Intellectual Ambitions and Interests

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

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.

Kultureller Vermittler, homme de lettres, Vagabund?

ZusammenfassungSalomon Negri (1665–1727) was one among many Arab Christians who played vital roles in the fields of diplomacy, missionary work, and Oriental studies in Early Modern Europe. Born in Damascus, he moved to Paris at the age of eighteen and later travelled to Halle, Venice, Constantinople, Rome, and London, working as a language teacher, translator, informant, librarian, and copyist. By examining Negri’s short autobiography, letters, and other ego-documents written in Latin, French, Italian, and Arabic, this paper explores how he adapted his self-representation to different audiences in Protestant and Catholic Europe. I argue that Negri’s flexible self-fashioning, which allowed him to navigate between various professional and denominational contexts, can be interpreted as the survival strategy of a peripatetic Arab Christian scholar who was never recognized as an equal member of the European ‘Republic of Letters’.

Riflessi d’Oriente

The book discusses the experience of two Florentine travellers in the Levant from the 1760s to 1792. During their separate stays in Cyprus and in Istanbul they visited the Holy Land, Anatolia and Mesopotamia providing extensive reports on natural history, institutions, local customs and languages as well as data on the economy and the health conditions of the area. Their numerous printed works enjoyed remarkable success and were translated into French and other languages. The inquiry places the authors firmly within the European ‘Republic of letters’ and testifies to the growing interest for Islam and Ottoman power during the Enlightenment debate on the eve of the French Revolution.

The Fellow Who Made Himself President of a European Republic: Gregory Ignatius Zhatkovych

This is the first comprehensive biography based on unique archival sources about Gregory Ignatius Zhatkovych, a Pittsburgh-based lawyer, who in 1918–1919 was instrumental in the creation of Czechoslovakia and the inclusion of its far eastern region, Subcarpathian Rus'/Ruthenia, into the new country.

Writing Women’s Lives and Mapping Indigenous Spaces

This chapter centers on Jesuit knowledge production about the Pacific as an expression of missionary masculinity. It also explores the transformation of missionary encounters in media disseminating the Jesuit missions to readers, cognoscenti, and patrons of the Society of Jesus. The chapter discusses Lives (hagiographies) of indigenous women as exemplified by several vitae of Catarina de San Juan; cartography on the mission frontier as exemplified by Jesuit maps of (today’s) Caroline Islands in Oceania; and serial publications of missionary letters targeting the broader European Republic of Letters as exemplified by the serial missionary publication Der Neue Welt-Bott. These media of knowledge productions served to stabilize and assert the masculine self of their Jesuit authors at the expense of the feminine and the indigenous as well as to feed colonial ambitions.

‘The Temper of the People’

This chapter provides a cultural context for the political debate in eighteenth-century British North America. It charts the emergence and describes the contours of a colonial public sphere, which paralleled similar transformations in European politics during the same period. It explores the media of colonial politics, from newspapers to public oratory, as well as the social settings in which news was spread and debated, from tavern halls to tea gardens, and the codes of conduct that accompanied them, from commerce to refinement. It shows how the colonial public sphere connected with a wider British and European republic of letters, from the circulation of news and opinion around the Atlantic world to the participation of colonists in the Grand Tour. And finally, it discusses the problems and methods of interpreting public utterances.

Scotland and the European Republic of Letters around 1700

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.

Bifurcation in the Process of European Integration under the Influence of a Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has become the most serious challenge since the European Union’s existence. The challenge is complex. The first blow was struck on four freedoms: movement of capital, goods, labor and services. Discontinuing production under the influence of a pandemic will mean both insufficient supply and too low demand. Quarantine measures have split the Common Market into “national containers”. The monetary union is also facing a serious crisis before the pandemic. The next blow to European solidarity was the crisis with illegal migrants. The humanitarian crisis has benefited populists to intensify xenophobic sentiment and terrorist movements to send their killers to the EU. The pretext of left and right populism is wandering Europe. Security threats are real. The UK’s exit from the EU has created a deficit in the EU budget. Germany and France should increase their contributions proportionally. The Visegrad bloc countries oppose their greater financial responsibility. Austria does not agree with the single Eurozone budget. Polls in the spring of 2016 showed an increase in the position of European skeptics in France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, the Greek part of Cyprus, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Contemporary political discourse offers European optimistic and European pessimistic scenarios. The European Republic is decentralized (European regions), post-national, parliamentary-democratic and social. This concerns a possible shift from the United States of Europe project to the European Republic. The concept of republic is a common ideological and political heritage of Europe. A New Europe Demands New Political Thinking without Populism and Nationalism. The European Republic should be at the center of the triangle: liberalism (liberty), socialism (equality) and nationalism (brotherhood). The pessimistic scenario focuses on the fragmentation of the European Union. The basis of such fragmentation can be the project of European integration of different speeds.