Reconsidering The World Republic of Letters: A Qualunque Community of Literatures

In the preface to the English edition of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova focuses on the existence of a literary world/universe, which maintains a relative autonomy from the world and its political disparities and restrictions. This suggested ideal of a literary space is an attempt to posit world literature as an alternative chronotope in which literary production can survive and multiply transnationally. My paper will offer a reconsideration of this global literary space, read via a philosophical perspective, shaped by the famous discussion of the common and community as conducted by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, among others. Within the above theoretical frame, my attempt will be to reread Casanova’s contribution to World Literature as a desired community of literature(s), formed by the coming together of qualunque singularities which co-exist and co-belong without “any representable condition of belonging” (Agamben). Furthermore, the idea of qualunque (whatever) will constitute the starting point for the ethico-political reconsideration and reconceptualisation of the global literary space offered by Casanova, not only without borders but also without hierarchies.

‘Your very obliging correspondence’: the Royal Society and the provincial Republic of Letters in Georgian Lincolnshire

It has been said that the Royal Society of the eighteenth century was in decline. The ground-breaking experimentation of the Restoration period was long gone, to be followed by talk rather than action, and the pages of Philosophical Transactions were filled with papers by provincial clergymen on natural curiosities and antiquities. But the links between the Royal Society and the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (SGS)—founded in 1712 and still in existence as the country's longest-lived provincial learned society—show a connection not just between city and country, but between scientific and antiquarian research, fields that had not yet assumed their distinct modern forms. A fruitful correspondence existed between the two societies for several decades in the first half of the century, and a number of Fellows (including Newton) became honorary members of the SGS. In this article, I show that the SGS did not simply rely on its metropolitan connections for intellectual sustenance, but rather, that this joint association allowed it to flourish as a dynamic society that cultivated international networks.

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.