Early Modern Academic Culture

This volume is the result of a conference held in Stockholm in April 2016 on Early Modern academic culture. The field is vast indeed and allows for almost anything within the field and the time period. However, a focus is discernible in that the Swedish contributors preferably deal with sources related to basic academic activities: letters of recommendation (Hörstedt), lecture notes (Lindberg) and dissertations (Sellberg), including both poetic (Fredriksson, Sjökvist) and political (Hellerstedt) aspects of that genre. Two papers deal with academic peregrination by discussing the role of dissertations defended extra patriam (Czaika) and the phenomenon of alumni, i.e. former students in the Diaspora (Viiding). A kind of contrast to that is represented by the Familienuniversität, where professors tended to be succeeded by their sons or relatives; the example analysed is Basel (Marti). The scholarly content of academic culture is treated in the contributions on specialization (Raffe), and the Aristotelian structuring of disciplines (Landgren). In a defence of the scholarly performance of English academic culture, it is argued that the research university came into existence in the humanities already in 17th century Oxford and Cambridge (Feingold). The outright, and unique, political potential of universities is illustrated by the role of the University of Leiden in the early days of Dutch independence (Waszink). Finally, a kind of academic self-image is traced in the metaphors for the quest of truth borrowed from classical authors (Helander).