”Allenast wedh sin hantering förblifwa” : Borgerlig identitet, rumslig ordning och urban tillhörighet i Visby 1624–1675

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates burgher status as a practice of boundary-making in seventeenth-century Visby, a town marked by economic decline and political turbulence, following the transition from Danish to Swedish rule in 1645. Using town-hall court records, it examines how the burgher community defined civic belonging through conflicts over trade, guild privileges, residence, debts, jurisdiction, honor, and relations with outsiders.The focus is on examining how physical, legal, and mental boundaries were drawn, defended, and negotiated in order to separate burghers from other groups, but also to regulate relations within the burgher community itself. By analyzing legal and spatial measures used to create and maintain order within the burgher community, the study highlights how early modern towns used rules, privileges, and norms to organize and control the urban space.The source material shows how burgher status functioned as both right and obligation, as an instrument of power and a burden, and as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. The conflicts examined in the essay range from questions internal to the burgher community, such as burgher status as an institution, spatial belonging, guild activity, and disputes among burghers, to conflicts directed towards outsiders, including the town’s spatial order, trade, monopolies, economic control, state centralization, privileges, jurisdiction, morality, social control, and honor. Generally, these conflicts can be grouped into three broader and overlapping fields: belonging and boundary-making; economic regulation and control; and social and political order. All of these areas of conflict were targets of the burghers’ control, both internally and externally.By illuminating these areas of conflict, this study shows that burgher status was more than a formal status. It was part of a practice that required participation in the town’s social, economic, and legal order. One of the study’s takeouts is that the boundaries of the burgher community became most visible when they were challenged. In disputes concerning trade, crafts, residence, debts, privileges, and relations with the countryside, the magistracy and the burghers sought to maintain the town’s order by defining who belonged to the civic community, who stood outside it, and what obligations belonging entailed.