Jesper Svedberg (1653-1735): Watcher on Sion's Walls
This remarkable man (father of an even more remarkable son, Emanuel Swedenborg) is familiar to students of Swedish church history through the works of Tottie,1 Annerstedt,2 Cornelius,3 Pleijel,4 and others, but now he makes himself known to us more intimately through his autobiography, published at...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
[1944]
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| In: |
Church history
Year: 1944, Volume: 13, Issue: 1, Pages: 42-55 |
| IxTheo Classification: | KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Parallel Edition: | Electronic
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| Summary: | This remarkable man (father of an even more remarkable son, Emanuel Swedenborg) is familiar to students of Swedish church history through the works of Tottie,1 Annerstedt,2 Cornelius,3 Pleijel,4 and others, but now he makes himself known to us more intimately through his autobiography, published at long last, and edited by Dr. Gunnar Wetterberg, Librarian of Lund University.5 He tells us that, because “children like to have their ancestors' portraits and see what they were really like,”6 he undertook, in his old age, this “Jesper Svedberg's biography written by himself, truthfully and in detail, and read through annually and augmented, to remind himself of God's good and strange providence. Bequeathed to his children and descendents for the necessary instruction in how to traverse the world happily,—to whom may God give his grace!”7 He states, somewhat naïvely, “No one can know me better than I myself, especially since, with God's grace, I take sufficient care that self-love shall not blind me and lead me astray.”8 (In spite of which “sufficient care,” the work has been disrespectfully described as a biography “written by a onesided, enthusiastic, and uncritical admirer”9!) He made seven copies, one for each of his children, of which four are still extant. To one who has leafed through the 1100 folio pages of the Linköping MS, struggling hopelessly to decipher the faded script, with its peculiar spelling and sentence structure, Dr. Wetterberg's achievement seems nothing short of miraculous! |
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| ISSN: | 0009-6407 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3161003 |