supplied so effectively from core markets, predominantly from the Low Countries and Northern Germany. Each peripheral region had its own core market: England relied first largely on France, and then later on the Low Countries; the Iberian market had close links with Lyon, Italy, and Antwerp; while Wittenberg, Leipzig, Venice, Vienna, Prague, and Kraków divided the Eastern European market between them.

It was already common in the manuscript age for buyers and collectors in the Nordic region to obtain their books from the core European markets. Around the time of the invention of printing, the monastic library at Vadstena possessed some 1,000 manuscript books. It is therefore no surprise that some of the earliest products of the German presses made their way to Scandinavian collectors and institutions, including copies of the Gutenberg Bible.[26] Even after the introduction of presses in Denmark and Sweden, many works were commissioned from foreign markets at the European core, where printers could take on more substantial projects. Before the Reformation, works produced specifically for the Danish market are known to have been printed in Lübeck, Mainz, Basel, Paris, Cologne, Leipzig, Rostock, and Zwickau; and for the Swedish market in Lübeck, Nuremberg, Basel, Leipzig, Halberstadt, and Rostock.[27] The first books printed at the behest of Finnish and Norwegian clerics were produced in Lübeck and Paris respectively.[28]

With the spread of the Reformation, the Low Countries and the northern German market effectively became the sole suppliers for the Nordic region. Many early Protestant works for Danish and Swedish customers were printed in Wittenberg and Magdeburg. The first book with texts in Estonian and Latvian appeared in Wittenberg, but the entire print run of this Lutheran service book was confiscated by Catholic authorities whilst the consignment was en route, and all but two copies of the work were destroyed (these two copies have since been lost). A fragment of a 1535 Wittenberg Estonian catechism does survive.[29] Lutheran works in Latvian and German were also produced for Riga booksellers in other German towns, especially in Königsberg. Some of these books were produced on direct commission from Nordic clerics or noblemen; others represented a commercial investment on the part of Nordic booksellers and book binders. Around 1600, the Stockholm bookseller Herman Sülken published over a dozen Swedish books that had been printed for him in Rostock.

Figure 3

A Finnish religious work printed in Rostock in 1607 for the Stockholm bookseller Herman Sülken.

Source: SLUB Dresden

-> See the list of figures

Over time, these book trading networks were strengthened further, while new networks also appeared thanks to the growth of the press in the Nordic region. While the booksellers of Stockholm and Copenhagen continued to rely on the European core market for great works of scholarship and science, these two centres in their turn began to supply much of the Nordic market. Printing developed slowly in Norway, meanwhile, because the market was so efficiently supplied from Denmark. Trondheim, the largest town in Norway, would not have a press until 1739, but already by 1700, two in three households in the town owned a printed Danish postil, while one in three owned a Danish Bible.[30] Finland was likewise well‑supplied by Swedish printing. Mikael Agricola (c. 1510–1557), Bishop of Turku, was the first to publish in Finnish and is considered the father of literary Finnish. All of his works, however, were printed in Stockholm, since there was no press in Finland during his lifetime. Even after a press was established in Turku, many Finnish works continued to be printed in Sweden throughout the seventeenth century. The growth of a provincial network of presses in Sweden also ensured that some towns, like Skara, Växjö, and Gävle, each of which had cathedral chapters or gymnasia, had no need for a local press, because they could rely on print shops in other towns.

In 1526, the Swedish King Gustav I Vasa wrote a letter in which he declared that he wished to have his royal press operated “by good, Swedish men so that there will be no further need to call in any Germans.”[31] The first generation of printers in most of Europe were Germans, a reality that often stirred up xenophobic sentiments, chiefly in Italy.[32] And in the European print periphery, the reliance on foreign print workers lasted much longer than in core territories.[33] In Denmark, there were only two Danish printers in the sixteenth century, while close to half of Denmark’s printers in the seventeenth century were Germans. The first Dane to be appointed printer to the University of Copenhagen, Peder Jensen Morsing, took up his office only in 1654 (incidentally, he would not enjoy the position for long: four years later he was killed by a Swedish cannonball during the siege of Copenhagen).[34] Despite Gustav Vasa’s patriotic declaration, Sweden too remained reliant on foreigners: at least a third of Sweden’s printers before 1700 were Danish, German, or Dutch in origin. In Estonia and Latvia, all printers whose nationalities are known hailed from elsewhere in Europe, most being German except for Mollyn, who was Flemish. Finland, Norway, and Iceland, which had been part of the Swedish and Danish realms far longer, likewise shared this reliance on imported printers, except that their printers, like their books, mostly came from Stockholm or Copenhagen.

