Correspondence Projects

Posted by nickpelling on Feb 27th, 2009

Manuscript archives hold a truly incredible corpus of early modern correspondence, which is only recently being started to be mined in a more concerted way. However, because the Herculean task of producing some kind of cross-collection finding aid / “map” of both correspondence and correspondents has yet to be taken up, this remains a very fragmented field of study.

The following is merely a short selection – for a much longer bibliography, see the page from the Scaliger Project listed at the end.

15th century – proto-Republic of Letters

  • Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Collected letters of 1436, 1438/1444 and 1455.

16th century – Republic of Letters

  • Erasmus (1469–1536) published his own correspondence in 1521 (Epistolae ad diversos) and 1529 (Opus epistolarum). Latin.
  • Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). Italian.
  • Guidiccione, Caro, Ruscelli, Domenichi, Tasso, Tolomei (all mentioned in “Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe”)
  • Pedro Mártir de Anglería (c.1456–1526) – 813 letters, published in 1530. Latin.
  • Tadeas Hajek
  • Andreas Dudek

17th century - correspondence collections & projects

  • Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) Project at Leiden University
  • Tycho Brahe – correspondence edited by Dreyer as “Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera Omnia” (better known as “TBDOO”) in 15 volumes (Copenhagen 1913-1929).
  • Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) – Correspondence published in 17 volumes
  • Lipsius – La Correspondance de Juste-Lipse conservée au Musée Plantin-Moretus
  • Linnaeus
  • Peiresc (1580-1637) Correspondence Network - Tamizey de Larroque edited seven volume of the “Lettres de Peiresc”, but died before completing the project.
  • Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz (1606-1682)
  • Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – Correspondence Volume I (1622-1659) and Volume II (1660-1679) edited by Noel Malcolm.

 Correspondence projects organized under the aegis of CELL at Queen Mary College, London:-

Web Resources

 The Scaliger Project at the Warburg Institute has a hugely helpful webpage on early modern correspondence, listing references for many obscure figures such as Caspar Barlaeus (1602-1648),  Jacques Daléchamps (1513-1588), Joh. F. Gronovius (1631-1671), André Rivet (1595-1650),Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), etc.

LIAS – sources and documents relating to the early modern history of ideas.