Professor%20Howard%20Hotson: List of publications

Cultures of Knowledge (CofK) is not a typical research project. It has not been devoted from the outset to testing a historical thesis or producing a set of traditional research publications. For most of its history, its main objective has been to pilot a collaboratively populated, international, digital union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO); but its intentions are not exhausted by resource creation or IT systems development. Instead, CofK’s deeper purpose has been to conduct a social and cultural experiment investigating the conditions in which individual scholars, projects, repositories, and publishers are willing to pool their data. Its research objective has been to discover the scholarly standards, technical systems, social relations, and cultural norms required for a community of scholars with many needs and problems in common to collaborate in unprecedented ways. The title of this essay, ‘Cultures of Knowledge in Transition’, is therefore intended to refer to more than the evolution of a single research project: instead, it views the project’s history as a window on the broader transition taking places as research communities develop means of tackling problems far too large, not only for the lone researcher or individual research project, but for single institutions, disciplines, or even national academic communities to solve on their own. More specifically, this paper narrates the project's conception, its efforts at generating fresh data, developing an initial system, building a community, and re-engineering the system to curate data collaboratively, and concludes by surveying the emerging prospects for future collaborative systems design, development, population, and research experimentation.

<p>The extraordinary breadth and depth of Leibniz’s intellectual vision commands ever increasing attention. As more texts gradually emerge from seemingly bottomless archives, new facets of his contribution to an astonishing variety of fields come to light. This volume provides a uniquely comprehensive, systematic, and up-to-date appraisal of Leibniz’s thought thematically organized around its diverse but interrelated aspects. Discussion of his philosophical system naturally takes place of pride. A cluster of original essays revisit his logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of nature, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. The scope of the volume, however, goes beyond that of a philosophical collection to embrace all the main features of Leibniz’s thought and activity. Contributions are offered on Leibniz as a mathematician (including not only his calculus but also determinant theory, symmetric functions, the dyadic, the analysis situs, probability and statistics); on Leibniz as a scientist (physics and also optics, cosmology, geology, physiology, medicine, and chemistry); on his technical innovations (the calculating machine and the technology of mining, as well as other discoveries); on his work as an ‘intelligencer’ and cultural networker, as jurist, historian, editor of sources and librarian; on his views on Europe’s political future, religious toleration, and ecclesiastical reunification; on his proposals for political, administrative, economic, and social reform. In so doing, the volume serves as a unique cross-disciplinary point of contact for the many domains to which Leibniz contributed. By assembling leading specialists on all these topics, it offers the most rounded picture of Leibniz’s endeavors currently available.</p>

<p>Intellectual history is traditionally text-based. Sometimes regarded as synonymous with the history of ideas, its natural starting points are the texts in which ideas are expressed and the authors who write them. Many intellectual historians now also situate authors, texts, language, and ideas in economic, social, political, and cultural contexts; and the scope of the field is now broadening further to consider the role of material objects and practices in shaping intellectual activities (Grafton, 2006; Kelley, 2002; Whatmore &amp; Young, 2016).</p> <br/> <p>Data now offers a further opportunity to enrich the field. Digital technology affords intellectual historians the capacity to extract insight from previously unmanageable quantities of highly granular data. In a manner in some ways analogous to the focus on material culture, this capacity facilitates the writing of intellectual history from the ground up. Instead of beginning from canonical texts and working downward to explore their reception, historians can potentially situate individual texts and authors within shifting landscapes of intellectual activity, animated by huge bodies of digital data previously immobilized on the printed page.</p> <br/> <p>This paper explores how one source of such data—university matriculation registers—can be used to map out one kind of intellectual exchange—student migration—at a scale and pace which makes visible for the first time patterns which structured the intellectual lives of hundreds of thousands of people across vast swathes Europe. More specifically, this paper examines the densest concentration of universities in early modern Europe at the most tumultuous moment in their history: Namely, the universities of the Holy Roman Empire in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War (16181648). After situating the topic on a broad geographical and chronological canvas (in Part I), this paper shows how even a relatively superficial engagement with this data can reveal how the war transformed the academic geography both of the Empire itself (in Part II) and of the huge catchment area which surrounded it (in Part III). After summarizing some basic historiographical and methodological results, the paper concludes (in Part IV) by examining the prospects for a more intensive engagement with this data.</p>

