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.
The Republic of Letters and the Origins of Scientific Knowledge Commons