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

The Correspendence of Joseph Justus Scaliger (8 volumes) has just been published by Droz. Edited by Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert, with supervision, advice, and coordination from Henk Jan de Jonge, Anthony Grafton, and Jill Kraye, the simultaneous appearance of all eight volumes of this major early modern corpus represents one of the most impressive scholarly achievements of modern times (work on Scaliger’s correspondence only started in earnest in 2004).

The critical edition contains nearly 1,700 letters sent to or by the French polymath, all of which are presented alongside a complete scholarly apparatus as well as English synopses. Scaliger’s correspondents include such luminaries as Dominicus Baudius, Tycho Brahe, Isaac Casaubon, the Dousa and Dupuy families, Daniel Heinsius, Johannes Kepler, Justus Lipsius, Claudius Salmasius, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Marcus Welser, and Joannes Woverius. The edition was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and (via Anthony Grafton’s Balzan Prize) the Balzan Foundation, with additional contributions from London’s Warburg Institute, the Scaliger Institute of the University of Leiden, and a number of Dutch societies and foundations.

No let-up in the pace: editors at work

The scene is set for the reception

The next generation of edition-makers

Rhodri Lewis and Sarah Rivett

This major publishing event was celebrated at the second of two publisher-sponsored drinks receptions at our latest conference Communities of Knowledge: Epistolary Cultures in the Early Modern World (20-22 September, 2012). Nearly one hundred delegates and guests assembled in the Bodleian Library’s magnificent Divinity School to toast the launch, where they were treated to wine, cocktail snacks, music from professional harpist Stephen Dunstone, ‘The Path to Scaliger: An Intellectual Journey’ (an animated presentation created especially for the occasion by Dirk), and speeches from Anthony Grafton and Max Engammare, Director of Droz. In related news, metadata from the edition is currently being prepared for inclusion in our union catalogue Early Modern Letters Online, while Dirk and Paul can be heard discussing the Scaliger corpus in their joint contribution to our 2010 seminar series.

Jan Loop, Noel Malcolm, and Dirk

Anthony Grafton’s address

Not pictured: four more volumes

Scaliger raises a glass

We congratulate Paul, Dirk, Henk Jan, Anthony, Jill, and Max (and thank them, as well as Wilma Minty and the rest of the Bodleian’s Historic Venues team, for their help with the reception), and wish the edition every success! For more information and to order online – in hard copy or electronic format – please visit the publisher’s website or download the flyer (pdf).

As I finalise annotations for Volume IV of The Correspondence of John Wallis (OUP), I encountered afresh one of the more curious letters in the corpus (pdf). In characteristic fashion for Wallis, the missive – written to Henry Oldenburg in April 1674 and read aloud at the Royal Society – concerns lofty topics, including Robert Hooke’s efforts to measure stellar parallax and thus to provide incontrovertible proof of the motion of the Earth. However, at the end of the letter, we find a rather more tragic story on a very human scale.

Wallis relates the tale of two young Danish scholars, the brothers Peter and Martin Rosenstand, who had resided in Oxford since late 1672 in the lodging house of a Mrs Mumford near the Sheldonian Theatre (Peter, incidentally, was the letter’s bearer). The pair rapidly gained a reputation throughout the city for combining impeccable scholarship, good manners, and sparkling wit; they were ‘civil persons, studious and good scholars’, according to Wallis, whose ‘commendable and ingenuous conversation’ had won them ‘acquaintance with persons of the best quality’. However, these halcyon days were not to last, for Wallis reports an ‘astonishing accident’ which took place the previous Candlemas Day (2 February). Martin, the elder brother at age twenty, ‘was found in the House of office, some distance from the house… he lay in, dead’, with severe contusions to the neck. Although his injuries were consistent with hanging, Wallis could not believe that such a dazzling young man could commit such a heinous act as ending his own life – suicide was a serious crime in early modern England – and so floated the theory to Oldenburg that Martin had ‘in his sleep, or dream, hanged himself… it is not accountable how it should be otherwise’. This consoling explanation was apparently widely shared by seventeenth-century Oxford’s great and good as news of the ignoble death of a rising star sent shockwaves through the quads: ‘It hath occasioned many discourses… and many stories of strange things done in sleep’.

