Taylor & Francis Not for distribution 11 CLASSICISM AND KNOWING THE WORLD IN EARLY MODERN SWEDEN Vesa-Pekka Herva and Jonas M. Nordin Introduction The foundations of Western culture and society are commonly traced back to the ancient Greco-Roman world, and classical antiquity has been appropriated in myriad ways in the literal and figurative building of the post-medieval modern world. The complex process of modernization involved, among other things, the development of new economic systems, large-scale urbanization, European colo- nization of the world, multiculturalism, and ultimately the birth of an industrialized consumer society. Modernization also involved a gradual secularization of Western society and the emergence of a scientific understanding of the world. Our aim in this chapter is to consider the material and intellectual appropriation of the classical and ancient worlds in early modern Sweden, and in particular to discuss how the uses of the past were embedded in – and came to manipulate – people’s perception and understanding of the world. “Classicism” is a term which can mean different things in different contexts, but we use it in an inclusive sense to denote any form of appropriating real or imagined classical antiquity. Fascination with classical antiquity started in Renaissance Italy and spread elsewhere in Europe, including regions like Sweden which historically had very little, if any, direct contact with the classical world. Classicism influenced both the European intellectual environment and its architecture and other types of material culture. In addition to classicism, the early modern period saw the birth of a broader antiquarian interest in the ancient past, which in Sweden developed into the curious ideology of Gothicism (see Eriksson 2002). Classicism and the broader appropriation of ancient worlds in early modern Sweden are considered in this chapter from a material culture perspective informed by the recent discussion of relational ontologies and epistemologies in anthropology and archaeology. While the views discussed below are relevant to and have implications