HoP 464 Howard Hotson on the Republic of Letters
42:14 Share

Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about the Republic of Letters with Howard Hodson, who is professor of early modern history at the University of Oxford. Hello, Howard. Hello, Peter. Nice to be with you. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You're an expert on the Republic of Letters, which is good because you can tell us what it is. I already did an episode about it last time, but I don't think I actually tried to define it. I just talked about it. So can you venture a definition?

Yeah, sure. In fact, there's quite a bit implicit in this term that needs to be carefully unpacked. And the best starting point is with that Latin phrase, which is really at the root of the whole phenomenon, the res publica literaria.

A res publica is, of course, a public thing, and this kind of emphasizes that we're talking about a community of learning which is common to all nations and perhaps created and sustained collectively, collaboratively as well.

The term "republica" obviously connotes republic or commonwealth, and this suggests something very attractive, I think, to modern historical scholarship as well as perhaps in the period, namely the notion that this "republica vetere" is an independent entity, autonomous, sovereign, self-governing, a law unto itself, not subject to the authority of churches and states in the post-Reformation period, in the period of absolute monarchy. Princes don't dictate

The axioms of geometry are the principles of natural theology. Churches don't legislate for grammar or rhetoric or history or optics. This is a republic in which the laws are made by the citizens themselves. And the fact that it's self-governing in this way

in authority shared in proportion to an individual's intellectual merit and contribution also gives it this resonance of being a meritocratic ideal. So that's the sort of res publica side of the notion, and part of the reason why it's so attractive, because this is the way in which we academics prefer to think of ourselves even today,

Literaria is also really important to define carefully. The standard English translation of the Republic of Letters, along with the French République des Lettres, suggests that we are talking about a republic of letters in the sense of epistles.

And of course, epistolary communication is a really characteristic feature of the Republic of Letters. It's informal, it's very personal, it reflects on all kinds of different matters. There's this notion that a letter needs to be answered, so reciprocity is a really important principle. There is some legitimacy in focusing, as I think we'll probably do in this little conversation, on letters, that is to say epistles.

But of course, literari effectively means lettered or learned. The German phrase is the Galertenrepublik, the Republic of the Learned. And there are many other Latin terms which were used at least as much as Republic of Letters in the period. Orbis eruditorum, the world of the learned. The sodalitas doctorum, the fraternity of the learned. The mundus literarius, the learned world, and this kind of thing. And of course, the other thing to bear in mind is that letters...

doesn't merely mean literary pursuits in the narrow sense of belles-lettres, it means the whole of learning

in the natural and social sciences, mathematics, history, medicine, law, and so on, although not primarily sacred letters. Theology, of course, is very much policed, particularly in the post-Reformation period. But this is learning associated with letters, which means liberal learning, that is to say, in the classical sense of...

primarily literary and cerebral as opposed to the sort of vulgar mechanical or manual art. So you're sidelining certain kinds of learning, which are, of course, going to be really important to the advent of modern science, but are not, as it were, full members of the Republic of Letters in this period. And this will probably feature again in our discussion because you'll see where these kind of borderline cases crop up.

I really like that point that there's a kind of conceptual connection to the liberal arts because the idea of a republic obviously goes together with the idea of freedom. It absolutely does. And it connotes the Roman Republic. And this is one of the reasons why, for instance, Cicero is the sort of standard of Latinity, particularly in the 16th century Republic of Letters. There's a really quite explicit evocation of Latinity.

that Republican phase of Roman. Okay, now, as I said, you are an expert on this whole phenomenon, and that means that you've had to come to grips with an absolutely staggering amount of material. I think this is actually going to be a feature of the history of early modern philosophy as we go forward, that we're suddenly grappling with a period where there's so much text to deal with more than anyone could really ever hope to read in a single lifetime.

And I guess maybe partially for that reason, you've been involved in an initiative to digitally catalog the letters from this period, letters in the sense of epistles. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What was the motivation and what are you trying to do? Yeah, about 15 years ago, a kind of wonderful symbiosis occurred to many of us between the

the sort of communications revolution of the early modern period and the communications revolution of the 20th, 21st century. We're talking about a time where the capacity of ordinary people to distribute correspondence across and beyond the length and breadth of Europe

was rendered more accessible, was rendered more affordable. So this community that we're talking about is created in no small part by people actually scattering their letters right across the length and breadth of Europe. But of course, the problem with the manuscript letter is that it only performs its communicative function by being dispersed.

