Networking Intellectual History

Funded by a research grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - one of the largest awarded recently to the University of Oxford ’s Humanities Division - Cultures of Knowledge is an interdisciplinary group of scholars working with partners in Britain and abroad to reconstruct the correspondence networks central to the revolutionary intellectual developments of the seventeenth century. The Project consists of four main strands:
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Oxford Resources

One group is working to catalogue, edit, and preserve the rich archives of correspondence deposited in the Bodleian Library by leading Oxford men of science in the seventeenth century.

Resources Elsewhere

Another group is collaborating with partner institutions in Sheffield, Prague, Cracow, and Budapest to catalogue, link, and explore letter collections internationally.

Infrastructure

A third group, based in Bodleian Libraries, is developing digital systems capable of organising these resources into an online catalogue and archive of intellectual correspondence.

Events

Finally, an international series of academic meetings will forge new intellectual frameworks and create a scholarly community coextensive with the seventeenth-century networks under study.

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.