In the early stages of the Cultures of Knowledge project, those precursory days in which workshops, seminars, and conferences were scheduled, when hard-copy editions were still the primary concern, and when Early Modern Letters Online as we know it now was no more than a glimmer in a number of professorial eyes, a handful of scholars were quick to spot the potential of the journey upon which we were embarking. And, of these, Dr Noémi Viskolcz, the scholar behind EMLO’s latest catalogue to be published — that of the correspondence of Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld — was the first. As our project director, Professor Howard Hotson, recalls, ‘It was in the very first month, at the very first workshop, which was held in Prague in January 2009, that Noémi asked if we’d like to include her metadata for the correspondences of Permeier and Bisterfeld’.

Today we welcome the second of Dr Viskolcz’s catalogues into EMLO. Bisterfeld, described recently by Professor Hotson as ‘truly treasured by those who know him’, was based from the age of twenty-four in Alba Iulia [Gyulafehérvár], then the capital of the Principality of Transylvania and the city to which he had travelled from Herborn in 1629 at the invitation of Gábor Bethlen, prince of Transylvania. Having completed this arduous journey (some one-and-a-half thousand kilometres) in the company of both Philipp Ludwig Piscator and his own father-in-law and former teacher Johann Heinrich Alsted, Bisterfeld remained in Alba Iulia for the rest of his life. As a professor at the city’s new Academia, he continued to exchange letters, however, with a number of scholars and members of learned circles across Western Europe. His correspondence provides an invaluable addition to EMLO, where it will be joined later this year by catalogues for, amongst others, Alsted.

We are delighted to announce simultaneously that it is possible now to search for catalogues within EMLO by contributor, whether an individual scholar, a correspondence project, a publisher, or a library. We hope this index will provide a sense of the broad range and scholarly expertise of the growing body of contributors working now with EMLO, as well as a means of checking quickly the origin of each catalogue’s metadata. It seems fitting at this stage of our history to reflect upon the origins of EMLO’s burgeoning catalogues, and we would like to thank those who, from the earliest days of Cultures of Knowledge, have followed the example of Dr Viskolcz with contributions of metadata. Of course, with each calendar of correspondence published in the union catalogue, our twenty-first century hopes for the early modern networks that stretched across the face of Europe and beyond become increasingly less of an aspirational dream and more an achievable reality. Coincidentally, this week also sees publication of an article by Howard Hotson in the Intellectual History Review. Entitled ‘Highways of light to the invisible college: linking data on seventeenth-century intellectual diasporas’, the article contains a discussion of Culture of Knowledge, of EMLO, and of the Reassembling the Republic of Letters COST Action, as well as the possibilities that lie ahead, all seen through the lens of the audacious pansophic enterprises of Comenius and Hartlib, who have provided one focus of attention for the scholarly dimension of the project since those first days in Prague. Who would not be excited about a virtual platform that, as Howard explains, could see ‘transnational and interdisciplinary scholarly communities capable of comprehending the communication revolution of the early modern period in ways virtually unimaginable during the age of print’? Happy Easter reading!

Detail from ‘Portrait of Monsignor Agucchi’, by Annibale Carracci. 1603–04. Oil on canvas, overall dimensions 60.3 by 46.3cm. (York Art Gallery, accession number 787; reproduced by kind permission of York Museums Trust [York Art Gallery] and used as the logo for the Cultures of Knowledge project).