Reading and writing the Swedish Renaissance
2009; Wiley; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1477-4658.2009.00556.x
ISSN1477-4658
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Influence and Diplomacy
ResumoThe species of humanistic learning ordinarily associated with the notion of ‘Renaissance’ was conspicuously absent from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Sweden. Sweden's most celebrated Renaissance writers, admittedly champions in a narrow field, were the brothers Johannes and Olaus Magnus (1488–1544; 1490–1557).11 Concerning Johannes and Olaus Magnus (Swedish names, Johan and Olof Månsson), see Kurt Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths: Johannes and Olaus Magnus as Politicians and Historians, trans. James Larson (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991). The former's Historia de omnibus gothorum sueonumque regibus [A History of All the Kings of the Goths and Swedes] (1554) and the latter's Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus [A History of the Northern People] (1555) were important works in establishing in the eyes of wider Europe some sense of Nordic political, social, and cultural history.22 Olaus Magnus’ work has been edited in a modern English translation: see Peter Foote (ed.), A Description of the Northern Peoples (Rome, 1555), trans. Peter Fisher & Humphrey Higgins. 3 vols. Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, No. 182 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996–1998). But both works were published in Rome, remote from their homeland, since the brothers Magnus were political and confessional exiles from Vasa Sweden. Though their motivations in writing these works may have been in some dark sense to counteract the Vasa regime, they were read in Sweden with interest, and served in effect to provide Gustavus Vasa (1496–1560) with frequently tendentious accounts of Sweden's age-old rights and dignities. And if the dispossessed Catholic bishops had no direct cultural impact upon their own people, a similarly stark situation applied to their successors, the Protestant few who constituted the Vasa intelligentsia. While Lutheranism brought some kind of polemical artistic vitality to the German lands, this did not extend to the other side of the Baltic Sea. That great agent of Reformation writing and visual expression, the printing press, was not a powerful tool in Sweden. Gustavus Vasa exerted close control over all published writings in the kingdom, a simple task in itself, since in 1526 he shut down all printing presses in Sweden, save one solitary apparatus in Stockholm reserved for the publication of royal proclamations and prayer books.33 See Michael Roberts, The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden, 1523–1611 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 115. With such stringent safeguards in place, there were few incentives for writers to publish anything, even in praise of the regime. The extent of Gustavus Vasa's mistrust of the press can be gauged from the fact that his trusty servant of the Reformation, Archbishop Olaus Petri, was forbidden to use the royal press after 1539, his offence having been to chide the king for coarse language. Scholarship withered for want of fresh printed stimuli, and there was no viable forum for literary or cultural debate since Uppsala University, which had been founded in 1477, had all but closed its doors by the 1510s. In the visual arts, too, we find thin evidence of Renaissance sophistication.44 The most extensive survey of the visual arts of Vasa Sweden in recent times is Göran Alm, Inger Estham, Torbjörn Fulton, Kersti Holmquist, Kurt Johannesson, Johan Knutsson, Mereth Lindgren, Magnus Olausson, and Peter Tångeberg, Renässansens Konst, Signums svenska konsthistoria (Lund: Signum, 1996). Kurt Johannesson's essay ‘Renässansens Bildvärld’ (9–31) is a good introduction to the subject. Painting, sculpture and architecture thrive in prosperous societies: Sweden in the sixteenth century was grindingly poor, and that great cultural force, the Church, had been banished in favour of the reformists. We look in vain for anything approaching a court culture under Gustavus Vasa. His tendency to trail his advisors and administrators around the vast kingdom is one reason why even the royal residences at Uppsala Castle and the old fortress of Tre Kronor [The Three Crowns] in Stockholm were furnished in the most functional manner. In part Gustavus Vasa was seeking to emulate the sainted medieval Swedish king Erik the Holy [Erik den Helige] (c. 1120–1160) who had ceaselessly moved through his kingdom on a kind of extended progress.55 Concerning Erik the Holy (born Erik Jedardsson, reigned 1156–1160), see Herman Lindqvist, A History of Sweden; From Ice Age to Our Age, trans. Rod Bradbury (Stockholm: Norstedt & Söner, 2002), 52–6. But Gustavus Vasa needed to follow the so-called