The old, the new and the unknown : the continents and the making of geographical knowledge in seventeenth-century Sweden

This thesis investigates early modern ways of looking at the world through an analysis of what the continents meant in three settings of knowledge making in seventeenth-century Sweden. Combining text, maps and images, the thesis analyses the meaning of the continents in, first, early modern scholarly ‘geography’, second, accounts of journeys to the Ottoman Empire and, third, accounts of journeys to the colony New Sweden. The investigation explores how an understanding of conceptual categories such as the continents was intertwined with processes of making and presenting knowledge. In this, the study combines approaches from conceptual history with research on knowledge construction and circulation in the early modern world. The thesis shows how geographical frameworks shifted between settings. There was variation in what the continents meant and what roles they could fill. Rather than attribute this flexibility to random variation or mistakes, this thesis interprets flexibility as an