1st Edition
Rethinking the Republic of Letters Memory and Identity in Early Modern Learned Communities
By Koen Scholten
Copyright 2025
412 Pages
by
Routledge
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... Read more
Introduction: The Republic of Letters as an Imagined Community, Chapter 1. An Inventory of Scholarly Values and Virtues, Chapter 2. Collective History and Geographical Inclusion in Vitae and Elogia, Chapter 3. Collective Memory and Identity in Hugo Grotius's Correspondence, Chapter 4. The Peregrinatio Literaria: Experiencing, Representing, and Forming Learned Communities, Chapter 5. The Basilica di Santa Croce: The Florentine Site of Learned Memory, Chapter 6. The Pieterskerk: Representing the Learned Community of Leiden University, Conclusion, Bibliography, List of Abbreviations, Manuscript Sources, Printed Sources, Before 1800, Printed Sources, Modern,Secondary Literature, Appendix 1, Corpus and Keyword Analysis, Main Corpus, Reference Corpus, Acknowledgements
Biography
Koen Scholten is a historian of science and published on memory and identity in scholarly and scientific communities. He edited Memory and Identity in the Learned World (Brill, 2022) and received his PhD from Utrecht University on a thesis on the formation of early modern communities in the world of learning in 2023.
