A Pilgrimage to the Past. Johannes Bureus and the Rise of Swedish Antiquarian Scholarship, 1600-1650. At the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon described the antiquarian scholars of previous generations as men of “profound learning and easy faith.” His exemplar was the Swedish polymath Olof Rudbeck, who in a series of frantic and combative tomes sought to portray Sweden as the model for Plato’s Atlantis and the seething cultural cauldron from which Western civilization had emerged. A Pilgrimage to the Past takes a century-wide step back and investigates the wellspring of a number of Rudbeck’s ideas and methods in the scholarly milieu surrounding Johannes Bureus (1568–1652), archivist, alchemist, self-proclaimed herald of the Apocalypse, and Sweden’s first antiquarius regni. The book follows Bureus and his contemporaries on a whirlwind scholarly expedition traversing through thrilling new discoveries and debilitating dead-ends, set against the backdrop of a world in which the vision of antiquity served as a virtual battleground on which the spiritual and intellectual convictions of a divided and gradually transforming Europe came to blows. In the process, it reminds us that the past has always been both a challengingly foreign and deceptively familiar place.