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The Republic of Letters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Marc Fumaroli
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Extract

The expression “République des lettress” is still used today. It appears in most recent dictionaries of the French language, and it even occasionally occurs in ordinary conversation or in the press, a pompous and ironic circumlocution to designate the Parisian literary “milieu.” This archaistic and pejorative survival masks (somewhat similarly to the word “rhetoric”) the attention that researchers are now according to the older meaning of this surviving expression, and to the concept of an international exchange of ideas that it represented for scholars of the Ancien Régime. As proof that this scientific interest is recent, Paul Hazard, in the famous Crise de la conscience européenne (1936), devotes not a single line to the “Republic of Letters,” while in the chapter dealing with Pierre Bayle he cites the “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (1684), the learned periodical published in Amsterdam by this erudite Calvinist, apparently without feeling a need to explain a title that seemed self-evident. For the history of ideas, this notion was not a subject for history. It resided outside the field of perception of a discipline that was completely devoted to a sort of chemistry of pure ideas, removed from the literary form that carried them, and a fortiori from institutional circuits, and forms of sociability and dialogue that “invent” and spread them, and even more so from the awareness that “scholars” might have had of the solidarity that united them and of the meaning they might be able to attribute to it.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 36 , Issue 143 , September 1988, pp. 129 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Paris, Boivin, 1943.

2 Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat, Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1982.

3 Respublica literaria, die Institutionen der Gelehrtsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (2 volumes).

4 Emilio Bonfatti, La civil conversazione in Germania, Letteratura del comporta mento da Stefano Guazzo a Adolph Kniggel (1574-1788), Verona, 1979.

5 F. Schalk, "Erasmus und die Respublica literaria," Acts of the Erasmus Con gress, Amsterdam-London, 1971.

6 Francisci Barbari et aliorum epistolae, Brixiaen 1743, letter of 6 July 1417, pp. 1-8; The Renaissance Book Hunters, The Letters of Poggio Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolas, ed. Phylis Walter Goodhart Gordon, Columbia, N.Y., 1974, p. 199.

7 St. Augustine, The City of God, II, 21; XIX, 21-26.

8 Carlo Dionisotti, "Chierici e laici", in Geografia e storia della letteratura italia na, Turin, Einaudi, 1967, pp. 63-67.

9 Salutati, in his correspondence, employed the expressions "studia literarum" and "studia humanitatis" to designate what we call "humanism".

10 Jean Leclercq, "L'Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu," Paris, Cerf, 1957; Otia Monastica, Rome, 1963.

11 Wilkins, "The Ecclesiastical Career of Petrarch," Speculum, 1953, pp. 754-775.

12 Rabanus Maurus spoke of Otium legendi et scribendi, "the leisure devoted to reading and writing."

13 Petrarch, to the Dominican Giovanni Colonna, Familiari, ed. Ugo Dotti, 1974, t. 2, pp. 625-626.

14 Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare, 1970; C. Grayson, "Leone Battista Alberti and the Beginnings of Italian Grammar", Proc. of Brit. Acad. 291-311, 1963; M. Tavoni, Latino, Grammatica, Volgare, 1984.

15 Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, Business and Scholarship in Re naissance Venice, Oxford, Blackwell, 1979; Aldo Manuzio Editore, Dediche, Prefa zioni, Note ai testi, introd. by Carlo Dionisotti, Milan, 1975, 2 vol.

16 See Thomas Pavel, Univers de la fiction, Paris, Seuil, 1988.

17 See Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, Paris, Seuil, 1975.

18 See Karl Popper, La Connaissance objective, (chap. "La théorie de l'esprit objectif"), Brussels, Complexe, 1978.

19 See Imre Lakatos, "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs", in Philosophical Papers, vol. I, Cambridge, 1978; Larry Laudan, Le Progrès scientifi que, Brussels, Pierre Mardaga, coll. "Philosophie et langage", 1988.

20 See also Charles Pierce, "The Fixation of Belief", in Collected Papers, t. V; and K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, (chap. "On sources of knowledge and ignorance"), 1963; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l'argumentation, 1970.