So in the very act of communicating with one another, these people are deliberately scattering the archive that you need in order to understand, you know, their individual networks, not to mention the sort of metan created by all these people corresponding in a sort of multilateral fashion with one another.

So this is where, you know, IT comes in. The ongoing revolution in digital communication provides really for the first time an adequate medium for reassembling material dispersed by the earlier revolution, postal communication. And this has led directly to this research project, Early Modern Letters Online, which, yes,

is designed to create the digital framework for a collaboratively populated union catalog of the Republic of Letters. Now, as you've suggested, this is an enormous enterprise, and to make it even more complicated, the boundaries of the Republic of Letters are very indistinct. Many of these people wear many different hats. Their communication is mixed in with all kinds of other forms of epistolary communication. But we've created...

not merely a digital environment, but also, I'd like to think, a culture of collaboration, which is, as it were, quite redolent of the original Republic of Letters itself for the collaborative attempt to bring together for the first time

a representative cross-section of the correspondence central to this period. We're nowhere near there yet. We started off with the latter 17th century with correspondence surrounding the early royal society as our point of departure. That's the period in which early modern letters online, or MLO, is most fully populated. But what we really have done is created the kind of

proof of concept that this is a feasible way of collecting unprecedented quantities of data, provided, of course, that you can maintain funding for this going forward. There's a clear need for

Reassembling this scattered material, there's a relatively simple means for doing so. Basically a simple and consensual data model. Everybody realizes that the basic data categories for a letter record are the name of the sender and the recipient, the place of sending, the place of receipt, the date of sending, and some kind of indication of where the letter is.

Clear benefits to contributors. You no longer need to devise your own data model, your own metadata standards to build or maintain a database and a website. Clear benefits for more passive users as well to be able to search a growing body of material and endless opportunities for further enhancement, not just in terms of the numerical quantity of data, but also with the sort of search and visualization capacities. And above all, the capacity to begin thinking

using social network analysis and other things in order to try to map out the patterns formed when multiple correspondences are brought together. We have hundreds and hundreds of catalogs from hundreds and hundreds of users

Over 200,000 letter records on EMLO at the moment. And by the end of the year, when we publish slightly less fully curated data from the Tudor and Stewart State papers, we'll be approaching the half million letter mark. So a lot has been accomplished, but there's still an enormous amount of work to do. That's amazing.

Actually, I have a question about what you've seen in terms of the data there, because you mentioned actually at the beginning of that answer that we're talking about a pan-European phenomenon. And I treated it that way in my discussion last time as well. But actually, I'm wondering how true is that? So you have these sort of heroes of the Republic of Letters like Parekh.

And Oldenburg writing even beyond Europe, right? Yeah. I mentioned Leibniz sending letters to China. Right. Right. Okay. So even a global phenomenon, arguably. But then I'm wondering, well, is that because there are these 10 guys in the whole 17th century who do that, but actually almost everyone is just writing to a smaller circle of friends in rural France plus Paris?

I mean, how typical was that? It's an excellent question. I mean, here, of course, we're interrogating the distance between the ideal of the Republic of Letters, morally, politically, intellectually, and geographically and confessionally, and its actual reality. And one of the great advantages of getting well-curated data, which is actually geolocated, is, of course, that you can then map it for the first time in its time. And it's such a revelation each and every time you do this to see for the first time computers are very good

at rendering visual, and we're very poor at processing. And, you know, one of the really striking early examples of this was the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford, where they mapped Voltaire's correspondence and immediately raised the obvious question, where are all the English correspondence? You know, you read the famous Lettres Anglais and

you give the impression that England is somehow an important part of Voltaire's world, but it's not evident in his correspondence to near the extent that, as it were, the experts on Voltaire and the French Enlightenment had anticipated. So this question of

