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This book highlights the diverse roles of the humanities in the history of the Swedish welfare society. This society has often been seen as dominated by an instrumental view of knowledge that rewarded the social sciences, natural sciences and technology, but the contributions in this book show the significant role that the humanities played in the Swedish welfare state. Various forms of humanistic knowledge and knowledge actors were part of large networks and left a clear mark on the public sphere and society at large. A narrative of the marginalization and crisis of the humanities in the postwar period must therefore be problematized. This edited volume brings together some twenty scholars from a number of humanities disciplines (history, history of ideas, media history, literary studies, archaeology, education, etc.). Much of the current research on the history of the humanities conducted in Sweden today is brought together here and put in relation to international discussions in fields such as history of humanities, history of knowledge, etc. The book is a sibling to the monograph Humanister i offentligheten, which was published in 2022.

There is a strong narrative on how the humanities were marginalized in postwar Sweden: in the land of engineers, technocrats and social scientists, there was no room for erudition, philosophy and history. This book challenges such a notion and shows how clearly the humanities were present in the public sphere of the time. By applying perspectives from the history of knowledge, the authors illustrate how humanists were key figures in the welfare society's culture and politics, media and book market, education and intellectual debate.
At the heart of the book is the public sphere of the 1960s and 1970s. In a first part, the authors highlight how humanists played a decisive role in the young television's educational program as well as in the popular science paperback publishing of the time and on the essay pages in the newspapers. In a second part, attention is drawn to the humanities' place in the Christian cultural sphere, the labour movement's education work and the New Left's book cafés. We meet people like Per I. Gedin, Gunnel Vallquist and Jan-Öjvind Swahn, but also TV producers, study circle organizers, translators of radical non-fiction and many others. They all helped to set humanistic knowledge in motion during the postwar decades.
Against an international background, the image of a humanistic knowledge system with deep roots and wide connections in Swedish society emerges. It is about these actors and arenas of knowledge that this book is about.

This anthology is a conclusion of the research results from a four-year VR project called Decorated Farmhouses of Hälsingland - a holistic study of a World Heritage (2014–2017). Decorative painted interiors and furniture as well as patterned interior textiles during 1700–1870 have been investigated with a combination of methods from both the humanities and the natural sciences. The purpose has been to obtain new and in-depth knowledge of paint, dyes and other raw materials and techniques used in the manufacture of artefacts and interiors in the farmhouses in this region. Through the study, an increased understanding of the local availability of paint material and the trade at that time has been obtained. In addition, detailed knowledge of the originators of the interiors has been generated. The project thus adds new knowledge for further investigation of cultural, social and economic contexts and conditions for the interior design culture that emerged and was formed in Hälsingland farms during the 18th and 19th centuries.

"In discussions relating to their role during the Middle Ages, women are typically assumed to only have been "pawns in a political game dominated by men", or to have primarily acted as intermediaries of power. In this book, however, the varying expressions of power are studied by changing the focus from a political and economic exercise of power controlled by men, to an approach based on interaction and communication between the sexes. In this volume, gender is instead interpreted as a total social phenomenon comprising all spheres of medieval society. This approach provides new opportunities to investigate how power operated on different levels within a societal structure. Thus, power is neither seen as emanating from a centre nor as dominated by only one sex. Instead, it is regarded as an all-embracing societal web, woven through threads of mutual dependence between men and women. In this book, scholars belonging to various disciplines, such as history, history of arts and literary history, discuss how cooperation between the sexes found expression in culture, judicial spheres and social organisation. The contributions do not only consider the Nordic countries, but also how gender constructions were affected by, and transformed through, the influence of contemporary cultural, juridical and ideological currents in Europe