Rethinking The Republic Of Letters

Rethinking the Republic of Letters

This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers. These communities formed through distinct memory cultures and the representation of and identification with collective identities. Rethinking the Republic of Letters looks at early modern biographical dictionaries (vitae), eulogies, letters, travelogues, and funerary monuments of early modern learned men to trace the (re)formation of these communities. It thereby offers a novel perspective on early modern learned communities – the many Republics of Letters.

Republic of Women

Republic of Women

Following the humanist Laura Cereta, I refer to this community as the "Republic of Women." However, their community was not isolated by their sex. This network was in fact an integral component of a much larger intellectual commonwealth, known as the Republic of Letters. And while it has been thought that female scholars were excluded from that larger communal enterprise, the evidence of this network's scholarly activity demonstrates that this was not the case.