The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Dover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Information Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Transformative Impact

This provocative new history of early modern Europe argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. These developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life. The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters. Engaging with historical questions across many fields of human activity, Paul M. Dover interprets the historical significance of this 'information revolution' for the present day, and suggests thought-provoking parallels with the informational challenges of the digital age.

The Concept of Conversation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Public Sphere

The Concept of Conversation traces the rise of conversation from a minor mode of rhetoric to the point where rhetoric as a whole was redefined as conversation, and argues that this was the most important change in rhetoric during the centuries between 1400 and 1700. In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations, conducted in the leisure time of noble men, and concerned with indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries and the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this written analogue of conversation. The Renaissance humanists from Petrarch onward further transformed conversation, and its genre analogues of dialogue and letter, by transforming it into a metaphor of increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe. The Concept of Conversation traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, periodical press and women. It revises Jürgen Habermas’ history of the emergence of the rational speech of the public sphere as the history of the emergence of rational conversation and puts the emergence of women’s speech at the centre of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.

Was There a Scientific Revolution?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Heilbron
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic

This article asks whether there was a Scientific Revolution (SR) at anytime between 1550 and1800. The label ‘Scientific Revolution’ to indicate a period in the development of natural knowledge in early modern Europe has carved a place in historiography. This article suggests that there was SR, if SR signifies a period of time; perhaps, if it is taken as a metaphor. It illustrates how the deployment of the metaphor to seventeenth-century natural knowledge might be accomplished. It also considers the physics of René Descartes, the influence of Cartesianism throughout the Republic of Letters, and the academies. The metaphor can be useful if it is taken in analogy to a major political revolution. The analogy points to a later onset, and a swifter career, for the SR than is usually prescribed, and shows that Isaac Newton was its counter rather than its culmination.

Leibniz’s Network

2018 ◽  
pp. 562-590
Author(s):  
Howard Hotson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Digital Infrastructure ◽  
Major Subject ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Generation

Leibniz’s network is a major subject of study in its own right, exemplifying the centrality of the ‘republic of letters’ to the intellectual history of early modern Europe.  Yet the primary reason for discussing it here is that understanding Leibniz’s network is also indispensable for understanding his thought.  Leibniz’s thought is not a fixed product, immortalized in a small number of polished publications.  Its content and expression evolved constantly in a long series of fragmentary statements, many penned in dialogue with contemporaries.  To understand these fragments, we must understand the hundreds of people with whom Leibniz was interacting, and the networks and communities for which they spoke.  Grasping the complexity of these interactions surpasses the limitations of print technology.  Obtaining a synoptic understanding of Leibniz’s network therefore requires a new generation of digital infrastructure capable of assembling and exploring the relevant data in a highly collaborative and interactive fashion.

Mapping Knowledge Exchange in Early Modern Europe: Intellectual and Technological Geographies and Network Representations

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Van Den Heuvel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Spatial Distributions ◽  
Virtual Networks ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic

This paper discusses the development of digital intellectual and technological geographies showing spatial distributions of information and proposes to combine these with network representations of actors and documents relevant for the history knowledge exchange in Early Modern Europe. The amount of technical and fortification drawings that were copied throughout Europe and the New World and the different nature of networks in which they were exchanged raises the question whether they belonged to the Republic of Letters, as some authors claim. We argue that instead of trying to explain knowledge exchange in Early Modern Europe by focusing on The Republic of Letters as one entity consisting of scholars , it might be more useful to reconstruct the spatial distribution of actors and of (non-)textual documents in virtual networks of knowledge. Inspired by the term “deep maps” coined by David Bodenhamer, we will introduce the concept of “deep networks” and explore the requirements for their future development. Hereto, we focus on the representation of historical evidence and of uncertainties in analyses of intellectual and technological letters and drawings and hybrid combinations of these.

Paris, Rome, Venice, and Vienna in Peter Lambeck’s Network

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittoria Feola
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Experience ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Biographical Account ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge ◽  
The Impact

This article considers, first, the roles of Paris, Rome, Venice, and Vienna in the network of Peter Lambeck, the librarian of the Hapsburg emperor Leopold I, and, secondly, Lambeck’s and Vienna’s own places in the Republic of Letters during the period 1662–1680. It begins with a biographical account, in which I situate Lambeck both geographically and intellectually. The importance of Paris is contrasted with his not so positive experience in Rome. Secondly, I focus on Lambeck’s declaration of intent to link Vienna to the Republic of Letters. Thirdly, I survey the eminently Venetian networks through which Lambeck tried to fulfil his intellectual goals. The tensions between France and the Habsburg Empire crashed against Lambeck’s idealistic aims. This raises the issue of the impact of geo-politics on the production and circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe, and prompts questions about openness and secrecy in the Republic of Letters.

VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 593-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA SHEPARD
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe

Violence in early modern Europe, 1500–1800. By Julius R. Ruff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+269. ISBN 0-521-59119-8. £13.95.The London mob: violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England. By Robert Shoemaker. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Pp. xvi+393. ISBN 1-85285-389-1. £25.00.Outlaws and highwaymen: the cult of the robber in England from the middle ages to the nineteenth century. By Gillian Spraggs. London: Pimlico, 2001. Pp. x+372. ISBN 0-7126-6479-3. £12.50.The duel in early modern England: civility, politeness and honour. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x+355. ISBN 0-521-82062-6. £45.00.Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms. By Roger B. Manning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+272. ISBN 0-19-926121-0. £47.00.Rebellion, community and custom in early modern Germany. By Norbert Schindler, translated by Pamela E. Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv+311. ISBN 0-521-65010-0. £55.00.The history of violence appears to hold a particular fascination for scholars of the early modern period. This is not least because it is so often deemed integral to the differences between modern and pre-modern culture and politics, despite the fact that this particular difference is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The progressive decline and containment of violence – or at least certain forms of violence – has been central to narratives of state formation, the transition from courtesy to civility, a shift from aristocratic to bourgeois cultural hegemony, and the ‘civilizing process’ first theorized by Norbert Elias. Despite Michel Foucault's complication (if not rejection) of their teleological assumptions, such celebratory accounts of modernization have proved remarkably tenacious, albeit in a fragmented fashion. As the selection of books under review here illustrates, with the exception of Manning and, most notably, Peltonen, current scholarship is more likely to uphold, or to modify subtly, rather than to reject entrenched views of a gradual abeyance of violence in early modern Europe in response to imperatives of civility and politeness and to emergent state control.

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