Suchergebnisse

This book discusses the intersection of the great military and intellectual disruptions of the mid-seventeenth century. It examines how the Thirty Years' War scattered representatives of Ramism from central Europe into old and new institutions, especially into the northwest, the Dutch Republic, and England.

Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor of philosophy and theology at the Calvinist academy of Herborn, was a man of many parts. A deputy to the famous Synod of Dort and the greatest encyclopedist of his age, he was also a pioneer of Calvinist millenarianism and a devoted student of astrology, alchemy, Lullism, and the works of Giordano Bruno. Alsted's intellectual biography opens up unexpected perspectives on the reforming movements of the seventeenth century, andprovides an invaluable introduction to many of the central ideas, individuals and institutions of this neglected era of central European intellectual history.

Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the 'respublica litteraria', a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era's intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. 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. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.