Anthony Grafton, “The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism,” in Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203–223 (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Perspectives of the Digitized Correspondence of Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687)
Dutch Crossing, 2014
The prominent Dutch poet and secretary to Frederick Henry, Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), was a true homo universalis. He was also a diplomat, an art connoisseur, a bibliophile, collector, musician, and a scholar. Mainly by means of his correspondence, he maintained a vast network of contactsreaching 'everybody who mattered' in the Dutch Golden Age. It is estimated that Huygens wrote and received more than 100 000 letters; of these only 10 000 have survived. In the early twentieth century, Huygens's correspondence was published by J. A. Worp. While Worp's work was exemplary, his editorial principles and practices fail to meet today's current scholarly standards. For example, Worp sometimes published abstracts of letters, rather than the letters themselves. He also selectively omitted letters that he deemed 'unimportant'. Several years ago the Huygens Institute of Dutch History began to create a new digital edition of Huygens's letters. This online edition of Huygens's correspondence reveals new perspectives on Huygens and on his work and writing. In addition to the newly discovered letters that now have been published, the digital edition also facilitates research on Huygens's varied use of language in letters to people, depending on their social strata. New analysis of his letters also grants insights into how Huygens communicated with the women of his time.
JLIS.it, 2018
This essay focuses on a digital text analysis with AntConc computational linguistics tool in order to find, list and compare the most important key word occurrences and their collocations in some of Christiaan Huygens last writings, from 1686 to 1695 and posthumous. The greatest attention is payed to three key words – Animus, Potentia and Lex – related to the themes of God's power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology and plurality of worlds. In addition, these key words are used to select the letters written by Huygens to the most important of his contemporaries on the same topics. This challenge firstly involves demonstrating that his last writings on philosophical and theological reflections on mechanistic philosophy are not an anomaly within Huygens' wider work, and secondly showing that these are indications of Huygens' involvement in a number of theoretical debates in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Return to Sender: Constantijn Huygens as a Man of Letters
2013
Even a quick glance at J.A. Worp’s six-volume edition of the Correspondence suffices to get a grasp of the impressive epistolary network that the Dutch diplomat-poet Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) managed to build up in the course of his long life and career. The numerous letters he exchanged with politicians, fellow writers, philosophers and scientists provide us with a broad view of the culture of the seventeenth century, both in the Netherlands and in Europe. Return to Sender takes as its starting point Huygens’ letters and shows us the author in his different guises: intimus of René Descartes, collector of art, writer of flirtatious love letters and the author of a long consolatory letter-poem for an ailing friend who threatened to go blind. In his letters, Huygens emerges as an often playful yet always ambitious fashioner of his own social image. Return to Sender gives us Huygens as ‘a man of letters’ in a very literal way: conceiving and construing his texts with an addressee in mind, but also with the distinct intention to fashion for that reader a persona that could be represented by means of the text at hand. This volume brings together eight chapters on as many facets of this singularly prototypical Renaissance individual.
History and the history of science in the work of Hendrik De Man
Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste …, 2011
De Man's self-conscious revision of the Marxist tradition. The sympathy of all three men for innovation is revealed in their strong attraction, before 1914, to the German social historian Karl Lamprecht. Pirenne was sympathetic to Lamprecht's attempt to "rescue 19 th-century positivism from asphyxiation by merging cultural and 'total' history, based on natural laws with a socio-psychological basis" (Boone, 2008; see also Warland, 2004). De Man attended Lamprecht's lectures in Leipzig between 1905 and 1909, and in 1912 Sarton recruited Lamprecht for the original editorial board of Isis. The three modernists also found a common interest in medievalism. Such an obsession might seem an odd attribute of a modernist, but, as Louise Blakeney Williams emphasised, modernists found the Middle Ages "a beautiful but also exciting world of deep spiritual fulfilment to which they might escape the drab ugliness of the present day" (Blakeney Williams, 2002, 45). Many modernists, Michael T. Saler contended, "sought unifying mythic and spiritual values that would remedy the perceived excesses of bourgeois liberalism, rationalism, industrialism, urbanism, and secularism" (Saler, 1999, 10). De Man was certainly not an early adopter of the idea that the Middle Ages constituted the cradle of modern capitalist democracy (Tollebeek, 1997, 60-62). From the first half of the 19th century, the Middle Ages offered an enormous reservoir of inspiration for thinkers operating in a wide range of ideologies, notably Romanticism and Historismus (Alexander, 2007; Miltenburg, 1996; Utz, 1998). Both Catholics and progressive liberals absorbed the medieval past into the present. The Modern continually grappled with the Medieval, whether in the Gothic architectural style or the scholarly identification of the 12th-century renascence. This tension was acute in Flanders, where the medieval cities of Bruges and Ghent inspired anti-modernist painters like James Ensor and symbolist writers like Maurice Maeterlinck and Georges Rodenbach. For these and other intellectuals, including major representatives of Art Nouveau architecture and applied arts, anti-modernism was both an expression of and a response to the modern world, and principal among their reactions were primitivism, nostalgia, and Georgic celebration (Hirsh, 2004; Aubert, Fraiture, & McGuinness, 2007; Ogata, 2001). Furthermore, self-conscious planning for a better world-to HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE [489] which modernists were committed-required grounding in the local past. George Sarton, as a young man, followed the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites and their Romantic fellow-travellers, for example Eugène Fromentin, Richard Wagner, and above all Thomas Carlyle. Sarton's mature, scholarly work focused on the medieval world. Hendrik De Man wrote his doctoral dissertation on the medieval cloth industry in Flanders, a focus of Pirenne's scholarship, and the celebration of socialist corporations at the centre of his mature revision of Marxism derived from Henri Pirenne's writings on the history of capitalism in the Middle Ages. Hendrik de Man cast himself as a unique spirit: "I believe that I have not fallen under the decisive influence of anyone; life itself made me what I am". If he had to mention any influence, he wrote, politician Jean Jaurès came to mind. 2 Indeed, De Man's archives present the picture of a self-educated man. 3 Yet Henri Pirenne was decisive for De Man, and, as we shall see, so was George Sarton. In 1927, Henri Fuss, a contemporary and acquaintance of both De Man and Sarton, reviewed the French version of De Man's Psychology of socialism for the first volume of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre's Annales d'histoire économique et sociale. 4 Fuss described De Man as a brilliant pupil of Henri Pirenne and "one of the principal Belgian representatives of the intellectual generation that has today attained its maturity" (Fuss, 1929, 452-453).
L. Gosseye, F. Blom & A. Leerintveld (Eds.) Return to sender: Constantijn Huygens as a man of letters, 2013
Early modern artists use their productions and public actions as platforms for self presentation. In literature, both the materials selected for publication and the arrangement and presentation of the printed volumes are the results of choices made by the author to meet, respond or anticipate to the circumstances of publication. Collected poetry volumes are representational platforms par excellence. The critical evaluation of the collected volumes Otia and Momenta Desultoria by the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) has touched upon an essential aspect of in his literary artistry. Preparing his impact on readers, Huygens is in full control of a coherent publication strategy to improve his social position. He really is a great player of the game the Italians would call fare bella figura, that is constructing significant and useful façades or images. In that sense, a striking metaphor is found in Huygens’ architectural achievements in his theoretical treatise Domus and the building’s literary presentation in the collected volume of Latin poetry Momenta Desultoria.