HIST 5320 Religion and the Enlightenment

Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination -and the criticism - of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects.

But what did these networks actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters, in collaboration with international partners, seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture.

MEDIATE is an ERC-funded digital humanities project, based at Radboud University (The Netherlands), that seeks to study the circulation of books and ideas in eighteenth-century Europe by drawing on a unique database of several hundred eighteenth-century private library auction catalogues.

Scholars of intellectual history have long focused on a small number of canonical authors and conceptual frameworks in studying societal change during the Enlightenment. Historians of the book have, for their part, often privileged radical, subversive or forbidden texts. Yet book historians have long recognized that it was authors who were not radical or subversive who sometimes produced the best-selling texts of the 18th century. This project aims to move beyond the present corpus of texts and models that dominate the field, and propose a new model of the circulation of books in eighteenth-century Europe that focuses not primarily on individual works, but adopts a relational approach to the literary system in Europe.

The last years, the geographies of the Enlightenment have been variously addressed. The main historiographical category involved to depict the circulation of ideas is that of “network”. The networks of the Enlightenment have been reconstituted through the study of the intellectual exchanges among the protagonists of the period. Correspondence, travels, violent displacements, but also the circulation of commodities and scientific instruments have all been used to help historians cope with the complexity of the phenomenon. Within this context, the project Mapping the Enlightenment aims to contribute to further “decentering” the established image of the Enlightenment. The comprehensive information system built for the purposes of this project is able to visualize the itineraries of traveling scholars, and display the building of networks between scientific centers and peripheries throughout the 18th century. Based on the latest developments in digital mapping, the system involves a multi-layered map connected with a travel data base that enable users to query and visualize data and flows through a modern and robust environment.

An ongoing project out of Europe:

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.

Electronic Enlightenment is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world's great historical “conversations”.