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

A lecture by Jacob Soll on ‘Enlightenment Libraries and the Quest for Universal Knowledge Reconsidered’ will take place at 3pm on Tuesday 25 May in the Seminar Room of the New Bodleian Library. Soll gained his doctorate in history at Cambridge University after completing a diploma of advanced studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His 2005 book, Publishing The Prince, about the afterlife and translations of Machiavelli’s work, won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. Since then he has written about the birth of information culture in Europe, including research on the origins of state archives, on note-taking by early modern readers, on accountancy in seventeenth-century Holland, and the critical uses of historical evidence in early modern Europe. In 2009 he published The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System. Soll teaches at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is a Consulting Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas and a co-founder and Associate Editor of the new online journal Republics of Letters, founded at Stanford University with Dan Edelstein.

A lecture by Susan E. Whyman entitled ‘Letter Writing, Reading, and the Rise of the Novel: Jane Johnson of Olney and Samuel Richardson’ will take place at Convocation House of Oxford’s Bodleian Library on Tuesday 4 May 2010 at 1pm. In the lecture, which is organised by the Friends of the Bodleian, Dr Whyman (author of The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660-1800 [Oxford, 2009]) will use the Bodleian’s manuscripts of Jane Johnson of Olney (1706-59) and the letters of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) to explore the complex relationship between reading, letter writing, and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. Admission is free, and all are welcome. Wine and sandwiches will be available at Chancellor’s Court after the lecture at a cost of £7 per person, for which bookings should be made with the Administrator. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to fob@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Electronic Enlightenment, the pioneering online archive of over 55,000 eighteenth-century letters, has just released its second version. New features introduced include additional content (for example the correspondence of Gustavus III and Adam Smith), and a more powerful range of search and browse functions (you can now sort letters by language, age of writer/recipient, and date range; lives by occupation and nationality; and sources by archive/country and title/publisher of early editions). The site has also been given a fresh new look. Electronic Enlightenment is a research project of the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, and is distributed by OUP.