Blood, tears and prayers: Affective strategies in an 18th-century Moravian mission diary
Magnus Hørnes, MA History of knowledge
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My project focuses on the Moravian missionary Christian Prottens (1715-1769) diary from his missionary attempt on the danish-norwegian Gold Coast in the mid-18th-century. The Moravian church was a radical pietist movement who established themselves globally through their missionary endeavours. Being some of the first protestant missionaries they were influential in most corners of the Atlantic world maintaining successful mission outposts and colonies in places as varied as the Caribbean, Pennsylvania and Greenland. A lesser-known venture was their attempted missions to West Africa centred around the danish-norwegian slave fort of Christiansborg. These attempts were led by Christian Protten, himself a local of the Gold Coast being of both Danish and Ga decent. Previous studies of Protten have primarily been interested in his role in the complicated power relations of West African society. My own research is more textually focused placing emphasis on what Protten does in writing his mission diary. This was not a private journal; it was intended for the global Moravian community and must be read as a call for resources to his mission. My focus is therefore on the rhetorical strategies Protten implements to market the Gold Coast as a fruitful field of mission. His primary means of doing this is through emotions relying on the affective theological language of the Moravian church with its emphasis on bridal- and blood mysticism. To be successful in this he needed to portray both his own, and the potential converts, emotional states as susceptible to the mission, both of which he viewed as intimately connected with the surrounding environment. At the core of the study is an interest in how emotions are mobilizing for action, the vast and influential Moravian missionary endeavour which was largely shaped by affective strategies is therefore a fruitful field of study.
Magnus Hørnes has a bachelor’s degree in intellectual history (2024) and is taking a master’s degree in the history of knowledge, both at UiO. He as also been the chief editor of the student’s journal of intellectual history Molo from 2024-2025.
Allegorized Nature and Cultural Adaptation in the Icelandic Physiologus
Essi Nuutinen, MA Viking and Medieval Norse Studies
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Medieval Icelandic audiences encountered representations of the world through allegorical texts in which animals and imagined creatures conveyed moral and emotional meaning. The Icelandic Physiologus fragments (c. 1190–1210) preserve an adaptation of a Christian didactic tradition in which such imagery was used to teach, warn, and move its recipients through allegory. What makes these fragments particularly interesting is the way moral and emotional reflection is articulated through this material. Here, I explore how animal and hybrid figures in the Physiologus were adapted to a vernacular cultural context informed by local narrative traditions and environmental experience. The discussion situates the Physiologus in its 12th-century milieu, drawing selectively on the Elucidarius as a contemporary didactic counterpart to illuminate broader patterns of adaptation. Within this framework, moral instruction and affective engagement are examined through the framing of imagery and motifs, rather than through attempts to reconstruct the emotional experience of the text’s recipients. Altogether, I consider how Icelandic adaptations participated in reshaping inherited didactic materials within a North Atlantic cultural setting. This perspective invites closer attention to how nonhuman imagery functions within medieval didactic culture.
Essi Nuutinen is pursuing a master’s degree in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies at the University of Iceland and the University of Oslo, and holds an MA in Folkloristics from the University of Turku. Her academic background centers on narrative traditions and manuscript culture, with experience working across both medieval and later vernacular materials, particularly in relation to cultural adaptation.
The role of the author amid ecological crisis: A rhetorical analysis of Future Library’s authorial performances in context of environmental change
Sara Louise Gjelsvik West, MA Sociology of literature
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This project investigates how Future Library—a century long public art project initiated by Katie Paterson—reshapes the contemporary authorial role in a time of ecological crisis. Each year, one writer contributes a manuscript that will remain sealed until 2114, written for future readers and preserved alongside a growing forest that will eventually provide the paper for the anthology. Using essays, statements, and interviews from the authors selected between 2014 and 2023, the project examines how the authors describe the responsibilities, hopes and uncertainties when addressing an unknown future. I analyse the affective, existential and literary dimensions of these statements. Through rhetorical and affect-oriented analysis, the project explores how they express their understanding of literature’s role amid environmental change. The project aims to analyse how authors speak from a present marked by collective experiences of crisis toward a distant future, and how such reflections contribute to redefining the cultural understanding of what it means to be an author in the age of environmental uncertainty. Key concerns include writing beyond reception, varying faith in literature’s endurance amid global upheaval, and the symbolic interplay between forest, book materiality and ceremonial transfer. Overall, the thesis explores how literary practice becomes a site for ethical and affective negotiation, and asks what forms of authorship are imagined, demanded, or resisted when writing for a world one will not see.
Sara Louise Gjelsvik West has a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Oslo, and is currently pursuing a master’s in sociology of literature (litteraturformidling).