Patriotism and Reform in Nordic Universities during the Long Eighteenth Century: (2023:08 Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment)

Only a few studies have dealt in depth with how, let alone why, Nordic academia and its learned cosmopolitan legacy were challenged and transformed as a consequence of the political claims of the patria. While studies of eighteenth-century learning have mainly pinpointed the role of enlightenment movements and ideas in the downfall of the early modern Republic of Letters, this study asserts the importance of universities by demonstrating that these centuries-old institutions were both the main carriers of ideas of learned cosmopolitanism and eventually also the main critics of this ethos.  The work explores how new governmental reforms and growing patriotic sentiments consolidated the state and university in new shared endeavours of ‘utility for the fatherland’, and how this development gradually replaced the centuries-old European academic cohesion with a system of competing national academic entities. In doing so, this work adds to our understanding of the learned world in the Nordic region and its relation to concurrent societal and political developments in the long eighteenth century. The book complements the new and more dynamic approaches to the history of universities by combining prosopographical methods, quantitative analysis and geo-visualisations with institutional and socio-cultural source material from various universities. The work takes a comparative and ‘democratic’ approach, as it also deals with the less well-known members of the Nordic learned elite, with several universities in different political and cultural settings.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of figures and tables Introduction Patriotism in the North Nordic universities and university professors 1. Structural foundation and institutional practice: from European similarities to regional differences A universal foundation ‘Our royal universities’ Academic citizenship The economic foundation 2. Academia as a socio-cultural community Towards academic citizenship: domestic upbringing and early education Becoming an academic citizen: matriculation and student life Being an academic citizen: cultural representation and self-perception 3. Consolidating State and University Patriotic utility of science and education Swedish reforms and a protective academia Danish reforms and the crumbling academic autonomy 4. Controlling academia: governmental needs for specialised knowledge Promoting new chairs and scientific sites Introducing specialised exams 5. Nationalising academia: birthplace criteria and domestic precedence The academic degrees The professor corpus 6. Constraining academia: Nordic travels in a learned Europe The intellectual geography of Nordic travels Academic self-sufficiency and changing travel practices 7. Endorsing patria, defending universitas: a learned patriotic estate From a learned estate to a learned state Trapped between patriotic virtues and cosmopolitan notions? Conclusion Bibliography Archival sources Primary sources Secondary sources Appendix Prosopography of Nordic university professors 1700–1799 Description of the use of the prosopography

About the Author :
Mikkel Munthe Jensen is a research fellow at the Gotha Research Centre. He is a specialist in history of universities, knowledge and higher learning, and is currently leading a project on the institutionalisation of early modern natural law. His work has appeared, most recently, in the Journal of History of Universities.