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.
Our Action IS1310 Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500–1800, represented by Prof. Howard Hotson, was featured in a COST video shown at the Ministerial Conference. The video is also available on the COST YouTube Channel. ...
We would like to congratulate our three COST Action members: Eero Hyvönen (Aalto University), Bruno Emanuel da Graça Martins (Universidade de Lisboa), and Patricia Murrieta-Flores (University of Chester) for being awarded funding in the 2017 DiD funding scheme! The Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social......
In the period 19 February – 2 March 2017, I stayed in Basel as a STSM grantee. My host was Dr. Fritz Nagel of the Bernoulli-Euler Zentrum, whose office is located at the Universitätsbibliothek Basel. The main task of my stay was to......
Italians wrote more letters than any other early modern group: against a backdrop of merchant letters from the 13th and 14th centuries and letters exchanged between humanists and literary figures in in the 15th, collections of printed vernacular letters poured from Venetian presses in the......