How representative is genuinely pan-European correspondence is one of those questions that we are now capable of answering, as it were, individual by individual, at least. One of the reasons that Erasmus looms so large in the sort of mythology of the Republic of Letters is that the geographical scope of his correspondence was genuinely pan-European. He's the father of this kind of phenomenon. If you map his correspondence, you see this remarkable sort of diagonal line

from the golden age of humanism in Poland right down to the golden age of humanism in the Iberian Peninsula, sort of intersected with another from England and Scotland, you know, down into Italy. And there you really do have

a remarkably comprehensive and coherent map of the Republic of Learning in the early 16th century. But of course, as we all know, the tragic experience of the Erasmus in Republic of Letters was to be drastically disrupted by the Reformation. And partly as a consequence of that, very few of the later 16th or 17th century maps look anything like Erasmus's

Spain, you know, tends to drop off the map. For instance, you do get a pretty clear confessional divide. There are certain nodes like Paris, which tend to figure quite prominently in any correspondence which is genuinely international. In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic also looms large in the correspondences of many learned figures from the Catholic world.

you can really begin to compare some of the great intellectual networks with one another in an extraordinarily effective visual way. Mersenne, for instance, reaches out from France not only to Italy and England, but especially to the Dutch Republic, which is where Descartes and many of his friends are. Hartlib's circle, we'll talk about him, I think, a little bit later on, stretches across vast areas of Protestant Europe, but there's almost no contact with Catholic scholars whatsoever.

Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society, has the benefit of, as it were, a public position as professional correspondent, if you will,

A lot of his network is mapped onto Hartlips, but he also reaches into Northern Italy, for instance. So making some headway into reclaiming genuine cross-fertilization with the Catholic world. Leibniz is a really gigantic exception. I mean, obviously, the gigantic quantity of his letters is important. The huge range of his interests and the fact that his

diplomatic as well as intellectual activity brings him into very close contact with Catholic as well as Protestant interlocutors. And he becomes quite famous. I mean, even Voltaire himself in the 18th century regards

Leibniz, even though nobody, even to this day, has a clear sense of the full shape of Leibniz's correspondence, because we don't have a full data set for that yet. Voltaire is very well aware of the extent to which Leibniz kind of exemplifies in an almost parallel fashion, the sort of ideal of the Republic of Letters as a transnational and as a trans-confessional, hugely interdisciplinary intellectual enterprise.

What about the sense in which the Republic of Letters lives up to another part of the ideal, which is its kind of openness to participation by people other than, let's say, elite aristocratic men? Is there evidence that there are less well-to-do men taking part or even women?

Yes, that's another wonderful example of the way in which we need to take a very long and somewhat skeptical look at the ideal, which is quite explicitly articulated, I think, for instance, immediately of Thomas Spratt writing the history of the Royal Society in 1660.

where he emphasizes the sort of heterogeneity of the membership of the Royal Society, when in fact, almost all of the fellows are gentlemen, that is to say, relatively prosperous, relatively well-educated, virtuosi without professions of one sort or another and without any engagement in artisanal forms of learning. It's like some of them are left-handed gentlemen. It's diverse, right? So...

So, I mean, the first thing to say, I think, is that it's a literary republic. And this brings us back to the idea that we're dealing with the liberal arts, the linguistic and cerebral arts worthy of a free man, a gentleman as opposed to the vulgar.

manual, mechanical arts of manual labor. And this is something that affects this Republic of Letters quite systematically across the 17th century. You know, you have figures like Bacon helping himself liberally to the intellectual insights of artisans and alchemists and so on, while pouring scorn on their methods and

and their achievements. You know, I think his posthumous reputation is enhanced by his patent of nobility. He's very often referred to in the sources as Lord Verulam, as opposed to Francis Bacon. Descartes famously learns the principles of his mechanical philosophy from a previously obscure scholar artisan by the name of Isaac Baikman.

But when Mersenne, you know, foments a priority dispute between them, Bacon contemptuously rejects the idea that a person like himself, descended from a minor French noble family, could possibly have learned anything from a Dutch artisan and school teacher, you know, this kind of thing. You get this with

People like Joseph Justice Scaliger, the absolute epitome of late humanist learning in Leiden, who constructs a princely pedigree for himself and clearly looks down his nose at his contemporaries, his learning contemporaries, not only on the basis of a superior bloodline. You know, you think of the enormous contribution of figures like Robert Hooke.

to the early accomplishments of the Royal Society, which he serves as the first curator of experiments. That is to say the artisan who actually gets his hands dirty, you know, building instruments and conducting experiments, but he's been written out of the history until relatively recently because he is artisanal rather than gentle in his background. And even figures like Leibniz, you know, who corresponds extensively with artisans and engineers,

perfecting his calculating machine, attempting to improve mining technology in the hearts and all this kind of stuff, he fails to acknowledge the contribution of artisanal know-how to translating his theoretical insights into practical machines. The notion that the "res publica literaria" is actually open to people who don't have a literary, that is to say, a liberal education, I think is very vulnerable to close scrutiny.

