Background and Justification

Disciplinary Context: A Fruitful Crisis of Identity

The seventeenth century was a period of enormous intellectual ferment, the full complexity of which is only now becoming properly appreciated. Nowhere is this more evident than in the central case of early modern science. The very existence of a single, coherent activity in this period which can accurately be described as ‘science’ has been called into question. Instead, disciplined investigation of the natural world is now believed to have proceeded through a wide range of disparate activities pursued by different classes of people with different methods for different reasons within different disciplines, professions, institutions, and settings.

‘… disciplined investigation of the natural world is now believed to have proceeded through a wide range of disparate activities pursued by different classes of people …’

This collapse of disciplinary boundaries creates fertile conditions for interdisciplinary research, opening the field of the history of science outward to embrace many aspects of intellectual, religious, cultural, social, and political history. Yet this disciplinary transformation has also brought new practical challenges. Perhaps the chief difficulty is maintaining coherence and communication in the absence of a disciplinary infrastructure commensurate with this rapidly expanding field. Cultures of Knowledge aims to address this problem by creating a central point of reference for work on one of the characteristic expressions of seventeenth-century intellectual life: local, national, and international networks of learned correspondence..
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Research Focus: Correspondence Networks

This point of focus is a natural one. Correspondence, almost by definition, was the thread which stitched the seventeenth-century republic of letters together, geographically, thematically, and socially. The geographical dimension is perhaps the most obvious. Multilateral exchanges of letters knit the scattered members of the international republic of letters into a web of communities stretching from one end of Europe to another and beyond it to Asia and America. Yet correspondence was equally embracing thematically: while a formal treatise moves through a compact body of knowledge in a disciplined and orderly way, any one letter can leap abruptly from one topic to a seemingly unrelated one, thereby displaying the pursuit of knowledge with an immediacy rarely replicated elsewhere. Correspondence could also bind together very different sorts of people, including many who had never met or indeed would not care to mix socially. Princes and aristocrats, gentlemen and scholars, diplomats and officer holders, physicians and apothecaries, clergymen and school teachers, students and tutors, printers and booksellers, merchants and travellers, instrument makers, craftsmen, alchemists and astrologers: all these and many more jostle together in the most representative correspondences of the century. Nothing better exemplifies the seventeenth century’s multiple cultures of knowledge – or better enables modern scholars to study them – than contemporary networks of intellectual correspondence.

‘Multilateral exchanges of letters knit the scattered members of the international republic of letters into a web of communities stretching from one end of Europe to another and beyond it to Asia and America …’

Research on correspondence networks can have a similarly integrative function today. On the one hand, correspondence represents a meeting place of many different disciplines. Straying as they often do from one subject to another, individual letters or exchanges of letters can attract the attention of scholars from different modern academic fields. On the other hand, these complex documents require such a daunting range of scholarly abilities – in archival exploration, palaeography, and languages, as well as in analysis, exegesis, and synthesis – that the study of letters and the networks created by them naturally lends itself to collaborative work. Networks of intellectual correspondence, then, are macrocosms, both of the early modern world which they preserve, and of the contemporary scholarly industry attempting to gain access to that world.
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Project Contribution

They provide a natural focus for a research project which aims to facilitate and help structure future research across this rapidly broadening field. Cultures of Knowledge will provide unprecedented concentrations of well-organised data, energetic new scholarly communities, and crucial elements of academic infrastructure – all badly needed if this disciplinary transformation is to continue apace. Moreover, assembling these new concentrations of data and scholarly expertise is not to be undertaken as an end in itself but as a means of deepening comprehension of these vast systems of intellectual exchange. Amongst the analytical frameworks with which it is intended to approach this task, two are embedded in the Project’s title. ‘Intellectual geography’ is intended to direct attention to the ways in which a diversity of concrete underlying geographical conditions gave rise to a rich variety of different ‘cultures of knowledge’, which in turn often germinated extraordinary intellectual fertility when brought into contact with one another through interregional and international intellectual exchange.