Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Videos of twenty-one papers and keynotes from our 2011 conference Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700 (Oxford, 5-7 September 2011) are now available on the conference website or via our Vimeo channel (with more hopefully to come). Organised by Howard Hotson, the event introduced and tested the novel concept of ‘intellectual geography’ as a means of appreciating and understanding the organisation of intellectual activity and the dissemination of ideas within space and across time, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A taster - Miles Ogborn’s keynote exploration of ‘What is Intellectual Geography?’ - is provided below. Happy viewing!

The second annual Anglo-French Conference on Scientific Communication and its History will take place in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure on 9–10 March 2012. The conference will explore how technological developments – from the invention of printing with movable type to the postal network, from the railway timetable to the electric telegraph, from the telephone to e-mail – have profoundly influenced the nature of scientific communication and the structure and practice of science. It will bring together scientists, historians, social scientists, and science communicators to explore the role of technologies, both physical and social, in the history and present practice of communication within and around scientific communities and between science and its various publics. The conference will be organised around four themes: print and text; correspondence; networks and gatherings; and non-print media. In each of these it will explore the interaction between technical change and communicative practice by considering examples taken from across a wide range of historical conjunctures and disciplines. Papers should be thirty minutes in length, and should fall within one of the four themes. Doctoral students are invited to give fifteen-minute papers. The deadline for 300-word proposals is 15 January 2012. For further details and submission instructions, please download the conference flyer (pdf).

Philip consults the Cometographia.

Kim introduces the union catalogue.

CofK Research Fellow, Philip Beeley, and Editor, Kim McLean-Fiander, have recently returned from Poland after participating in a conference on Johannes Hevelius: The Burgher of Gdańsk and his Work. Hosted by the Gdańsk Scientific Society on 24-25 November, and taking place in the splendid historic setting of the Main Town Hall, the conference was organised to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of the city’s most famous sons, the astronomer, instrument maker, inventor, brewer, printing-house owner, and town councillor, Johannes Hevelius (1611-87).

The conference opened with a special viewing of some of the Hevelian treasures of the Polish Academy of Sciences Library, including the Cometographia. His life and works were then examined from a wide range of perspectives by speakers from Poland, France, Italy, and the UK on topics such as the correlations between Hevelius’s astronomical observations in Gdańsk and those taken by Jean Picard on the same day in Paris; the controversy which arose between Hevelius and Adrien Auzout over systems for tracking comet paths; Hevelius’s work as an inventor of scientific instruments and the pendulum clock; his curriculum whilst attending the Gdańsk Academic Gymnasium; and his vocational experiences as city councillor, brewer, and printing-house owner. After a private viewing of the Main Town Hall’s excellent exhibition Johannes Hevelius and Gdańsk of his Times, Philip opened Friday afternoon’s session with a paper on ‘Hevelius, Hartlib, and Wallis: Early Modern Ideals of Scientific Collaboration’, which argued that this tripartite correspondence between Oxford, London, and Danzig exemplified, as no other, the ideals of the Republic of Letters: intellectual collaboration and exchange as a means to promote the growth of knowledge. Drawing on examples from these and other correspondents within Hevelius’s circle, Kim then demonstrated our forthcoming digital union catalogue of intellectual correspondence, revealing how it allows researchers not only to locate often elusive and dispersed early modern letters, but also to interrogate them in new and exciting ways.

Kim and Philip would like to thank their Polish hosts, in particular Professor Marian Turek and his wife Liz, for their warm hospitality and the invitation to attend the conference in this beautiful Pomeranian city.

The newly founded Journal of Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for a special issue on the timely theme of ‘Shaping the Republic of Letters: Communication, Correspondence and Networks in Early Modern Europe’:

‘A well known metaphor of the early European modernity and an important instrument in the understanding of seventeenth-century thought, the ‘Republic of Letters’ was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily a label for new projects of intellectual and scientific association. Various models for the Republic of Letters have been investigated and described as closed circles or open networks, shaped around a variety of elements: scientific societies, intellectual networks, formal or informal circles of intellectuals, proponents of the new and old philosophies. What all such models had in common was a an ideal of shaping communities around a moral, intellectual and sometimes a religious project understood as a reformation of the (whole) human being.

This special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies aims to bring together articles devoted to the investigation of such models of early modern communities governed by the ideal of the Republic of Letters. The journal is particularly seeking papers dedicated to the exploration of various ways of disseminating and communicating knowledge within the Republic of Letters, with a special focus on the exchanges between the East and the West of Europe…’

For more information please contact Vlad Alexandrescu.

The Early Modern Center of the University of California at Santa Barbara invites paper proposals for their eleventh annual conference, Early Modern Social Networks, 1500-1800. The conference will take place on March 16-17, 2012 at UCSB, and will feature keynote speakers Ann Blair (Harvard University), Elizabeth Eger (King’s  College London), and James Raven (University of Essex). Possible topics include: knowledge networks, (such as the Royal society, libraries, salons, and coffeehouses); secret societies; clubs; literary coteries; epistolary correspondents; religious communities (including sacramental practices); print and publication networks; gift communities (patronage, the ward system); trade networks (such as the East India Company, the Royal Exchange, workers’ guilds, black markets); colonial administration; infrastructure expansion (the post, turnpikes, canals); financial organizations (stock markets, insurance); and others. The deadline for abstracts of 250-500 words in length is January 6, 2012. For further details and submission instructions, see the conference website.

Miles Ogborn's keynote.

Simon Burrows from the FBTIEE project.

Giovanna Ceserani's keynote.

Discussions continue over lunch.

Testing the demonstrators.

Mark Curran from the FBTIEE project.

The Project’s second international conference, International Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700, took place at St Anne’s College last week on 5–7 September 2011. The event, which was attended by over sixty delegates, allowed twenty-seven emerging and established scholars to present conceptual papers and rich case studies – from Europe and the wider world – which both explored the organization of early modern intellectual activity across time and space, and attempted to implement and refine the concept of ‘intellectual geography’ as a new means of understanding and appreciating the spatial dimensions of intellectual exchange. On the final day, papers from several digital projects – including our good friends from CKCC (Huygens ING) and Mapping the Republic of Letters (Stanford) and new friends from The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (Leeds) – shared some of the opportunities and challenges of capturing and visualizing intellectual geography electronically. Delegates were also treated to a drinks reception in the historic Museum of the History of Science (which incorporated a talk and tour of the intellectual geography of scientific objects), and enjoyed playing with software prototypes of the enormously impressive database of the STN archives prepared by the FBTIEE project, as well as of our own union catalogue of intellectual correspondence. Conference reports, videos, and other outputs will be available soon; in the meantime, for further information, including speaker profiles and abstracts, please visit the conference microsite. Details of our 2012 conference will be available soon.