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Översättning från latin till svenska av Tomas Thorilds Maximum seu archimetria (Berlin: Lange, 1799), med översättarens förord.

I november 2023 hölls en temadag om specialsamlingar vid Riksantikvarieämbetet i Stockholm, ett arrangemang i samarbete mellan Vitterhetsakademiens bibliotek och Uppsala universitetsbibliotek. Denna volym har utmynnat ur de föredrag som presenterades under dagen och rymmer sju texter som belyser aktuella frågor och forskningsperspektiv kring kulturarvsmaterial vid svenska minnesinstitutioner.

Supported by the legal ideas of Hugo Grotius, the Swedish armies exploited opportunities to seize books as spoils of war from conquered enemies to an unparalleled degree in the seventeenth century. They took books from countries such as today’s Latvia, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic and Denmark, distributing the goods to recently founded institutions and private manors in their native country. In this work, a summarizing overview of these plunders is given: from which regions and owners full libraries or selected books were taken during the conflicts, where they subsequently tended to end up when arriving in Sweden, and how they have been received and curated over the years. It is argued that it can be questioned whether large portions of the spoils have served any proper user needs in their new contexts.

After arriving in Sweden, the literary spoils of war taken from Poznań in the Swedish deluge in the 1650s ended up in the private country house library of nobleman Clas Rålamb (1622–1698), who had been sent by Swedish King Charles X Gustavus (reigned 1654–1660) to manage the difficult situation in this Polish town while it was under Swed-ish command. With the help of a still extant inventory from the 1690s drawn up at the country house before the books were donated to Uppsala University Library, where they remain today, the contents and possible arrangement of this library are briefly described and discussed in this article. Some notable characteristics are the sections on theology and duplicates being larger than what would normally be expected from a country house library of this kind. It is assumed that these factors, among others, indicate that Rålamb did not make any sort of selection when seizing the books from monasteries and churches in Poznań. In addition, it suggests that their primary role in their new environment was to increase the cultural capital of their owner. Large numbers of the confessionally Catholic books were of little practical use in a Sweden characterized by Lutheran Orthodoxy.