Migrating slandering: Tracking Royal Sex Scandals (1880–2010)

This paper presents two cases from royal media scandals, journalism, rumours and street slandering. The investigation comprices the late 19th century to the early 21st. Our chosen scandals have Swedish kings and presumed and forbidden sexuality in centre of focus. The first scandal took place in the late 19th century, the second in the early 21st century.

Via the concept of media system we track the spoken word through archived texts such as social media forums, novels, newspaper articles, singing chapbooks, poetry and documentary books. Through such a set of different sources we open a methodological discussion on how to track down talk, in our cases popular rumours and street slandering. Methodologically we connect to Carlo Ginzburg’s clues concept and affirm the Ginzburgian faiblesse for small and seemingly insignificant phenomena in search for bigger pictures and totalities. We are also inspired by Robert Darnton’s way of ‘listening’ to texts and his claim that no history of communication and massmedia can be executed without taking the oral word into account.