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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the Library Science Channel on the new books network. My name is Jen Hoyer, and today I'm joined by Emma Haggstrom-Munn, author of Spoils of Knowledge, 17th-century plunder in Swedish archives and libraries, published by Brill in January 2023. Spoils of Knowledge offers new perspectives on document and book plundering, grounded in the controversial heritage connected to the new books.
And the book is a part of Swedish archives and libraries. Previous studies suggest that continental spoils were perceived as an inferior and problematic category, and the Catholic books in particular were hard to accommodate in Protestant libraries. However, by considering systems of classification and collection orders of archives and libraries, this book under a much more complex history of how plundering knowledge was appreciated used and fused with its new Swedish settings. Emma Haggstrom-Munn is a researcher in history of science and ideas at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Emma, welcome to new books network. Thank you very much, Jennifer. Before we get started, could you share a little bit with listeners about your background where you grew up in winter school and brought you to your research on libraries and archives? Yes, I would love to.
I grew up in a small industrial town in Sweden, so nothing special. It's called Captain in the Hall. And I guess there's not much cultural around in this town, no museums, no archives. But I really love the library.
There was a library, and I spent a lot of time there as a child, and I think most children that are exposed to books, you really sort of like, enjoy them. And it was not self-evident for me to go to university with my background, but I did. I did a little bit later. I started at 22.
And for some reason I chose history as my major. And I also did a BA in book history, which is a very, very small subject in Sweden. It's, I mean, very few students. And I think when I wrote my first bachelor thesis in history, it was about a Swedish queen.
And I looked at some letters that she didn't write them, but she dictated them, and they were going to her sister. And I remember when I held this 17th century, literally in my hands, and we're like, wow, this is really like, you know, I sort of got this feeling, this is history in my hands. And it sounds a bit corny. I guess it has some of its, you know, fetishizing sources and so on.
But I mean, then I sort of heard about this subject book history, and that you actually could take it at university and it offered you the opportunity to look at all manuscripts, medieval manuscripts and so on, and study them as objects. Like, it's not about reading, but about the materiality. And I felt like, oh, I really need to take a course and then I sort of continued. So that was sort of the beginning of it.
I guess I was just very drawn to the materiality of archival documents and books. And also like, since it affected me so much, it also gave me like a, like a sense of how we as researchers are affected by the environments that we conduct research in the archive library and so on. So that's sort of like self-reflexive take on. I mean, it's always present in the work that I do, I guess.
Yeah. Wow. That's a, that's an amazing start. I mean, I don't remember having the opportunity to take book history in my undergraduate years and that must have been so exciting.
It was, it was. Yeah. Yeah. So turning to this book, spoils of knowledge.
I'd love if you could speak a little more about how you came to this project and what your main goals were in writing it. Yes. So I mean, the book is a revision on my PhD that I finished in 2015. I did it, I did it within these real ideas.
So just a bit specific to Sweden, I guess it reminds a little bit about intellectual history in combination with history of science, I guess. And I did, I mean, I started as a PhD student in 2010, and I did this within an interdisciplinary research school in cultural history. And the topic plundering Swedish collections sort of came to my mind when I was writing the application. I sort of thought it was a fruitful object of study.
I mean, once again, as I said, I took book history as a student and when I took, I think it was the bachelor course we read an old book or thesis written by a librarian at the beginning of the 20th century. His name is Otto Valder, Mary Swedish, is a soldier name and he was a librarian and he was an expert in spoils of or in Swedish archives and libraries. So the first he wrote two books about this, the first one was published in 1916. So during the first World War.
I mean, I just remember that I was a bit shocked. I had no idea that Swedish libraries were full with books that had been abducted from continental collections. And of course, it was very interesting to learn how public institution in Sweden had been established through this material. And when I turned it into an application for a PhD position, and when I started out, I had fairly the knowledge about the subject.