Eriksgata as a consequence of his political insecurity – having repeatedly to establish afresh feudal loyalties and allegiances. This political nervousness was allied with financial strain on the royal exchequer. With enemies to face at home and keep at bay along the country's long forested borders, Gustavus Vasa did not have the resources or will to act as any kind of northern Maecenas. It is only with the accession to the throne in 1560 of Gustavus Vasa's eldest son Erik that the notion of Renaissance can be applied to the Swedish cultural environment.66 For Erik's cultural interest and attainments, see Roberts, The Early Vasas, 199–200; and Malin Grundberg, ‘Ceremonies and Power in the Vasa Era in Sweden: The Example of Eric XIV's Coronation’, in Lars Andersson (ed.), The Vasa Dynasty and the Baltic Region: Politics, Religion and Culture, 1560–1660. A Symposium at Kalmar Castle, 4–6 February, 2000 (Kalmar: Kalmar Castle, 2003), 19–28; Malin Grundberg, Ceremoniernas makt. Maktöverföring och genus i Vasatidens kungliga ceremonier (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2005), 69–103. Erik XIV (1533–1577) had been tutored by such continental masters as Georg Norman and Dionysius Beurreus who instilled in his fertile mind a sophisticated appreciation of mathematics, music, astrology, and dancing. Furthermore, they facilitated his natural disposition towards languages by teaching him Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Hebrew, in addition to his easily come-by knowledge of German. Rather unusually, Erik was extremely proficient at drawing and even copper engraving, and it is an odd fact that modern Swedish historians of art regard Erik as the country's most skilled draughtsman of the sixteenth century. Erik, temperamental and unpredictable, brought a new polish and panache to the austere northern court, establishing himself at the castle at Uppsala and more particularly his favourite residence at Kalmar. He adorned the latter with a recognisably Renaissance decorative programme including stuccowork and intarsia wood panelling; he encouraged European artisans – mostly brought across from the Low Countries – to introduce the cultural forms of the continent into the Swedish sphere.77 For an account of Kalmar's Renaissance decor, see Torbjörn Fulton, ‘Byggnadsskulpturen’, in Göran Alm (ed.) et al., Renässansens Konst, op.cit., 127–37. As a consequence of his initiatives, from the 1560s on we begin to see in the material culture of Sweden such representative Renaissance and Mannerist elements as the grotesque, strapwork, emblems and mythological scenes taken from Flemish engravings. Erik also welcomed musicians and writers to the court, and even introduced onto the coins of state his personal impresa with a Hebrew and Latin inscription.88 See Lars-Ingvar Jönson & Lars O. Lagerqvist, Erik XIV:s mynt med ‘Göteborgsmotiv’ (Gothenburg: Numismatiska Litteratursällskapet), 1975. These hopeful beginnings quickly receded, however, as the country slipped into an enervating conflict with Denmark, the so-called Seven Years’ Nordic War (1563–1570). Erik's fate was tragic: the demands of the war exhausted the royal coffers and put heavy strain on his vulnerable mental state. He fell prey to an innate tendency to madness that ran through Vasa veins; with Erik this manifested itself in spectacular and unpredictable outbursts of verbal and physical violence. Servants were killed on the spot if he suspected them of smirking or fidgeting. Most remarkably, Erik murdered several of his political rivals as they languished defenceless in the dungeons of Uppsala Castle.99 Erik stabbed the defenceless Nils Sture before ordering the summary executions of Svante Sture, Erik Sture, Abraham Stenbock and Ivar Ivarsson. Concerning this infamous incident, see Jan von Konow, Sturemorden 1567. Ett drama i kampen mellan kungamakt och högadel (Karlskrona: Jan von Konow, 2003). In 1568 Erik was removed from the throne in a coup by his half-brother John; he was ultimately to die in prison in 1577, allegedly after eating poisoned soup.1010 Toxicology tests carried out on Erik's exhumed remains in the 1950s confirmed that he had died from arsenical poisoning. Despite his ruthlessness, John III (1537–1592) shared many of Erik's cultural instincts, with some different emphases. He was interested in theological synthesis and was a deep reader in confessional works. He also cultivated writers of distinction to promote his position on the international stage, among them the learned Flemish humanist Jacobus Typotius (1540–1601) and the Swedish neo-Latin poet Sylvester Johannis Phrygius (1572–1628).1111 Concerning Typotius’ Swedish service, see Mout, Nicolette, ‘A Most Useful Servant of Princes: The Netherlandish Humanist Jacobus Typotius at the Prague Court around 1600’, Acta Comeniana 13 (1999), 27– 49. For Phrygius’ literary endeavours for John, see Peter Sjökvist (ed.), The