Marie-Christine Skuncke

Trådte mennesket ud af mørket med oplysningen, eller trådte det ved siden af? Er oplysningens projekt for længst forældet, er det stadig i gang, eller er det i virkeligheden knap nok begyndt?Store spørgsmål vendes og besvares her i lyset af knap så omfattende, men dog vigtige emner: hvordan en friere forfatning eller en idé som velfærd opstår, om læringsmål altid har været så bindende som i nutidens pædagogik, om forholdet mellem vores identitet som køn eller bare menneske var bedre i balance før end nu, om digterne spillede en mere fremtrædende rolle i oplysningstidens samfund, om jura og religion kom i ligevægt, eller om man kan aflæse ideologi af en have. Og for resten: Hvem lagde grunden for den nordiske model?1700-tals svar på 2000-tals spørgsmål ledsages i bogen af billeder fra Christiansfeld – med eksempler på funktionalisme i 1700-tallets arkitektur og design.

The Swedish botanist and physician Carl Peter Thunberg, a pupil of Linnaeus, was the only European who visited and published his observations of Tokugawa Japan in the eighteenth century. On his way to and from Japan, he visited territories in the Dutch colonial empire: the Cape Colony, Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Following his return to Sweden, he made a spectacular career at the University of Uppsala. He published a ground-breaking work on Japanese plants, Flora Japonica (1784), and a travel account that was translated into several languages. In 1787 the Swedish king Gustav Ill, on Thunberg’s initiative, founded a new Botanical Garden and a monumental building for natural history – Linneanum, now the home of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) – as a gift to the university. Marie-Christine Skuncke reconstructs Thunberg’s scientific career by exploring exchanges within the networks which he built in Europe, the Dutch colonies, and Tokugawa Japan. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book is a study of social practices in natural history, in a global perspective. Marie-Christine Skuncke, Professor of Literature at Uppsala University and a Former Fellow of SCAS, was born in Paris of a Swedish father and a French-Polish mother. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Since 1995, she chairs the Uppsala Interdisciplinary Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century Sweden in a European perspective, with a particular focus on theatre and opera, the education of Gustav Ill, political rhetoric, and media history. Her research on Thunberg has turned her attention to relations with Asia and Africa.

The eighteenth century, in which the Royal Academy of Letters was created in Stockholm, was a time of intense political discussion. Concepts such as human rights and social equality were beginning to take shape in Europe and North America. Critical views spread through a variety of media which undermined the power structures of the Old Regime, gossip, newspapers, libels, memoirs, chroniques scandaleuses, engravings, etc. When the Royal Academy of Letters celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2003, one of the events was a symposium in Stockholm entitled ‘Media and Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century’. The present volume includes the contributions of the four keynote lecturers, John Brewer, Robert Darnton, Carla Hesse and Jean Sgard. The British historian JOHN BREWER is currently Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at California Institute of Technology. The American scholar ROBERT DARNTON is Professor of European History at Princeton University. The American scholar CARLA HESSE is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. The French press historian JEAN SGARD has been Professor of French Literature at the Université Stendhal in Grenoble 1969-1994. The editor, MARIE-CHRISTINE SKUNCKE, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Uppsala University.