So it was completely new to me besides reading all the study, of course. I was lucky because the Swedish Royal Armory, it's a museum called the Swedish Lindenoste Camarum. And they did an exhibition about spoils of or in Swedish collections. So this was like one year before I started in 2009.
So that was very lucky to me because this was an excellent exhibition. I think it was very brave of them, and it was an important initiative team and they sort of choose to place this common in Sweden, but also difficult heritage in the public spotlight. And most importantly, the museum creators, they did several publications. I think there were three of them.
And one is in English, that sort of connected early modern warfare, the Swedish plundering with also collecting cultures of the early modern period and also the dynastic ambitions of the Swedish elite. So they really put like more contemporary perspectives on this material. If I compare it to this author, the book that I mentioned earlier from the early 20th century, which is very national romantic, of course, because this is a grand era of Sweden when we have an empire in the 17th century. So, I mean, that was what I saw that with.
I had read Baldus book, I had had this. We had a publication from this very interesting, very important exhibition that the Swedish Royal Armory made. But with that said, I felt that there was something that was not right in, especially when it comes to the usefulness of the loot in Sweden. And so, I mean, how could these books be used when they finally arrived in, for instance, of Sol University Library in the 1620, 1630s.
And it was especially the so-called Catholic books, because a lot of the books that were confiscated or, or, or, libraries who were funded by the Swedish regions belong to the Jesuit order. So a Catholic order. And, and this material has often been depicted as useless in the Protestant setting, the setting of Protestant Sweden. And that goes from Bald up to date, I would say, that we can't really understand what did the use the books for, right?
And this was sort of a juxtaposition that fascinated me. So, the Swedish king, Gustavus, at office, that we started this in the 1620s, this sort of grants gave plundering on the continent. He was a devout Protestant. And of course, if you take all the books from the Jesuits, I mean, he destroyed their possibility to educate people and to do missionary work, of course.
So, I mean, that makes sense. You want to deprive the Jesuits from something. But still, you know, why didn't he just destroy the books on site like Berndam, or, or he could also like later in Sweden, done a selection, he could kept the book that was important and Berndam, but there were not important that were two Catholics, so to speak. So, so there's a lot of like sophisticated logistics going on in this project.
I mean, all these books were gently packed in chests, they were sent off to Sweden and then they were inventoried, and then they were reused within the Swedish educational system. So, there must be something more to it. That was my thoughts, so to speak. So, when I approached this object, I started with consulting lists, the picking plunder, I looked at inventories, I looked at catalogues from Swedish, the Swedish National Archives, the Obsidian University Library, for instance, and little by little, I started as the Swedish boys of war in a different light.
And to me, the key to that was looking at classification and spatial organization and how that sort of changes over time. And an important insight that I had, I think like about one or two years into the project was that the word, the spoils of war actually doesn't exist in the Swedish language during this period. So, it comes into the Swedish language at the beginning of the 18th century, after roughly a hundred year period of intense plundering. So, the practice confessed the word for it later.
So, when the Swedish elite, the kings, the commanders, when they write about these objects, they write about the mass books that came from a certain place, books that were taken from a certain place. And sometimes they even describe what they are doing as collecting and preserving. And I mean, to us, today, it sounds very weird because this is plundering and it's looting. But I also think it's important to sort of try to understand how the actors thought about this in the 17th century.
And to them, this was a kind of collection practice. One could argue. Yeah, that's a really, really helpful context, I think, for some of the other things that we'll talk about. And I was wondering if we could talk a little more about these practices of looting.
In the 17th century that you really described in the introduction to the book, and the changing historic meaning of these practices, or, I mean, as you've said, the creation of words for these practices. So, could you speak a little bit more about how plundering has changed over time? And also the distinction that you make about cultural plundering, which I found really interesting. Yes, so I mean, I guess we could start in antiquity, right?
Because, I mean, as long as we have had war, we have also had plundering. And for instance, Cesarot has written about the victor's right to plunder. I mean, something like when the battle is won, all places ceases to be sacred. So he sort of opens up for even religious institutions to be victims of plundering.
