Skip to:

Rethinking the Republic of Letters

Forum: Rethinking the Republic of Letters
Edited by Jacob Soll
Volume 1, Issue 1

Along with the King of France, the pope, salon- and theater-goers, duelists, alchemists, and disgraced finance ministers, the Republic of Letters comes in for bitingly satirical treatment in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721). We are introduced, for instance, to a scholar whose boasts on behalf of his erudition serve only to damn him: among other useless accomplishments, he has written an essay proving “by means of learned conjectures drawn from the most venerated Greek authors, that Cambyses was wounded in the left leg, not the right.”...

Volume 1, Issue 1

Few figures better represent the world of scholarship at the turn of the seventeenth century than Bernard de Montfaucon, the French maurist monk and antiquarian who lived from 1655–1741.[1] Montfaucon was trained in ancient languages and philology, and was an avid collector of manuscripts and antiquities. He founded the Academie des Bernardins, and later became president of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres during the Regency in 1719. Montfaucon wrote what...

Volume 1, Issue 1

In 1722 Sir Thomas Dereham (ca. 1678-1739), a member of the Royal Society since 1720, wrote a series of letters to the Royal Society secretary James Jurin about the state of Italian science. At the beginning of the year Sir Isaac Newton, in his capacity as President of the Royal Society, authorized Jurin to accept Dereham’s offer to act as a conduit of information between England and Italy, “that Learned & Inquisitive Nation, with which you reside.”

Volume 1, Issue 1

A historical traveler’s report on a strange imaginary land—one that had few of the distinctive marks by which we usually identify a state.

Volume 1, Issue 1

In the beginning there was backwardness. Before Orientalism and subaltern studies there was backwardness. Before Homi Baba and hybridity, there was backwardness. Before post-coloniality, naturalization, theatricality, modernization theory, imbrication, hydraulic societies, Dependistas, the IMF, or the Asiatic mode of production, there was backwardness. And that backwardness had a name; it was called “Russia.”

 

Volume 1, Issue 1

Gisbert Cuper’s career and his rise to fame allow us to examine the working practices of the Republic of Letters and reconsider how to judge a scholar’s merits in a historical context other than our own. First appointed professor of history and rhetoric at a provincial Athenaeum in Deventer (1668), Cuper subsequently became Rector of the institute (1672), burgomaster (mayor) of the city (1674), a delegate of the city to the meetings of the provincial States (the States of Overijssel), a delegate of the province to the States...

Volume 1, Issue 1

The “new” history of political thought and the “new” history of scholarship both began around the same time, in the first half of the 1950s. They also, both, took as key agents the long-despised “antiquary.” And, they focused on England in the seventeenth century. Peter Laslett’s research into the scholarly context for the work of Locke and Filmer, along with that of his spiritual heir John Pocock, emphasizes the role of the “ancient constitution” in seventeenth-century English political argument. Their work, in turn, needs to be set amidst the history...

Volume 1, Issue 1

Historians usually consider the eighteenth century as the apogee of the cosmopolitan European Republic of Letters, with a French—or even Parisian—center. The “Republic of Letters” was not, however, a phrase central to the Enlightenment lexicon, especially in France. Eighteenth-century French writers sometimes referred to what we now call the Republic of Letters, but most often they speak about the philosophes, hommes de lettres, and gens du monde. The “Republic of Letters” was...

Volume 1, Issue 1

On September 1768, Diderot wrote a long and effusive letter to his friend the sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, who was in Saint Petersburg, entrusted by Catherine II with the task of creating a bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The letter was among the last in a long epistolary debate initiated in 1765, in which the two friends vigorously argued about the long-term survival of the artwork, as well as the artist’s and the philosopher’s desire for posthumous celebrity.

Volume 1, Issue 1

In 1981 I argued that the period of the early Enlightenment, bound roughly from the 1680s to the 1720s, had produced within the Republic of Letters a set of ideas and attitudes, as well as texts, that were by any standard as radical as those we associate with the High Enlightenment. In my 1981 account three quite diverse national settings (England, France, and the Dutch Republic) mixed to create, as it were, a perfect storm. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 thousands of exiled French Protestants fled to the Dutch Republic and England—to name only the countries with the...