Between 1500 and 1800, a revolution in postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across and beyond Europe. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the respublica litteraria, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, and formative of many modern European values and institutions.
Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since.
To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community we need a revolution in digital communications.
This COST Action is dedicated to envisaging the open-access, open-source, transnational digital infrastructure capable of facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly methods and research questions.
We are pleased to announce a fourth call for applications for short term research visits (“Short Term Scientific Missions (STSMS)” relating to the EU COST Action IS 1310: Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500-1800. This funding promotes international mobility between COST Countries participating in......
The Annual Conference of the COST Action IS 1310 “Reassembling the Republic of Letters” took place at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, Poland from 11 to 15 June 2016. Having previously explored scholarly work from the perspective of shared technical standards, the......
On Friday 4 March 2016 a meeting of WG4’s sub-group on metadata of manuscript correspondence was held in Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin. Convened by Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin, and Leader of Work Group 4, the workshop included......