My latest article about the Library of Leufstabruk has been published in Quaerendo, Brill’s peer-reviewed journal on the history of books and manuscripts in Europe. In this article, I consider Leufstabruk as a place for the production of knowledge and a portal of cultural transfer between Sweden and the Dutch Republic.
The article ‘The Library of Leufstabruk: An Eighteenth Century Portal of Cultural Transfer Between Sweden and the Dutch Republic’ can be found here. It is a result of the project The Library of Leufstabruk, a collaborative project between Uppsala University Library and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, for which I spent six months in northern Uppland in 2018.
It has long been known that some 1500 books from the library were purchased by mail-order from the booksellers Samuel (II) and Johannes Luchtmans in Leiden. I argue, however, that Leufstabruk was not only a place where Enlightenment literature was brought in, but also a centre of knowledge production. In this article, I explore Leufstabruk as a portal for cultural transfer between Sweden and the Dutch Republic, and consider how this collection may serve as a frame to rethink the emergence of Sweden as a centre of knowledge creation in the eighteenth century