Any number of misconceptions about millenarians and messianism in the early modern period will be laid to rest by a reading of this volume. It is too often thought that millenarianism was largely an English phenomenon. One of the reasons for bringing these studies together is to show, as Martin Mulsow puts it, that we can understand this European-wide movement as a "millenarian international" in analogy with the later "socialist international". Another misconception is that millenarianism and messianism were a world apart from mainstream developments in intellectual history; but, as Mulsow also insists, a proper understanding of millenarianism places it in the context of the growth and stabilization of science, material progress, and political reform. A third mistake is to conclude too quickly that millenarianism and messianism have formed a single, monolithic bloc in history; but we learn in this volume that there were all sorts of millenarians. Readers of this volume will be struck by at least two things. One is the sheer numbers of millenarian thinkers to be found throughout Europe in the early modern period, especially north of the Mediterranean. We will not list them all 1 here, but the index to this book contains dozens and dozens of them. The second striking point is the amount of work that remains to be done. For every millenarian that we explore and explain here, several are mentioned about which little is known.

This book provides a uniquely detailed case study of the origins of millenarianism within the vast opera of one of its earliest and most influential Calvinist exponents: the Herborn encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638). The young Alsted, it emerges, looked forward not to the millennium of Apocalypse 20 but to a brief, final period of enhanced illumination described in a poorly understood central European tradition of astrological, alchemical, spiritualist, and generally `occult' prophetic speculation. It was the disasters following the Bohemian Revolt of 1618 which forced Alsted to recast these expectations as the more exclusively scriptural expectation of a literal millennium; and the material for this revision was found in a protracted dispute over the millennium between senior theologians in Herborn and Heidelberg and a little-known work on the conversion of the Jews by one of the figures most probably behind the composition of the Rosicrucian manifestos. Based on study of the full range of Alsted's works, his diverse sources, and widely dispersed manuscript material, the result is the first English book on 17th-century continental millenarianism and the first monograph in any language exclusively devoted to the origins of the doctrine within mainstream Protestantism.

Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. While its origins in France, its impact in colonial America, and its influence in England, Scotland, and Ireland have been studied in detail, its uniquely warm reception in central Europe - where the great majority of posthumous reprintings of Ramus's work appeared - has never been synoptically studied. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, therefore has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the 'new philosophy' in the mid-seventeenth century.

Religious conciliators have always faced resistance and critique as they mediate between groups devoted to ideological agendas that leave little room for maneuver and negotiation. From the conciliar to the confessional age the normal challenges that peacemakers perennially faced were magnified. The church was divided, and there did not appear to be any obvious solution to the crisis that began in the late fourteenth century with the Great Western Schism (1378-1415). This volume investigates the activities of those who worked for the restoration of ecclesial unity, first in the conciliar era, then in the early years of the Protestant reformations, and finally during the “confessional age” when theological and cultural distinctives of competing religious groups began to emerge more clearly. Throughout, special attention is paid to the religiously diverse communities of central and eastern Europe, an area that has often been overlooked by scholars who have focused more exclusively on Protestant/Catholic relations in the western half of the continent.

Samuel Hartlib was a key figure in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century. Originally from Elbing, in Prussig, Hartlib settled permanently in England from the late 1620s until his death in 1662. His aspirations formed a distinctive and influential strand in English intellectual life during those revolutionary decades. This volume reflects the variety of the theoretical and practical interests of Hartlib's circle and presents them in their continental context. The editors of the volume are all attached to the Hartlib Papers Project at the University of Sheffield, a major collaborative research effort to exploit the largely untapped resources of the surviving Hartlib manuscripts. In an introduction to the volume they explore the background to the Hartlib circle and provide the context in which the essays should be read.