The prominence of foreigners in the Nordic print world was initially due to the general absence of native artisans, but by the seventeenth century, it seems that some Nordic patrons expressed a general preference for foreign printers. Gustav Vasa’s later successors would continue to extend invitations to German and Dutch printers because they were recognized as more experienced and skilled artisans. The first printer in Denmark to use Hebrew type, Henrich Waldkirch, came from a prominent Basel publishing family.[35] The German Peter von Selow, who has often been referred to erroneously as a Dutchman, was specifically invited to Stockholm by Gustavus Adolphus so that he would cast Cyrillic type, which he used to produce Slavonic grammars and Lutheran catechisms for the new Russian territories conquered by the king.[36] The Dutch Elzevier and Janssonius firms, who established branch shops in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Uppsala from the 1620s onwards, were widely esteemed for the quality of their typography and the range of titles in their stock.[37] Both firms published retail catalogues for their Copenhagen branch offices, which confirm that they brought a stock of thousands of Latin titles from the main European centres of trade, in addition to a sizeable selection of German and French books. This stock was continually refreshed, and the successive catalogues published by Janssonius in Copenhagen and in Stockholm demonstrate that the Dutch were able to expand their offerings over the years considerably, with over 4,000 titles available in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.[38]

Some of the local Nordic booksellers, chiefly those in Copenhagen, grumbled about the privileges granted to their foreign colleagues.[39] Over the course of the seventeenth century, most booksellers learned to live with their presence, and indeed many co‑operated with them, becoming branch or print shop managers. The fact that the Dutch printed little in the Danish or Swedish languages also reserved for the native booksellers a significant share of the market: this largely voluntary self‑denial on the part of the Dutch was crucial in preserving harmony in these book worlds. Ultimately, the few complaints about the Dutch intruders went unheeded. This was partly because the local booksellers could still make a decent living, but also because thanks to foreign imports, local book buyers could feast on some of the best books that the European market had to offer. The book collectors of the Nordic region would, by the end of the seventeenth century, go on to build some of the greatest personal libraries in the early modern period, while the institutional libraries of Denmark and Sweden were also notable for their size. Supplied with thousands of books from the Low Countries, Germany, and France, Nordic bishops, professors, and statesmen created libraries as fashionable as any princely library at the core of the European book market.[40]

Due to the liberal supply of books to the Nordic region, and the presence of so many collectors assembling libraries, Denmark became home to Europe’s second earliest book auction market. The Dutch had been the first to institutionalize the book auction as the preferred means by which to recycle old stock and libraries through the book market. After 1599, book auctions in the Dutch Republic were also accompanied by printed catalogues.[41] This practice began in Denmark in 1661 and gained rapidly in popularity. At least 100 book auctions would take place in Copenhagen by the end of the seventeenth century, attracting Norwegian and Swedish collectors as well.[42] A close analysis of the contents of their collections reveals that these auctions served a prominent role in circulating stock amongst the great collectors of the realm; often the same books were passed down through the generations as their owners died and they came back to the market.[43] When books arrived in the Nordic region from the main European markets, they tended to stay there; the chance of them being sold on (or back) to larger markets in Germany or the Low Countries was negligible.

