Digital humanities have become an integral part of the academic landscape, providing scholars with unique opportunities to explore the past in imaginative and innovative ways. Demonstrating the exciting possibilities of such approaches, this volume draws upon the increasing availability of on-line primary sources to highlight on-going research reconstructing the scholarly and scientific networks of communication that flourished across early-modern Europe.
Following an introductory essay providing an overview of recent developments in European intellectual studies, twelve scholars - from Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom - provide a selection of wide-ranging chapters united by a focus on comparisons between key correspondence networks. Fully exploiting the possibilities provided by online databases - the searchability of big data and new methods of visualisation - each essay reflects upon the relationships between scholarly institutions such as libraries, universities and societies, loosely organised intellectual circles and important individuals. In so doing a vivid picture emerges of the developments in scholarly communication between late sixteenth-century Humanism and the era of the early Royal Society in the second half of the seventeenth century. A broad geographic coverage, including the Austrian lands, Czech lands, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, the Netherlands and England, enables questions of centre and periphery within the republic of letters to be asked and to analyse how major political and military events impacted upon intellectual geography, restructuring communication networks and transforming practices of scholarly exchange - crucial infrastructure for the circulation of ideas underpinning concepts of universal reform.
