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

In exciting news for scholars of the Moravian educator and CofK stalwart Jan Amos Comenius, two Comenius-related publications prepared by colleagues and partners at the Czech Academy of Sciences have recently been released:

The new volume of J. A. Comenii Opera Omnia, 15/IV, appeared with Academia (Prague) in November 2011. Prepared by Martin Steiner, Markéta Klosová, and others, the volume builds on three installments already published under 15 and continues the ongoing work of the Opera Didactia Omnia corpus. The edition encompasses a significant part of Comenius’s activities in Hungary, including complete versions of textbooks prepared for the first two classes of his Latin school, and includes a full editorial apparatus as well as notes, comments, and summaries of information on edited works already available in English. For further information and to order a copy, please visit the publisher’s website.

The letters of Jan Patočka, prepared by Věra Schifferová, have also been released in two volumes (1931-77) by Oikoymenh. A leading Czech philosopher of the twentieth century, Patočka was an eminent interpreter of Comenius’s life and work who corresponded extensively with other students of the pedagogue worldwide such as Milada Blekastad, Stanislav Sousedík, Julie Nováková, Jiřina Popelová, Josef Brambora, Antonín Škarka, Dmytro Čyževskyj, Klaus Schaller, Marcelle Denis, Franz Hofmann, and George Henry Turnbull. The letters, published in Czech, shed important light on Comenius as well as on the evolution of scholarly attitudes towards him. For further information and to order a copy, please visit the publisher’s website.

The opening plenary session.

Relaxing in the foyer.

The Project’s inaugural conference, Universal Reformation: Intellectual Networks in Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670, took place at St Anne’s College on 21–23 September 2010. The event, which was attended by over ninety delegates, built on three preparatory European workshops (held in Prague, Cracow, and Budapest), and allowed forty-two emerging and established scholars from eleven countries to share their perspectives on the international networks and intellectual traditions brought into being by the upheavals of the Thirty Years War. Themes explored included institutional networks and intellectual exchange, encyclopaedia and pansophia, the early modern European media revolution, ecclesiastical reconciliation, and millenarianism, prophecy, and propaganda. Delegates also enjoyed a drinks reception in the Bodleian Library‘s historic Divinity School (incorporating a private viewing of the exhibition ‘My Wit was Always Working’: John Aubrey and the Development of Experimental Science), and were present for the prototype launch of our union catalogue. For further information, including speaker profiles and abstracts, please visit the conference microsite; for details of our 2011 event, please visit the conference webpage.

We are pleased to announce that booking is now open for ‘Universal Reformation: Intellectual Networks in Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670’, the first Project conference, which will take place at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on 21-23 September 2010. Organised by Howard Hotson and Vladimír Urbánek, the event will showcase the work of a diverse group of emerging and established scholars, many from east central Europe, who will converge on the intellectual networks and traditions engendered by the upheavals of the Thirty Years War. For provisional programme information, a steadily growing lists of speaker profiles and abstracts, and to book online, please see the new conference website. The deadline for registration is Friday 10 September.

Workshop participants in discussion. © SOM

The third and final workshop in our extremely successful east-central European series took place last month in Budapest on the theme of ‘Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560-1670′. The workshop was generously hosted and co-sponsored by Central European University and the Semmelweis Museum, Library, and Archives of the History of Medicine (with additional financial support from the Institute of Literary Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Literary Studies and Lingusitics of the University of Miskolc), and was organised by Márton Szentpéteri, Gábor Kecskeméti, Benedek Varga, and Márton Zászkaliczky. It allowed eighteen emerging and established scholars to converge on the related seventeenth-century ideas of collecting all knowledge into a single coherent system and of teaching all things to all men, as well as the networks and communicative strategies by which these universalist philosophies were disseminated across the fragmented geographical and political canvas of east-central Europe. For full details of the workshop, including abstracts and photographs, please see the workshop webpage. Themes addressed in the course of the workshop series will be drawn together in the international conference Universal Reformation: Intellectual Networks in Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670 (St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, 21-23 September).