Early Latin Poetry of Sylvester Johannis Phrygius, Studia Latina Upsaliensia 31 (Uppsala; Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007), 49–55. It is interesting to note that when John died in 1592, he was laid to rest in a mortuary chapel in Uppsala Cathedral decorated with stucco representations of the allegorical virtues found in the pages of Cesare Ripa's celebrated Iconologia published for the first time in Rome that same year.1212 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo Descrittione dell’Imagini universali cavate dall’antichità et da altri luoghi da Cesare Ripa Perugino (Rome; The Heirs of Giovanni Gigliotti, 1593). The political turmoil that followed John's death precluded any flourishing of learning or nurturing of creativity. The struggle between John's son Sigismund and his uncle Charles, Duke of Södermanland, resulted in civil war. The Calvinistic Charles (1550–1611) was disinclined to promote artistic frivolities, and in any case, was soon swamped by troubles at home and abroad. On his death in 1611, his sixteen-year-old son inherited a kingdom that was at once broke, riven with internal dissension, and simultaneously at war with Denmark, Russia and Poland. It was Sweden's lasting fortune that the sixteen year old forced to deal with these critical problems was Gustavus Adolphus. There is no doubt that Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632) played the seminal role in transforming his kingdom from a divided and crisis-ridden peripheral nation on the brink of utter collapse into a major European power.1313 Concerning Gustavus Adolphus and his achievements, see Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1953–8). Also useful are Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus, 2nd ed., Profiles in Power (London: Longman, 1992); Nils Gabriel Ahnlund, Gustavus Adolphus the Great, trans. Michael Roberts (New York, 1940; repr., New York, History Book Club, 1999); C. R. L. Fletcher, Gustavus Adolphus and the Struggle of Protestantism for Survival (New York & London: G. Putnam, 1896); Günter Barudio, Gustaf Adolf der Große. Ein Politische Biographie (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer, 1982); and Sverker Oredsson, Gustav II Adolf (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2007). Against the scale of his achievements in reforming the constitution, uniting the four estates of the realm, overhauling the country's infrastructure, modernizing the legal and educational systems, bringing stability to the church, and initiating the military revolution that would have an impact across all Europe, his patronage of the arts is comparatively unimportant. But it was he who encouraged the revival of learning in Sweden, re-founding the University of Uppsala, establishing new professorial chairs and reviving others that had fallen into abeyance a century earlier. A gifted musician and fluent in seven languages, Gustavus Adolphus welcomed musicians and scholars to his court, reversing a tendency towards insularity that had characterized the cultural outlook of most of his predecessors on the throne. But above all, somewhat oddly, his greatest contribution to what we may call the acculturation of Sweden – or what is known to Swedish historiographers as ‘the Europeanization’– was his decision to enter the Thirty Years’ War in defence of German Protestant liberties.1414 See Göran Rystad (ed.), Europe and Scandinavia: Aspects of the Process of Integration in the Seventeenth Century, Lund Studies in International History (Lund: Scandinavian University Books, 1983), particularly Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Europe and the Glory of Sweden: The Emergence of a Swedish Self-Image in the Early Seventeenth Century’, 237–44. The manifold cultural encounters and discoveries experienced by the Swedish soldiers, particularly of the officer class and above, in their victorious progress through the Empire inspired both a sense of cultural inadequacy and aspiration. With military success came financial enrichment, and it was the expenditure of the newly wealthy Swedish nobility – a considerable constituency in a country with a tradition of higher and lower aristocratic strains – that sparked a mania for building, burnishing and beautifying country and town houses newly filled with continental decorative fashions. The boom years around Queen Christina's coming of age and coronation (1644–1650) saw Stockholm transformed from a small town of wooden houses where goats grazed on the grass roofs to a city of Roman and Italianate palazzi, each seemingly vying with its neighbour in grandeur and ostentation. And if Erik Dahlbergh's discriminating pencil did sometimes broaden a vista or endow a palace with fantasy pavilions it in truth lacked, the essential character of the city remained as he drew it – elegant, solid, expansive, and perhaps even a little vulgar.1515 Erik Dahlbergh