Danish is as Danish does: Negotiating Ethnic Identities in Early Modern Elsinore, Denmark

Abstract

The paper takes its starting point in the Danish city of Elsinore, a city that housed a thriving migrant community in the Early Modern period. The presence of a large community of resourceful and skillful migrants in the city, many of whom were refugees from the Dutch wars of independence, called for flexibility and diplomacy on behalf of migrants as well as Danes. The paper aims to shed light on how the migrants succeeded in living relatively freely and peacefully among the Danes in the city through careful negotiations of public and personal identities. These negotiations are visible through the careful balancing of public and private languages and prudent adjustment of the legal system that were undertaken to avoid social tension, as well as in settlement patterns in the town and the use of material culture. The many sources from Elsinore thus demonstrate the success of the migrants in a time of social and religious tension, where religious conformity was demanded in public, and personal beliefs thus had to be expressed in the privacy of the home.