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Transforming the Republic of Letters
Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720
April G. Shelford
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 the Renaissance, 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 world of 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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DETAILS
7 line illustrations
Size: 9 x 6
13 digit ISBN: 9781580462433
Binding: Hardback
First published: 03/Aug/2007
Price: 75.00 USD / 45.00 GBP
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series: Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe
Subject: Modern History
BIC class: AVH
STATUS: Available
Details updated on 18/11/2008
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Reviews
Huet is a formidable subject to treat in a single book, but Shelford has done an admirable job with full documentation in the notes, mainly from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Laurenziana, since few of Huet's works are available in modern editions. --Charles Fantazzai, East Carolina University in RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY, May 2008
Shelford's book is a well-researched, thoughtful, and critical study of Huet and the transformation of the older Republic of Letters into the more widely studied one of the eighteenth century. She demolishes the mantras of modernity that have burdened scholarship of the period and provides us with a more subtle understanding of the cultural changes in the period that does not read contemporary ideals backward, proleptically, into the past. SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEWS
Transforming the Republic of Letters is a formidable book about a formidable man: Pierre-Daniel Huet. A deft and vivid narrator, April Shelford recreates Huet's career, his friendships with learned men and women, his projects and his quarrels with erudition, tenacity and deep historical insight.... This finely observed biography is also an original and striking work of cultural history. --Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
At a time when Enlightenment historians are re-discovering the critical importance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, April Shelford offers us a sophisticated and beautifully written study of the birth of the siècle des lumières as witnessed by a man present throughout its long and difficult gestation. That Huet's relationship to the child was ambivalent -- even hostile -- only renders his story the more compelling. Reading it, we are reminded of how closely death attends to life, and of what is lost as the world is made anew. Huet's tragedy of displacement becomes, in Shelford's skillful handling, in some measure our own. --Darrin M. McMahon, Department of History, Florida State University
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