was responsible for the extensive series of copper engravings recording the significant buildings and topographies of Sweden, a counterpart to the great European topographies of Matthaeus Merian in whose workshop Dahlbergh had received some training. The series was begun in 1667 under the title Svecia antiqua et hodierna, and expired in 1715, thirteen years after Dahlbergh's death in the crisis years of the Great Northern War. Concerning Dahlbergh's venture, see Börje Magnusson, Att illustrera fäderneslandet. En studie i Erik Dahlberghs verksamhet som tecknare, Ars Suetica 10 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1986); Börje Magnusson, ‘Svecia antiqua et hodierna’, Stormaktstid. Erik Dahlberg och bilden av Sverige, ed. Leif Jonsson (Skövde: Läckö Castle, 1992), 96–111; and Börje Magnusson, ‘Sweden Illustrated. Erik Dahlbergh's Svecia antiqua et hodierna as a Manifestation of Imperial Ambition’, in Allan Ellenius (ed.), Baroque Dreams: Art and Vision in Sweden in the Era of Greatness, Figure Nova 31 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2003), 32–59. The inhabitants of these manifest fruits of war moved through rooms gilded and stuccoed, moralized by emblems, and hanging with portraits, landscapes and mythological scenes, not a few of which had once graced the collections of Rudolph II or the electors of Bavaria.1616 During the seventeenth-century wars, the Swedes operated what amounted to a policy of enriching its cultural resources by seizing art works and books from conquered territories; perhaps Gustavus Adolphus’ instructions that captured libraries be sent to Uppsala to serve as the basis for the university's collections is the best-known example of this. But it is wrong to conclude that cultural enrichment was simply achieved through theft and the seizure of war booty. A more nuanced view has been presented in the recent volume Krigsbyte, ed. Ann Grönhammar (Stockholm: Livrustkammaren, 2007). Where a generation before few of the Swedish nobility would have had a very sure grasp of classical or contemporary European literature, the new enfranchised breed of courtier and cleric had benefitted from an education at Uppsala, or at Dorpat (modern-day Tartu), the university founded in 1632 by Gustavus Adolphus in the Swedish imperial possession of Estonia (Estland). By the standards of the previous century there is no question that the court presided over by Queen Christina (1626–1689; reigned 1632–1654) was marked by a remarkable cultural efflorescence.1717 Among the many studies of Queen Christina, see Sven Stolpe, Drottning Kristina, 2 vols. (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1960–1961) with an English edition, Christina of Sweden, trans. Sir Alec Randall (London: Burns & Oates, 1966); Curt Weibull, Christina of Sweden (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1966); Per Bjurström, Christina, Drottning av Sverige – En europeisk kulturpersonlighet (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1966); Georgina Masson, Queen Christina (London: Cardinal, 1968); Veronica Buckley, Queen Christina (London and New York: Harper Collins, 2004); and Peter Englund, Silvermasken. En kort biografi över Drottning Kristina (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2006). It is well known how the bookish queen drew men of intellect to her court in the 1640s and early 1650s. It is a testimony to her discernment that she approached men of the stature of René Descartes, Claude Salmasius, Isaac Vossius, and Daniel Heinsius to constitute her learned salon and to enter into dialectical discussions on matters of philosophy, philology and literature. At the same time she enlisted figures like Sebastian Bourdon, Jeremias Falck and Sebastian Dadler to glorify her person and kingdom in the visual arts, fashioning her as a Northern Minerva with such success that even Andrew Marvell in faraway Eton could claim ‘Uppsala is thought not unequal to ancient Athens, here Pallas has both her aegis and her chariot’.1818 ‘Upsala nec priscis impar memoratur Athenis,/ Aegidaque et currus hic sua Pallas habet’: see ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo, then with my Lord Whitelocke, Ambassador from the Protector to the Queen of Sweden’, in Nigel Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Longman, 2003), 263–6. Christina's interest in scholarly concerns has sometimes been considered a dilettantish extravagance, but none can doubt the impetus her engagement with recondite and learned matters provided for the cultural profile of her court. Christina was rare among Swedish monarchs in delighting in a ballet or poem over a jousting tournament or well-milled sword. She favoured those among her courtiers who shared her intellectual interests and who showed the most polished manners. Chief among them was the pavonine Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (1622–1686), handsome and