Bernd Roling – författare

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.

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.

Die lateinische Lehrdichtung der Frühen Neuzeit ist ein von der modernen Forschung bis heute nur wenig beachtetes Phänomen, dem sich der vorliegende Band auf weiter Ebene widmet: die diskutierten Texte erstrecken sich über einen Raum von Italien bis Brasilien und eine Zeitspanne vom ausgehenden 15. bis zum späten 18. Jahrhundert. Neben grundlegenden Fragen zur Gattung des frühneuzeitlichen Lehrgedichts, das mit seinen vielseitigen Ausprägungen eine Herausforderung für strenge Klassifikationsmodelle darstellt, bieten die Analysen einen Einblick in die Strategien dichterischer Wissensvermittlung, bei der neben wissenschaftlichen Themen nicht zuletzt gesellschaftliche und politische Zusammenhänge im Fokus stehen. Die Publikation richtet sich an ein fachkundiges Publikum, gibt jedoch durch Übersetzungen und ausführliche Paraphrasen der Originaltexte auch Interessierten ohne Lateinkenntnisse die Möglichkeit, dieses in der Frühen Neuzeit beliebte Genre in seiner ganzen kulturellen Bandbreite sowie seinem enormen Einfluss auf volkssprachige Dichtung kennenzulernen und zu erkunden, wie wissenschaftliche Dichtung zu einer Zeit funktionieren konnte, in der Literatur und Wissenschaft noch keine getrennten Bereiche darstellten.

The question of how pure spiritual beings like angels communicate had already been discussed by the Church Fathers. How could an angelic speech-act take place, if it does not follow the laws of ordinary language? The scholastic philosophers conducted an extensive and rather controversial debate about the language of angels ('locutio angelica'), which covered pragmatics, aspects of the 'Language of Mind' and the theory of truth and meaning. This debate was already very complex in the Middle Ages, but in Jesuit circles (and in Baroque Scholasticism more generally), discussions of angelic communication became a leading field of interest in the philosophy of language influencing such eminent thinkers as Leibniz.This study reconstructs the 1500 years of controversy on the language of angels as a striking example of the longue durée of European intellectual history.