Literary Spoils of War in Uppsala in Practice – Controversial Theology

Abstract

Religious conflicts did not only take place on battlefields in the 17th century, but in far wider contexts. We see them also in propaganda, poetry, sermons and academic discourse. When the literary spoils of war were taken by the Swedish from Catholic libraries in Poland to the Lutheran Uppsala University, many books were not highly valued. These Catholic books ended up stored separately from the ‘sound and pure’ volumes found in the first library building in Uppsala. In this article, it is shown how these Catholic books did at times prove useful, at least in the field of polemical theology. In fact, teaching at the university took an increasingly anti-Catholic direction after the arrival of the collections from Braniewo and Frombork to Uppsala, with the main confessional enemy apparently being Robert Bellarmine.