A professional historian has said “we know less than 1% of what really happened five hundred years ago, and two thirds of that is wrong.” So how do we know anything at all about the past? One source, at least in the European tradition, is writers who recorded events in their lives and their impressions of them, and of the people they knew. The problem with that is that, also in the European tradition, the great majority of the population were illiterate. The group that could read and write weren’t exactly representative; they were typically part of some upper class, either financially, socially, or religiously, and nearly all of them were men.
Agneta Horn, though, was born August 18 in 1629 in a part of Sweden that’s now part of the Republic of Latvia. She was definitely part of the social upper class. Her father was the Count of Björneborg, and an officer in the Swedish army. As an officer, he was able to bring his family with him on military campaigns — even quite active ones, so Agneta wrote later that “…the bullets fell into our tent” during one battle.
And there’s the key: she wrote. Specifically, she kept journals and diaries and around 1660 compiled them into her autobiography, Agneta Horn’s Leverne. For a woman to write an autobiography in the 1600s was quite unusual, and Horn didn’t really have any examples to emulate, which may have made her manuscript somewhat unusual too. It’s organized into sections, and she doesn’t go into great detail about some situations, apparently because she assumed readers would already know about them. Some critics have supposed that Horn expected her readers to be limited to mostly people she already knew. She didn’t publish her book in any traditional way, but apparently a few copies were made, probably by hand. She may have made them herself.
Agneta Horn’s Leverne is also unusual, particularly for the time, in focusing more on the author’s emotional reactions to events than the events themselves. She also used language creatively; at the time (and maybe even now; I don’t know) written and oral Swedish were not quite the same, and Horn sometimes combined the two forms to create completely new words.
Agneta Horn’s Leverne is one of the first works written in Sweden by a woman, and the leading reference for what life was like for Swedish people centuries ago. Horn herself led a pretty difficult life, traveling with her father’s army as a child and eventually marrying an army officer, only to be widowed at 26. She only lived to be 42, although it’s not known what illness or disease she might have suffered from. Her autobiography was lost for about two centuries after her death, and only discovered in 1885, to provide at least a limited view into what happened centuries ago — and how people might have felt about it all.
