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

Electronic Enlightenment, the pioneering online archive of over 55,000 eighteenth-century letters, has just released its second version. New features introduced include additional content (for example the correspondence of Gustavus III and Adam Smith), and a more powerful range of search and browse functions (you can now sort letters by language, age of writer/recipient, and date range; lives by occupation and nationality; and sources by archive/country and title/publisher of early editions). The site has also been given a fresh new look. Electronic Enlightenment is a research project of the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, and is distributed by OUP.

Dr Leigh Penman, the Project’s Samuel Hartlib Postdoctoral Fellow, will this week deliver a paper in the Oxford History Faculty’s Early Modern Europe Seminar entitled ‘Prester John’s Legacy: The Hartlib Circle, Andreas Haberweschel, and the Fantasy of a Christian Kingdom in the Orient in Seventeenth-Century Europe’. As Leigh describes it, ‘in 1643, word reached the London-based intelligencer Samuel Hartlib that diplomats from a heretofore unknown Christian kingdom had recently visited an obscure Bohemian physician, Andreas Haberweschel, at The Hague. Anticipating funds and weapons for Protestant Europe, Hartlib and his compatriots greeted the news, despite its dubious provenance, with delight and enthusiasm. Yet, perhaps predictably, not everything was as it seemed. In this paper, which draws extensively on the Hartlib Papers, I shall unpack some of the contemporary codes and contexts that made news of this Christian kingdom of the ‘Indies’ plausible for those that heard it. I want to use the incident as a looking glass in which we might reflect on the activities and expectations of Hartlib and his circle, as well as of European Christians more broadly. For this incident not only tells us much about the nature of contemporary Reformed eschatology, but also sheds light upon the contemporary reception and assimilation of geopolitical news, methods of constructing ideas of the Christian self through the projection of values on to the other, as well as nascent aspects of imperial ideological discourse’. The paper will take place at 2.15pm on Friday 4 December in the Rees Davies Room of the History Faculty.

To celebrate its 350th anniversary, a selection of papers published by Royal Society since its foundation has been made freely available online. The Trailblazing site, launched on 30 November 2009, showcases sixty articles from the Society’s archive of more than 60,000 published since 1660. Publications are presented along an interactive timeline, which places them in the context of social, political, and economic events. While no works by John Aubrey, John Wallis, or Martin Lister are featured, seventeenth-century papers include Newton’s work on light and colour from 1672 and Antonie van Leewenhoeck’s 1676 treatise on ‘little animals in water’. Halley’s account of the 1715 solar eclipse is also included, in which he reports his own detailed observations, as well as the unfortunate circumstances that led the Professors of Astronomy at both Oxford and Cambridge to miss the celestial event. The former, Dr John Keill, was thwarted by excessive cloud cover; the latter, Rev. Mr Roger Cotes, ‘had the misfortune of being oppressed by too much Company, so that, though the Heavens were very favourable, yet he miss’d both the time of the Beginning of the Eclipse and that of total Darkness’. The concept of ‘Company’ was most frequently used by early modern Britons as a euphemism for social drinking.

Papers are sought for an interdisciplinary graduate conference on ‘Intellectual Exchange and Networks in Europe, 1500-1660: Approaches from the Humanities and Social Sciences’, due to take place at the University of Chicago on 7-8 May 2010. Featuring keynote contributions from Denis Crouzet and Peter N. Miller, the conference will explore how ideas moved through Europe between 1500 and 1660, with a particular emphasis on social networks, trade routes, epistolary webs, and multiple forms of literary transmission. The conference will also consider the movement of ideas in the present. The deadline for the receipt of 250-word abstracts is 30 November 2009; for further details and submission instructions, see H-Net.

Contributions are sought for a workshop on ‘Intellectual Networks and Exchanges’, due to take place at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge on 1-2 July 2010. Building on the methodological redefinition of ‘exchanges’ and of ‘networks’ which has occurred in the past three decades, the workshop will investigate cultural and intellectual networks and exchanges of ideas from the late medieval to the modern period. It will pay particular attention to the role of sources, historical factors, geography, images, and ideologies in creating, fostering, and preserving communicative practices, especially within colonial settings. For further information, please see the workshop webpage or contact the organizer, Dr Isabel DiVanna.

A workshop on ‘Go-Betweens, Translations and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries’ will take place on 13-14 November 2009 at UCL’s Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. Speakers include Sven Dupré, Toon Van Hal, Candice Delisle, Florike Egmond, Philippe Selosse, Benjamin Schmidt, Roger Hart, Matthias Schemmel, Peter Burke, Felicity Henderson, and Harold Cook. The workshop is organized by Harold Cook (UCL) and Sven Dupré (Ghent), in association with the Research Network Circulating Knowledge in Early Modern Science. For a programme, please see the workshop flyer (pdf). Registration and inquiries should be made to the Programmes Administrator, Miss Sally Bragg.