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

Journal Special Issue: Shaping the Republic of Letters

James Brown — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:08:26 +0000

The new Journal of Early Modern Studies has launched with a special issue on Shaping the Republic of Letters: Communication, Correspondence, and Networks in Early Modern Europe.

Edited by the Foundations of Modern Thought Research Centre at the University of Bucharest, and featuring our very own Howard Hotson on its Advisory Board, the new publication is billed as a ‘an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal of intellectual history, dedicated to the exploration of the interactions between philosophy, science, and religion in Early Modern Europe’. The epistolary opener features seven contributions (as well as related review essays and book reviews) on particular correspondents and correspondence networks, including an article by Noel Golvers on Sino-European exchanges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Noel initiated our seminar series in 2010 with a wonderful paper on this topic (listen to the podcast). For full details and to order your copy, visit the journal webpage.

Workshop: Across the Channel 2

James Brown — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:45:04 +0000

Following on from November’s workshop, a second installment of Across the Channel: Intellectual Relations between England and France in the Early Modern Period will take place at the Maison Française D’Oxford on Tuesday 28 February 2012. Organised by Martine Pécharman and our very own Philip Beeley, this boutique event will allow five invited scholars to explore Anglo-French exchanges from a variety of perspectives in the context of rich case studies. For the full programme, see the workshop webpage; all are welcome.

Cultures of Knowledge hopes to collaborate on and co-produce a third Across the Channel workshop later in 2012. Watch this space!

CFP: Scientific Communication and its History

James Brown — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:19:50 +0000

The second annual Anglo-French Conference on Scientific Communication and its History will take place in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure on 9–10 March 2012. The conference will explore how technological developments – from the invention of printing with movable type to the postal network, from the railway timetable to the electric telegraph, from the telephone to e-mail – have profoundly influenced the nature of scientific communication and the structure and practice of science. It will bring together scientists, historians, social scientists, and science communicators to explore the role of technologies, both physical and social, in the history and present practice of communication within and around scientific communities and between science and its various publics. The conference will be organised around four themes: print and text; correspondence; networks and gatherings; and non-print media. In each of these it will explore the interaction between technical change and communicative practice by considering examples taken from across a wide range of historical conjunctures and disciplines. Papers should be thirty minutes in length, and should fall within one of the four themes. Doctoral students are invited to give fifteen-minute papers. The deadline for 300-word proposals is 15 January 2012. For further details and submission instructions, please download the conference flyer (pdf).

CFP: Shaping the Republic of Letters: Communication, Correspondence and Networks in Early Modern Europe

James Brown — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:31:45 +0000

The newly founded Journal of Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for a special issue on the timely theme of ‘Shaping the Republic of Letters: Communication, Correspondence and Networks in Early Modern Europe’:

‘A well known metaphor of the early European modernity and an important instrument in the understanding of seventeenth-century thought, the ‘Republic of Letters’ was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily a label for new projects of intellectual and scientific association. Various models for the Republic of Letters have been investigated and described as closed circles or open networks, shaped around a variety of elements: scientific societies, intellectual networks, formal or informal circles of intellectuals, proponents of the new and old philosophies. What all such models had in common was a an ideal of shaping communities around a moral, intellectual and sometimes a religious project understood as a reformation of the (whole) human being.

This special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies aims to bring together articles devoted to the investigation of such models of early modern communities governed by the ideal of the Republic of Letters. The journal is particularly seeking papers dedicated to the exploration of various ways of disseminating and communicating knowledge within the Republic of Letters, with a special focus on the exchanges between the East and the West of Europe…’

For more information please contact Vlad Alexandrescu.

CFP: Early Modern Social Networks

James Brown — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:49:01 +0000

The Early Modern Center of the University of California at Santa Barbara invites paper proposals for their eleventh annual conference, Early Modern Social Networks, 1500-1800. The conference will take place on March 16-17, 2012 at UCSB, and will feature keynote speakers Ann Blair (Harvard University), Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London), and James Raven (University of Essex). Possible topics include: knowledge networks, (such as the Royal society, libraries, salons, and coffeehouses); secret societies; clubs; literary coteries; epistolary correspondents; religious communities (including sacramental practices); print and publication networks; gift communities (patronage, the ward system); trade networks (such as the East India Company, the Royal Exchange, workers’ guilds, black markets); colonial administration; infrastructure expansion (the post, turnpikes, canals); financial organizations (stock markets, insurance); and others. The deadline for abstracts of 250-500 words in length is January 6, 2012. For further details and submission instructions, see the conference website.

Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies

James Brown — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:42:38 +0000

James introduces the Project.

Anna Marie describes stibnite.

