Rethinking the Republic of Letters

Memory and Identity in Early Modern Learned Communities

Koen Scholten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040774403
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires médiévales

This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers. These communities formed through distinct memory cultures and the representation of and identification with collective identities. Rethinking the Republic of Letters looks at early modern biographical dictionaries (vitae), eulogies, letters, travelogues, and funerary monuments of early modern learned men to trace the (re)formation of these communities. It thereby offers a novel perspective on early modern learned communities – the many Republics of Letters.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction: The Republic of Letters as an Imagined Community
• 1. An Inventory of Scholarly Values and Virtues
• 2. Collective History and Geographical Inclusion in Vitae and Elogia
• 3. Collective Memory and Identity in Hugo Grotius’s Correspondence
• 4. The Peregrinatio Literaria: Experiencing, Representing, and Forming Learned Communities
• 5. The Basilica di Santa Croce: The Florentine Site of Learned Memory
• 6. The Pieterskerk: Representing the Learned Community of Leiden University
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1
• Acknowledgements
• Index Nominum
• General Index