Mars Destroys, Love Mends<subtitle>Wedding Poetry During the Great Northern War</subtitle>

Abstract

Wedding poetry was an important genre in early modern literature and a way to congratulate and praise a newlywed couple on their wedding day. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, war emerged as a central topic of wedding poems in the kingdom of Sweden. By applying the concept of repertory poetry, referring to poetry as a system based on the circulation of literary material, I examine how the war was discussed in wedding poems and how poems articulate common understandings and personal experiences of war, military occupation, and life as a refugee.

Keywords

• Occasional poetry
• wedding poetry
• Great Northern War 1700–1721
• Great Wrath 1714–1721
• repertory literature