Bernd Roling

Bernhard Schirg

Stefan Heinrich Bauhaus

Despite its enormous extent and impact, the Swedish scholarship produced in the context of Olof Rudbeck's monumental 'Atlantica' (4 vols, 1679-1702) has hitherto escaped attention outside Scandinavia. The present volume explores the numerous disciplines that comprised this, one of the last, but grandest appropriations of the classical heritage in early modern times. In the decades around 1700, dozens of scholars all around the Baltic Sea embarked on studies of classical and Norse mythology, material remains and antiquities, of languages, botany and zoology as well as biblical scholarship, in order to reveal the primordial status of ancient Sweden. Fusing together numerous disciplines within Rudbeck's elaborate and all-encompassing epistemological framework, they gave to a nation that had advanced to the rank of a European superpower a narrative of a glorious past that matched its contemporary pretentions. Presenting case studies stretching from the 17th to the 19th century and across a wide number of fields, this volume traces the extent and longue durée of one of the most fascinating and underestimated episodes in European intellectual history.

The Swedish Appropriation of Classical Antiquity around the Baltic Sea and Beyond (1650 to 1800)

Apotheosis of the North

In Odins Imperium Bernd Roling reconstructs the majestic influence of Olaus Rudbeck’s Atlantica on the landscape of Scandinavian science up to the 19th century.

Odins Imperium: Der Rudbeckianismus als Paradigma an den skandinavischen Universitäten (1680–1860) (2 vols.)

For a long time studies on northern antiquarianism have focused on individual nations. This volume introduces this phenomenon in a transnational perspective. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baltic Sea was at the centre of a culture of debate, whose networks encompassed numerous European centres of learning. When the countries around the Baltic began to explore their own antiquities in this period, the prevailing climate of competition between Sweden, Denmark, Russia and the German countries soon permeated the construction and presentation of their own pasts. Exploring the ancient literatures and monuments of Iceland, Sweden or Denmark, studying runic writings or the Sami tradition, the northern scholars were establishing an individual architecture of history, and so extending the horizon of their emerging nations both geographically and historically. The contributions in this volume provide case studies illustrating the role that scholarship, art and literature played in establishing and maintaining national claims around the Baltic Sea. The variety of methods combined for this purpose makes this book of interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of art and early modern science.

Antiquarianism and national narratives in 17th- and 18th-century Scandinavia

Boreas rising

With his unconventional philosophical tracts, his translations from the Hebrew, and his work on Christian kabbala, the neophyte Paulus Ritius (d. 1541), a friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Johannes Reuchlin, became one of the most important mediators of Italian Renaissance philosophy in Germany. His attempts to combine the natural philosophy of Aristotle and Averroës with Christianity brought him in conflict with the German universities and culminated in public disputes with the leading Catholic theologians of the day. His fate as an academic outcast was sealed when he undertook to reconcile Catholics and Protestants. The study is an appreciation of Ritius' significance for the history of ideas in the early modern age.

Aristotelische Naturphilosophie und christliche Kabbalah im Werk des Paulus Ritius

Stretching from the Middle Ages to Modern Times and including sholars like Albertus Magnus, Conrad Gessner, and even Georges Buffon and Carl of Linné, this book offers a wideranging survey of the theological, medical and zoological discussions devoted to hybride creatures such as mermaids, fauns, dragons, giants and dwarfs.

Die Rationalisierung und Abwicklung der Mythologie an den europäischen Universitäten

Drachen und Sirenen

Christoph Helmig

Anne Eusterschulte

Sascha Salatowsky

Lutz Bergemann

Bettina Bohle

Cornelia Selent

Thomas Leinkauf

Hanns-Peter Neumann

Lena Gätjens

Vom Seelengefährt zum Glorienleib

Die Rationalisierung und Abwicklung Der Mythologie an Den Europäischen Universitäten

In Physica Sacra, Bernd Roling explains how medieval and early modern commentators of the Bible were for centuries able to use the natural sciences to demonstrate the historicity of biblical miracles.

Bernd Roling

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