Portuguese Humanism And The Republic Of Letters

This volume focuses on the interdisciplinary investigation of Portuguese humanism, especially as a noteworthy player in the international network of early modern scholarship, literature and visual arts.

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.

Erasmus was not only one of the most widely read authors of the early modern period, but one of the most controversial. For some readers he represented the perfect humanist scholar; for others, he was an arrogant hypercritic, a Lutheran heretic and polemicist, a virtuoso writer and rhetorician, an inventor of a new, authentic Latin style, etc. In the present volume, a number of aspects of Erasmus’s manifold reception are discussed, especially lesser-known ones, such as his reception in Neo-Latin poetry. The volume does not focus only on so-called Erasmians, but offers a broader spectrum of reception and demonstrates that Erasmus’s name also was used in order to authorize completely un-Erasmian ideals, such as atheism, radical reformation, Lutheranism, religious intolerance, Jesuit education, Marian devotion, etc. Contributors include: Philip Ford, Dirk Sacré, Paul J. Smith, Lucia Felici, Gregory D. Dodds, Hilmar M. Pabel, Reinier Leushuis, Jeanine De Landtsheer, Johannes Trapman, and Karl Enenkel.

This open access book explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology. Johannes de Sacrobosco compiled his Tractatus de sphaera during the thirteenth century in the frame of his teaching activities at the then recently founded University of Paris. It soon became a mandatory text all over Europe. As a result, a tradition of commentaries to the text was soon established and flourished until the second half of the 17th century. Here, readers will find an informative overview of these commentaries complete with a rich context. The essays explore the educational and social backgrounds of the writers. They also detail how their careers developed after the publication of their commentaries, the institutions and patrons they were affiliated with, what their agenda was, and whether and how they actually accomplished it. The editor of this collection considers these scientific commentaries as genuine scientific works. The contributors investigate them here not only in reference to the work on which it comments but also, and especially, as independent scientific contributions that are socially, institutionally, and intellectually contextualized around their authors.

This exploration of the culture of public speaking in the Iberian world places the renaissance revival of letters within a global context.

From Lisbon to Rome via the Gulf of Guinea and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, this book explores the strategies and practices that displaced scholars cultivated to navigate the murky waters of late Renaissance politics. By tracing the life of the Portuguese jurist-scholar Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) across diverse social, cultural, and pol-itical spaces, Fabien Montcher reveals a world of religious conflicts and imperial rivalries. Here, European agents developed the practice of 'bibliopolitics'– using local and international systems for buying and selling books and manuscripts to foster political communication and debate, and ultimately to negotiate their survival. Bibliopolitics fostered the advent of a generation of 'mercenaries of knowledge' whose stories constitute a key part of seventeenth-century social and cultural history. This book also demonstrates their crucial role in creating an inter-national and dynamic Republic of Letters with others who helped shape early modern intellectual and political worlds.

This book establishes a dialogue between colonial studies and the history of science, contributing to a renewed analytical framework grounded on a trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-imperial perspective. It proposes a historiographical revision based on self-organization and cooperation theories, as well as the role of traditionally marginalized agents, including women, in processes that contributed to the building of a First Global Age, from 1400 to 1800. The intermediaries between European and local bearers of knowledge played a central role, together with cultural translation processes involving local practices of knowledge production and the global circulation of persons, commodities, information and knowledge. Colonized worlds in the First Global Age were central to the making of Europe, while Europeans were, undoubtedly, responsible for the emergence of new balances of power and new cultural grounds. Circulation and locality are core concepts of the theoretical frame of this book. Discussing the connection between the local and the global, in terms of production and circulation of knowledge, within the framework of colonialism, the book establishes a dialogue between experts on the history of science and specialists on global and colonial studies.

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions, and which are explored in this book, ranged from lofty ideals to the more practical concerns of making ends meet when one depended on the whims of the powerful. This volume articulates a 'pragmatics of poetry' that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology (network analysis, sociology of professions, valuation studies) to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse in the court, with patrons, or in the marketplace for books. It reveals how poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. It shows how they threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres and to better their European rivals, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is a book about the various ways in which poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.