So, I mean, if I were to generalize a little bit, you can say antiquity, the Middle Ages, plundering is much of a controlled practice. But if we move forward to the early modern era, all of a sudden laws appear that aim to control the plundering, and this is something new. And why do the princess, the aristocrats in Europe, in the early modern era try to control these practices? Well, first of all, first of all, it's important to sort of, as you said, I distinct the cultural plundering from other types of plundering, because plundering, of course, occurs for many different reasons.
You need to support the troops during the campaigns. So that's one reason for plundering. And also, it was also like a wave of soldiers that were mercenaries in general during this period to earn the living. So they also had a right to plunder.
But when it comes to this cultural plundering that I'm trying to sort of unpack. And with that, I mean, the practice of taking entire archives, libraries or our chambers or even certain aristocrats, they could hand pick certain valuable objects that they knew from start were in a certain collection. So sometimes it could be like very precise, these practices. This must be this kind of practice, I think, need to be connected to this European collecting culture that we see in the early modern era.
And according to this culture, regions and aristocrats, they established ground collections in order to manifest their power knowledge, but also the diagnostic ambitions, as I mentioned earlier. And of course, the more to share these switches with the soldiers, so we would come in us. So it was very important for them to sort of try to have control over the plundering situation. And of course, they didn't always succeed with that.
However, they had these articles of war that, for instance, Gustavus Adolphus, before he goes to war in 1621, he established these rules that all the soldiers have to swear and oath on to follow. And the rules say that you can be con this always can't plunder before the king says so now it's okay. And usually with the archives and the libraries, there are quite distinct instructions, letters that are written to certain educated individuals that are parts of the campaigns that they need to secure the library when they need to secure the archive before chaos sort of takes over and the plunderers is just going wild, right. So, I mean, it's clear that the people in power, the aristocrats, the regions, kings, queens, they really tried to collect or to not collect, but to enrich their own collections in this way.
And there were also philosophers like Hugo Guwatsus, for instance, that wrote about this in the 1620s that he picked up on this anti-credential principle and said that, well, in a just war, the victor has to write to take plunder. So there were philosophers, there were laws that sort of legalized this practice. So, I mean, the early modern looting, plundering within Europe is something quite different from what we see later in history during the colonial era, for instance. So this is something different.
And I'm guessing that there could be other museums in Europe that could do similar exhibitions like the one that was made in Stockholm in 2009 and lived as Kamala, because these, I mean, these objects exist in most of the collection, I would guess, because the princes really, if they had a chance, they really took the opportunity to plunder their enemy. So, this is a very common practice in this period. And it's not national projects. That is also important to remember.
So this is before the nation states. So the people that really gains are individuals like the kings and the rest across the commanders, the high ranked officers. They are the ones that had the authority to seize an entire collection. That's a really fascinating distinction as well to remind ourselves that these weren't national projects at that point in time.
I think there are a lot of assumptions that we bring to spoils of war and things like that. So it's helpful to have that framework. So your book then looks at three different case studies. And the first one concerns the Mitao files, a collection of parchment and papers that live today in Sweden's National Archives.
How does studying these documents and the way that they've been classified over time help us understand the impact of plunder documents in Sweden's history and more directly their impact on Sweden's National Archives? It's a very good question. I think in order for me to answer that, I think I need to say something about archival organization in general first. So, I mean, today most Western archives are arranged according to the provenance principle, right?
Which means that when you bring different collections together, I mean collections of different origin. And this is usually the case in a National Archive, for instance, or in a National Archives, I mean, it sort of implies that you have several archives within the archive, right? And according to the provenance principle, you don't mix, but you respect the origin of each collection. But this is a practice that appeared first in the 19th century, when many nation states were centralizing archival collections.