The ease with which books from the European core were supplied to peripheral book markets had a profound impact on the production of books at the periphery. As a rule, book production at the periphery was dominated by books in the local vernacular languages, rather than in Latin, the language of international scholarship. In the early modern period, the printed output of the British Isles was overwhelmingly in English rather than Latin; similarly, the printers of Spain and Portugal produced many more books in Spanish and Portuguese than Latin.[44] In the Nordic region, vernacular publishing also surpassed printing in Latin, though in number of editions, not as drastically as in the British and Iberian print markets.[45] This relative importance of Latin texts can be explained by the importance of the academic presses of the seventeenth century that churned out short academic dissertations and other academic ephemera, mostly with small print runs. Thus the Finnish press, and the presses at Tartu and Uppsala, were almost wholly dedicated to printing in Latin. Yet the types of Latin works produced in the Nordic region were, in contrast to many of those produced at the European core, never meant for export. Academic disputations, orations, and posters were intended to circulate within the community where they were produced. Because they were eagerly collected by scholars, they have also survived in greater numbers than other genres produced in the Nordic region, such as almanacs, schoolbooks, ordinances, and catechisms.[46] It is nevertheless a fair assumption that in terms of total output (that is, the volume of work calculated in printed sheets rather than editions), vernacular publishing still outstripped scholarly publishing.

In the early modern period, the Nordic presses did not produce substantial tomes of Latin jurisprudence, medicine, and classical learning for export to other markets. Although students at Nordic universities studied many of the same texts as their peers in Germany or the Low Countries, they tended to source their texts from the larger markets, spoiling the market for local reprints. By the end of the seventeenth century, Nordic publishers took some tentative steps towards producing editions of the classics, and publicized the scholarly writings of their home‑grown professors, but these attempts represented an excess of ambition rather than commercial acumen. There was simply little incentive to risk devoting immense capital to great projects that might bankrupt a print shop in a town such as Uppsala, Tallinn, or Riga, when the printer could rely on regular business from local customers. It was only when the Crown or another wealthy patron stepped in to provide the funds that printers were willing to take on substantial works, such as a folio Bible. In the end, the absence of commercial opportunities to produce works for export only reinforced the reliance of the press on local institutional customers. This also helps explain why most Nordic print centres did not require more than a single active print shop at any one time.

Nordic Opportunities, Nordic Challenges

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the Nordic region is its low population density. The geographical mass of the region, by surface area, is twice that of France; yet in the seventeenth century, the total Nordic population of around 3.5 million paled in comparison with France’s 20 million.[47] In the same era, the Nordic population was around twice the size of that of the Dutch Republic, but the surface area of the Dutch Republic covered only one thirtieth of that of the Nordic region. The climate of the Nordic region was hostile compared to much of Europe, and it was incapable of sustaining a large population. The population of the Nordic region was overwhelmingly rural, and the urban settlements that did exist were small. By 1700, Copenhagen and Stockholm had each grown to around 60,000 inhabitants, and they dwarfed any other town in the Nordic region. The average town in the early modern Nordic world had around 1,000 inhabitants.[48]

The rural demographics of the Nordic region presented one of the greatest challenges to the development of a domestic printing trade. What is striking, however, is that by the end of the seventeenth century, literacy rates in the Nordic region were among the highest in the world, first matching and then overtaking the rates of the famously literate Dutch Republic. This remarkable achievement was largely the result of the adoption of Lutheranism in the Nordic region; the new church had been fully embraced in Denmark by 1537, and in Sweden by 1593. The fervour with which the Crowns of Denmark and Sweden institutionalized the Lutheran faith in their realms, and the unrelenting dedication with which Lutheran ministers pursued their evangelical mission, ensured that Lutheranism truly became the universal religion of the Nordic region. The propagation of the Lutheran faith underpinned the development of the Nordic press, as the requirements for successive editions of vernacular Bibles, catechisms, hymnbooks, prayer books, and postils formed the bedrock of the printing industry.

