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

Paper proposals are invited for a one-day colloquium on Translation and Translators in the Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern Science, which will take place at London’s Warburg Institute on Friday 28 June 2013. The event ‘will explore the role of translation in early modern science, providing a forum for discussion about translations as well as the translators, mediators, agents, and interpreters whose role in the intellectual history of the period remains ill defined and deserves greater attention’. Suggested topics include the philosophy and theory of translation; the ‘professional translator’; the function and use of translations; auxiliary languages; translation in learned correspondence; the readers of translations; and informal translations (adaptations, paraphrases).

The deadline for proposals for 25-minute papers and full panels is 28 February 2013. For further details and submission instructions, see the colloquium webpage.

Those seeking to balance the port and mince pies this holiday season with some state-of-the-art reflections on early modern epistolarity are in luck: the latest issue of Lives & Letters – the free online journal of UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters – is devoted to New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Correspondence.

Guest-edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, and developing out of a conference held at Plymouth University in 2011, the issue features an introduction to the latest developments in the field (in which EMLO gets a name-check); eight case studies of particular correspondents and correspondence networks; and a spectacularly useful select bibliography on the manuscript letter in early modern England. All articles are free for download from the journal website. James also contributed to our 2011 seminar series (here’s the podcast), while his latest book on the material letter has just been reviewed by the IHR.