Scotland and the European Republic of Letters around 1700

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-93
Author(s):  
Thomas Ahnert ◽  
Martha McGill
Keyword(s):  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
European Republic

This chapter focuses on the extent to which the discussion of philosophical subjects at Scottish universities drew on and was informed by the writings of thinkers in other parts of Europe around 1700. In spite of the practical difficulties in obtaining publications from abroad, Scots around 1700 had many, if not most, of the main recent texts available to them. Regents at the Scottish universities discussed contemporary European (including English) authors and used their writings. The references to heterodox or ‘radical’ authors such as Spinoza or Hobbes were generally dismissive, and sometimes bordered on caricature, but Scots did incorporate other up-to-date material into their lectures and disputations. On the whole, the intellectual concerns of Scots at this time were not radically dissimilar from those of the learned in many other parts of Europe.

Intellectual Ambitions and Interests

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-218
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Academic Writer ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Personal Recognition ◽  
John Selden ◽  
European Republic ◽  
Tommaso Campanella

Highly educated seventeenth-century noblemen and gentlemen frequently studied theology, history, and philosophy privately for pleasure; wrote verse; and acquired libraries, but rarely wrote books and treatises. Chapter 9 builds upon the literary, philosophical, and theological interests identified in earlier chapters and provides the intellectual context for Herbert’s emergence as a respected gentleman scholar and published academic writer. It introduces the scholarly circles with which he was associated in London and Paris, his membership of the European Republic of Letters, and his links with scholarly irenicism. It establishes his scholarly connections with John Selden, William Camden, Sir Robert Cotton, Hugo Grotius, Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Tommaso Campanella, Fortunio Liceti, Gerard Vossius, John Comenius, and others. It examines Herbert’s scholarly practices and rebuffs claims that he was a dilettante. It browses the collection of books he accumulated in his substantial libraries in London and Montgomery, which ranged across the academic spectrum from theology, history, politics, literature, and philology through the various philosophical and mathematical disciplines to the natural and physical sciences, jurisprudence, and medicine, but also included works on architecture, warfare, manners, music, and sorcery and anthologies of poetry and books of romance literature. It suggests that Herbert’s scholarship was motivated as much by intellectual curiosity and the need to reduce religious conflict as by a desire to secure personal recognition and approval.

Courtier, Scholar, and Man of the Sword

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Country House ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
European Republic

Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648) was a flamboyant Stuart courtier, county governor, soldier, and diplomat who acquired a reputation for duelling and extravagant display but also numbered among the leading intellectuals of his generation. He travelled widely in the British Isles and Europe, enjoyed the patronage of princely rulers and their consorts, acquired celebrity as the embodiment of chivalric values, and defended European Protestantism on the battlefield and in diplomatic exchanges. As a scholar and author of De veritate and The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, he commanded respect in the European Republic of Letters and accumulated a substantial library. As a courtier, he penned poetry and exchanged verses with John Donne and Ben Jonson, compiled a famous lute-book, wrote an autobiography, commissioned portraits, and built a new country house. Herbert was a Janus figure who cherished the masculine values and martial lifestyle of his ancestors but embraced the Renaissance scholarship and civility of the early modern court and anticipated the intellectual and theological liberalism of the Enlightenment. His life and writings provide a unique window into the aristocratic world and cultural mindset of the early seventeenth century and into the outbreak and impact of the Thirty Years War and British Civil Wars. This book examines his career, lifestyle, political allegiances, religious beliefs, and scholarship within their contemporary European context, challenges the reputation he has acquired as a dilettante scholar, boastful autobiographer, royalist turncoat, and early deist, and offers a new assessment of his life and achievement.

scholarly journals The Imported Culture: Who is the Dummy?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Magnani
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
European Context ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
European Republic

Between the 17th and 18th century the European ‘Republic of Letters’ was characterised by a great interest in the ‘Other’ and the fascination with different, ‘exotic’ cultures. In this cultural environment, the Jesuit missionaries in China acted as a ‘bridge’ between the two continents exchanging information and books from each side. This paper discusses the use of the concept of ‘agency’ as applied to Chinese books, analysing how they were subjected to actions and, in turn, were capable of action, in this specific European context. The aim of this paper is to reflect how the agency of these texts conflicts and coincides with the agency of other actors connected with this trans-cultural process.

Hume’s Life and Works

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Republic

This summary account of Hume’s life and works challenges the usual way of telling the story of Hume’s career. It is generally believed that what Hume most wanted to be was a philosopher and that Hume turned to politics and history because that desire was frustrated, principally by the reputation for atheism he had acquired as a result of his writings on religion. The author argues that, from the beginning, Hume was as interested in politics as he was in philosophy; that a career as an independent man of letters, and not as a professional philosopher, was what he most wanted; and that that career was a success, with the History of England its triumphant culmination. Hume’s religious skepticism was no obstacle to his living the life that he most wanted to live, the life of a sophisticated and widely respected citizen of the European republic of letters.

scholarly journals Universal History and the Origin Narrative of European Modernity: The Leiden Lectures of Jacob Perizonius (1651–1715) on Historia Universalis

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-395
Author(s):  
Frederic Clark
Keyword(s):  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Universal History ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Fall Of Rome ◽  
European Republic ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Continuous Narrative

This article explores a central facet of humanist scholarship and pedagogy—namely, the writing and teaching of universal history—in the decades around 1700. In does so by examining one of the most prominent humanists of the European Republic of Letters: the Leiden classical scholar Jacob Perizonius (1651–1715). Through analysis of Perizonius’s unpublished lectures on universal history, it explores how ‘classicists’ (long before they commonly identified as such) could command geographies and temporalities far distant from Greco-Roman antiquity. Late humanist classical scholars like Perizonius used the ancient genre of universal history or historia universalis to combine everything from the fall of Rome to the emergence of Renaissance Europe into a single continuous narrative. In so doing, Perizonius helped forge a via media between antiquity and modernity at a moment when self-identified “ancients” and “moderns” frequently engaged in conflict. Perizonius’s synthesis proved immensely influential to Enlightenment historiography and beyond. As argued here, universal history enabled Perizonius to craft an origin narrative of how nostra Europa or ‘our Europe’ purportedly became modern.

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