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A multi-faceted study of intellectual transformation in early modern Europe as seen through the eyes of a leading French scholar and cleric, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Early modern Europe's most extensive commonwealth -- the Republic of Letters -- could not be found on any map. This republic had patriotic citizens, but no army; it had its own language, but no frontiers. From its birth during theRenaissance, the Republic of Letters long remained a small and close-knit elite community, linked by international networks of correspondence, sharing an erudite neo-Latin culture. In the late seventeenth century, however, it confronted fundamental challenges that influenced its transition to the more public, inclusive, and vernacular discourse of the Enlightenment. Transforming the Republic of Letters is a cultural and intellectual history that chronicles this transition to "modernity" from the perspective of the internationally renowned scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Under Shelford's direction, Huet guides us into the intensely social intellectual worldof salons, scientific academies, and literary academies, while his articulate critiques illumine a combative world of Cartesians versus anti-Cartesians, ancients versus moderns, Jesuits versus Jansenists, and salonnières versus humanist scholars. Transforming the Republic of Letters raises questions of critical importance in Huet's era, and our own, about defining, sharing, and controlling access to knowledge. April G. Shelford is Assistant Professor in the History Department at American University, Washington, D.C.
The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.
Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize A Longman–History Today Book Prize Finalist A Sheik Zayed Book Award Finalist Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year “Deeply thoughtful...A delight.”—The Economist “[A] tour de force...Bevilacqua’s extraordinary book provides the first true glimpse into this story...He, like the tradition he describes, is a rarity.” —New Republic In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a pioneering community of Western scholars laid the groundwork for the modern understanding of Islamic civilization. They produced the first accurate translation of the Qur’an, mapped Islamic arts and sciences, and wrote Muslim history using Arabic sources. The Republic of Arabic Letters is the first account of this riveting lost period of cultural exchange, revealing the profound influence of Catholic and Protestant intellectuals on the Enlightenment understanding of Islam. “A closely researched and engrossing study of...those scholars who, having learned Arabic, used their mastery of that difficult language to interpret the Quran, study the career of Muhammad...and introduce Europeans to the masterpieces of Arabic literature.” —Robert Irwin, Wall Street Journal “Fascinating, eloquent, and learned, The Republic of Arabic Letters reveals a world later lost, in which European scholars studied Islam with a sense of affinity and respect...A powerful reminder of the ability of scholarship to transcend cultural divides, and the capacity of human minds to accept differences without denouncing them.” —Maya Jasanoff “What makes his study so groundbreaking, and such a joy to read, is the connection he makes between intellectual history and the material history of books.” —Financial Times
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.
This book is the first full-length study of Scots in the United Provinces between 1650 and 1750, showing that the Scottish-Dutch relationship provided the infrastructure, which allowed Scotland to become part of the Republic of Letters.
Goodman chronicles the story of the Republic of Letters from its earliest formation through major periods of change: the production of the Encyclopedia, the proliferation of a print culture that widened circles of readership beyond the control of salon governance, and the early years of the French Revolution.
The first major English-language collection of plays and essays by Syrian playwright Sa'dallah Wannous Sa'dallah Wannous is acknowledged to be one of the Arab world's most significant playwrights, writers, and intellectuals of the twentieth century. This is the first major English-language collection that brings together his most significant plays and essays. Selections include the groundbreaking 1969 play An Evening's Entertainment for the Fifth of June, a scathing indictment of the duplicity of Arab leaders during the 1967 War, as well as Wannous's most celebrated play, Rituals of Signs and Transformations, a bold treatment of homosexuality, prostitution, clerical corruption, and the quest for female liberation. In addition to his work as a playwright, Wannous, like Brecht, was an astute theatrical and cultural critic, and his essays, some of which are included here, offer shrewd diagnoses of the ills of Arab society and the essential role of theater in ameliorating them.
A provocative exploration of intellectual exchange across four centuries of European history by the author of When the World Spoke French In this fascinating study, preeminent historian Marc Fumaroli reveals how an imagined "republic" of ideas and interchange fostered the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. He follows exchanges among Petrarch, Erasmus, Descartes, Montaigne, and others from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, through revolutions in culture and society. Via revealing portraits and analysis, Fumaroli traces intellectual currents engaged with the core question of how to live a moral life--and argues that these men of letters provide an example of the exchange of knowledge and ideas that is worthy of emulation in our own time. Combining scholarship, wit, and reverence, this thought-provoking volume represents the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship.
In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a large wad of folded papers. They were letters. Fifty-six of them. In German. Written in 1949. Letters from her father to her mother, when they were courting. Just four years earlier, he had fought to stay alive in Auschwitz and on the Death March while she had spent the war years suffering in Uzbekistan. Thirty years later, Eleanor—a theatre artist who has been on the forefront of keeping Yiddish alive—finally had the letters translated. The particulars of those letters send her off on an unimaginable adventure into the past, forever changing her and anyone who reads this book. “‘The Holocaust,’ Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and courageous book, ‘is attached to me like my skin and I would be formless without it.’ A very personal story that is also a fundamental one of a woman trying to make sense of her life and family and of the shadows that go back before she was born. There is plenty of feeling and sentiment but it never feels sentimental. Her inimitable wit leavens the sadder scenes. This journey of discovery is riveting, told with tender insight, at times heartbreaking and at times heartwarming just like the Yiddish songs that have delighted Ms. Reissa’s audiences.” —Joseph Berger is a New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust “Among the great number of personal takes on the Holocaust, Eleanor Reissa’s book really stands out, both for its intelligence and courage and for the unique way she braids the inter-generational stories together. In this brutal, poignant, and searingly honest book, Reissa simultaneously pieces together the unfathomable story of her Holocaust survivor father, reckons with the guilt she came to feel as his uncomprehending American daughter, and manages somehow to find insight and purpose in the ashes. This extraordinary account of two parallel journeys will stick with anyone privileged enough to read it.” —David Margolick, a former reporter for The New York Times, author of several books, including, most recently, The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. And Robert F. Kennedy “The Letters Project is a wonderful book—funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately transcendent. Eleanor Reissa’s journey back into her family’s past makes for a gripping—and very human—international mystery. I highly recommend it.” —Tony Phelan, TV Showrunner for: Grey’s Anatomy, Doubt, and Council of Dads “Eleanor Reissa has written a gritty, fearless yet funny memoir about herself, her family, and the Holocaust. Once I began reading it, I was completely swept away until the journey ended. I was moved by the power of this uniquely personal yet universal story.” —Julian Schlossberg is an American motion pictures, theatre, and television producer