History @ CUL

Digital Resources for the Republic of Letters

A recent review in Reviews in History from the Institute of Historical Research praises the project called Cultures of Knowledge (Cofk).  CofK offers a platform on which early modern intellectual historians can meet virtually and exchange knowledge about early modern networks through the study of their correspondence. The reviewer notes that “the site structure makes sense, everything is explained clearly and everything works, updates are continuous and everything that ends up on the CofK website is worth reading. It is a gem of a resource.”

The reviewer’s one regret is that CofK and other resources for early modern studies are not more well-known.  We can start to rectify that. Here are some projects that early modernists should have bookmarked and consult regularly:

• Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters. http://cofk.history.ox.ac.uk/ “The ultimate objective of Cultures of Knowledge is to use the intellectual networks and epistolary cultures of the seventeenth century as a means of connecting transnational interdisciplinary research across the broad field of early modern intellectual history.”
• Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO). http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. A union catalog for basic descriptions of early modern correspondence from eight contributing collections.  It hopes to add more institutions and guides over time.
• Mapping the Republic of Letters. https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ “A collaborative, interdisciplinary humanities research project looking at 17th and 18th century correspondence, travel, and publication to trace the exchange of ideas in the early modern period and the Age of Enlightenment.” The project is described here.

• 

• e-corpus. http://www.e-corpush.org/ is a French collective digital library “that catalogs and disseminates numerous documents: manuscripts, archives, books, journals, prints, audio recordings, video, etc.” Among the 27 virtual collections are the correspondence of Nicholas Claude Fabri Peiresc (1580-1637) and one on the “Landscape of War” in the 20th century.
• Europeana. http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ Europeana is a growing collective digital library for Europe with contributions from 1500 institutions. There is a small amount of early modern correspondence included.  You can search for correspondence by searching for “what:Correspondence” and then use the “Timeline” display to see material that may be of interest from a particular century.
• Electronic Enlightenment. http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/misc/6993675 A subscription product from the Voltaire Foundation that was announced earlier on this blog.

Comments

Comments are closed.