Our project in the First Estonian Annual Conference of Humanities on 10–12 April 2024

On 10–12 April 2024, the First Estonian Annual Conference of Humanities will be held at Tallinn University titled Future humanities: how the humanities shape society in an era of transformative changes. Our project takes part in the event with a poster presentation.

Poster presentation

The writing nobility of early modern Estonia and Livonia 1561–1730

Presenter(s): Marin Jänes, Martin Klöker, Kaarel Vanamölder, Kristi Viiding, Aira Võsa; Under and Tuglas Literature Centre, Estonian Academy of Sciences

In 2023, Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences launched a five-year research project “Connections, transition, change: nobilitas haereditaria ac litteraria in the emergence of early modern literature in Polish and Swedish Livonia”. The poster introduces the multilingual beginning of Estonian and Livonian noble literature (1561–1730), proposing the hypothesis that the emergence of the writing nobility was not only caused by the rapid improvement in the economic, political and legal situation of the nobility in Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century stemming from Enlightenment ideas. Rather it was due to sociocultural and educational changes in the early modern period. Local nobility demonstrated interest in the written word earlier than in other aesthetic fields such as (manor) architecture and visual arts. Our poster illustrates these theses with texts found during the research done so far.