Learned Discourses on the Indigenous in Fennoscandia and Beyond, c. 1500–1800

Northernmost Europe was central to several salient questions preoccupying the minds of the early modern Republic of Letters. Both laity and learned elites strove to understand the physical geography and ethnic composition of these vast borderlands, whose indigenous populations were especially intriguing. While some books and maps succeeded in reaching a wide market, the major bulk of knowledge production is today traceable only in all-but-forgotten academic treatises and manuscripts. Each chapter of this volume approaches this rich cultural heritage from a fresh angle and brings rarely studied documents to the attention of modern readers. With an afterword by Håkan Rydving and contributions by Henning Hansen, Hans Beelen, Ronny Spaans, Joanna Kodzik, Andreas Klein, Konsta Kaikkonen, Toon Van Hal, Taarna Valtonen, Jonas Wellendorf, Ralph Tuchtenhagen, Per Pippin Aspaas, Simon Franzen, Francis Young, and Mads Langballe Jensen.

Per Pippin Aspaas, Ph.D. (2012), Senior Academic Librarian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, is a neo-Latinist and historian of early modern knowledge. He is a co-author of Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe (Brill, 2020).Anna Fredriksson, Ph.D. (2003), is a Latinist and Curator of Manuscripts at Uppsala University Library. She has edited several medieval and early modern Latin texts. In recent years, she has focussed especially on the authorship of Johannes Schefferus. Andreas Klein, Ph.D. (2021), Senior Academic Librarian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, is a historian of early modernity and a special collections curator. He is the author of Early Modern Knowledge about the Sámi (2023).