A Pilgrimage to the Past : Johannes Bureus and the Rise of Swedish Antiquarian Scholarship, 1600-1650
At the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon described the antiquarian scholars of previous generations as men of “profound learning and easy faith.” His exemplar was the Swedish polymath Olof Rudbeck, who in a series of frantic and combative tomes sought to portray Sweden as the model for Plato’s Atlantis and the seething cultural cauldron from which Western civilization had emerged. A Pil