Obviously, the fact that we're dealing with international communication initially in the era in which Latin was the primary language of learning excludes people who haven't had the benefit of an expensive and protracted education. Equally, obviously, when...

In the latter 17th and into the 18th century, French emerges as the preferred language of international communication, and the European vernaculars become acceptable means of national communication as well. That sort of entry threshold, the linguistic entry threshold, is considerably lowered. And this is one of the reasons why...

the Republic of Letters is far more accessible to women from about the mid-17th century onwards, and that this is an exceptionally important forum for women's participation in intellectual life and also their letters as a preservation of women's contributions to these discussions. And there are any number of really quite striking examples. I mean, one category would be

female correspondence of canonical philosophers. One immediately thinks of Descartes' correspondence with Elizabeth's Bohemia, which is one of the primary means that we know, for instance, about his ethical thought, or Leibniz's correspondence with

Elizabeth's sister, the Duchess and later Electress of Hanover, Sophie, and Sophie's daughter, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia. But there are lots and lots of other examples in these networks of female correspondents. Robert Boyle's sister, Catherine Jones, Viscount Rannelly, John Durie's wife, another member of the Hartlib Circle, Dorothy Moore.

as examples. And then, you know, really at every phase, women who are celebrated for their learning quite independently of their correspondence with men. I mean, Anna Maria van Schurman is a famous Dutch Protestant example, possibly the first woman to attend university lectures in Utrecht. Eleanor Lucrezia Coronapiscopia

The first woman awarded a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Padua. And then, of course, you get into the 18th century and the famous Salon hostesses, people like Francois de Graffigny, who was also an internationally renowned novelist, not to mention great political figures like

Catherine of Russia. In fact, we have a whole separate section of EMLO, which we call WEMLO, Women's Early Modern Letters, which is precisely about collecting the correspondence of women in this period as such a vital record of their literary activity. And we have a large and growing collection of catalogs of women who participate directly in the intellectual affairs, mostly from the mid-17th century onwards.

Yeah, this is a very striking contrast to what we see with existing institutions of higher learning. So the universities, which obviously didn't admit women for the most part, although you just mentioned Piscopio, who got a doctorate in Padua. So I think this takes us to another topic.

thing that people always say about the Republic of Letters, which is that it creates this informal virtual space for doing scientific and philosophical and literary discussion, intellectual inquiry outside of an institutional setting. Is that right? I mean, is that another feature of the Republic that's a little bit overblown? The early modern universities have suffered from a great deal of bad press, partly because every single generation of intellectual innovators

describes what they're doing in contradistinction to what they learned when they were young people at the University of the Renaissance, humanists, the Reformation theologians, proponents of the new philosophy, Enlightenment philosophers, they all do the same thing.

I think there's very robust statistical reasons for supposing that the European universities experience a golden age, you know, from 1400 right through to about 1640. The number of foundations is growing rapidly all the time. The number of matriculations is growing rapidly all the time. And it's that war-torn period in the mid-17th century where the foundations sort of grind to a halt and the

matriculations flatline and actually decrease in relative to the overall population. So the universities are actually very healthy in this period. And of course, the universities are the institutions which are preparing people for participation, particularly in the Latinate Republic of Letters. So in a way, you know, the universities are the foundation on which the Republic of Letters rests. You know, it's worth remembering that the universities are in fact

literary republic. If you matriculated in Oxford University in the 17th century, you wore your academic vestments and your mortarboard out into the street to indicate to the local townspeople that you were in Oxford but not of Oxford. You were not subject to the authority of the civil magistrate. There's a special room in the Bodleian Library complex called the Chancellor's Court

where the chancellor exercised justice over the matriculated members of the university community. So they were legally an independent republic. And so there's a sense in which the Republic of Letters kind of floats on top of what is actually a legally constituted republic right across Europe. And the university is preparing people for

participation. You know, one of the ways in which letters circulated as well was people traveling to and from universities and all this kind of thing. So there's actually quite a close symbiotic relationship, at least sort of for the first half of the early modern period. But there's also a really important division of labor.

