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

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!

Philip consults the Cometographia.

Kim introduces the union catalogue.

CofK Research Fellow, Philip Beeley, and Editor, Kim McLean-Fiander, have recently returned from Poland after participating in a conference on Johannes Hevelius: The Burgher of Gdańsk and his Work. Hosted by the Gdańsk Scientific Society on 24-25 November, and taking place in the splendid historic setting of the Main Town Hall, the conference was organised to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of the city’s most famous sons, the astronomer, instrument maker, inventor, brewer, printing-house owner, and town councillor, Johannes Hevelius (1611-87).

The conference opened with a special viewing of some of the Hevelian treasures of the Polish Academy of Sciences Library, including the Cometographia. His life and works were then examined from a wide range of perspectives by speakers from Poland, France, Italy, and the UK on topics such as the correlations between Hevelius’s astronomical observations in Gdańsk and those taken by Jean Picard on the same day in Paris; the controversy which arose between Hevelius and Adrien Auzout over systems for tracking comet paths; Hevelius’s work as an inventor of scientific instruments and the pendulum clock; his curriculum whilst attending the Gdańsk Academic Gymnasium; and his vocational experiences as city councillor, brewer, and printing-house owner. After a private viewing of the Main Town Hall’s excellent exhibition Johannes Hevelius and Gdańsk of his Times, Philip opened Friday afternoon’s session with a paper on ‘Hevelius, Hartlib, and Wallis: Early Modern Ideals of Scientific Collaboration’, which argued that this tripartite correspondence between Oxford, London, and Danzig exemplified, as no other, the ideals of the Republic of Letters: intellectual collaboration and exchange as a means to promote the growth of knowledge. Drawing on examples from these and other correspondents within Hevelius’s circle, Kim then demonstrated our forthcoming digital union catalogue of intellectual correspondence, revealing how it allows researchers not only to locate often elusive and dispersed early modern letters, but also to interrogate them in new and exciting ways.

Kim and Philip would like to thank their Polish hosts, in particular Professor Marian Turek and his wife Liz, for their warm hospitality and the invitation to attend the conference in this beautiful Pomeranian city.