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.
