The biography of Martin Lister recently published by our Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos was officially launched this Tuesday at a small but perfectly formed reception in the splendid environs of the Royal Society Library in London. Around thirty guests gathered to mark the appearance of Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Arachnologist(Brill, 2011) and, during the course of the evening, they were treated to selected readings from Anna Marie, wines from French vineyards visited by Lister (sourced by Anna Marie while researching Lister’s medical journal), and some thematically congruous cupcakes bearing illustrations from Lister’s arachnological and conchological masterworks. Many thanks to Anna Marie for suggesting the idea, to Brill for their generous financial support, and to all at the Royal Society (with special shout-outs to Felicity Henderson and Keith Moore) for allowing us the use of their wondeful venue, for hosting us so graciously, and for all of their assistance with preparations. For more information about the book and to purchase copies, please visit Brill’s website or download the flyer (pdf).
When one goes beyond a first, superficial understanding of any of Descartes’s primary works, whether the Meditations, Discourse on Method, or the Principles of Philosophy, one realizes that the basis for many of his doctrines cannot be found in the primary works themselves. For this, one needs to consult his correspondence. Unfortunately, the standard edition of Descartes’s letters (by Adam and Tannery) is about a century old; its second edition, almost forty years old, improved upon the first significantly, but made it practically unusable. And there is no complete English translation of the correspondence, just a one-volume selection of partial translations from the French and Latin. A new historico-critical edition and complete English translation of the corpus has for many years been a major desideratum of the learned world.
We are delighted to announce, therefore, that Roger Ariew (University of South Florida) and Erik-Jan Bos (Utrecht University) have been awarded $235,000 by the US National Endowment for the Humanities to enable them, together with Theo Verbeek and others, to complete a new critical edition of Descartes’s correspondence with a complete English translation, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Erik-Jan is a long-standing friend of Cultures of Knowledge; as well being a core member of the CKCC team at Huygens ING, he participated in our 2010 data workshop, our 2010 conference, and spoke to our 2011 seminar about the loss, theft, and forgery of Descartes’s letters (see the brief video above in which Erik-Jan discusses his surprise discovery of a hitherto unknown epistle via Google in 2010). Warmest congratulations to Erik-Jan and all of the editorial team!
Further to the spatial excitements of our own recent gathering, a one-day conference on Imaginative Geographies: Travels of the Mind in Early Modern Europe will take place at the University of Bristol on Wednesday 28 September 2011. According to the organisers, the event will ‘explore correspondences between geography [and] literary and historical fields of research, to enable varied… cross-disciplinary discourses between scholars and students of the arts and sciences, and to enrich renaissance and early modern research with methodological and thematic diversity’. Panels are devoted to spiritual geographies, cartographic spaces, mapping the other, and mapping the familiar. For the full programme and to sign up please visit the conference website.
The Project’s second international conference, International Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700, took place at St Anne’s College last week on 5–7 September 2011. The event, which was attended by over sixty delegates, allowed twenty-seven emerging and established scholars to present conceptual papers and rich case studies – from Europe and the wider world – which both explored the organization of early modern intellectual activity across time and space, and attempted to implement and refine the concept of ‘intellectual geography’ as a new means of understanding and appreciating the spatial dimensions of intellectual exchange. On the final day, papers from several digital projects – including our good friends from CKCC (Huygens ING) and Mapping the Republic of Letters (Stanford) and new friends from The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (Leeds) – shared some of the opportunities and challenges of capturing and visualizing intellectual geography electronically. Delegates were also treated to a drinks reception in the historic Museum of the History of Science (which incorporated a talk and tour of the intellectual geography of scientific objects), and enjoyed playing with software prototypes of the enormously impressive database of the STN archives prepared by the FBTIEE project, as well as of our own union catalogue of intellectual correspondence. Conference reports, videos, and other outputs will be available soon; in the meantime, for further information, including speaker profiles and abstracts, please visit the conference microsite. Details of our 2012 conference will be available soon.
Further to the spatial excitements of our own 
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