MEDIATE is an ERC-funded digital humanities project, based at Radboud University (The Netherlands), that studies the circulation of books and ideas in eighteenth-century Europe by drawing on a database of several hundred eighteenth-century private library auction catalogues.
Developing an interoperative, Open Access database, the MEDIATE project has harvested and substantially enriched data from a corpus of 600 printed catalogues of smaller private libraries sold - most often, at auction - in the Dutch Republic, France, Italy, and the British Isles between 1665 and 1830. This database holds data on over half a million individual books that circulated in eighteenth-century Europe, creating a unique DH resource for intellectual historians seeking to link books to owners and intellectual networks across Europe, in a comparative, transnational perspective. MEDIATE's central hypothesis is that, to adequately understand the spread of ideas and books associated with the Enlightenment movement, it is crucial to understand how these books were embedded in the cultural field at large. Writers are significant not only as individuals, but also as part of a complex literary system, or set of relations between higher- and lower-prestige texts, geographic regions and languages, and between authors closer and farther away from centres of cultural authority.
By focusing on private libraries, MEDIATE addresses the Enlightenment from a reception viewpoint, studying not only books but also potential readers. The project posits that book ownership, regardless of whether books listed in private catalogues were actually read, and even if catalogues fail to reflect the full extent of an individual's book ownership or reading during a lifetime, provides important indications about intellectual aspirations, processes of (posthumous) self-fashioning, relative prestige assigned to specific books as a form of cultural capital, and booksellers' evaluation of books' monetary worth.
The MEDIATE project thus brings a bottom-up approach to intellectual history, using book history data and new digital tools to argue that the Enlightenment was fashioned not only by the progressive intellectuals we know today, but just as importantly, also by a large mass of forgotten books - "the great unread", as described by Margaret Cohen - that need to be adequately studied if we are to truly understand how we "became modern" (or not).
