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

Podcast available on the seminar page!

The zoological theme continued on Thursday 3 May when Florike Egmond from Leiden University (formerly of the Clusius Project) gave a talk in our seminar series entitled The Webs of Clusius and Gessner: Correspondence, Images, and Collecting in Sixteenth-Century Natural History. In a detailed and lavishly illustrated discussion, Florike described her recent discovery of two albums of original watercolour drawings created for the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1551-1558) within the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam.

Crafted in Basel by the anatomist and natural historian (and Gessner’s friend) Felix Platter (1536-1614), the images – of a menagerie of marine life, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, across 369 pages – formed the basis of many of the illustrations within Gessner’s zoological masterwork, the Historiae Animalium (1551-1558). You can find out more about this exciting discovery in Florike’s recent blog post for the Picturing Science network, and in her recent article for the Journal of the History of Collections.

Conrad Gessner.

Anna Marie chairs Florike.

Renaissance correspondence networks, argued Florike, played a key role in sharing and disseminating (although not, curiously, in facilitating discussion of) manuscript images, as both Gessner, Clusius, and other naturalists solicited hand-drawn illustrations of animals to serve as the basis of woodcuts in their publications from colleagues and agents around the world. These exchanges, in turn, formed the basis of what Florike termed (with caveats) a kind of visual ‘canon formation’ within natural history, as elements of various portrayals were adapted, reworked, and reappropriated across different contexts and between media; as representational norms stabilized; and as the repertoire of animals deemed suitable for inclusion in zoological texts (whose wide remit originally encompassed familiar creatures such as cats and goats) was narrowed and standardized. A lively question and answer session focused on the artisanal communities responsible for producing the illustrations; how the works were commissioned and stored; and the frustrating but typical absence of any kind of discussion of manuscript images in the letters with which they circulated (resulting, suggested Florike, from the self-evident nature of enclosed materials).

Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series – and to listen to the podcast of Florike’s paper – please see the seminar webpage. All are welcome!

While Anna Marie was weaving animal magic at the Royal Society, our Technical Director Neil Jefferies and I were headed to the Forzhungszentrum Gotha of the University of Erfurt for an invited workshop on ‘Visualizing Data Resources: The Potential of  a Wikimedia Platform for the Digital Humanities’ (27–28 April 2012). Expertly organised by Martin Mulsow, Olaf Simons, and Kristina Petri, and generously funded by Wikimedia Deutschland – the largest and most active of the national chapters – the workshop provided an inspiring forum for a wide range of international participants and projects to share approaches and converge on the question of Wikipedia, the digital humanities, visualizations, and many points in between (see the full description [pdf]).

One set of presentations showcased the Wikimedia community’s own plans for data capture and computational seeing, many of which have great potential for the digital humanities; not always a straightforward relationship, as Olaf discussed in his opening address. These include Wikidata (a collaboratively curated, centralised database of entities designed to support the 280+ language editions of Wikipedia, as well as third-party initiatives, currently under development), and Semantic Mediawiki, an open source extension to Wikipedia capable of (re)organizing the site’s existing content into highly configurable, collectively editable semantic databases. The accumulation and management of structured, actionable (wiki)data within these streamlined platforms will facilitate the creation and deployment of information visualizations across the site’s many interfaces, and by its millions of users in the context of exports and mash-ups.

Scott Weingart (Indiana/CKCC), Neil (CofK/Oxford), James (CofK/Oxford), and Nicole Coleman (MRofL/Stanford).

Andreas Wolter (ImpulsBauhaus), Jens Weber (ImpulsBauhaus), and Judith Pfeiffer (IMPAcT/Oxford).

A second cluster of talks focused on the data capture, curation, and visualization techniques and applications being pursued and developed by humanistic projects based in archives, libraries, and universities worldwide. As well as presentations from ourselves and good friends Mapping the Republic of Letters, The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, CKCC, IMPAcT, and Scott Weingart, we heard about (inter alia) linked data and gamification at the University of Colorado; an adaptive, interactive, dynamic historical atlas (AIDA) being created at the University of Erfurt; and the wonderful ImpulsBauhaus initiative based at the the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Designed to collect information on and represent the global social networks of the Bauhaus, and led by the designer-developer team Jens Weber and Andreas Wolter in 2009, the project harvested extensive biographical and prospopgraphical data on the movement’s participants and affiliates within a specially designed platform which served as the basis for dynamic network infographics and an interactive three-dimensional table, presented most memorably within an illuminated cube. A video of this extraordinary project opens the post.

I’ve recently returned from the Situating Early Modern Science Networks workshop at the University of Saskatchewan in a chilly but sunny Saskatoon. Hosted by Dr Lisa Smith (who we met when she gave an excellent paper on Hans Sloane’s correspondence in our 2011 seminar series), the two-day event (12-13 April) saw scholars from the UK, Canada and the US – generously funded by the conference – speak about early modern networks from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including English, History, and the History of Science.

Introducing the catalogue.

Post-presentation discussion.

My paper ‘Digitizing Gender: Women’s Correspondence and Knowledge Networks in the Early Modern Era’ focused on the ideological and technical challenges of digitizing gender, including the so-called ‘digital gender ghetto’ wherein data on early modern women is only collected and made accessible within gender-specific online silos. Such resources, while valuable, raise methodological and conceptual difficulties; not only does the information they contain often get bypassed by large portions of the scholarly community, but the long-standing trope that early modern women occupied a hermetically sealed separate sphere is implicitly reinforced, sustaining unhelpful assumptions that they were not fully engaged in intellectual or public life. To overcome this predicament, I suggested that we need to develop digital systems which can link or speak to each other so that data on men and women can be interrogated simultaneously. By doing this, the role played in early modern knowledge communities by individuals such as Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, or Dorothy Moore Dury, for example, can be properly assessed and appreciated within a wider network of both male and female individuals and correspondents.