you know, the fundamental purpose of the university was the transmission of received learning, preferably in terms of some kind of coherent worldview, which, you know, could be put to use by university students in later life. And, you know, the 17th century in particular is the period in which

That sort of Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, Galenic synthesis is coming apart at the seams. This is increasingly subject to all kinds of increasingly devastating criticisms, and

but there's not yet an equally authoritative and equally comprehensive and equally coherent alternative worldview to put in its place. So the members of the university community are compelled, as it were, to continue to work within that received worldview because it's the only coherent worldview that they can pass on to their students. And this is where I think the "Republican Letters" takes on a rather different form

Because, I mean, as particularly evident, for instance, with Baconian sort of empirical experimental natural philosophy, it's not an alternative philosophical system. It's just a method, which if applied will hopefully generate in fullness of time, an alternative philosophical system. And it's going to proceed very slowly and in a very piecemeal way, right? Which is not appropriate for university instruction. So then you get

not only the Republic of Letters, where people are dismantling the received worldview and experimenting with various alternatives to it, but you also get alternative institutional foundations like the scientific societies and academies, where that incredibly slow, piecemeal demolition and reconstruction of alternative worldviews can take place without the necessity of communicating something

coherent to the next generation of students. In other words, the great benefit which the Republic of Letters has is that it is free of that pedagogical imperative, that need to transmit a coherent worldview, and therefore it can undertake a much more critical approach and a much more piecemeal approach to constructing alternative worldview. Yeah, it seems like the modern day university is sort of a combination of the two, right? So you have undergraduate education is the kind of received

wisdom. And then on top of that, you have doctoral programs and the research aspects of the modern day university. Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. And really, that's a product of the German universities of the 19th century, right? That the PhD is a German invention, and the university as a research institution, as well as a teaching institution, something that really comes

Once our sort of golden age of the Republic of Letters is over, that's one of the sort of watersheds that distinguishes this early modern intellectual culture and academic culture from fully fledged modernity.

Speaking of Germany, I didn't want to stop until we discussed a couple of more specific figures who you've worked on. And I thought one of them could be Leibniz. So I was anticipating our coverage of him, which will come much later when I get to the series of podcasts on early modern philosophy in Germany. I did mention him in the last episode. So I talked about him sending letters all over the place to learn about languages and

But maybe you could give us another example or two about Leibniz's letters and how they tell us about his thought. The first, an obvious thing to say about Leibniz is that his correspondence is a different order of magnitude than any other intellectual figure in the 17th century, you know, the 17th century, you know.

Spinoza leaves 88 letters. Descartes, 723. Newton, less than 2,000. Mersenne, who's supposed to be one of these great intellectual networkers, less than 2,000. Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, about 3,000.

Hartleb, about 5,000 survive, although his original correspondence was much larger than that. Nobody knows how many letters Leibniz left behind, but it's something like 20,000.

So it is an absolutely gigantic sum. And of course, the other thing about Leibniz's correspondence is that it's incredibly encyclopedic. I mean, as is his thinking, it's not confined to philosophy and mathematics and science. It also, of course, spills over into diplomacy and into history and into law and all kinds of other disciplines as well.

But, you know, the other really striking aspect of it is the indispensable nature of consulting Ladin's correspondence in order to work out his thought on any particular issue. He has this

all-embracing network of mutually independent conceptions, inextricably related to one another, but it's constantly in flux, it's constantly developing, and it's never captured in some kind of all-embracing synthetic masterwork.

And this is partly because for Leibniz, philosophy is a very social activity. I think it's really useful to contrast him with Descartes. You know, this famous image of Descartes, imbued in his stove-heated room, isolated from the world.

insulated from all external stimuli, engaging in pure introspection, and with this notion that he has the capacity to rebuild a new intellectual world himself, you know, and he closes down the discourse by saying, well, if people ask me how they can contribute, he basically says, you know, just send money, but otherwise leave me alone, because this is something I have to do myself, you know. Well, Leibniz is a later generation, and he's a fully fledged member of this

