This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers. These communities formed through distinct memory cultures and the representation of and identification with collective identities. Rethinking the Republic of Letters looks at early modern biographical dictionaries (vitae), eulogies, letters, travelogues, and funerary monuments of early modern learned men to trace the (re)formation of these communities. It thereby offers a novel perspective on early modern learned communities – the many Republics of Letters.
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Introduction: The Republic of Letters as an Imagined Community
Chapter 1. An Inventory of Scholarly Values and Virtues
Chapter 2. Collective History and Geographical Inclusion in Vitae and Elogia
Chapter 3. Collective Memory and Identity in Hugo Grotius’s Correspondence
Chapter 4. The Peregrinatio Literaria: Experiencing, Representing, and Forming Learned Communities
Chapter 5. The Basilica di Santa Croce: The Florentine Site of Learned Memory
Chapter 6. The Pieterskerk: Representing the Learned Community of Leiden University
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Abbreviations
Manuscript Sources
Printed Sources, Before 1800
Printed Sources, Modern
Secondary Literature
Appendix 1
Corpus and Keyword Analysis
Main Corpus
Reference Corpus
Acknowledgements
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Product details

ISBN
9789048559855
Published
2025-05-27
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press; Amsterdam University Press
Height
234 mm
Width
156 mm
Age
UP, 05
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
412

Biographical note

Koen Scholten is a historian of science and published on memory and identity in scholarly and scientific communities. He edited Memory and Identity in the Learned World (Brill, 2022) and received his PhD from Utrecht University on a thesis on the formation of early modern communities in the world of learning in 2023.