The Republic of Letters
The Republic of Letters was a (self-proclaimed) community of scholars, who communicated mainly through letters and whose primary function was the sharing of work-related material, “nova literaria” and other information that could be helpful to the members. Another non to be neglected aspect of these letters is gossip about colleagues. For members of the res publica literaria, correspondence became an integral part of their erudite lives. Fortunately for us, many of these erudite letters are preserved and can be used to trace these networks of sharing – which makes them an incredibly valuable source.
This can also be seen in the big number of projects that circle around questions of erudition in the Republic of Letters.
Here are some of my favourites (with more explanations on the Republic of Letters):
Very nice for all who are new to this – and also for just everyone else – is Mapping the Republic of Letters, a Stanford based project that develops fancy visualization tools in order to answer many research questions, especially concerning the evolution of the network.
The Oxford project Cultures of Knowledge seeks to use digital methods to reassemble and interpret correspondences. They have a very nice database called Early Modern Letters Online which hopefully continues to grow in the near future.
For the 17th century, Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic is an extremely interesting project that wants to explore, how the scientific revolution has been made possible by the increased circulation of knowledge. They have their own database called ePistolarium.
On a somewhat smaller scale, but highly important for research on erudition in the catholic south part of the Holy Roman Empire (but also beyond) was the Monastic Enlightenment and the Benedictine Republic of Letters project, that was based at the university of Vienna and centered around the brothers Pez, two monks of the abbey of Melk. The initial project ran until 2014, but the research still continues in the newly founded Association for the Study of Monastic Learning in the Early Modern Period and in the follow-up project Benedictines, Church Reform, and the State in Austria, 1720–1740.
Last but definitely not least, there is even a European funded COST-Action called Reassembling the Republic of Letters that wants to reassemble all correspondences in the long term by building a digital infrastructure that can handle this huge amount of data and beyond that, the huge amount of collaborators… It goes without saying that all the projects mentioned above, as well as myself, are somehow related to this enterprise.