Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Jonas Liliequist, ‘Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century’ Gender & History, Vol.23 No.1 April 2011, pp. 1–25. Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century Jonas Liliequist The most detailed and comprehensive historical studies on marital violence so far published concern English conditions and contexts. 1 The aim of this article is to provide the first analysis of the history of marital violence in Sweden, focusing on changes in public representations and discourses from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century. The Swedish case is of great interest, not least because of the modern reputation of Sweden and other Nordic countries for being pioneers in the development of a policy of gender equality. Is this relevant historically too? At first glance, the answer would seem to be ‘no’ – Sweden’s pioneering reputation for gender equality seems not to have had any far-reaching historical roots. Just a few decades ago, male violence within marriage was confined in the Swedish public by silence and obfuscating euphemisms like ‘domestic incident’ and ‘family argument’. In a longer historical perspective, however, this modern silence was preceded by a far more salient public attention and problematisation of the husband’s use of violence within marriage. In seventeenth-century Sweden, husbands had the legal right to ‘chastise’ their wives, a right which extended back to an ancient tradition rooted in medieval provincial laws. With the coming of the Reformation and the emergence of the modern state, marriage and the household were given central ideological roles as foundation stones of the social order. The husband’s relationship with his wife as the basis of a household in good order was given the highest social priority. Violence within the marital union and the family became the object of public scrutiny, albeit under different conditions and with different objectives and aims than today. In this article, the way this changing public scrutiny was reflected in official legislation and cautionary tales, playlets, pamphlets and broadsheets will be examined from the time of the Swedish Reformation, with particular focus on how, and to what extent, the justification or condemnation of a husband’s use of physical force was portrayed at different points in time. 2 The aim has been to trace the histories of several prominent themes or motifs and the way in which they have been represented in various genres. In other words, the place of violence in the general public discourse will be the focus of the analysis, not how men actually behaved or what they said in order to legitimate their behaviour. 3 C  2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.