There was a sense in which the distribution of these books to common layfolk was more important than in other regions of Europe, for in a vast but thinly populated region, many parishioners would not always be under the immediate supervision of the clergy. The nearest church might be dozens of miles away, and during the wet spring and autumn months, travel could prove extremely difficult.[49] For that reason, every home had to offer the most basic functions of the church; every head of the household had to be capable of fulfilling the pedagogical functions of the minister. Teaching ordinary men and women to read was a critical mission for the planting of the Lutheran faith in the Nordic region. That this mission was achieved is undeniable: by the mid‑eighteenth century, 90 percent of male and female Swedish parishioners could read the catechism, and although literacy rates in Denmark‑Norway were not as high as this, they were still far above the European norm.[50]

These are extraordinary statistics, and they would not be matched in many European countries until well into the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Yet the statistics shroud the fact that the advancement of literacy was driven by a single purpose; once parishioners could read the most basic Lutheran texts, the mission of the state and church had been achieved. The ability to write, a form of literacy that was always taught after reading had been mastered, remained relatively rare in the Nordic countryside. The limitations of Nordic literacy ensured that there was little chance for the domestic print trade to grow and diversify, because most inhabitants who learned to read did not go on to buy a larger variety of books, or to build a small collection for the home. The catechism, psalm book, ABC book, and almanac may have been ubiquitous, but that was the extent of the engagement with the book world for the majority of Nordic people in the seventeenth century. This may also explain why some of the larger towns in the Nordic region failed to attract a local press. In much of Europe, printers were naturally drawn to those centres with a critical mass of potential customers; this was not necessarily the case in the Nordic region. The second and fifth largest towns in seventeenth‑century Sweden, Falun and Karlskrona, did not have printing presses.[51] Aalborg and Viborg, two of the largest towns in Denmark, did not have presses either.[52] The largest Norwegian town, Bergen, with a population of 10,000, did not have a press until 1721; Trondheim, the great capital of the medieval Norwegian kingdom, would only establish a press in 1739.[53]

It is clear that Nordic institutions, rather than individual book buyers, set the tone for the development of the print trade. Without patrons, the early modern press could not have survived, but the complete dominance of the Danish and Swedish Crowns over the press is remarkable indeed. There were few regions where the Crown made such a decisive intervention in the print trade as in sixteenth‑century Sweden, when the royal printing house in Stockholm was, for many decades, the only press in the realm: the other active presses, at Uppsala and Söderköping, had been deliberately shut down by the Crown. In Denmark, the authorities exercised similar control over printing in Copenhagen, where the local academic elite oversaw the output of the press. Repressive censorship was, however, often unnecessary: the dependence of the printing firms on the government was so pronounced that most printers had little wish to test the patience of the monarch and their councillors.

The power of the Crown only grew over time. The proliferation of presses in the seventeenth century was not a source of sedition or unorthodoxy. Print played an important role in the projection of cultural power as the Swedish empire expanded; and in both Denmark and Sweden print helped pave the way for the absolutist reforms at the end of the seventeenth century. The establishment of academic institutions and academic presses throughout the broader Nordic region was part of this development, as were the activities of the royal historiographers appointed in Denmark and Sweden, and the subsidized grand cartographical projects, which were intended to visualise the geographical mass of the Nordic kingdoms for a European audience.[54] Perhaps the only press in the Nordic region that had the opportunity to escape the close supervision of the Crown was the Icelandic press. While the University of Copenhagen was given the privilege (and responsibility) of regulating the Icelandic press’s output, its professors were not up to the task, given their limited understanding of Icelandic. Yet because the press itself was entirely in the hands of one of Iceland’s bishops, there was never any interest in diversifying its output beyond the spiritual and pedagogical texts necessary for the Icelandic community. The Danish Crown had little to fear when it came to its farthest‑flung printing firm.

The close association between the press and the Nordic Crowns was the source of one additional unusual development in Nordic print history. During the early modern period, the history of the European press is one of gradual and general growth. Once the print trade stabilized in the sixteenth century, we can observe a steady increase in the number of printing houses and locations that could sustain a press. This was initially no different in the Nordic region—until the end of the seventeenth century. The martial endeavours of the Swedish Crown and the expansion of its empire had prompted the establishment of presses in Tartu, Tallinn, and Turku. As we have seen, these were printing firms that were entirely reliant on the business of Swedish academic and governmental institutions. Their survival was therefore at stake when the Swedish empire began to buckle and crumble under the combined assault of its many enemies.