The Swedish military state of the 17th century, however, they were already doing this sort of like centralizing work in the 17th century in the early 17th century. And this is then, of course, before the provenance principle existed. So archives then were often arranged according to the type of documents that were involved were by subject. And in the early 17th century, the Swedish National Archives had a very particular organization.
The files should be arranged off the rule of each king. So it was a sort of like a genealogical organization of the archives of each king, or later we have a queen also had its own department, or its own cabinet with files, right? And the mittel files became to the National Archives in Stockholm in 1622. They have been taken from a castle, a mittel castle in 1621 by the Swedish king of the Zabusad office.
And it was a collection of parchment and papers that once had belonged to the Livomian knights. So this was a knights order, they rule Livomia, and the Livomia is then today, the Stomia Lothia in the Middle Ages, right? So this is a historical collection. I think this is important to remember.
And when these spoils that they came confiscated in mittel, when they arrived in the Swedish National Archives, there were remarkably, well, first they were in the toilet, of course, but then they were actually integrated with the records of the Swedish kings. So this would have happened today, right? Because today we have the provenance principle, but they were actually, or at least part of these plans, were integrated with the record of Swedish kings. And it's very clear that in the beginning, the first archivist to work with these files, he receives them as extremely valuable, because here you have lots of historical sources to work East and European.
History, you have correspondence, for instance, between the order of masters in the room, and the Pope. So if you're interested in history and you are a Swedish official in the 1620s, you have gold in this collection, right? But it was not that easy to handle this sort of alien material in the context of the Swedish National Archives. So, I mean, of course, they demand a space, so that is always like a problem that when you try to write archival history, it's something that comes up over and over again.
It's always too cramped. And then, of course, also the archivists needed to read through all these files, they needed to classify them. And sometimes it seems like the origin of these files and their content did not really fit into this narrative that archival officials were trying to create, that I mentioned earlier, that endorsed the Vossackings. And this meant that after a few years, these records were sort of scattered throughout clicking on a castle that housed the archives at this time.
So some beats that could be directly related to the Vossackings, they sort of disappeared among other documents in each king's collection. So they sort of lost their provenance, their loss of geographical origin and identity and transformed actually to Swedish. And then there were also certain old and therefore particularly valuable parchments that had been taken in the town. They were still kept together and they actually stored them in a portable casket.
So they were very easy to access and also to move around in archive rooms because there were several of them. And finally also there were a lot of me documents, possibly paper files that were perceived as less important at the time, and they were also probably more difficult to classify, more difficult to read. So they were stored in chests and boxes in a completely other part of the castle, so far away from archive rooms that were too cramped. So this took up a long story, the point here is that National Archives, they are made up by a variety of collections, as I said, initially, not just file created by the government itself.
But material can have been included to do to confiscate, confiscations, for instance, or thundering. However, since classification changes over time, this suspicious material or alien material or whatever we want to call it, it may be very difficult to trace right. So our understanding of documents are informed, since our understanding, I mean as historians as archivists, as people working engaging with collections, it's of course informed by the classification and epistemic structure of archives today. So we need to look into how classification has changed with time in order to reveal these unexpected histories and materials, and then we can sort of see that that things has actually lost the provenance, for instance, and become a part of Swedish material, so to speak, or maybe going in the other direction, become more alienated in the archival context.
So if we don't look into classification, we can't really find these stories, I think that's the most important part and also that collections, you should have a more complicated and and and and hidden histories behind this sort of like a game. It's behind this sort of like epistemic structure that we first see when we approach the archive or the library for instance, and you need to be a little bit of a detective in order to sort of detect these stories, I guess. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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Learn how at ontario.ca-safer-ontario, pay for the Government of Ontario. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm thinking about how as archivists, we often think that it's our job to make it really clear like how the collections are organized, but at the same time, maybe we need to help people find these complications that are hidden in our very clear finding aids and organization structures. Yeah, and I think it's important to remember that that we need to preserve different traces of classification.
