Project Linnaeus was founded in 1995 with the creation of the international team responsible for the editing of the Linnaean correspondence, a corpus of 7000 letters to and from Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the father of modern botanical classification.

This edition, carried forward under the aegis of the Swedish Linnaean Society in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and the Linnean Society of London, is based at the University of Uppsala. It is funded through to the year 2006 by the National Bank of Sweden. The general editor is Tomas Anfält of the University Library of Uppsala.

The correspondence is being published electronically on the the world wide web by the Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle of Ferney-Voltaire within the "c18" project being carried forward in collaboration with the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Project Linnaeus will build a comprehensive archive of electronic resources relating to Linnaeus, including his correspondence and his collected writings. The texts will be linked both between themselves and with related resources available elsewhere on the web to form an exceptionally powerful research tool designed to meet the requirements of historians of science, botanists, zoologists, cultural historians and linguists.

Linnaeus occupies a central position in many disciplines and the classification system he developed remains at the heart of current scientific research. By placing his work within the immediate reach of the academic community Project Linnaeus will meet an established need and will serve as the basis for future study in all of the areas affected by his encyclopedic activity.

The project will make full use of the latest electronic tools in order to maintain the homogenity of the whole and in such a way as to ensure full integration with the corpus of primary and secondary material being made available within the "c18" project. Among the features under development at "c18" are on-line discussion groups, on-line editing facilities, including those for collaborative annotation, access to bibliographical sources and biographical archives, global indexing, global and selective searching and databases for the management of links between the many separate web sites involved in the project.

The Linnaean Correspondence

Linnaeus was one the leading scientists of his century. Through his works – such as Systema Naturae, Genera plantarum and Species plantarum – he introduced a general binomial system for animals and plants which soon became accepted by the majority of his contemporary colleagues. Linnaeus' binomial nomenclature is still in use.

Linnaeus was born in 1707 in a rectory in the county of Småland in southern Sweden. Like his father, the parson of Stenbrohult, he took great interest in botany and he chose a medical career in order to be able to study botany, then regarded as a part of medicine.

As a student at the University of Uppsala he made remarkable progress in the study of botany. In Praeludia sponsaliarum plantarum and other works from the end of the 1720s he discussed sexuality as the foundation for the classification of plants.

After a journey in Lapland in 1732 and in Dalecarlia 1734, Linnaeus continued his academic peregrinations abroad. He became a doctor of medicine at the University of Hardewijk and moved on to Amsterdam and Leiden. During his three years' stay in the Netherlands he published eight of his major works, among them the Systema naturae (1735) and Genera plantarum (1737). In Leiden and Amsterdam he befriended other scientists, including Herman Boerhaave, Johannes Burmannus and Johann Frederik Gronovius. From the middle of the 1730s Linnaeus enjoyed a high reputation in the republic of letters and his correspondence with colleagues and admirers grew.

Linnaeus himself was aware of the importance of his correspondence. His correspondents, according to himself, "were the most learned and curious in Europe" who let Linnaeus know and take part of what was newly discovered by sending him letters and books. In an autobiography from the 1750s he listed over 70 foreign correspondents. When Linnaeus died in 1778 more than 170 Swedish and 400 foreign correspondents had written to him. Over three thousand letters had been sent to him from Europe, America, Asia and Africa by colleagues but also by admirers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, not least, by his own students who reported to their professor from their travels all over the world.

After Linnaeus' death his correspondence, manuscripts, library and herbarium remained in the possession of the family. Linnaeus' son Carl Linnaeus the Younger (who succeeded his father as professor in botany at the University of Uppsala) added his own correspondence, books and natural history collections to those of his father. Linnaeus the Younger died in 1783 leaving his estate to his mother, Sara Moraea. In need of funds to provide dowries for her four daughters she decided to sell the collections. Unable to find a Swedish buyer willing to pay the required 1000 guineas she sold the Linnaean collections in 1784 to the young English medical student and naturalist James Edward Smith.

In 1829, after Smith's death, the collections were transferred to the Linnean Society of London, founded by Smith and other naturalists in London in 1788. The Linnaean correspondence, together with the rest of Linnaeus' manuscripts, the herbarium and the greater part of his library, remain preserved at the Linnean Society of London.

Little of Linnaeus’s correspondence was published during his lifetime. James Edward Smith published a selection of the letters in 1821, A selection of the correspondence of Linnaeus and other naturalists from the original manuscripts (London 1821), in two volumes. From the 1820s onwards separate sections of the correspondence appeared. In 1829 came the correspondence with Alexander Garden, in 1830 with Johannes and Nic. Laur. Burmannus, in 1841 with Nicolaus Jacquin, in 1851 with Bernard Jussieu, in 1860 with Sauvages, 1861 with Johann Georg Gmelin and in 1878-1880 a collection of 265 letters to and from Swedish correspondents.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the interest in Linnaeus intensified further and in 1885 the Swedish botanist, Ewald Ährling, published the first printed catalogue of the Linnaean correspondence.

It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that a proposal to publishing the complete correspondence emerged. In 1907, 200 years after the birth of Linnaeus, it was announced by the Swedish Parliament that the Linnaean letters were to be published in their entirety. Over a period of 36 years around a quarter of the correspondence was published in Brev och skrivelser till och från Carl von Linné (Stockholm, Uppsala 1907-1943). For different reasons the edition ceased to appear after 1943.

Fifty years later a new initiative was taken by the Swedish Linnaean Society to take up the publishing of the Linnaean correspondence. In 1994 the Swedish National Bank, through its research foundation, consented to support the project financially. A collaboration between the Swedish Linnaean Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Uppsala University and its library, the Linnean Society of London and the Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle of Ferney-Voltaire will hopefully lead to the realisation of Linnaeus' wish to "to make public" all the letters. This time the correspondence will be published in an international edition. All the documents will be published in their original form. The letters written in Latin and in Swedish will be accompanied by short summaries in English. Commentaries, biographies etc. will also be in English.

The first phase of the project started in the summer 1995 and consists of listing and locating the letters to and from Linnaeus. By February 1999 some 5500 letters have been recorded but we expect to find many more. A request for information about letters from Linnaeus to his friends and colleagues has been sent out to more than two hundred libraries all over the world.

A representative selection of the correspondence is available on the web at www.c18.org/pr/lc.

The first ten years of the correspondence is expected to be published during 1999 and preparations for the publication of letters from the period 1740-1749 are well advanced. These letters will appear progressively over the next two years. The correspondence is expected to be published on the world wide web in is entirety before 2007.

Editorial board