New Book | Rethinking the Republic of Letters
Previously, Scholten has spent considerable time addressing the 970-page travel journal of the Utrecht-born Joannes Kool (1672–1712). From Amsterdam UP:
Koen Scholten, Rethinking the Republic of Letters: Memory and Identity in Early Modern Learned Communities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025), 442 pages, ISBN: 978-9048559855, €159.
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.
Koen Scholten is a historian of science and published on memory and identity in scholarly and scientific communities. He edited Memory and Identity in the Learned World (Brill, 2022) and received his PhD from Utrecht University on a thesis on the formation of early modern communities in the world of learning in 2023.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: The Republic of Letters as an Imagined Community
1 An Inventory of Scholarly Values and Virtues
2 Collective History and Geographical Inclusion in Vitae and Elogia
3 Collective Memory and Identity in Hugo Grotius’s Correspondence
4 The Peregrinatio Literaria: Experiencing, Representing, and Forming Learned Communities
5 The Basilica di Santa Croce: The Florentine Site of Learned Memory
6 The Pieterskerk: Representing the Learned Community of Leiden University
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Abbreviations
Manuscript Sources
Printed Sources, Before 1800
Printed Sources, Modern
Secondary Literature
Appendix 1
Corpus and Keyword Analysis
Main Corpus
Reference Corpus
Acknowledgements
Celebration of the York Georgian Society’s 2024 Nuttgens Award Winners
From the York Georgian Society:
Celebration of the York Georgian Society’s 2024 Nuttgens Award Winners:
Charlotte Goodge and Constance Halstead
York Medical Society, 18 June 2025, 6pm
Organised by Jemima Hubberstey, Charles Martindale, and Moira Fulton
York Georgian Society is delighted to host two talks given by our 2024 Nuttgens Award Winners: Constance Halstead and Charlotte Goodge. The event will start with a drinks reception in the garden of York Medical Society (weather permitting). Then in the Lecture Room, Professor Mary Fairclough (University of York) will give an introduction, followed by our award winners who will deliver two short talks. It will be a wonderful opportunity to network with other members of the Society and hear exciting new research in eighteenth-century studies. Current students at the University of York also have the chance to learn more about the Nuttgens Award and how the York Georgian Society supports early-career research. Ticket are £15 for members, £25 non-members, and free for students who book in advance. Booking is available here; please note that ticket purchase and free ticket registration must be done separately. In case of any questions, please email jemimahubberstey@hotmail.co.uk.
Charlotte Goodge | Colonial Strategies for Disempowerment and the ‘Deformed’ Mammae of Khoekhoe Mothers
Dr Charlotte Goodge submitted and successfully defended her AHRC-funded PhD thesis in December 2024. Her interdisciplinary doctoral research broadly examines the cultural constructedness of female fatness in the period, demonstrating that both the real-life and the fictional fat female figure was variously used as a vehicle through which ideologies of femininity, class hierarchy, and civilisation were reinforced. Charlotte has held fellowships at the Huntington Library (2023) and Chawton House (2021) and was recently awarded the ASECS Race & Empire Caucus’s Graduate Student Essay Prize (2024). Her work has been published in The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2023), Eighteenth-Century Life (2025), and in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2025). This talk will explore the way in which eighteenth-century European commentators and travel writers depicted Khoekhoe mothers and their breastfeeding practices in South Africa.
Constance Halstead | ‘Surely It Was Not Platonic’: Anne Lister’s Queer Account of the Ladies of Llangollen
Constance Halstead is a second year PhD student at the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, where her research is funded by the Sally Wainwright Scholarship for the Study of Anne Lister. Her thesis, titled “Telling ‘All as It Really Is’: Form and Formation in Anne Lister’s Manuscript and Digitised Journal,” offers a literary study of Lister’s journal. It focuses on Lister’s generic, material, and textual negotiation of eighteenth-century traditions of diary writing. Constance completed her BA at the University of Oxford and MLitt at the University of St Andrews.
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The Nuttgens Award is named in honour of Patrick Nuttgens (1930–2004). A well-known and warmly remembered figure, both locally and nationally, Nuttgens was founding director of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies within the University of York and successively served as secretary, chairman, and president of the York Georgian Society. The Nuttgens Award was first offered in 2008, the result of a fruitful collaboration between York Georgian Society and the University of York. It provides a grant of £500 to be awarded annually to two PhD students researching any aspect of the Georgian period.
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