So we don't so we don't erase it because it can be an object of study for researchers in the future. And I think that is especially important when we consider materials from the colonial imperial era and classification that we today perceive as racist. And I very much sympathize that you want to change that classification today, but it's also important I think to preserve old classifications to be sort of unlocked, you know, certain context when we study the historical material in the future. If that makes sense.
Yeah, no, absolutely. That's a really important thing to keep in that conversation. That's a great point. So they're moving to your second case study, you describe books and collections, which became part of the upsello University Library.
And here you explain that studying the spatial organization classification and reclassification helps us understand more about the history of knowledge and libraries. So could you share a little bit about what these materials were and where they came from and then what they help us understand about changing ideas about knowledge and knowledge management. Yes, I mean, I mentioned Jesse the collections already right so many of the collections that were taken from this office for instance, but also the regions that came after him. They were taken from Catholic settings, for instance, from just with colleges in Europe.
And the question then is of course how can you create a Lutheran University library with these Catholic spoils right and according to previous scholarship this was not a very successful enterprise. But if you look at it in terms of classification in terms of spatial organization of collections, I would say that it was fairly easy in the end for this British librarians to sort of accomplish something that actually was very useful to the professors of the university library but also to the students of course that have access to this material. So it's I mean, I'm sorry, I mean, I'm sorry university isn't old medieval university, but it didn't have a library until the 1620s so it was actually a part of the office cultural politics sort of established a library and and many books that at least around I would say 50% of the books at the beginning had been taken from Catholic scholarly environments So I mean, I mentioned the gessulate colleges that were funded by Swedish troops but we also had, of course, monetary and other religious institutions in Sweden before we became a Protestant right so so those books were also confiscated and some of them ended up in a university library. So basically the same kind of books.
And it's also important to remember I think that the bookmark it was not this divided during the 17th century as one might think today I mean educated aristocrats they read a variety of authors it was I mean a lot of Swedish aristocrats went to Paris for instance in order to do that. And so I mean even when it came to to confessional books or books that dealt with theological issues, I mean if you were educated nobleman you should really have knowledge that is quite broad you should know the other side so to speak. So this is important also to have in mind. But if we look at how the library in books are that was organized, they used a house that had two floors and the librarians there actually created two libraries.
And one that was the first floor that they called the upper library, that was the library that sort of functioned as a universe at universal university library. Here you had books that matched all the subjects that were taught at university at the time. So it was really a collection that sort of followed the faculties of the university in the 17th century. But they also in the second floor they they created another library where they put most of the older books and most of the.
Evil men's quit it's not all of them, but most of them. And here they put most of the books that also work classified as Catholic as Jesuit and so on Polish books books in German and so on, those things that might not be very interesting to a professor at a Lutheran university right. It's quite when you look at material it's it's quite striking that this this floor sort of had a historical meaning to to the key raiders and to the professor it worked as a historical collection a little bit like a museum over this religious past that they had now put behind them that was Catholic, but still this could be important sources to Swedish history. So this was also an argument for keeping these books and for trying to preserve them as well as they could.
So in the end, like all the books were actually preserved, no books were burned or taking out of the collections or they were never. There were no discussion about these books being dangerous or books that were kept away from the students for instance these kinds of discussions doesn't exist in the 17th century. I think it becomes differently drawn in the 18th century but in the 17th century. They had a library that was the universal library and then they had a historical collection and they both had a function in this university setting.
And I found your descriptions of that house so interesting because you really had good architectural drawings of this space that had two floors that were not connected internally. And when that became the place for these libraries that that environment or architectural environment created the possibility for these two separate libraries that made me think a lot about how the architectural spaces that we use for libraries and shape. The way we organize knowledge within them. Yes, and I mean also the first catalogs that are made up over the two libraries in the 1640s also have their grounded in that space.
