Belief

Paolo Astorri, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Natural Law and Governance in Henning Arnisaeus” in W. Druwé, R. Lesaffer, G. Sluijs (eds.), Natural Law and Domestic Government, Studies in the History of International Law (Leiden: 2024).

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, La conversation éternelle: L’intimité spirituelle dans les lettres de Madame Guyon à Fénelon, 2024, (Accepteret/In press) Paris: Hermann. (Les collections de la République des Lettres).

Mette Birkedal Bruun, ”Cloistered Correspondences: Engaging and Renouncing the Grand Siècle”, in M. Green & L.C. Nørgaard (eds.), Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: 2024).

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Michaël Green, "Refractions of Privacy in Early Modern Letter Writing" in  Michaël Green & Lars Cyril Nørgaard (eds.) Early Modern Correspondence: The Privacy Perspective (Brepols Publishers: 2024).

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, & Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondence between Fénelon and Maintenon, (Accepteret/In press) Early Modern Correspondence : The Privacy Perspective. Michael Green & Lars Cyril Nørgaard (eds.). Brepols Publishers: 2024.

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Nathalie Freidel (ed.), Judith Scribnai (ed.), Emma Gauthier-Mamaril (ed.), Le pouvoir de la faiblesse: L’éthos mystique de Jeanne Guyon à la lumière de sa correspondance, 2024, (Accepteret/In press) In: Tangence.

Mette Birkedal Bruun, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Au Milieu d’une Cour Superbe & Tumultueuse’ Devotional privacy at the Court of Versailles”, in D.M. Neigbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (eds.), Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, (Amsterdam: 2024), 215-240.

Adam Horsley, “When Private Speech Goes Public: Libertinage, Crypto-Judaic Conversations, and the Private Literary World of Jean Fontanier, 1621”, in Tracing Private Conversations in Early Modern Europe. Talking in Everyday Life, ed. by Johannes Ljungberg & Natacha Klein Käfer, Palgrave Macmillan 2024, 59–80.

Jane McKee, ‘Privacy and Discretion in the Correspondence of Charles Drelincourt’, in  M. Green & L.C. Nørgaard (eds.), Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: 2024)

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Bastian Felter Vaucanson, “Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondance between Fénelon and Maintenon”, in M. Green & L.C. Nørgaard (eds.), Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: 2024)

Virginia Reinburg, “Talking About Religion During Religious War: Gilles de Gouberville, Normandy, 1562”, in Tracing Private Conversations in Early Modern Europe. Talking in Everyday Life, ed. by Johannes Ljungberg & Natacha Klein Käfer, Palgrave Macmillan 2024, 33–57.

Oskar J. Rojewski, ”The translation of court culture from the Burgundian Court to the Kingdom of Castile: The sovereign’s privacy and relationship with court artists”, in D.M. Neigbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (eds.), Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide (Amsterdam: 2024), 163-190.

Paolo Astorri, ”The Redefinition of Clandestine Marriage by Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Theologians and Jurists”, Law and History Review 41/1 (2023), 65-92.

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, "Between Faith and Work: Fénelon's Conception of Charity for a Monarch". French Historical Studies vol. 46 (2023), no. 1: pp. 37-55.

Paolo Astorri, Lars Cyril Nørgaard “A little Republic. The conceptualisation of the household according to Henning Arnisaeus (1570-1636)”, in B. Holm & N. Koefoed (eds.), Reformation and Everyday Life, (Göttingen: 2023), 195-220.

Jesper Jakobsen, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Changing Reasons of Censorship? The Faculty of Theology of Copenhagen University (1740-1770)”, in J. Ljungberg & E. Sidenvall (eds.), Between reason and orthodoxy: Religious Enlightenment in the Nordic Countries, c. 1680–1820, (Manchester: 2023), 287-311.

Johannes Ljungberg, “Sabbath Crimes in a City of Enlightenment. Religious and Commercial (dis)order in mid-eighteenth-century Altona”, in J. Ljungberg & E. Sidenvall (eds.), Between reason and orthodoxy: Religious Enlightenment in the Nordic Countries, c. 1680–1820, (Manchester: 2023), 312–40.

Paolo Astorri, Søren Frank Jensen, ”Heinrich Hahn (1605–1668). A Portrait of a Lutheran Jurist at the University of Helmstedt”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 108/1 (2022), 204-242.