The ‘Digital Coffee House’.

EMLO on the big screen.

The potential for online resources to facilitate and manifest these kinds of connections became clear during the hands-on ‘Digital Coffeehouse’ portion of the workshop, during which participants were introduced to the following array of early modern digital resources: The Digital Ark, The Newton Project, The Sloane Printed Books Project, The Grub Street Project, The Textual Communities Project, Digital MappaeMundi, and our own Early Modern Letters Online. Future digital collaborations may well result! The conference was rounded out with a thought-provoking talk by Professor Robert Iliffe on the implications for scholarly work arising from the increasing digitization of the academic infrastructure. His presentation sparked a lively debate during the roundtable discussion on the future of online scholarship which covered how the UK’s REF (Research Excellence Framework) assessments handle digital humanities outputs; the ownership of digital materials; concerns about scholars losing old skills and values in favour of new ones; and a consideration of the perils and benefits of crowdsourcing.

We are pleased to report that Volume III of The Correspondence of John Wallis (1616-1703) – one of a number of epistolary editions the Project is supporting, and the latest installment of the prestigious multi-volume edition of the mathematician’s letters – is now available for pre-order from Oxford University Press, pending publication in May. Painstakingly crafted by our Research Fellow Philip Beeley in conjunction with Christoph J. Scriba, work on the third volume began in the context of the AHRC-funded Wallis Project, and has been completed under the auspices of Cultures of Knowledge.

Consisting of 254 letters in total, the volume covers the exciting period 1668 to 1671, during which England was at peace with itself and its neighbours, publication techniques were becoming ever-more sophisticated (especially with the emergence of academic journals), and scientific activity thrived across the continent. It finds Wallis embroiled in fascinating debates on techniques for determining areas contained by curves (quadratures) and figures (cubatures), as well as on theories of motion and the nature of tides. Other volume highlights include Wallis’s celebrated disputes with Thomas Hobbes and French mathematician François Dulaurens, and ceremonial visits to Oxford by the Crown Prince of Tuscany and William of Orange, during which – in telling evidence of rapid disciplinary consolidation – Wallis presented the visiting dignitaries with examples of state-of-the-art geometrical thinking. Below, Philip discusses the latest installment and looks ahead to Volume IV, which will be delivered in the summer.

For further publication details and to pre-order your copy, please visit the OUP website. For background information about Wallis and other outputs emerging from this sub-project (including podcasts, video, and a complete catalogue of Wallis’s extensive correspondence within Early Modern Letters Online), head along to the Wallis webpage.

As part of their recent strategic alliance with Queen Mary, University of London, the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick has announced two Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, one based at Queen Mary and one at Warwick, on the theme of ‘Networks and Information Technologies, 1300-1800’. To form part of the collaborative project ‘Rewiring the Renaissance: Cultural Networks and Information Technologies’, the Fellows will explore modes of communication and networking in the Renaissance period, from letter writing to orality, and develop IT-led modern mechanisms which can capture and analyse the Renaissance communities that were constructed. Projects that explore cultural transmission in any media or European language are welcome; in addition, the Queen Mary Postdoctoral Research Fellow will be expected to have the skills that will allow for an interrogation of the ways in which we communicate historical information in a digital world.

The deadline for applications is Friday, 11 May 2012. For background information on the collaboration, further details about the two posts, and to apply, please visit the project webpage. Please send informal enquiries to Dr Penny Roberts.

Much of the seventeenth century was blighted by conflict, and the Thirty Years’ War, which stretched the length and breadth of Europe, affected every aspect of life. The implications for educational institutions and resulting intellectual networks and traditions were wide-ranging, and as such the Bodleian cards refer frequently to the effect of the conflict on universities and those teaching and studying within them. For example, in today’s card – sent on 3 February 1641, when war had been raging for over twenty years – John Christenius (1599-1672) laments the ‘injurious effect’ of the pan-European conflict on ‘the quality of the intake and studies at his university’. The original card compiler speculated that this letter might have been written from Deventer (where Erasmus had been at school a century and a half before, and the economic decline of which was attributed to religious war), and in Dirk van Miert‘s Humanism in an Age of Science: The Amsterdam Athenaeum in the Golden Age, 1632-1704 we read that from 1637 Christenius had indeed held a position at the newly formed Deventer Athenaeum. As students rush their work, emerging ‘unfit for a profession or status’, Christenius suggests to Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), professor of history at Amsterdam’s Anthenaeum Illustre, that a teacher capable of inspiring the ‘studiously inclined young men to cultivate their minds towards a more scholarly standard’ be found, recommending the appointment of Hamburg-born Johann Frederick Gronovius (1611-1671). This suggestion met with approval and, following travels in England, France, and Italy, Gronovius was duly appointed professor of rhetoric and history at Deventer, a post he retained until his transfer to Leiden in 1658.

According to other EMLO records, Gronovius was no stranger to the city. In 1631 he was writing from there and, by January 1644, the scholarly situation at the Athenaeum appears to have improved to such an extent under the auspices of its new star professor that Vossius praises the ‘great flow of good works from G’s. university and hopes that this will stimulate the senators of G’s. city, renowned for its academic traditions and as the place where Erasmus studied, to provide further for the dissemination of the university’s world-wide fame through monumental works of genius and learning’. Although he encountered problems – see the complications concerning one particular ‘homicidal maniac’ – Gronovius found his lectures ‘well attended’, and it’s a relief to find a productive pedagogical outcome despite (or perhaps even because of) the persistent maelstrom of war.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Launch Record of the Week