Telling Histories of the Republic of Letters in the 18th Century: “History of Learning” as Expression of Growing Self-Awareness of an International Community of Scholars and Scientists

It is a historiographical orthodoxy that the 18th century witnessed the rise of a historical consciousness, partly in response to what Hazard called the crisis of the European mind. Within this rise, we can identify a particular historical sub-genre: that of History of Learning. This ‘historia litteraria’ marks the beginning of History of Science. It is by now a well known albeit still understudied phenomenon, prevalent in Germany from the late 17th century onwards. I will show how, within this historiographical tradition, which takes its cue from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, the emphasis shifted from the remote to the more recent past. The 18th-c. history of recent learning points at a growing self-awareness of the Republic of Letters as a social phenomenon, noticeable also from the rise of the scientific journal, editions of complete works of recent scientist and scholars, the posthumous editions of letters, and table-talks and the expanding scholarly apparatuses accompanying these editions. The scientific and scholarly community started to assert its own independence from state and church, and retroactively projected their own enlightened ideals back onto the earlier history of the Republic of Letters. This is causing the modern historian considerable problems: we are still reading the 16th- and 17th-c. socio-cultural history of learning through the prism of Newton, Bayle and Voltaire and fail to appreciate the variegated history of the deceptively stable term ‘Republic of Letters’, which in fact experienced many ups and downs through time and across space.