Regulating the Exchange of Knowledge. Invoking the 'Republic of Letters' as a Speech Act

2008

Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 2019

Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble the scattered documentation of the early modern Republic of Letters and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.

La poésie palinodique, 299-302, the illustration shows the prince of the Puy of Rouen on a seat at the centre of the stage during a contest. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The reach of the republic of letters : literary and learned societies in late medieval and early modern Europe / edited by Arjan van Dixhoorn, Susie Speakman Sutch. p. cm.-(Brill's studies in intellectual history ; v. 168) Papers presented at two workshops held in Rome in 2003 and 2006. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Science in Context, 1991

The ArgumentThe Republic of Letters of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries teaches us two lessons about style in science. First, the bearer of style—individual, nation, institution, religious group, region, class—depends crucially on historical context. When the organization and values of intellectual life are self-consciously cosmopolitan, and when allegiances to other entities (e.g., Protestant versus Catholic, or urban versus rural) are culturally more compelling than those to the nation-state, distinctivelynationalstyles are far to seek. This was largely the case for the Republic of Letters, that immaterial (it lacked location, formal administration, and brick and mortar) but nonetheless real (it exercised dominion over thoughts and deeds) realm among the sovereign states of the Enlightenment. Second, that form of objectivity which made science seem so curiously detached from scientists, and therefore so apparently unmarked by style at any level, also has a history. Th...

British Journal for the History of Science, 2020

Anglo-Swedish scholarly correspondence from the mid-eighteenth century contains repeated mentions of two merchants, Abraham Spalding and Gustavus Brander. The letters describe how these men facilitated the exchange of knowledge over the Baltic Sea and the North Sea by shipping letters, books and other scientific objects, as well as by enabling long-distance financial transactions. Through the case of Spalding and Brander, this article examines the material basis for early modern scholarly exchange. Using the concept of logistics to highlight and relate several mercantile practices, it examines ways of making scholarly knowledge move, and analyses merchants' potential motives for offering their services to scholarly communities. As logisticians in the Republic of Letters, these merchants could turn their commercial infrastructure into a generator of cultural status valid in both London and Stockholm. Using mercantile services, scholarly knowledge could in turn traverse the region in reliable, cost-effective and secure ways. The case of Spalding and Brander thus highlights how contacts between scholarly communities intersected with other contemporary modes of transnational exchange, and it shows how scholarly exchange relied on relationships based on norms different from the communalism often used to characterize the early modern Republic of Letters. Thus the article suggests new ways of studying early modern scholarly exchange in practice.

Presentation at the Forschungszentrum Gotha, 15 Dec 2016. What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the 18th century. And yet, in the 19th century, there was still a learned community gathering in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network, and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not entirely go out of use. This presentation traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early 19th century. Specifically, I do so by looking at texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, at the wider diffusion of the term, and at the changing role of learned journals in that period. It transpires that most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, and that much of the further usage of the term is either a petrified cliché or negatively flavoured. But a specialist scientific community was hardly there before the 1870s. That leaves us with a undefined period.

2010

This combined poster and software demonstration will introduce ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic Letters’, launched in January 2009, and based in the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Comprising a diverse group of academics and technical experts from the Faculties of History, English, Theology, and Bodleian Libraries, as well as from partner institutions in Britain and east-central Europe, the Project is seeking to reconstruct the correspondence networks that were central to the revolutionary intellectual developments of the seventeenth century. One group is working to catalogue, edit, and preserve the rich archives of scientific correspondence deposited in the Bodleian Library. Another is working with colleagues in Sheffield, Prague, Cracow, and Budapest to enhance and link letter collections elsewhere. Finally, a third group, based in the Systems and e-Research Serv...

Nuncius 31, 2016

Science in the early modern world depended on openness in scholarly communication. On the other hand, a web of commercial, political, and religious conflicts required broad measures of secrecy and confidentiality; similar measures were integral to scholarly rivalries and plagiarism. This paper analyzes confidentiality and secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchange via letters and drawings. We argue that existing approaches to understanding knowledge exchange in early modern Europe –which focus on the Republic of Letters as a unified entity of corresponding scholars –can be improved upon by analyzing multilayered networks of communication. We describe a data model to analyze circles of confidence and cultures of secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchanges. Finally, we discuss the outcomes ofa first experiment focusing on the question of how personal and professional/official relationships interact with confidentiality and secrecy, based on a case study of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius.

Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 2019

An important early description of the Republic of Letters was by the Carthusian monk Dom Bonaventure d’Argonne (1640–1704), who had an interest in astronomy. His text is notable for its acknowledgement of the legitimacy of female participation in the republic of letters. His essay is translated in full for the first time here.

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2020

What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.