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.

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.

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.

Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
EMILY WEISSBOURD
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black America ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
History Of

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

Circles of Confidence in Correspondence

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles van den Heuvel ◽  
Scott B. Weingart ◽  
Nils Spelt ◽  
Henk Nellen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Technological Knowledge ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Republic

Science in the early modern world depended on openness in scholarly communication. On the other hand, a web of commercial, political, and religious conflicts required broad measures of secrecy and confidentiality; similar measures were integral to scholarly rivalries and plagiarism. This paper analyzes confidentiality and secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchange via letters and drawings. We argue that existing approaches to understanding knowledge exchange in early modern Europe – which focus on the Republic of Letters as a unified entity of corresponding scholars – can be improved upon by analyzing multilayered networks of communication. We describe a data model to analyze circles of confidence and cultures of secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchanges. Finally, we discuss the outcomes of a first experiment focusing on the question of how personal and professional/official relationships interact with confidentiality and secrecy, based on a case study of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius.

Mapping science's imagined community: geography as a Republic of Letters, 1600–1800

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT MAYHEW
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Self Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Over Time

This paper extends discussions of the sociology of the early modern scientific community by paying particular attention to the geography of that community. The paper approaches the issue in terms of the scientific community's self image as a Republic of Letters. Detailed analysis of patterns of citation in two British geography books is used to map the ‘imagined community’ of geographers from the late Renaissance to the age of Enlightenment. What were the geographical origins of authors cited in geography books and how did this change over time? To what extent was scholarship from other cultural arenas integrated into European geography? Such an analysis draws on and interrogates recent work in the history of science and in the history of scholarship more broadly, work which has made important contributions to our understanding of the historical geography of scholarly communities in 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.

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.

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