In the PhD project about the social structure of the learned community, the PhD candidate has numerically confirmed that learned men and women in the Low Countries maintained an equal balance between domestic and foreign contact, supporting the notion that Dutch scholarly culture formed a continuum with other European countries. He has analysed that marriage patterns of university professors were integrated in civic life rather than forming ‘professorial families’, contrary to what the literature suggests. This qualitative and prosopographical socio-cultural study of the Republic of Letters progresses beyond the predominant attention to a limited number of famous scholars towards understanding the social tissue of the world of learning as a whole.
In the PhD project about collective scholarly identity, the PhD candidate has shown that, from the 16th century onwards, scholars considered themselves to be part of a transnational imagined community, to be then appropriated by different countries who nationalized parts of the scholarly community in the 17th century. By publishing collective biographies of scholars, a sense of history and collective identity was shared throughout Europe. When it comes to practice, the paradox is that local actors stressed the learned character of local communities by inscribing themselves into the framework of the larger Republic of Letters. For being identified and accepted as an important scholar in the moral economy of Republic of Letters, innate brilliance was regarded of paramount importance, but it needed to be polished through training by members of the learned community.
In the postdoc project about the terms that reference the ideal of sharing knowledge, the postdoc has discovered, through text mining digitized early modern scholarly letters, through conventional keyword searches and by close reading, that the term ‘Republic of Letters’ seems to have appealed primarily to scholars in precarious and dependent positions as religious minorities. She has also shown that modern historians’ infatuation with the term ‘Republic of Letters’ has overlooked the fact that historical actors used almost as frequently a less emphatic term to denote their commonality, i.e. ‘world of learning’ (orbis literatus). This is one of the phrases that are actually more suitable to use in modern studies: it is less projective and still an actors’ category.
In the postdoc project about the social dynamics between the citizens of the Republic of Letters, the postdoc has shown that personal scholarly networks tend towards balance if that network comprises enemies who resist mutual links. Because the postdoc started only recently, it is too early to draw conclusions from her research.
In his synthesis of the general history of the Republic of Letters, the Principal Investigator has shown, drawing on the case of female participation in the Republic of Letters, that the notion of ‘cultural citizenship’ is productive to analyse inclusivity. Nevertheless, some elements of institutional citizenship such as the role of family, the state, the church, and the market are also relevant in a non-legal context. In this context, the ‘Republic of Letters’ was part of a moral economy shaped by discours of obligation, through which mutual bonds were created and consolidated in order to ask for favours. As such, the rhetoric of the Republic of Letters was both intentional and consequential for enabling the sharing of knowledge.
As planned, we set up the crowdsourcing project CEMROL (Collecting Epistolary Metadata of the Republic of Letters) and collectively managed it.
As a team we have collected some 150k records of metadata of early modern learned letters, comprising 79k epistolary metadata we received from partner projects, 20k newly created individual catalogues, and (beyond the planning) another 50k-60k from the Catalogus Epistularum Neerlandicarum (a catalogue of letters kept in Dutch libraries), as well as some 1,000 records from CEMROL.
