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Networking Early Modern Correspondence
A festive reception marking the first public release of our correspondence catalogue.
Correspondence was the thread which stitched the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters together, but the dispersal of manuscript corpora facilitated by the postal networks of the period has created enormous challenges. How can scholars locate the letters relevant to their research in the hundreds of thousands preserved in repositories around the world? As academic attention has spread from ‘great men’ to broader epistolary communities, solving this problem has become urgent. We have brought together scholars of history, philosophy, science, and literature with librarians, archivists, and systems developers to meet this challenge. Cultures of Knowledge consists of three main strands:
Research Projects
A set of seven discrete but overlapping research and editorial initiatives focussing on the epistolary activities of some key figures in early modern science.
Infrastructure
The creation of new digital systems capable of organising these resources into an online union catalogue and archive of early modern correspondence.
Events
An international series of academic meetings designed to forge new conceptual frameworks and cultivate a scholarly community coextensive with the seventeenth-century networks under study.
By these means, the ultimate objective of Cultures of Knowledge is to use the intellectual networks of the seventeenth century as a means of interconnecting international, interdisciplinary research in the broad and still poorly mapped-out field of seventeenth-century intellectual history.
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