Description

The “Republic of Letters,” as the autonomous community of scholars in early modern Europe was known, constitutes the venerable ancestor for a wide range of intellectual societies: the seventeenth-century salons, early modern Academies, the Enlightenment “société des gens de lettres,” and the modern university all owe numerous characteristics to this Renaissance creation. As a non-State network, moreover, it arguably provided the foundations for the bourgeois “public sphere,” in which critical discourse and opinion could challenge governmental authority.

Our knowledge about the Republic of Letters, however, remains remarkably patchy. What was its reach, in terms of territory and social groups? How long did it last? What were its relations with the State? How did gender factor as a significant element? Were there separate “republics,” and if so, how did they differ? What were the politics of this Republic?

In an attempt to provide richly detailed answers to these and other questions, we are organizing a two-day conference on “The Republic of Letters: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment,” that will bring together an international group of intellectual historians, historians of science and philosophy, literary scholars, and bibliographers—a group, in other words, that mirrors the very object it proposes to study.

Traditional challenges confronting the study of the Republic of Letters are periodization and a narrow geographical focus. To overcome this first difficulty, we have invited scholars whose research concerns the 17th– and/or 18th–century to consult and debate with specialists of the Renaissance, the period when the Republic of Letters was first formed. We hope to uncover in this manner, possibly for the first time, some of the later avatars of this Republic. In response to the second challenge, we are assembling a diverse group of scholars, whose combined expertise encompasses a vast international breadth (including Russia, the Americas, Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain).