Rethinking the Republic of Letters

Memory and Identity in Early Modern Learned Communities
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-485-5985-5
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 15, 412 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 635 g

Reihe: Knowledge Communities

This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers. These communities formed through distinct memory cultures and the representation of and identification with collective identities. Rethinking the Republic of Letters looks at early modern biographical dictionaries (vitae), eulogies, letters, travelogues, and funerary monuments of early modern learned men to trace the (re)formation of these communities. It thereby offers a novel perspective on early modern learned communities – the many Republics of Letters.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scholten, Koen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: The Republic of Letters as an Imagined Community

Chapter 1. An Inventory of Scholarly Values and Virtues

Chapter 2. Collective History and Geographical Inclusion in Vitae and Elogia

Chapter 3. Collective Memory and Identity in Hugo Grotius’s Correspondence

Chapter 4. The Peregrinatio Literaria: Experiencing, Representing, and Forming Learned Communities

Chapter 5. The Basilica di Santa Croce: The Florentine Site of Learned Memory

Chapter 6. The Pieterskerk: Representing the Learned Community of Leiden University

Conclusion

Bibliography

List of Abbreviations

Manuscript Sources

Printed Sources, Before 1800

Printed Sources, Modern

Secondary Literature

Appendix 1

Corpus and Keyword Analysis

Main Corpus

Reference Corpus

Acknowledgements

Über Autor(innen)

Scholten, Koen
Koen Scholten is a historian of science and published on memory and identity in scholarly and scientific communities. He edited Memory and Identity in the Learned World (Brill, 2022) and received his PhD from Utrecht University on a thesis on the formation of early modern communities in the world of learning in 2023.