New findings from Stockholm and Uppsala on the literary activities of Estonian and Livonian nobles

On 13–16 May 2024, the project members Aira Võsa and Kristi Viiding visited the Stockholm Royal Library, the Swedish State Archive in Stockholm and Uppsala University Library to find and take photos of material linked with literary activities of Estonian and Livonian nobility.

The primary focus of this archival work was the career of Andreas Virginius – the Pomeranian nobleman, the first theology professor at the Academy of Tartu and the later Bishop of Estonia. Namely, the manuscripts of disputations supervised by him in the 1630s, his correspondence, materials associated with the poet Hermann Schwembler who was ennobled in 1653, and the Uppsala Library collection Personalverser över enskilda were researched. From the latter, we found more than half a hundred hitherto unknown poems by Estonian and Livonian noblemen written in German and Latin. As a gift from our kind colleagues in Uppsala, we received an annotated source publication of the previously unpublished linguistic works of the Swedish nobleman Georg Stiernhielm: Linguistic works, vol. 1–2, published and annotated by Josef Eskhult, Uppsala 2023.