Bernhard Schirg – författare

The Economics of Poetry takes an innovative approach to the genre of Neo-Latin poetry, encompassing the entire process of poetic production, from composition and physical realization to the formal presentation to the honorand. This process was not predicated upon post-Romantic ideas of inspiration and originality, but rather upon the need to produce literary works in a timely fashion, often (though not exclusively) dependent upon the realities and exigencies of the contemporary political situation.

Applying this approach across more than three centuries of literary production, this volume analyses the techniques employed and developed by authors all around the world to reduce the effort of poetic composition, streamline its production and facilitate its presentation when time was a crucial factor in success. To reveal the efficient techniques which authors employed in order to meet their deadlines, each essay focuses on a variety of works by the same writer and examines the full context of their production. The re-use and recycling of previous texts and rhetorical templates and even the re-dedication of previously presented manuscripts emerges as a central and essential modus operandi in response to the strict dictates of fast production.

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.

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.