Spoils of Knowledge: Seventeenth-Century Plunder in Swedish Archives and Libraries

In Spoils of Knowledge, Emma Hagström Molin offers novel perspectives on document and book plundering. At the forefront is the controversial heritage connected to the Swedish Empire (1611-1721) kept in Swedish archives and libraries. Previous studies suggest that continental spoils were perceived as an inferior and problematic category, and that Catholic books in particular were hard to accommodate in Protestant libraries. However, by considering systems of classification and collection orders of archives and libraries, Hagström Molin unearths a much more complex history of how plundered knowledge was appreciated, used and fused with its new Swedish settings. Moreover, spanning a history of 400 years, she shows that the understanding of spoils changed significantly over time.