Republic of Letters understood not merely in correspondence, but also, you know, books and journals and visitors and letters, you know, constantly interrupting and deflecting his flow of thoughts, interjecting a kind of chaotic order in which his mind and his pen moves from one

subject to another. And because all of his thinking is systematically related, you know, he reads something, he talks with somebody, it changes his metaphysical views, and that has implications for his logic or his mathematics or something like this. So his philosophical thinking is in a constant state of becoming,

And of course, the other thing is he's a diplomat, right? So he shows different facets of his synthesis to different people, depending on what he thinks they're going to be most interested in and disposed to accept. So Leibniz scholars, I think probably more than any other major canonical thinker,

have to read his manuscript fragments and his complete and published works against the backdrop of this constantly shifting discourse he's having in his correspondence. So, in other words, the really striking thing about Leibniz is not merely the sheer volume of his correspondence, but also the centrality of his correspondence.

to understanding his intellectual evolution and his, as it were, final view on any particular topic. Immensely challenging and immensely rewarding, but above all, as I already suggested, in the views of later people like Voltaire,

the perfect representation of the Republic of Letters, precisely insofar as his thinking is constantly being enriched and deflected by commerce, whether in print or in manuscript or through live encounter with people of his generation pursuing intellectual innovation across a gigantic front.

I have to say, you're making me wonder how I'm going to cover him in podcast form. It's not easy. I can recommend a book or two, but I think you probably know them already. Yes, I do. Yes. Okay. And maybe at the other end of the famousness spectrum, let's talk about a figure you've mentioned a couple of times. And I mentioned him last time too. This is Samuel Hartlibb.

who's, I think it would be fair to say, not very famous. But you just said we have thousands of letters from him. And he was quite a networker who brought together a lot of intellectuals without producing that much in his own right. Is that right? That's absolutely right. So Hartliff's a central figure in the intellectual circles during the English Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and protected

That is to say, this period in the mid-17th century, 1640 to 1660, where the British Isles temporarily abolishes the monarchy and experiments with Republican government.

This means, of course, that he fell profoundly out of favor, and it's a very turbulent period, so there's an awful lot going on. His archive is a kind of central archive for documenting a lot of this activity. This means, of course, that he falls profoundly out of favor with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660.

As he lays dying in 1662, his friends are coming in and pilfering a lot of his letters because they didn't want their correspondence to associate with this person. And then his entire archive disappears until in the 1930s, a trunk is found full of 25,000 folios of letters and other papers.

Its first study in the 1940s, it becomes available as scholarship in the 1960s. It's really only interjected into English intellectual history by Charles Webster in the 1970s. And then it's one of the first major correspondence archives to be fully digitized in the 1990s. Now, there's no question that this material...

you know, justifies Hartlep's status as one of the great intelligences of the period, in terms of the variety of material, in terms of the geographical extent of his network, in terms of the fact that he's connected with so many interesting people. And he is related to a number of really crucial developments. The most obvious one being is this kind of intelligencing and coordinating and recruiting to, you know, an alternative,

philosophical and educational set of objectives, crucial for laying the foundation of the Royal Society. The Royal Society, of course, is founded immediately after the Stuart monarchy is re-established. Leading question, you know, how could this be possible unless its foundations had been laid in the previous period, right? And there's no question that

One of his roles, the roles of his circle is to recruit central figures like Robert Boyle and Henry Oldenburg, you know, to the new philosophy who are central figures in the early Royal Society. I tend to view his work in a very different light. He is one of a large number of Central European refugees from the Thirty Years' War who come to England in the 1630s.

And I would argue, interject into the English scene ways of going about your intellectual business, which are actually not in any way anticipated by figures like Francis Bacon, who are very often regarded as the sort of architects of the early Royal Society and so on, but are actually indigenous to the places from which people like Hartlib and Oldenburg

came, you know, Hartlep comes from a semi-independent city-state, Elbing or Elblok on the Baltic coast, Oldenburg from Bremen on the North Sea coast.

These are tiny polities, the survival of which depends on them networking intensively with one another economically to maintain their prosperity across the dwindling Hanseatic League, politically with other empirical free cities to preserve their political autonomy, confessionally through this archipelago of mostly small cities.

Calvinist cities and principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, networking is what they do. That's how they survive. There's no real equivalent to this in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis or the Novum Organum. It's a very statist notion of intellectual communication where it's very hierarchical and all the information flows into the center. So, I mean, this is a...

