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.
The online version of the volume describing the work carried out in this Action (“Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship”) is now finally available online as an open access PDF from Göttingen University Press. The book is available to......
Many of the attendees at the Action’s final conference in Valletta, Malta (January 29 – February) posted their responses and feedback to the event on Twitter. These can be viewed online via the #rrol18mt Twitter hashtag....
Applications are invited for attendance at the International Summer School A (new) Republic of Letters: intellectual communities, global knowledge transfer 29 July – 9 August 2018 German Literature Archive Marbach Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Association Application deadline: 28 February 2018 ......