Memory and Identity in the Learned World: Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science

Memory and Identity in the Learned World offers a detailed and varied account of community formation in the early modern world of learning and science. The book traces how collective identity, institutional memory and modes of remembrance helped to shape learned and scientific communities.

The case studies in this book analyse how learned communities and individuals presented and represented themselves, for example in letters, biographies, histories, journals, opera omnia, monuments, academic travels and memorials. By bringing together the perspectives of historians of literature, scholarship, universities, science, and art, this volume studies knowledge communities by looking at the centrality of collective identity and memory in their formations and reformations.

Contributors: Lieke van Deinsen, Karl Enenkel, Constance Hardesty, Paul Hulsenboom, Dirk van Miert, Alan Moss, Richard Kirwan, Koen Scholten, Floris Solleveld, and Esther M. Villegas de la Torre.

Koen Scholten is a PhD candidate and researcher at the Research Institute for History at Utrecht University. He has published articles on early modern science and scholarship as well as on scholarly travels. His current research focuses on how scholarly communities form and reform in early modern Europe.

Dirk van Miert is Associate Professor of Early Modern Culture at Utrecht University and Director of the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). He has published widely on the history of learning, scholarship, universities and the Republic of Letters.

Karl A.E. Enenkel is Professor of Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin at the University of Münster. Previously he was Professor of Neo-Latin at the University of Leiden. He has published widely on international Humanism, early modern culture, paratexts, literary genres 1300–1600, Neo-Latin emblems, word and image relationships, and the history of scholarship and science.