Engraving of the Gustavianum

Engraving of the Gustavianum

This is an engraving of the Gustavianum, the oldest standing building in Uppsala University. It owes both its name and construction to Gustavus Adolphus, a Swedish king who enacted many reforms in the country. Sweden was largely ignored by Europe, but Gustavus Adolphus changed this by building a massive army and leading his country in several victorious campaigns in the 30 Years’ War (Wiesner-Hanks 353). Gustavus Adolphus’s vision was to make Sweden a prestigious European nation that other powers could not afford to ignore. One way that he aimed to increase Sweden’s authority was through education. Gustavus Adolphus “increased the number of faculty severalfold, and donated over three hundred manors from the royal domain to provide for its upkeep” (Lockhart 86). He also imported art and other artifacts from European powers to increase the prestige of his court—evidence of this exists in the Gustavianum today in the Augsburg Art Cabinet. The king also established secondary schools across his nation, and began a trend of founding new universities to further the education of his citizens (Lockhart 86). He had several motivations to do so: education of the country’s clergy would allow them to better defend their faith, and educating his newly-formed bureaucratic system would improve its efficiency, but increasing the size and reputation of Uppsala University was also an attempt to increase prestige and prove that Sweden was not as backwards as other European countries might think it was (Lockhart 86). That education was a metric of prestige shows how important it had become, and how ingrained education now was in European society.

Fredrik Akrel

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gustavianum_with_garden_-_from_Busser,_Om_Upsala_Stad_etc.jpg

c. 1770

Benjamin Wightman