This is an argument that's never been fully developed, but it seems to me the really crucial contribution of Hartlep and Oldenburg, who is kind of like the person, the most important person that he recruits to the whole English philosophical enterprise, is introducing this kind of intellectual networking approach.

into London, institutionalizing it within the Royal Society, eventually transforming it into Philosophical Transactions, which is the very first scientific journal which Oldenburg found basically to supplement his meager income as secretary to the Royal Society as a private enterprise. So it's a question of really important intellectual cross-fertilization

in the intellectual sphere, which is consequence of the enormous disruption of the mid-17th century in a military and political way with the Thirty Years' War on the continent and the civil wars in the British Isles. Wow, okay. That's a great example of how it helps to know more about the historical context to understand the development of history of ideas.

Speaking of which, the last thing I want to ask you is kind of an open-ended question. We've been talking really about the 17th century and all the figures we've named almost are from the 17th century. So Dick Harkness and Perik Hartleb-Leibniz. Looking ahead, would you say that there's a big rupture between that period and the 18th century? Or does the Republic of Letters continue on into the 18th century in more or less the way we've been discussing?

Well, I think it's best to say that the Republic of Letters goes through a whole series of transformations from the 15th, the 16th, the 17th, the 18th century. And because of those transformations, you know, despite the continuity, there's really a distinctively different character in the 18th century. I'm not an expert in that period, but if you'd like me to venture a couple of distinctions, I mean, the most obvious one is linguistic.

In the beginning of the 17th century, there's no question that Latin is the primary mode of intellectual discourse internationally. By the end of the 17th century, it's rapidly being overtaken by French, which of course becomes the lingua franca of international literary and learning discourse in the 18th century. This is related to a difference in intellectual style from really ponderous deep learning characteristic of the 17th century,

to a more literary, skeptical, critical, philosophical, and literary in the sense of highly readable and widely read. Someone like Voltaire, of course, exemplifies that. I think it's also possible, again, certainly in the French context, to imagine the Republic of Letters being more fully decoupled from universities. I'm inclined to follow the older academic consensus that

When this golden age of the universities I was talking about comes to an end in the mid-17th century, the universities are no longer as fully integrated into the Republic of Letters in the 18th century as they were in the previous period. The institutional coordination provided by the academies and societies is very important, but you get much more sort of scientific specialism beginning to come into, which then inflects the nature of the Republic of Letters itself.

The nature of the discourse actually makes the Republic of Letters more accessible to women, amongst other things. You know, you've got the salon hosts and other figures who are playing a really crucial function in intellectual communication at a kind of social level.

I think it's fair to say confessional tensions have declined somewhat, and enlightenment takes on a far more anti-clerical tenor, at least in France. And then you see a geographical expansion as well, eastwards, you know, as far as Russia, and of course, also greater involvement of Europe's colonies with someone like Benjamin Franklin being a characteristic example. You know, so that's probably a very crude 17th century specialist's

characterizing some of the differences with the 18th century. The one thing you would say, though, is that, as I've already suggested, figures like Voltaire clearly see themselves as part of this Republic of Letters reaching back at least as far as Erasmus and definitely including major figures of the 17th century. In other words, we are still talking about an imagined community which imagines and describes itself in very similar ways in terms of very similar kind of ideals.

to the earlier period. And the much greater distinction would be between the characteristic 18th century, Republican letters and what replaces it in the 19th century, where the vernacular completely triumphs over international discourse, where

universities very clearly founded to serve the needs of the state also interrupt international communication, where a great deal more academic specialism within and outside the universities means that there's less kind of interdisciplinary discourse. So the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries are

quite rightly, I think, packaged together as part of this gradually evolving Republic of Letters. One interesting subject of discussion is why it begins to dissolve in the latter 18th century and what it transforms into in the 19th. Okay, great. Well, we'll maybe get to that eventually, but not yet.

So next time we're going to be focusing actually on the 17th century and also now narrowing our geographical focus. So having just talked about this pan-European phenomenon, we're going to be focusing from now on for quite a while on France and the Netherlands. I'm going to have a historical introduction to that next time, followed by a whole series of episodes on Descartes.

So that's exciting. But also exciting was to hear from you, Howard Hodgson, on this topic about which you've thought so much. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks, Peter. And I will invite the audience to join me next time for a look at 17th century France and the Netherlands here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. ♪