Anni Henriksen, The Private Mind in Elizabethan England: Representations of the Mind in Literary, Political, Religious, and Legal Discourse”, PhD dissertation, supervised by M.B. Bruun and A.Brett (Copenhagen: 2022).

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Copie ou Création? Les petits livres secrets de Madame de Maintenon”, in “Toute la cour était étonnée”: Madame de Maintenon ou l’ambition politique au féminin, actes du colloque, eds. M. da Vinha & N. Grande. (Rennes: 2022), pp. 137-148.

Paolo Astorri, ”Can a judge rely on his private knowledge? Early modern Lutherans and Catholics compared” , Comparative Legal History 9/1 (2021), 56-88.

Maarten Delbeke, “Privacy and Exemplarity in Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 317-363.

Walter S. Melion, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as Artisans of the Heart and Home in Manuscript MPM R 35 “Vita S. Joseph beatissimae Virginis sponsi” of ca. 1600”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 317-363.

Natacha Klein Käfer, ”Dynamics of Healer-Patient Confidentiality in Early Modern Witch Trials”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021),281-296.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, ”Making Private Public”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 378-400.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Eelco Nagelsmit, “Ah! Mignard que vous louez bien !”: Le secret et le sacré dans le portrait de Madame de Maintenon” Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles. Sociétés de cour en Europe, XVIe-XIXe siècle (2021)

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Levels to ekphrasis in the Tableaux de la Pénitence”, in A.J. DiFuria & W.S. Melion (eds.), Ekphrastic Image-making in the Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700, (Leiden: 2021), 410-482.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Overvejelser over en ligprædiken” Kirkehistoriske Samlinger, 2021, p. 7-39

Natália Da Silva Perez, Peter Thule Kristensen, ”Gender, Space, and Religious Privacy in Amsterdam”, TSEG - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 18/3 (2021), 75–106. 

Anne Régent-Susini, “How to make exemplarity with secret virtues”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 179-193.

Lee Palmer Wandel, ”The Moment of Communion”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 159-178.

M.B. Bruun, M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, “En privé & en public. The Epistolary Preparation of the Dutch Stadtholders” Journal of Early Modern History 24.3 (2020),  253–279.

Letters offer a particularly rich source for exploring early modern privacy, as they are both highly contextual and personal. As objects in constant flux, letters allow us to trace how privacy emerged through interpersonal interactions and examine the kinds of experiences this privacy enabled and shaped. The spiritual letter, an epistolary genre that spread and evolved rapidly in the wake of the confessional reforms of early modern Europe, exemplifies this dynamic. Although such correspondence was always personal, its degree of privacy and intimacy could vary significantly. By analyzing the differences and similarities in exchanges between spiritual directors and their spiritual "children," we can discern how letters functioned as tools for carving out private spaces. Within these spaces, negotiations of social status, particularly around gender and class, unfolded through spiritual communication, creating conditions in which cultural norms and power structures are both reinforced and subverted.

Members: Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Michaël Green, Alexander Mkandawire, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Jane McKee, Anne Régent-Susini and Luc Vaillancourt

Nuns at the End of the World (NEW): Cross-Cultural Contact in Seventeenth-Century Québec was an individual postdoctoral research project financed by the Carlsberg Foundation’s Internationalisation Fellowship (631.347,- DKK, app. 85.000 Euros) to Bastian Felter Vaucanson in May 2023. The project, which ran out in 2024, explored the archives of the Ursuline convent in Québec and was carried out in collaboration with the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la première modernité (CIREM 16-18).

The colonial context generates its own privacy-related dynamics. Part of the French missionaries’ strategy of evangelization was to penetrate the private spaces – both physical and symbolic – of the Indigenous. But privacy also works the other way around and can operate in defiance of such attempts to regulate and control. Scholarship has identified Indigenous religious ceremonies, beliefs, and imaginations as significant. By rejecting missionaries access to the meaning-making aspects of spiritual practices and religious ceremonies, religious leaders create spaces of privacy that protect certain kinds of intimacy

By studying the rich collection of devotional objects in the Ursulines convent, NEW explored how European and Indigenous private devotional practices blend and influence each other.

Related PRIVACY projects: Spiritual Intimacy in New France, Privacy and Letter Writing, Privacy Black and White, Privacy at Sea, The Danish Mission to Greenland

Organized by the Centre for Privacy Studies, the Research Chair for Indigenous Discourse (University of Québec in Chicoutimi), and Formes et Idées de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Intimacy and Spirituality in New France/Intimité et spiritualité en Nouvelle France was a bilingual interdisciplinary workshop in Octobre 2024, followed by a proposal for a special issue of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, currently under review.

