Rethinking the Republic of Letters

Memory and Identity in Early Modern Learned Communities

Koen Scholten (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

412 Seiten

2025
Amsterdam University Press (Verlag)
978-90-485-5985-5 (ISBN)

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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.

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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	28.05.2025
Reihe/Serie	Knowledge Communities
Zusatzinfo	17 Illustrations, color; 38 Illustrations, black and white
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	90-485-5985-5 / 9048559855
ISBN-13	978-90-485-5985-5 / 9789048559855
Zustand	Neuware