suave scion of an immigrant French family of soldiers who had found their fortune in the wars of Gustavus Adolphus in the 1610s and 1620s.1919 The standard biography of Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie is Rudolf Fåhraeus, Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (Uppsala: Hugo Geber, 1936); see also Georg Wittrock, ‘Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie’, Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon, Vol. 10 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1931), 657–80; Bernhard Tarschys, ‘De la Gardie, Magnus Gabriel’, Svenksa Män och Kvinnor, Vol. 2 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1944), 233–5; and Göran Rystad, ‘Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie’, in Michael Roberts (ed.), Sweden's Age of Greatness, 1632–1718 (London: Macmillan, 1973), 220–31. De la Gardie's cultural interests are treated broadly by various authors in the two-volume exhibition catalogue Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, ed. Ulf G. Johnsson & Gösta Vogel-Rödin (Skövde: Nationalmusem/Västergötlands Turisttrafikförening, 1980–81); see also Lars Ljungström, Magnus Gabriel De la Gardies Venngarn. Herresätet som byggnadsverk och spegelbild (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2004). Eloquent, urbane, and imbued with a little French elegance, De la Gardie became Christina's cultural foil, meeting her in terms of sumptuous display, connoisseurship, and critical discernment. He was the head of a class of the higher nobility who lavished money on making their stern Nordic fortresses and fastnesses into elegant palatial residences. But the example of Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie offers a telling insight into the true mentality lurking behind the apparent optimism of this, Sweden's Stormaktstid, or Age of Greatness. De la Gardie's principal seat was the castle of Läckö in Västergötland. Sitting upon a spur of rock overlooking Lake Vänern, Läckö could trace its origins to a thirteenth-century fort, but it had been wholly rebuilt from the ground up in the 1610s by De la Gardie's father. Today, visitors to its vaulted lower chambers are confronted by bold and belligerent fresco figures of barbaric warriors painted on the plaster walls during the time of Jakob Pontusson De la Gardie.2020 The paintings were executed by Gulich Gulickson and his son Johan between 1625 and 1637: see Barbro Flodin, ‘Läckö slott under Jacob De la Gardies tid’, in Leif Jonsson (ed.), Läckö. Landskapet, borgen, slottet (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1999), 168–72. These warriors are representatives of the ancient Goths, the tribes who overthrew the pomp of Rome. Through the fanciful inventions of figures like the medieval Erik Olaus and the exiled sixteenth-century Swedish clerics Johannes and Olaus Magnus, the Swedes cherished their own foundation myth that claimed they were descended from the victorious Germanic tribes.2121 Some key texts of the Storgoticist theory are Ericus Olai, Chronica regni Gothorum (c. 1470); Johannes Magnus, Historia de annibus gothorum sveonumque regibus (Rome, 1554); Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555); see Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths, op.cit. Brief, but incisive introductions to the subject can be found in Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience, 1560–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 70–75; and Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years’ War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 156–64. Nurtured by the philological resonances of such places as the Baltic island of Gotland and the provinces of Väster- and Östergötland, not to mention that nebulous Swedish tribe of the Wends (i.e., the Vandals), the Storgöticist [Great Goth] paradigm became an article of faith for the newly emergent Swedish nation. In the guise of the latter-day Goths, the Swedes felt equipped to meet on equal terms with their firmly established and culturally confident new partners at the top table of seventeenth-century European politics; the French, Dutch, English, and various potentates of the German Reich. The significance of the presence of these titanic warriors on the cellar walls at Läckö is that they quite intentionally underpin the entire edifice of Renaissance and Baroque confection prevalent in the splendid rooms above. The power of Stormaktstidens Sweden evident in such showpiece architectural spaces as the Kungssalen and the Slottskyrka are seen to have their foundation upon an older heritage than wider Europe affords the Swedes in its historical chronicles. Apparent evidence that the country was no parvenu political power, such semiotic programmes as that at Läckö made counterclaims against Sweden's peripheral provincialism. Other nobles instructed their (invariably foreign) architects to falsify the foundations