|
The Republic of Letters (''Respublica literaria'') is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and America. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or "philosophes" as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture. These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic. Because of societal constraints on women, the Republic of Letters consisted mostly of men. As such, many scholars use "Republic of Letters" and "men of letters" interchangeably. The circulation of handwritten letters was necessary for its function because it enabled intellectuals to correspond with each other from great distances. All citizens of the 17th-century Republic of Letters corresponded by letter, exchanged published papers and pamphlets, and considered it their duty to bring others into the Republic through the expansion of correspondence. The first known occurrence of the term in its Latin form (''Respublica litteraria'') is in a letter by Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini dated July 6, 1417;〔Hans Bots, Françoise Waquet, ''La Rèpublique des Lettres'', Paris: Belin - De Boeck, 1997, pp. 11-13 (on the first uses of the term).〕 it was used increasingly in the 16th and 17th, so that by the end of that century it featured in the titles of several important journals. Currently, the consensus is that Pierre Bayle first translated the term in his journal ''Nouvelles de la République des Lettres'' in 1684. But there are some historians who disagree and some have gone so far as to say that its origin dates back to Plato's ''Republic''. Part of the difficulty in determining its origin is that, unlike an academy or literary society, it existed only in the minds of its members. Historians are presently debating the importance of the Republic of Letters in influencing the Enlightenment. Today, most Anglo-American historians, whatever their point of entry to debate, occupy a common ground: the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment were distinct. ==Academies== The mid-17th century had seen the community of the curious take its first tentative steps towards institutionalization with the establishment of permanent literary and scientific academies in Paris and London under royal patronage. The foundation of the Royal Society in 1662, with its open door, was particularly important in legitimizing the Republic of Letters in England and providing a European center of gravity for the movement. The Royal Society primarily promoted science, which was undertaken by gentlemen of means acting independently. The Royal Society created its charters and established a system of governance. Its most famous leader was Isaac Newton, president from 1703 until his death in 1727. Other notable members include diarist John Evelyn, writer Thomas Sprat, and scientist Robert Hooke, the Society's first curator of experiments. It played an international role to adjudicate scientific findings, and published the journal "Philosophical Transactions" edited by Henry Oldenburg. From the first decades of the 18th century, in contrast, academies began to be founded throughout the continent. In the second half of the 18th century, then, there was an institutional focus for the Republic of Letters in virtually every major town of Europe (and even in the case of Philadelphia on the American continent). Membership, too, was not limited to members of the Republic living in the immediate vicinity. Indeed, only in Paris was specialization ever taken to an extreme, where, in addition to existing Académie Française and the Académie des Sciences founded in 1635 and 1666, there were three further royal foundations in the 18th century: the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1701), the Académie de Chirurgie (1730), and the Société de Médecine (1776). By the second half of the 18th century the position was very different. As universities all over Europe abandoned Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenist medicine in favor of the mechanist and vitalist ideas of the moderns, so they placed a greater emphasis on learning by seeing. Everywhere in teaching science and medicine the monotonous diet of dictated lectures was supplemented and sometimes totally replaced by practical courses in experimental physics, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, botany, ''materia medica'', even geology and natural history. The new emphasis on practical learning meant that the university now offered a much more welcoming environment to the Republic of Letters. Although most professors and teachers were still uninterested in membership, the ideological and pedagogical changes across the century created the conditions in which the pursuit of curiosity in the university world became much more possible and even attractive. Institutions – academies, journals, literary societies – took over some of the roles, duties, and activities of scholarship. Communication, for example, did not have to be from individual to individual; it could take place between academies, and pass thence to scholars, or be encapsulated in literary journals, to be diffused among the whole scholarly community. Literary agents, working for libraries but sharing the values of the learned community, demonstrate this professionalization on the most fundamental level. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Republic of Letters」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|