Transforming the Republic of Letters
Since there’s no time like the present to procrastinate, I note here (instead of getting on with the reading and reviewing) that I’ve been asked to review a new book by April Shelford entitled Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720, just out of the University of Rochester Press. Here’s the jacket:
I met Professor Shelford several years ago at a conference in, I believe, Lubbock, Texas, where she told me about this project of hers. I’m glad to see it has appeared now in print and, especially, that I get to have a free copy of it (these Rochester Press books aren’t cheap!). I’ve only just begun to read the volume, so I can say little about contents, but if you’ve ever wondered about the life of Pierre-Daniel Huet, a curious chap who wasn’t too happy with what the philosophes did to his precious respublica litteraria, then this book is for you. Shelford traces the history of the Republic of Letters, that informal, elite society of early modern “intellectuals” that only existed as a network of correspondence and personal exchange as it transformed from a society of elite, Latin-writing Renaissance humanists into a more radical, vernacular, even democratic society of Enlightenment gens de lettres. In brief, the book looks at another front in the early modern Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. Until recently, most scholars found themselves firmly biased in favor of the Moderns, but more recent work has taken a new look at the Ancients, resisting the temptation to think of them as backwards, conservative, reactionaries who hated the progressive Moderns.
As a side note, I have an article I hope will be in print soon that looks at the continuation of Ancient concerns even into the nineteenth century. It is called “The Renaissance of Peiresc.”
Leave a Reply