Mary Wollstonecraft in the 'Study-Chamber of Liberty' Discourses of civilization, manners and morals in Denmark-Norway after the French revolution

This article is concerned with regime criticism, feminist thinking and enlightenment historiography in the 1790s. Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) defended Norwegian allodial rights and criticised the Danish-Norwegian government's mercantilism and conservatism, reflecting the views of her Danish and Norwegian interlocutors. In the anthology Danish travel observations (1799), edited by Jacob Neumann, Wollstonecraft's travel writings were criticized but propagated, and travel writing by the celebrated poet Frederike Brun echoed Wollstonecraft's northern voyage. The article also discusses "gothic feminism" in Denmark-Norway, subject of a prize competition at Copenhagen University in 1796 won by Laurits Engelstoft's (1774-1851) Essay on the History of Scandinavian Women before the introduction of Christianity (1799). Engelstoft demythologized the mores of Northern antiquity, rejecting the narrative in older enlightenment historiography by which the mores of the north shaped the development of strictly gendered chivalric and courtly manners. In historicizing the barbarous past and applying a universal norm of ungendered, common reason and universal rights, Engelstoft argued in greater depth along the lines of Wollstonecraft's historical narrative. Neumann, Engelstoft and Brun were from the same salon milieu, closely linked to the Duke and Duchess of Augustenborg. The arguments for popular enlightenment and educational reform advanced by the Duke of Augustenborg in 1795 therefore provides an intriguing context for Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian travels.