The special issue unites historians, church historians, historians of literature and archaeologists from Canada, France and Denmark. Each author is free to choose their methodology and sources, but the theme of intimacy brings a particular privacy-related dynamic of early modern colonial society to the fore: That specific point in place and time when an “individual” meets “society” and boundaries are being traced between them. In early modern Europe, intimacy is theorized in theological and rhetorical terms. By introducing spirituality as the second strand of our shared investigation, we wish to enquiry into the reciprocal impact of notions and practices of intimacy and religious beliefs and imaginations in the broadest sense, allowing for an approach that includes Indigenous as well as European experiences. Above all, we are interested in the tensions that arise when boundaries are drawn around intimacy by means of spirituality.

Members: Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Anne Régent-Susini and Luc Vaillancourt

Connection to other research projects at PRIVACY: NEW, building early modern privacy,

Organized by the Centre for Privacy Studies in collaboration with the Centre for Practiced Based Art Studies (PASS), Privacy and Slavery Past and Present: Academic and Artistic Approaches to Knowledge-Production is a series of workshops and a three day conference-exhibition taking place in 2026. We invite academics and artists to engage with the theme in a spirit of open-minded curiosity and creative approaches to knowledge-production with the aim of generating new knowledge about practices of enslavement and the ways in which privacy has been and continues to be used as a means of social resistance and control. How no­tions and practices of privacy shape relations between individuals and communitites when the use of enslaved labour is part of the social status quo?

Throughout all its manifestations, the structure of enslavement is designed to maintain control over people through the privation of rights. As such, privacy may seem a distant concept to enslaved people both past and present. What is private in a setting of constant surveillance? Can a kinship bond be private whilst commodified? And how is it possible to raise questions about the privacies of those who leave very few records of their own and have much of their lives under control of others?

Privacy and privacy related phenomena such as intimacy, secrecy, family, and domesticity existed and mattered in contexts and ways we might intuitively think unimaginable. Although conventional ideas of privacy might seem almost intuitively opposed to life under enslavement, this does not mean that enslaved people will simply submit to doing without it.

The call for papers will be published in the second half of 2025. Stay tuned on PRIVACY’s website for more information!

Members: Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Hannah Katharina Hjort, Francis Ethelbert Kwabena Benyah, Anne-Julie Arnfred, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Mikkel Bogh

Institutional collaborations: Centre for Practiced Based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen.

The Night as a Private Space: Darkness, Secrecy, and Shadows in the Early Modern Period and Today is an interdisciplinary conference organized in collaboration with Institut für Dänish at the University of Flensburg. The event takes place on 11-12 December and will lead to a collected volume targeted to De Gruyter publishing house.

How does the night impact privacy? Which activities and creative potentials become available and/or acceptable under the cover of nocturnal darkness? Is the night more private than the day? How have these dynamics changed from the early modern period until today? In this two-day international conference, we invite scholars from all historical fields and all career levels to engage with the early modern night from the interdisciplinary perspective of historical privacy studies. Our aim is to reconsider the night in contemporary late capitalist society, where the 24/7 lifeworld is, arguably, steadily undermining the distinctions between night and day, between light and darkness, between rest and action.

Obscure, opaque, and occult, the early modern night comes across as a privileged space of privacy and solitude. Perceived at once as a threat and a value, the night transforms social space into a mirror world of shadows populated by twilight beings such as demons and angels, genies and ancestors. If, since antiquity, the night has born death and sleep as her children, the tomb-like stillness of the shadowy embrace is deceptive. In the densely populated urban areas of the early modern world, privacy was hard to come by for the vast majority. As prohibitions that obtain during normal day-time activity are lifted, night-time leaves room for alternative sensory experiences, social relations, and mental projections that are often accorded no existence during daytime. Is this still the case today?

The Call for Papers closes 15 July 2025. It can be accessed .

Publication: Bastian Felter Vaucanson and Søren Frank Jensen, “Kristus Corpscore. Black Metal i et kirkehistorisk perspektiv”, in Skriget ved Verdens ende (red. Markus Floris Christensen), Copenhagen: Multivers, forthcoming.

Members: Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Markus Floris Christensen