The Project was on the road again this week, this time at the venerable Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies, which this year took as its theme ‘Communication and Exchange’ (University of Reading, 18−20 July 2011). On Monday afternoon, a panel devoted to CofK comprised three interlocking papers. Project Coordinator James Brown provided an overview of the Project and its intellectual objectives, Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos delivered a wonderful case study of Martin Lister‘s hitherto unsung contributions to Newtonian telescopy, while Editor Kim McLean Fiander introduced our union catalogue of early modern correspondence and treated delegates to a sneak preview of its editorial and search interfaces. In the evening, Project Director Howard Hotson concluded our contribution with a plenary address on the multi-layered network of Samuel Hartlib. In a wide-ranging analysis, Howard recapitulated some of the broader objectives of the Project, before describing the way in which Hartlib’s legendary intelligencing both superimposed and reflected the pedagogical, diplomatic, commercial, and military networks engendered by the upheavals of the Thirty Years War. For more information about the conference, please download the programme (pdf).

Kim introduces the catalogue.

Howard's keynote on Hartlib.

Seminar 5: The Scribal Circulation of Letters

James Brown — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:15:51 +0000

In the fifth paper of our seminar series on Thursday 2 June, Professor James Daybell (University of Plymouth) delivered a fascinating paper entitled ‘The Scribal Circulation of Early Modern Letters’. Debuting material from his forthcoming book on the materiality of the letter, and in a slight change from the advertised title, Daybell provided a sophisticated overview of the ‘complex textual afterlives’ of letters beyond their initial composition, sending, and receipt; a conceptualization which challenges prevailing views of early modern epistolarity as a private, historically anchored exchange between only two individuals. By means of a rich range of political and religious examples from early modern England, Daybell traced several consecutive phases of subsequent manuscript dissemination: the controlled circulation of epistolary separates through private copying within discrete manuscript networks; a less discriminate casting abroad; commercial scribal publication within anthologies and miscellanies (in which copies of letters co-mingled with verse, libels, prose, and other manuscript genres); and finally, in many cases, print publication. Daybell also provided insights into the postal conditions which facilitated scribal transmission in early modern England, a surprisingly makeshift mixture of different delivery methods (ordinary posts, royal posts, messengers, carriers, servants, and chance travellers) until the introduction of a more stable and predictable postal structure with the founding of the post office in 1635. Questions focussed on the role of London and the universities as entrepôts for scribal dissemination; the costs of delivery; the anxieties and self-censorship engendered by the instability and porosity of the early modern postal network; and the distinction between ordinary street copies and scribal separates produced by commercial scriptoria. Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series, please see the seminar webpage.

Podcast now available on the seminar page!

CFP: Philosophical Correspondence and the Republic of Letters

James Brown — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:53:52 +0000

The 11th Bucharest-Princeton Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, which will take place in Bran, Transylvania on 2–8 July 2011, is currently seeking contributions. Organised by the Research Centre for the Foundations of Modern Thought (FME) at the University of Bucharest in collaboration with the Philosophy Department at Princeton University, this year’s event takes as its theme Collaborative Aspects of Early Modern Thought: Philosophical Correspondence and the Republic of Letters. The deadline for the receipt of one-page abstracts and CVs is 27 April 2011. For submission instructions, as well as details of registration, costs, and keynote speakers, please visit the seminar webpage.

Symposium: Early Modern Data Delivery

James Brown — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:30:52 +0000

A symposium on Early Modern Data Delivery will take place in the English Faculty of the University of Oxford on Monday 28 February 2011. The event will focus on letters as a manifestation of seventeenth-century information exchange, and will feature the following contributions:

Johanna Harris (University of Exeter), ‘Obstinate Letters: Lady Brilliana Harley’s Defence of Brampton Bryan’
Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Information Delivery in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth: A Habermasian Reading’
Katherine Duncan-Jones (University of Oxford), ‘A ‘Tragicall’ Letter (c. 1604): Writer, Recipient, Bearer’

The symposium will be held in Lecture Room 2 from 5pm.

CFP: Communication and Exchange (2011 University of Reading Early Modern Studies Conference)

Kim McLean-Fiander — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:52:08 +0000

A Woman Writing a Letter (1680) by Frans van Mieris

The University of Reading Early Modern Studies Conference will take place 18–20 July 2011. Organised by the Early Modern Research Centre, the conference takes as its theme Communication and Exchange and will feature both a panel on Cultures of Knowledge and a plenary session by the Project Director Professor Howard Hotson. The conference hopes to generate new thinking and debate on such questions as: what forms did communication and information take (oral, printed, numerical, or even visual), how did its forms change, and how was it circulated; what did people know about the world outside their own immediate spheres in the early modern period; what new techniques for the calculation and expression of information appeared; how far was information managed by government through propaganda and censorship or the maintenance of secrecy; did changing practices of communication stimulate the emergence of new genres; how did the stock of knowledge of the world increase through the endeavours of seamen, merchants, factors and adventurers as well as scientists and travel writers; and what part did patronage and the commerce in books and manuscripts play? The deadline for paper and panel proposals is 31 January 2011. Further details are available in the full call for papers (pdf).