So that makes it very easy to sort of follow how the books were arranged within within this space or the two floors right. But then it becomes trickier with the catalogs that follow because they are not anchored in a space and I think so I mean I was very lucky with the material because I had both the drawing and then I had these two catalogs that were made in around 1640 that are really like striking gold when you have an amazing opportunity for research. Yeah, but I mean that space matters, obviously, yeah, in order to understand the collections and I mean there have been, I think a few mentionings of these distinction between an upper and a lower library by scholars before, but this lower library with all the books have always been perceived as not very important or like the less the books that are not used or like not so valuable, but I can't really see that in the material that I have consulted. It was just something different.
So, yeah, that's really fascinating. So, I think your last case study here you looked at the spoils collected by Carl Gustav Rangel at Schokluster Castle Castle. And Rangel had this very careful curatorial practice. So, could you tell listeners more about how he curated his collections and what this demonstrates for us about the intellectual work that he was doing?
Yeah, first of all, I think I need to say that he had a lot of people working for him helping him with creating these collections. I mean, he had agents all over Europe, especially when it came to books, that sort of provided him with the latest within different fields that interested him. And of course, he also had a wife, and a mother, a mother, a mother, a mother, a father, and she was also very much involved in this project of managing their collections. And when Schokluster Castle was built from the 6050s and onward, I decided to move his collections from different states that he had, not only in what is Sweden today, but also Northern Germany, in order to sort of create this safe space.
So, no one would comment plunder, or he thought that they were more safe as me than we were in his German estates, right? And this place that he created Schokluster, I mean, even though a lot of people were involved in creating this, this place, this sort of museum, it was really the narrative that these collections created that he brought together was really, really reflected his biography and his sort of achievements in life. So this is very much a castle and collections to speak about war, because that was sort of how he made this reputation. He was a successful but also a respected warlord.
There are even sources, because he conducted warring in Denmark, for instance, and there are some data sources that actually describe him as a fair warlord. So he didn't have a bad reputation, in that sense, and he was also quite moderate when he plotted. I will get back to that in a minute, but the most important collection that he created within this. Giant Schokluster castle was his armory and his library, but definitely the armory.
He was very fond of weapons. And when it came to weapons, he liked to have the latest within weapon technology. And the library sort of corresponds to that, because it was the same there that he really wanted to have new books, new information. He loved handbooks.
He loved books that gave him advice on how to take care of his weapons, for instance, or how to do drawings. He also found out making architectural models. So we had that kind of books and books on perspective. He was a practical man.
So even though he was a Chancellor of the University in Gereifsald, but he's now in Germany, Northern Germany. And I mean, he was a little bit involved in certain theological debates, but still he wasn't really that sort of like educated bookish man, but still he had these interests, and especially if it was something that was practical, fencing, horseback riding, all these noble virtues that a man of was of his rank, so to speak, was supposed to be a master. That was things that he collected. And what is interesting really spoils because he was very particular when he took spoils.
And he was also moderate because that was considered to be a virtue. So he didn't take too much. And this is a complete opposite if you compare it with his office that was a king. And if he could, he confiscated entire collections.
I mean, he even wrote to confiscate that door, ruined that door. And he really reused these materials in Sweden to sort of establish different collections, right, that was used in the educational system. So that was sort of a part of cultural politics. And Sweden was a very poor country also, we need to remember.
But Daniel in the 60s, 40s, 50s, he had a lot of money. And he put a lot of money into his collecting into buying books, buying art, buying all the different kinds of beautiful objects that you can imagine. But still, I mean, as a world where he was supposed to take a little bit of spoils and he did that. And then he often handpicked them.
And the interesting thing is that he often handpicked objects that when he came to books, for instance, they could be just a few years old. So, for instance, I had consulted a list where he from a library catalog has picked, I think it's around 90 books that he wants to have from his collection. The rest he let go up, but he won't be 90 books. Right.
So it's quite fascinating to follow. And it's a completely different practice. As I said, if I compare it to what was also, but also instance data, right. So there are a few exceptions though, from this book, he wanted to have the latest within everything, within information, within a weapon technology and so on.
