From the Alps to the Baltic Sea : Waldensian News in the Swedish Newspapers (1686-1690)

Abstract: This thesis addresses four years of the turbulent history regarding a small Italian Reformed group, better known as Waldensians, that lived in the duchy of Savoy (or Italian Piedmont). It will focus on how the Swedish press presented their issues to the Swedish readership in the years 1686-1690. The source is the Ordinarie Stockholmiske Posttijdender, a newspaper that started to be published during the final years of the Thirty Years’ War, and which is the only preserved Scandinavian and Lutheran newspaper survived (until these days). Within the newspaper there are few and short reports on the Reformed groups from the Piedmont area that sometimes are in disaccord. This paper aims to see how Swedes portrayed the Waldensians through media within the Swedish Lutheran State. One main argument is that the newspaper represents a slow process of knowledge of the Waldensians. Only during the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697), the newspaper started considering them as one of the many examples to discredit Sweden’s enemies. The Swedish newspaper is thus also understood as part of the wider European news network during the centuries of the absolutistic European States and as a tool propagating the State’s view on foreign events.