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

Much of the seventeenth century was blighted by conflict, and the Thirty Years’ War, which stretched the length and breadth of Europe, affected every aspect of life. The implications for educational institutions and resulting intellectual networks and traditions were wide-ranging, and as such the Bodleian cards refer frequently to the effect of the conflict on universities and those teaching and studying within them. For example, in today’s card – sent on 3 February 1641, when war had been raging for over twenty years – John Christenius (1599-1672) laments the ‘injurious effect’ of the pan-European conflict on ‘the quality of the intake and studies at his university’. The original card compiler speculated that this letter might have been written from Deventer (where Erasmus had been at school a century and a half before, and the economic decline of which was attributed to religious war), and in Dirk van Miert‘s Humanism in an Age of Science: The Amsterdam Athenaeum in the Golden Age, 1632-1704 we read that from 1637 Christenius had indeed held a position at the newly formed Deventer Athenaeum. As students rush their work, emerging ‘unfit for a profession or status’, Christenius suggests to Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), professor of history at Amsterdam’s Anthenaeum Illustre, that a teacher capable of inspiring the ‘studiously inclined young men to cultivate their minds towards a more scholarly standard’ be found, recommending the appointment of Hamburg-born Johann Frederick Gronovius (1611-1671). This suggestion met with approval and, following travels in England, France, and Italy, Gronovius was duly appointed professor of rhetoric and history at Deventer, a post he retained until his transfer to Leiden in 1658.

According to other EMLO records, Gronovius was no stranger to the city. In 1631 he was writing from there and, by January 1644, the scholarly situation at the Athenaeum appears to have improved to such an extent under the auspices of its new star professor that Vossius praises the ‘great flow of good works from G’s. university and hopes that this will stimulate the senators of G’s. city, renowned for its academic traditions and as the place where Erasmus studied, to provide further for the dissemination of the university’s world-wide fame through monumental works of genius and learning’. Although he encountered problems – see the complications concerning one particular ‘homicidal maniac’ – Gronovius found his lectures ‘well attended’, and it’s a relief to find a productive pedagogical outcome despite (or perhaps even because of) the persistent maelstrom of war.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

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