Collaboration, Counterfeit, and Calumny in Amsterdam

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Mike A. Zuber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Republic

This chapter proves that Friedrich Breckling considerably adulterated a text originally composed in the late sixteenth century and embedded aspects of spiritual alchemy within it. Accusations raised among religious dissenters, notably by prophet and poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, and within the republic of letters at large led some of those who owned exemplars of the resulting book, Bartholomaeus Sclei’s Theosophische-Schrifften of 1686, to annotate their copies with information on Breckling’s interventions. Based on three such copies and other sources, several other collaborators and heavily edited passages can be identified. Yet there is reason to believe that even such annotated exemplars considerably underestimated Breckling’s contribution. In particular, the book’s index draws attention to several passages in which spiritual alchemy figures prominently and its bodily consequences are discussed.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oosterhoff
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Approach To Learning ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Moment

The moment unfolded in this book unravelled in the following decades, partly because its students moved on, partly because Lefèvre took up a controversial role in the French Reformation. But his circle’s books continued to cultivate a particular approach to learning, and especially to the cultural place of mathematics, through the sixteenth century. This epilogue picks out a specialist strand of this influence in Lefèvre’s edition of Euclid, often reprinted and used in the republic of letters. A second strand is discernible in the pragmatic stance towards the utility of mathematics held by their heirs, Oronce Fine and Peter Ramus, which came to define European culture.

Juan Luis Vives and the Organisation of Patristic Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Arnoud Visser
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Republic

The edition of Augustine’s City of God by the Spanish-born humanist Juan Luis Vives (first published in 1522) is one of most successful pieces of patristic scholarship of the sixteenth century. Produced just before the explosive escalation of the Reformation, it remained the key version of the text for over a hundred years. This article analyses the presentation of patristic knowledge in Vives’ commentary to explore how the confessional conflicts affected patristic scholarship. It argues that Vives’ work survived the confessional pressures relatively unscathed because it made Augustine’s work manageable and accessible across confessional parties. In doing so it seeks to highlight the importance of confessional silence in the Republic of Letters as a strategy to confront the pressures of confessionalisation.

The London Edition of De Thou's History: A Critique of Some Well-Documented Legends

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Soman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Great Length ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

For more than two hundred years, the Buckley-Carte edition (London, 1733) of Jacques-Auguste de Thou's History of His Times has been the standard one for this great Latin chronicle of the latter half of the sixteenth century. In six massive folio volumes, it presents the most complete and accurate text generally available. A seventh volume offers an imposing array of pièces justificatives: letters by and to de Thou and his friends, discussing the publication, emendation, and censoring of the History as well as its reception at the courts of Europe and in the ‘republic of letters.’ Many of these documents were reproduced in the three most widely used French translations of the History. In his recent bibliographical study, Samuel Kinser demonstrates at great length the superiority of the London text.

Experimentalists in the Republic of Letters

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 89-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Otto Sibum
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Academic Recognition ◽  
Electro Magnetic

ArgumentWithin the Republic of Letters the art of experiment led to immense reorientation and an extensive redrawing of the enlightened map of natural knowledge. This paper will investigate the formative period of the exact sciences from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century when the persona of the experimentalist as a scientific expert was shaped. The paper focuses on Moritz Hermann Jacobi’s experimental knowledge derived from his modeling of an electro-magnetic self-acting machine and the social and epistemological problems of its integration into traditional academic life. His struggle to achieve academic recognition and credibility for his experimental work reflects not just his individual quandary, but important structural problems of the historical development of experimental knowledge traditions and science in what has been called the “second scientific revolution.”

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