And that is that he actually sometimes took objects as also word that had like connection to certain noble or royal families, for instance, sort of brought history to his collection that had his genealogical connections. So, for instance, he takes more prayer books that you, I mean, have female owners, and in the beginning of these prayer books they sometimes write who gave the book to them. This was given to me by my father and so on and a little bit about their family history. So these objects are very personal and they are linked to certain individuals, they're linked to certain family histories.
And this is something that interested interested in playing and he took spoils. And it's striking because he never bought these kind of books, he never bought all the books, only new ones. So, so here it's like, you can sort of see that certain things in his collections sort of became trophies, so probably more of a trophy than a book that were read in this investigation. But otherwise, I mean, this giant cabinet of curiosities that you could sort of call as well as the castle is very, very carefully curated, and also when it came to the spoils.
And there are not that many of them in the collections, but because the collection sort of had created this very narrative of a great warlord war is everywhere in this collection. People have visited school cluster later in the 18th century and in the 19th century and so on, and they have thought that, oh, it's filled with spoils of war. But that's not the case actually because this was a this was a man that had a he was extremely rich and he really wanted to present himself as a man of the world as a man that had a lot of knowledge, and therefore he also consumed a lot of books and a lot of fine art. So, like display this to the world.
Yeah, that's such an interesting example, then of how collections get used to, you know, not just for learning but to build reputation and persona. Yes, and also in the, I mean, since it became a museum early on, and I mean, in the 17th century, this was a castle that was very much a museum over its creator, called the San Daniel, but later when we have national romanticism coming in the 19th century, this becomes a symbol for this long gone Swedish empire that we had in the 17th century. So it becomes appreciated because it speaks about the Swedish, Swedish horse in the 17th century and the Swedish success is in those war. So it's also interesting to see that space that creation is something that sort of the meanings shapes with time, definitely.
Yeah, it's interesting. So we've been talking about three case studies that are located in Sweden, but I think, and we've hinted at this that a lot of your conclusions can be applied more broadly to archival library collections organized by colonizing nations. What are some of the conclusions that you've reached about house oils impact collections today and how should, how should we look for those impacts in other collecting institutions. That's very good question.
And I think, I mean, I mean, I have been talking a lot about justification. So I think that would be like my main, main points that it's important to study classification, because I mean, of course, boys war in or colonial objects collected during the colonial imperial eras are often hidden behind these schemes right of classification and, and I think this is especially true for libraries. I mean, in Sweden, we quite recently have started to notice provenance in our digital catalogs, for instance. So if I'm interested in a certain provenance, something that I provenance from the 30 years war, for instance, to see what is in in Swedish libraries.
I can't really just do a, a sorry because that information hasn't really been added yet. I mean, there are working on it, but, but it's, it's, it's something that is sort of happening now. And I mean, there are many reasons for this. I mean, yes, of course, it's been, this is a difficult heritage.
So curators, archivists, libraries have been a little bit ashamed of it. But at the same time, I mean, there's also a lot of ignorance going on because I can see that just during a time span of 100 years from from the 1620s to the beginning of the 18th century in this time, there's a lot of international archives, for instance, they lose the knowledge because the people that were around when the meat of files, for instance, came to the archive, they're not around anymore. They can dive and so on. And new archivists come in and they rearranged the archives and then it becomes more and more difficult to trace certain certain files and documents.
So I think that there are hidden histories always to sort of unravel behind these schemes of classification. So that is like one thing that I think is sort of like a general point that is important. And also that objects are, I mean, there's so depending on the context, I mean, time and space that sort of exists in, right? So it's, it's, it's important to remember that regardless if it's an archival document, if it's a book or if it's an art object, text are many different things.
They have many sort of layers of temporality attached to them. And I mean, yeah, I'm not sure how to wrap that one up. Yeah, I mean, it is a difficult question. I'm sorry.
