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Lost letters – and reputations

My first RECIRC blog post explained Why we’re glad Samuel Hartlib read other people’s mail. This, my final post,* is about manuscript letters that have gone missing – whether lost in transit, lost to posterity, or available only in scribally revised copies – and so cannot be read as originally composed and sent, if at […]

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Women in Hartlib’s Ephemerides

At the risk of giving the exaggerated but not completely inaccurate impression that I’m obsessed with the Ephemerides, here’s another post about it. You see, I’ve just finished reading Hartlib’s notebook from cover to cover (well, from screen to screen) in the process of completing and cleaning all our reception data from this source. So […]

Maria Sibylla Merian, Erucarum ortus, alimentum et paradoxa metamorphosis. Amstelaedami: Apud Joannem Oosterwyk, [1717 or 1718]
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Four early modern books from the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway – as seen at #recirc17

In the preceding post, Bronagh McShane discussed three early modern books from the Galway Dominican convent library, now preserved in the James Hardiman Library. This post discusses four additional books from the exhibition that we co-curated with Special Collections Librarian Marie Boran for the conference ‘Reception, Reputation and Circulation in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800’ […]

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Hartlib’s Ephemerides: Making Universal Knowledge Tweetable since 1634

One of the first things that struck me about the holograph notes kept by the seventeenth-century intelligencer Samuel Hartlib is how tweetable they are. Those of you who follow @flmaxwell and/or @RECIRC_ on Twitter have already been treated to several fine examples over the last two years. A blog post, unlike a tweet, allows for […]

Bibliothèque de Genève, on the Uni Bastions campus of Université de Genève
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What’s the big idea? Women in the République des lettres

For someone who’s become accustomed to deciphering handwritten squiggles and entering metadata for hours on end – hard on the eyes, but not too hard on the brain – participating last month in the intensive one-week summer course « Vertus, savoirs et religion : parcours intellectuels de femmes dans les espaces confessionnels à l’âge moderne » at […]