The Sheldonian Theatre, in the vicinity of which the Rosenstands lodged

The yard of St Mary Magdalen parish church in St Giles

This ‘favourable’ view (in Wallis’s terms) was not, however, subscribed to by the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, who provided a graphic account of the incident in his memoirs, the Life and Times (Volume II, pp. 280-1). While confirming Wallis’s claim that the siblings were ‘both the civilest men that ever came into that house [Mrs Mumford’s]’ (adding that Martin Rosenstand was ‘apt to blush’), for Wood the latter’s untimely passing was not a tragic misadventure but a willful act of self-destruction: ‘He rose up about four, struck fier, put off his shirt, went down naked (with his cote, loynings, hose and shoes in his armes), and so with the candle in his hand to the privy house, where (though I myself can just stand up in it) [he] hanged himself with his cravet, which came across his neck twice, upon a little rafter that went cross the house’. Moreover, in Wood’s version of events, Peter Rosenstand meddled with the scene in order to conceal his older brother’s actions: ‘His brother rising… went down to the privy house, and found him [Martin] stark naked hanging, tooke him downe and covered his privities with his coat, strived to conceal his death viz reporting that he died at his business’. This intervention notwithstanding, a surgeon ‘found that by his neck he had hanged himself’.

Whether Martin Rosenstand’s self-inflicted demise in a lavatory on a cold February morning in 1674 was deliberate or not, University coroner William Hopkins and his attending jury agreed with Wallis and the rest of Oxford’s learned community: the young Scandinavian had ‘hanged himself in his sleep… he dreamed of it, and so hanged himself’ (a verdict Wood deemed ‘doubtfull’). With the accidental nature of the death officially confirmed, Martin’s corpse was interred in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen parish church at the southern end of St Giles at ten o’clock the following night, ‘close under the wall next to the stile or passage’ (church burials were denied to victims of suicide). Perhaps tellingly, ‘nobody [was] present but the carriers and clerk of the parish’…

Our third and final seminar series was rounded out this summer by a triumvirate of superb presentations with a decidedly British twist:
 

An Index of Modernity: Narratives of Communications in the Late Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic

In his paper on 31 May, Konstantin Dierks (Indiana University) spoke about the shift in the latter half of the seventeenth century from an epistolary culture to a culture of ‘communications’. This conceptual transformation was brought about particularly by the British postal acts of 1657 and 1660 which saw the creation of the role of Postmaster General and a new infrastructure of communication comprised of reliable postal routes and a series of post offices which could be held to public account. Konstantin asserted that this new infrastructure was the result of a commercial rather than imperial vision in the first instance, but that it soon became very much linked to ideologies and discourses of modernity and empire as postal systems were developed in the Americas (Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Jamaica) which were subject to the regulatory powers of the Postmaster General in London. Konstantin argued that, rather than the intellectuals and scientists of the Republic of Letters, it was the merchants and innovators who most affected government institutions by successfully articulating an ideology around the growing importance of conveying letters and goods. In other words, early modern business and enterprise trumped intellectual enquiry when it came to influencing decisions of state. Plus ça change.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

‘An After-Suppers Work’: Sir Kenelm Digby and Varieties of Correspondence in the 1630s

Kenelm Digby

Joe fields questions

On 7 June, Joe Moshenska (University of Cambridge) spoke about the letters of natural philosopher and courtier Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), focusing especially on the impact his 1636 reconversion to Catholicism had on the nature of his correspondence. Although at the time Digby was viewed as an emblem of frivolity for being swept along in the series of fashionable Roman Catholic conversions of the 1630s, Joe showed, through a close reading of a number of letters, that Digby had actually been engaged in serious theological debate, regularly disputing with other thinkers about the true origins of the church. Digby’s correspondence was also used by Joe as a case study to explore more general questions about early modern letters. For instance, should the courtier’s 100-page work on the early church fathers, which was written in an epistolary fashion, be considered a letter or a treatise? What actually constitutes a letter? Furthermore, did early modern people assume that all letters were public documents unless the writer specifically indicated otherwise? Were explicit epistolary requests for secrecy, as found, for example, in Archbishop Laud’s letter to Digby after the latter’s conversion, genuine or mere rhetorical posturing? These and other questions about the primacy or authority of different letter versions – manuscript copies versus printed editions, for example – aroused productive methodological debate in the question and answer session.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