Those are really useful takeaways and also gratifying for me to hear someone who spends time cataloging to think about, you know, the value of adding information into the record about about a book and how that helps people. And I mean, provenance is not an easy issue either because they changed with time as well. So I mean, I mean, because, because I mean, the map of Europe has changed a lot since the Second World War, for instance. So I mean, and when we had these changes when new states appears, for instance, I mean, you think a new interesting sort of problem analysis arises.
So, and I think also, like I said before, it's very important to also to sort of separate this plundering that goes on within Europe during the early modern period with what happens later in colonial complex reasons. I mean, it's like the power structure is completely different, I would say. But I think that it would be important. I mean, this kind of research that attend to pronouns that attend to, I mean, the coming into being of collections in history.
It's something that we could, I think, explore a little bit more because it's often more complicated than we think. And it's important because I mean, we have a sort of perception of heritage today, right? But I mean, the idea of heritage is not that old in one way. So especially if I say national heritage, that's a pretty new way of perceiving historical nature.
So I think that we sort of need these like different layers of time in order to sort of complicate what we actually have in our archives museum and libraries. Yeah, it's exciting to think about all of the potential research that can be done about collections and how they come together. I've taken a lot of your time. So before we wrap up, I would love if you could share a little bit about what you're working on next.
No pressure. But I don't know if you have any new projects that have grown out of this book or anything completely new that you're working on. Well, I actually, I'm working on a project now that deals with provenance. So, I mean, I think when I did the book, there was so much in order to sort of get down to the 17th century context, I had to sort of remove the 19th century from the material.
And sort of move this sort of national romantic gaze on the 17th century. And that was quite difficult. And I got very annoyed with the 19th century. So I decided I need to project about the 19th century.
And I mean, I noticed when I worked on the book that the word provenance enters Swedish by the end of the 19th century, very much due to a lot of foreign scholars coming to Sweden searching for spoils of war that arrived in Sweden during the 17th century. And that's absolutely fascinating to me. So this project that I'm working on now, it sort of deals with provenance as a European concept that is sort of born in the 19th century because it comes into the Germanic language. Which is English, German, Swedish, for instance, in this period, it comes from French.
So, and it's of course left it from the beginning. However, it didn't exist in Germanic languages before the 19th century. So I'm interested in a concept that is attached to provenance being an organizing principle of archives, but also research practice that emerged in 19th century Europe. And I am then thinking about these actors that for instance, campus, Sweden researching such provenances.
And I have recently actually published an article about this called provenance research and the other title is book history, history and the rise of an epistemic category in the 19th century Europe. So the scope is wide. But the case I actually discuss is quite, it's a Habsburg Austria, the little region of what are the in connection to material in Sweden and Rome. So it's connected to the 17th century looting enterprise that is Swedish regions occupied themselves with.
So this is one thing that I'm working on at the moment. I'm also trying to develop a new project has to do with the internet in archives and libraries. Because there are so many things that you realize that these architects and librarians are not aware of. And there are also a lot of, I mean, I noticed among these visiting scholars or these foreign researchers that comes to Sweden, they often have these fantasies of all the richness that they will find.
And these fantasies are something that really nurtures there's got to be creativity. So this is something that I would, I'm trying to sort of develop a project around. And I mean, Peter Burke recently wrote a book about ignorance and global history. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this field at the moment.
And I think it's particularly interesting to explore ignorance in the settings of knowledge collections, right, because we think that's the opposite of knowledge. And the argument from Peter Burke and others are that ignorance and and all the sort of work together in order to creating these epistemic hierarchies of archives and libraries, for instance. So, yeah, that is something that I'm thinking about the moment. That sounds really, really interesting.
Looking forward to seeing what comes from that. Yeah, maybe in seven years there will be another book. Sure, sure. Absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Once again, my guest today is Emma Haggsrow Mowen author of spoils of knowledge 17th century plunder in Swedish archives and libraries. My name is Jen Hoyer and you are listening to the library science channel of new books network.