Enfilade

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