VERITRACE addresses the influence of ancient wisdom writings on the development of early modern natural philosophy. During the Renaissance, works such as the Chaldean Oracles, the Sibylline Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Orphic Hymns were rediscovered and reappropriated into a prisca sapientia, a perennial tradition that considered these writings to contain truths about God, mankind, and the cosmos. People like Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, foundational for the development of modern science, all ascribed to this tradition, and with them many others; yet so far no comprehensive account exist of exactly what they took from these ancient wisdom writings and how the idea of a perennial truth influenced their knowledge-making. This project focuses on the influence of the Renaissance prisca on early modern natural philosophy in its broadest sense by deploying bespoke techniques for distant reading on a large corpus of early modern printed works. It traces how the most prominent ancient wisdom writings returned in the natural philosophical discourse, what exactly natural philosophers took from these writings, and how these writings functioned in the economy of early modern science. Moreover, it traces the debate surrounding these ancient wisdom texts and the supposed truths contained therein throughout early modern Europe, differentiating between the various sentiments with which these texts were perceived, read, and discussed. As such, VERITRACE fills in a major lacuna in our understanding of the emergence and development of early modern science, focussing not on isolated episodes but covering the overall dissemination and influence of the ancient wisdom tradition, while making use of state-of the-art digital techniques adapted for an early modern environment.
The project is designed around three main research objectives:
1 To provide a comprehensive roadmap of the incorporation of ancient wisdom writings into early modern natural philosophy
2 To map out the ancient wisdom discourse as it spread from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe, with particular emphasis on its inclusion in natural philosophical debates
3 To trace the influence of perceived watershed moments in the reception and perception of these ancients wisdom writings
The impacts of VERITRACE go way beyond its current scope. It is intended to set a new methodological standard for historical research by relying not on predefined hypotheses, but instead on research questions to which the answer is simply not known. It addresses these by exploring hundreds of thousands of sources to provide detailed and statistically signficant answers, and to explore how these answers migrate across various temporal, linguistic, geographical, and cultural domains. Its deliverables not only include an incredibly rich and detailed dataset covering printed volumes in all major European languages from 1540-1728 with unique identifiers for each object included compatible with the Universal Short Title Catalogue and other meta-standards; it also includes a fully developed web-based user interface for research, as well as a plethora of compatible open-access scripts, to be used with future projects.