Editing Evelyn Editing Evelyn

John Evelyn

Discussions continue over dinner

David Galbraith (University of Toronto) brought the seminar series to an edifying close on 14 June with a paper describing the challenges of editing John Evelyn’s letterbook while also situating it within the context of his other, better-known works. Evelyn is an example of an early modern auto-archivist who, after an illness in the 1680s, began the task of reconstructing his papers for posterity in his diary and across four letterbooks. Like editors and archivists today, he used headnotes to identify his correspondents as well as an index, although he evidently had trouble dating some of his earlier communications. According to David, researchers have tended to focus solely on the diary, but it and the letterbooks were in fact parallel projects used by Evelyn as instruments of self fashioning in which he cast himself sometimes as a mediator or cultural broker between different social worlds, and other times as an agent in the transmission of knowledge or as an instructor in morality. David argued that the letters, more so than the diary, reveal a more personal side to Evelyn; he comes across as a funny, witty individual who was adept at self parody and who enjoyed the intimacy afforded by the epistolary genre. Furthermore, the letters, characterized by much stylistic variation, offer details of Evelyn’s life that are simply not found elsewhere in his oeuvre. For instance, John Beale is never mentioned in the diary, yet was Evelyn’s most prolific correspondent on gardens, a topic of enormous importance to the creator of Elysium Britannicum, an encyclopaedic assemblage of horticultural knowledge, practice, and wisdom of the seventeenth century.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

2010 Series and Podcasts

2011 Series and Podcasts

2012 Series and Podcasts

We wish to thank all twenty-six speakers, our hard-working convenors, our many chairs from within and beyond the Project, and our loyal audiences for contributing to the success of our three seminar series since 2010.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (1596-1662) has often been portrayed as a romantic and frivolous figure; as a desperate, poverty-stricken, devout widow, or as a dilettante who spent her time going to ballets and masques and keeping the company of monkeys (which she allegedly enjoyed more than that of her children). A key constituent of these narratives has been the assumption that her political influence within Europe was negligible.

However, as Nadine Akkerman of Leiden University argued in her paper in our seminar series on 24 May (Opening up the Winter Queen’s Cabinet: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia), this is a distorted and partial perception of the monarch that has largely arisen because historians have tended to overlook her vast correspondence. The fact is that Elizabeth’s nearly 1700 surviving letters from forty-seven archives in Europe and the US (estimated to be a mere 10% of what once existed) − which Nadine is editing for OUP − contain almost no information on her cultural life, and very little mention of plays, artists, or poets. They reveal instead that she was immersed in politics and was a keen follower of military affairs. Indeed, the underlying purpose of nearly all of her letters, Nadine argued, was to regain the lost Palatinate lands for her heirs.

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia

Nadine fields questions over drinks.

In a stimulating and wide-ranging analysis, Nadine discussed the often ignored, though politically important, roles of royal secretaries, scribes, and letter carriers. She traced the various ways by which Elizabeth attempted to outwit her brother Charles I’s surveillance of her correspondence (by using cryptography and steganography, for example), and suggested that Elizabeth used letters as a polite instrument by which to sabotage her brother’s plans for the Thirty Years War, thus making that event last ten years longer than it might otherwise have done. In sum, Nadine posited that an examination of this important though neglected correspondence should bring about an overdue reconfiguration of the Queen of Bohemia’s pivotal role in seventeenth-century diplomatic, military, and political history.