of their new stately villas and châteaux to provide the appearance of rugged foundations redolent of sturdy bastions of the Middle Ages. The aim in this endeavour was to fabricate a supposed pedigree stretching back over many generations: the contemporary Swede could therefore be seen as reaping the rewards on the international stage of long-expectant dynasties. These twin energies – the discovery of learning and continental cultural expression, allied with an uneasy sense of inferiority as Swedes measured themselves against the attainments of their political partners and competitors – are the binary poles within which the Swedish Renaissance developed and found its expression. The essays in this volume elaborate in specific ways upon these central and defining energies. In the first, Stina Hansson looks at self-conscious discussions close to the centre of the regime concerning the development of a national poetic language. In it, Professor Hansson examines tensions between impulses for a literature that syncretised some of the poetological trends of wider European writing and a more strictly nationalistic view that argued for an independent literary voice proclaiming Sweden's supposed Gothic traditions. The principal advocate of the patriotic position was the court poet Georg Stiernhielm (1598–1672), author of the most important Swedish language work of the Stormaktstidens era, his Hercules of 1658.2222 Concerning Stiernhielm's Hercules, see Axel Friberg, Den svenske Herkules: studier i Stiernhielms diktning (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1945); for his life and career, see Rune Pär Olofsson, Georg Stiernhielm – diktare, domane, duellant. En levnadsteckning (Hedemora: Gidlund, 1998). There is an obvious irony that the spokesman for a faction so keen on establishing Sweden's cultural distance from mainland Europe should frame his work on noble manhood with reference to the embodiment of Greek virtue, despite the claims made that Hercules had his origins in the Swedish term ‘Herr kule’[Head of the army]. But Stiernhielm's thinking defied anticipatory logic: for him, Sweden was the Vagina gentium, the birthplace of all nations. From the North, learning and culture radiated out into the wider world, to Egypt and India, Persia and Greece. The Greek Hercules was explained as a later approximation to his Swedish original. Such fantastical conceptions of Sweden's primary place among the nations reached their zenith with the extraordinarily inventive and tendentious researches of Olaus Rudbeckius (1630–1702), polymathic professor at Uppsala, who identified the university city and ancient Swedish capital as Plato's Atlantis, and attributed the pantheon of ancient gods to philological corruptions of various Swedish deities and heroes.2323 Olaus Rudbeckius, Atland eller Manheim (Uppsala, 1679–1702); see Gunnar Eriksson, The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science, Uppsala Studies in the History of Science 19 (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, USA, 1994); and Ekman, Ernst, ‘Gothic Patriotism and Olof Rudbeck’, Journal of Modern History 34 (1964), 52– 83. Olaus Rudbeckius has recently been the subject of a book of popular scientific history: see David King, Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (New York: Harmony Books, 2005). Patterns of cultural indebtedness to continental Europe are clearer still in Gunilla Dahlberg's essay on the scope and scale of drama at the court of Queen Christina. Drama here is taken in its broadest sense of theatrical display, a remit that embraces such representative seventeenth-century entertainments and public spectacles as tournaments and fireworks displays. But Dr Dahlberg also traces the place of ballets, masques and opera in Christina's court, noting the importation of Italian and French musicians, and positing the influence of itinerant English acting companies upon Swedish performers. Thus, modest as the theatrical scene in Sweden might appear, particularly in unflattering contrast with the situation in England or France, evidence is advanced of how Swedish native traditions were informed by the fashions of more culturally confident countries. Dr Dahlberg's essay also underlines the importance of Christina as a figurehead for patronage. Lavish in her own expenditure on cultural embellishments, her example prompted other prominent figures to direct funds in a similar direction. The austerity of the court of her successors, Charles X Gustavus, Charles XI and Charles XII exemplifies the sense of a cultural Golden Age for Sweden during Christina's reign. During the seventeenth century, Sweden acquired a Baltic empire that embraced the modern-day Baltic States and parts of north Germany and Poland. Also within this empire was modern-day Finland, although it had been from the Middle Ages incorporated as a
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