The Tartu press, initially the most prolific press of Swedish Livonia, was shut down between 1656 and 1690 due to the invasion of the Russians during the Second Northern War. It was re‑established in 1690, but in 1699 it moved to the coastal town of Pärnu, together with the Tartu academy, again due to the threat of war. As the Great Northern War (1700–1721) turned against Sweden, the press was moved from Pärnu to Stockholm; it would never return. The Russian conquest of Swedish possessions in Livonia also meant the closure of the presses at Riga and Tallinn. In Finland, the press at Viborg also disappeared after the Russians captured the city in 1710, while the two presses at Turku closed their doors in 1713, resuming activity only in the 1720s. Since printing was so closely tied to the designs of the Swedish administration, the fragility of that administration inevitably jeopardized the existence of print.

Conclusion: Print and Risk at the Periphery

The last Nordic region to have its own press was the kingdom of Norway. The first printer, Tyge Nielsson, arrived in Christiania in 1643, at the invitation of a local minister, Christen Steffensen Bang. Nielsson had been active in Copenhagen as a printer since 1631, but had run up serious debts, so he accepted the opportunity to move gratefully. Perhaps he should have stayed in Denmark: in Christiania, Bang commissioned Nielsson to produce an 8,000‑page Lutheran postil that he had written, eight volumes in quarto in all. Intimidated by this project, Nielsson printed several other works first, including a Danish almanac and some shorter devotional works. In 1644, Bang dragged Nielsson before a local court for ignoring his great project, and when it was demonstrated that the printer had failed to honour the terms of his commission, Bang took possession of the press. The next two printers enticed from Copenhagen to Christiania, Melchior Martzan and Valentin Kuhn, continued work on the great postil, but they too tried to abandon Bang’s pet project. Martzan was successful in doing so and fled back to Denmark; Kuhn was not and died in Christiania of the plague in 1654. It took the fourth printer of Christiania, Mickel Thomeson, to finish the postil between 1656 and 1662.[55]

How are we to interpret this episode? It gives the impression that an invitation to set up a printing business in Norway was a licence to lose money, run into trouble, or both. Are we to blame the recalcitrant printers, who balked at the risk involved, or Christen Bang, an author with money to spare but little understanding of the print trade? From the earliest days of printing, authors and printers often had misgivings about one another. To authors, print represented a wondrous invention, a means to acquire more books and to have their own works disseminated in great numbers; to printers, print was a commercial endeavour, one that often struggled to accommodate the pipe dreams of humanists, poets, and aspiring authors, because their projects rarely turned a reliable profit.[56] This disconnect was heightened in peripheral markets, where a necessary mass of regular book buyers remained elusive for centuries after the invention of printing. The Christiania of Bang’s day had no more than 4,000 inhabitants. Ultimately, Mickel Thomeson was able to remain in business, not by taking on more projects like Bang’s postil, but by printing ordinances, news pamphlets, wedding poetry, funeral sermons, and catechisms.

These types of print, so common in the early modern print world, have not always found admirers within the scholarly community. A.F. Johnson believed that the early print culture of Scotland, another peripheral region of print, was “full of interest from the local point of view … [but was] of no importance to the development of the book.”[57] We contend that the opposite is true. The products of the press in the Nordic region offer insights into the importance of institutional sponsorship, and of the functioning of the print and book trades, which often operated in quite different ways. Nordic printers did not necessarily sell commercially much of what was printed locally, since the whole edition was often paid for by the individual or institution that had commissioned it; conversely, booksellers got most of their stock from abroad, bypassing the local printers. The essence of the development of print lies not in the greatest works, the milestones so familiar to scholars, but in the common, everyday publications that shaped lives, communities, and institutions. These humble publications ensured that print, as a business, could develop and ultimately be sustained, even in the most unlikely and apparently unpromising terrain.