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

A beta version of the correspondence of the sixteenth-century naturalist Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), developed by the Huygens ING (KNAW) and the Scaliger Institute (Leiden University Libraries), is now available online. Created with eLaborate, the online transcription platform developed by Huygens ING, the site currently features fully searchable transcriptions of 450 letters, but metadata on all known letters together with scans of 1,300 letters in the Leiden University Library are also included. Scholars in the field of the history of science, students of languages and paleography, and anyone seriously interested in the history of botany are invited to participate in the ongoing refinement of the resource, contributing new transcriptions, or improving existing texts. For further information and a link to the beta, please visit the Project webpage.

On Thursday 3 May Florike Egmond from the Clusius Project will be sharing a paper on Clusius, collecting, and practices of scientific illustration in our third annual seminar series. For her talk and seven other exciting contributions, please visit the seminar webpage.