Joachim Frederik von Bassen: A Danish Scholar in Restoration Scotland

Abstract

First paragraph: Scottish scholarship of the seventeenth century remains sadly understudied. The inhabitants of late-humanist Scotland are a chequered crowd of professors and heralds, physicians and ministers, now mostly forgotten and often seemingly insignificant. However, as has been argued elsewhere, they can nonetheless shed new, often unexpected light on the period as a whole. The older vision of Restoration Scotland as an intellectual wasteland, in particular, has been decisively rejected in the work of Clare Jackson, Esther Mijers, and others, while scholars such as Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean have emphasised the ongoing importance of contacts between Scotland and continental northern Europe during this period. Now, new work not only by these scholars, but by others such as Kathrin Zickermann, Nadine Akkerman, Thomas Brochard, and Steven Reid, to name only a few, is causing our understandings of the intellectual and cultural world of early-modern Scots to increase by leaps and bounds