Volume II of Nadine Akkerman’s The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, covering the period 1632 to 1642, is out now with OUP.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

In the fourth paper of our seminar series on Thursday 17 May, Dr Glenn Roe – formerly of the University of Chicago, and current Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at Oxford’s OERC – gave a sophisticated and suggestive paper on ‘Text-Mining Electronic Enlightenment: Influence and Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters’.

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Building on his recent work with the Electronic Enlightenment corpus and other online repositories of long-form historical text, Glenn started his talk by observing the irony that the recent efflorescence of big data, culturomics, network analysis, and other quantitative approaches to culture – focusing in many cases on the macro interpretation of metadata over content – has authorized and promoted a convention of ‘not reading’ within the digital humanities, in which historical texts themselves can be marginalized or effaced altogether by the superabundance of information. The ready modelling of letters as a finite number of abstract datapoints (sender, recipient, and so on) and the vast quantities of diverse and often disorganized information exchanged within epistolary systems makes correspondence highly susceptible to such an approach.

Glenn during discussion.

Visualizing influence.

As a supplement to this ‘distant’ reading, Glenn went on to demonstrate the potential of the latest machine-learning technologies to render significant volumes of transcription meaningful via text mining and the automated creation of patterns, frequencies, statistical models, and other forms of ‘mediated’ or ‘directed’ reading. Glenn distinguished between three kinds of text mining: predictive classification (used to generate new categories from unprocessed texts); comparative classification (used to correct and refine existing categories within processed texts); and similarity (used to measure broader similarities between documents and parts of documents, especially in terms of the identification of meaningful borrowing and instances of intertextuality). He then demonstrated each kind of approach within a rich series of examples drawn from his work with the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, and most recently Electronic Enlightenment, before concluding his analysis by presenting – with caveats – some preliminary radial visualizations of textual influence generated using the D3 JavaScript library.

On 26 September 1679, while the astronomer Johannes Hevelius and his wife Elizabetha were spending a relaxing evening in gardens outside the gates of their home city of Danzig (Gdańsk), fire consumed their house in the old town. A large part of their possessions, books, personal manuscripts, and instruments, was destroyed; by the following morning the observatory which Hevelius had carefully erected on the roof of the house lay in ruins.

Much was irretrievably lost, but remarkably the letters he had exchanged with the learned men and women of Europe, including Kepler, Boulliau, Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, Oldenburg, Wallis, and Kircher, together with his treasured collection of Kepler manuscripts, survived. At that time comprising thirteen volumes, the correspondence of Hevelius constitutes one of the great resources for the study and appreciation of early modern scientific networks.

Hevelius’s 45m focal-length telescope.

Johannes Hevelius.

Making this extraordinarily rich corpus available to the wider scholarly community is the task of a major collaborative editorial project currently underway in France, Germany, and Poland, of which I am pleased to be serving on the advisory committee. With most of the over 2,700 surviving letters now housed in collections at the BNF and the Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire in Paris, it was particularly fitting that the director of the French team Professor Chantal Grell (University of Versailles) – accompanied by Professor Robert Halleux (University of Liège) – should inform our third seminar series of the background and methodologies of this ambitious enterprise on Thursday 10 May. In a talk entitled ‘Editing the Correspondence of Johannes Hevelius: Networks, Themes, and Methodological Challenges’, Chantal first provided an overview of Hevelius’s life and letters, before giving a lively account of the complex archival afterlives of the astronomer’s epistolary collection following his death in 1687, including details of the letters famously purloined by Guillaume Libri in the mid-nineteenth century. Following a conspectus of Hevelius’s many correspondents, Chantal concluded with an analysis of the exemplary seventeenth-century scientific exchange between Hevelius and Pierre de Noyers, the secretary to the Queen of Poland. Following an interesting question and answer session – which included, inter alia, discussion of the benefits and challenges of balancing hard copy and digital outputs within large-scale correspondence projects – the evening came to fitting conclusion with a visit to the opening of the Renaissance in Astronomy exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science.

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. All are welcome!