JOHN JORTIN, ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, AND THE CHRISTIAN REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 961-981 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. YOUNG
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Liberal Learning ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
The Republic

ABSTRACTThe writing of ecclesiastical history is rarely disinterested, and this was especially so in eighteenth-century England. Its leading practitioner, John Jortin, wrote with a clear, determined, and dynamic purpose: to offer an effective critique of orthodoxy and its ally, persecution, and to secure civil and religious liberty in a way commensurate with maintaining an established church and liberal learning. His life and writings meditated on early eighteenth-century tendencies in thought and scholarship in a spirit that allowed often radical developments to take place. Unambiguously heterodox in tone and conclusions, Jortin's researches were drawn on by radical dissent. A scion of a Huguenot family, Jortin was a critical mediator between the culture of the Huguenot Refuge and English scholarship. He was a pioneer in the study of English literature, moving such study away from the narrowly philological methods of Richard Bentley towards more reflective literary scholarship. Above all, Jortin was determined that the Republic of Letters should be a Christian Republic; his contribution to and experience of Enlightenment substantiates J. G. A. Pocock's contention that, in England, it was largely clerical and conservative: study of Jortin in context challenges the hegemony of the Radical Enlightenment thesis that is rapidly becoming an interpretative orthodoxy.

OPERE E LIBRI DI UN ASTRONOMO CARTOGRAFO DEL XVIII SECOLO: TRA ERUDIZIONE E STATO

Nuncius ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-491
Author(s):  
ANNA GIULIA CAVAGNA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mathematics Teacher ◽  
Technical Skills ◽  
Astronomical Observatory ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Military Engineer ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Military School ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Set Up

Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title Giovanni Giacomo Marinoni (Udine 1676 - Vienna 1755), of humble origins, lived in Italy and Austria as an official of the Empire. In the early Eighteenth century he embarked upon a brillant carreer as a mathematics teacher, a topographer and a military engineer. He set up and run a military school in Vienna, partly financed by the Crown. The curriculum of the school included many new technical skills. As a cartographer and surveying instructor he was in the region of Lombardy where he defended the interests of the Austrians. He built the first Viennese astronomical observatory, again only partly financed by the Crown. He was ennobled and created Imperial counsellor. As an habitue of the Republic of Letters he corresponded with many scholars and became a member of the London, Berlin and Saint Peterburg Academies. He published his own works and owned a rich library.

August Tittel (1691–1756): The (Mis)fortunes of an Eighteenth-Century Translator

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-430
Author(s):  
Asaph Ben-Tov
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Republic ◽  
A Minor

August Tittel, a Lutheran pastor, translator, ‘minor author’, and fugitive, was best known to contemporaries for his German translation of Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament Connected and for his turbulent life. Together with his printed oeuvre, Tittel’s extant correspondence, especially with his patron Ernst Salomon Cyprian, allow us a close scrutiny of the life and work of a minor and troublesome member of the Republic of Letters. Despite its peculiarities, there is much in his career which is indicative of broader trends in early eighteenth-century scholarship, e.g. networks of patronage and a German interest in Jansenist and English biblical scholarship, theology, and confessional polemics. This view of the Republic of Letters ‘from below’ sheds light on a class of minor scholars, which often evades the radar of modern scholarship, but was an essential part of the early modern Republic of Letters.

scholarly journals Afterlives of the Republic of Letters: Learned Journals and Scholarly Community in the Early Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Changing Role

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.

‘A Religious Attention to Minutiae’: César de Missy (1703–1775) Studies the New Testament

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-202
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Scholarly Activity ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Public Scholarship ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Greek New Testament ◽  
The Republic

“This article offers a portrait of the milieu and scholarly activity of César de Missy, an assiduous and richly connected but hitherto unknown member of the Republic of Letters in eighteenth-century London. De Missy preached at Huguenot churches and collected books, especially bibles: he published little, but left a great deal of scholarship in manuscript, mostly concerned with the readings and codicology of the Greek New Testament. Perhaps his most peculiar and revealing pursuit was the minute study of scribal error in the production of manuscripts, an activity that absorbed his attention far more than its profit might seem to warrant. I argue that De Missy's fixation on the multiple histories of the scriptural text represents a private reaction to loss, turning away from the more conventional public scholarship of the Huguenot diaspora.”

RIDICULE, CENSORSHIP, AND THE REGULATION OF PUBLIC SPEECH: THE CASE OF SHAFTESBURY

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-380
Author(s):  
ROSS CARROLL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
State Power ◽  
Corrective Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710Soliloquy, or Advice to an Authoragainst the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.

A Note on the Archives of the Republic of Cabo Verde

1980 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 347-348
Author(s):  
Christopher Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Municipal Administration ◽  
Cabo Verde ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Official Records ◽  
Thick Layers

The archives of the Republic of Cabo Verde contain the official records of Portuguese rule up to 1975. I did not see any documents that dated from before the early eighteenth century. At independence in 1975 the jubilant crowd broke into the main administrative building in Praia, the capital, and threw the records into the street. The records of the Praia municipal administration and of the Instituto de Trabalho were also ransacked. Eventually the dispersed documents, together with several thousand volumes from the Praia Public Library, were gathered up and packed haphazardly into wooden crates. In 1978 a large municipal warehouse was allocated as an archives store. Shelves were installed and the documents were slowly disinterred from the crates, where they had accumulated thick layers of dust.The earlier documents, about 1500 manuscript volumes of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, have been put on shelves, but not in any systematic order. Many are defective or fragile. The documents from the later nineteenth century up to 1949 are preserved in about 1300 metal boxes. They too have been put on shelves, but not in chronological order (if only because many of the boxes have lost their labels). The documents from 1950 to 1975 were enclosed in cardboard file covers. Some have been put on shelves, others are stacked on the floor. None are in order. Many have come loose from their covers and have been tied up arbitrarily in bundles, along with documents from the municipal and Instituto de Trabalho archives. There are also many bundles of miscellaneous municipal records.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document