Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720

Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720

Shelford, April

Hardcover

Letters & EssaysGeneral European HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 158046243X
ISBN13: 9781580462433
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: Aug 3 2007
Pages: 276
Weight: 1.15
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.37 Depth: 9.35
Language: English
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.

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