by

Dirk van Miert

The Intricacies of Conceptual History: The 192 Republics of Letters in Latin

I am currently busy drafting an article in which I analyse how early modern letter writers used the phrase ‘Republic of Letters’. As a corpus, I use the 20,020 letters in the wonderful ePistolarium, developed by the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands. These letters comprise the correspondences of a number of important citizens of the Republic of Letters, including Hugo Grotius, Constantijn Huygens, Christiaan Huygens, René Descartes, Caspar Barlaeus, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and Johannes Swammerdam, as well as two minor collections by Isaac Beeckman and Dirck Rembrantsz van Nierop. These people are only a handful of the hundreds of correspondences available from the 17th century, but they are well studied and generally taken as representative of the ‘Republic of Letters’, since they include scholars, scientists, poets, brokers – important figures and lesser gods – writing in Latin, French and in some other vernaculars.

An obvious first question was of course how often these people invoked the Republic of Letters. Since the corpus is multilingual, I anticipated that my largest problem in charting instances would be to trace the word ‘Republic of Letters’ across different languages, forcing me to translate the word into several vernaculars and negotiate spelling variants, such as Republic(k) with c or k, or differences such as Gelehrtenrepublik and Gelehrte Republik. Indeed, trying out various forms, I ended up with one instance of Republick of Letters and one of Commonwealth of Learning (there are very few English letters in the corpus), 7 times the phrase République des Lettres, and once the Italian Repubblica letteraria. The most surprising thing is the small number of French hits: 26.5 % of the corpus is in French (32.8 in Latin and 37.1 in Dutch, but the Republiek der Letteren does not figure in any of these Dutch letters!).

It turned out, however, that my largest challenge was the phrase in Latin. In fact, it turns out that the Latin expression counts a staggering 192 variations! Let me explain, for this makes it frustratingly complex to deliver on easy promises to conduct a key word analysis.

The best known form of the expression is no doubt respublica literaria (learned republic). Sometimes the variant respublica literarum (republic of letters) is mentioned in secondary literature (this form is common in English, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, but far less so in Latin). As I went along, however, I realised that it would not be surprising if letter writers spoke of a respublica literatorum (republic of the learned) or even a respublica literata (literate republic or republic versed in letters; this variant is suggested by the phrase orbis literatus, the literate world, which also frequently occurs in the letters). Digging into the data, I realised that in any of these, the word respublica can occur separated as res publica or abbreviated as resp.; in each, the radix lit(t)era- can occur with single or double t; and in each the word order can be reversed. To my relief, I have never seen the format res literaria publica or the theoretically possible publica res.

In total there are, then, 192 possible variations; see the tables below. Unfortunately, the Lucene query syntax of the ePistolarium seems unable to cope with combining wildcards and double quotes. The formula

“Re*publica* lit*erar*” OR “lit*erar* re*publica*”

proved too complex, and even

“Re*publica* lit*erar*”

yielded no hits.

In practice, at least in the 20,020 letters of the ePistolarium, the majority take the form respublica lit(t)eraria; the format respublica literatorum is found only once, and the word respublica is never separated, at least not in combinations denoting the Republic of Letters. Surprisingly, the common known variant of Respublica literarum is mentioned only once. The form Republica litterria in fact occurs in two more letters, but those are in Italian, and constitute a spelling variant of Repubblica letteraria (which occurs once, in another Italian letter by the same author). Note that some variants are neutralised by editorial decisions to expand the abbreviation resp. or to standardise the use either of single or of double t.

After easy but burdensome work (which happily seduced me to read many of the letters), it resulted that the phrase occurs only 44 times in all those 20,020 letters. I also realised that the vocabulary can be expanded: permutations of the phrase ‘learned world’ (orbis literarius, -tus, -torum) occur 11 times. The words ‘all the learned men’ (omnes litteratores) were dropped 10 times. But still: on twenty thousand letters, this gives the impression that the Republic of Letters was no big deal for the people we like to style as self-aware citizens of a virtual community.

Much more about the context and function of ‘invoking the Republic of Letters’ will be said in the actual article, but one thing is clear by now: charting the geographical and spatial distribution of this concept cannot be done with a single formula and should be done largely ‘manually’. It also implies that I from now on I will be more critical about the practical side of projects that promise to do digital conceptual history, at least of compound concepts, and above all Latin ones. Perhaps this is the reason why Google N-gram still has no predefined corpus of Latin texts to select

The 192 permutations of the ‘Republic of Letters’ in Latin

(the numbers, e.g. in the first box, refer to the number of hits in the ePistolarium)