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.
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 ......
Call for Applications COST-Action IS1310 ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters’ Training School in Tallinn, Estonia, 13–16 March 2018 ‘EMLO on the road’ The third Training School of the Action will take place in March 2018 in Tallinn, Estonia. DATE Tuesday, 13th –......
Thanks to a Consolidator Grant awarded by the European Research Council to our COST Action member Dr Dirk van Miert for his ‘Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks: the Republic of Letters as a pan-European Knowledge Society’ project, the Department of History and Art History......