ABSTRACT

Johannes Thomae Agrivellensis Bureus (1568-1652) was a busy man around the turn of the seventeenth century. After a short and unexceptional academic career at a makeshift college set up in Stockholm during Uppsala University’s long period of dormancy (c. 1520-1593), he was hired in 1590 as a clerk at the Royal Chancery during the reign of John III, a ruler who had attempted to balance his Protestant upbringing with his sympathy for the Catholicism of his Polish wife Catherine Jagiellon by introducing an ecumenical programme of liturgical reform that served only to infuriate his subjects of all religious confessions.1 Within two years’ time, the king had died and power passed to his son Sigismund, an unapologetic Catholic who was already serving as king of Poland, and who was viewed as having designs to establish a foothold for the CounterReformation in Sweden. Almost immediately, John’s brother, Duke Charles of Södermanland (later Charles IX), rallied Protestant support in order to seize effective control of the country during his nephew’s absence. It was during this turbulent period of shifting political and spiritual allegiances that Bureus, the son of a well-respected Lutheran pastor, emerged as an important intellectual figure attached to the new Protestant regime, Charles having been impressed by his polymathic talents no less than his correct religious background.2