The first issue (Fall 2012) of the Journal of Early Modern Studies is now published

A well known metaphor of the early European modernity and an important instrument in the understanding of seventeenth-century thought, the “Republic of Letters” was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily a label for new projects of intellectual and scientific association. Various models for the Republic of Letters have been investigated and described as closed circles or open networks, shaped around a variety of elements: scientific societies, intellectual networks, formal or informal circles of intellectuals, proponents of the new and old philosophies. What all such models had in common was a an ideal of shaping communities around a moral, intellectual and sometimes a religious project understood as a reformation of the (whole) human being.

This special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies brought together articles devoted to the investigation of such models of early modern communities governed by the ideal of the Republic of Letters. The issue selected papers dedicated to the exploration of various ways of disseminating and communicating knowledge within the Republic of Letters, with a special focus on the exchanges between the East and the West of Europe.


TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Articles 
Daniel Andersson, On Borrowed Time: Internationalism and its Discontents in a Late Sixteenth-Century University Library 
Noel Golvers, “Savant” Correspondence from China with Europe in the 17th-18th Centuries 
Roger Ariew, Descartes’ Correspondence before Clerselier: Du Roure’s La Philosophie 
Anne Davenport, English Recusant Networks and the Early Defense of Cartesian Philosophy 
Michael Deckard, Acts of admiration: Wondrous Women in Early Modern Philosophy 
Koen Vermeir, The Dustbin of the Republic of Letters. Pierre Bayle’s “Dictionaire” as an Encyclopedic Palimpsest of Errors 
J.B. Shank, A French Jesuit in the Royal Society of London: Father Louis-Bertrand de Castel, S.J. and Enlightenment Mathematics, 1720–1735 

Review Article 
Alexander Douglas, A Worldlier Spinoza: Susan James on the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [Susan James. Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]

Book Reviews 
Roger Ariew, Descartes among the Scholastics, Leiden: Brill, 2011 (Robert Arnăutu); Arnaud Milanese, Principe de la philosophie chez Hobbes. L’expérience de soi et du monde, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011 (Andrea Sangiacomo) 

Books received 
Guidelines for Authors

JEMS is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal of intellectual history, dedicated to the exploration of the interactions between philosophy, science and religion in Early Modern Europe. It aims to respond to the growing awareness within the scholarly community of an emerging new field of research that crosses the boundaries of the traditional disciplines and goes beyond received historiographic categories and concepts.

JEMS publishes high-quality articles reporting results of research in intellectual history, history of philosophy and history of early modern science, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary approaches. It furthermore aims to bring to the attention of the scholarly community as yet unexplored topics, which testify to the multiple intellectual exchanges and interactions between Eastern and Western Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.


JEMS is edited by the Research Centre “Foundations of Modern Thought”, University of Bucharest (http://modernthought-unibuc.blogspot.com/), and published and distributed by Zeta Books (http://www.zetabooks.com/).



 ISSN: 2285-6382
ISBN: 978-606-8266-35-0 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-606-8266-36-7 (ebook)
Availability: Paperback & Electronic (pdf)
Publication date: 25 October 2012
Size: 17 x 24 cm
Pages: 220
Language: English