Abraham Ortelius, who thanks to his Theatrum orbis terrarum, is best known as the author of what is described frequently as ‘the first modern atlas’, was an extensive traveller: the son of an Antwerp merchant, he journeyed through the Low Countries, France, Italy, Germany, and crossed the channel to England, from where he moved on west to Ireland. Back in Antwerp, he began to compile and publish his own maps, starting with a wall map of the world and continuing with maps of ancient Egypt; the Roman empire; Asia; and Spain. In 1573, Philip II conferred on him the honour of the title of ‘his majesty’s geographer’, and today EMLO is truly delighted to be publishing Ortelius’s catalogue of correspondence.

Fittingly, but to the intense frustration of early modern historians, the story behind the after-life of Ortelius’s correspondence is composed of travel and movement as well. Ortelius became one of the leading humanists of the Low Countries and was in communication with a large number of the leading European intellectuals of his day; some decades after his death in 1598, the bulk of his correspondence ended up in the custody of the Dutch Church in London, possibly as the result of a bequest from his nephew, Jacobus Colius the younger. There the letters remained safe and sound until 1862 when the remaining nave of Austin Friars, the Dutch Church in question, was destroyed by fire. Thankfully the letters were saved and were deposited in the Library of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall. From there, at the end of 1884, they were relocated temporarily to Cambridge University Library to allow Jan Hendrick Hessels to prepare his edition for publication. Disaster befell the (now reconstructed) Dutch Church once again when, during an air raid in 1940, a German bomb razed it to the ground. To fund rebuilding work, Ortelius’s letters were dispatched for auction and sold through Sotheby’s, London, to an American collector, Dr Otto Fischer, who rehomed them in Detroit. A second sale was held, back again in London with Sotheby’s in 1968, as a result of which the letters were well and truly scattered across the face of the globe. Since 1992, Ortelius scholar Joost Depuydt, an archivist at the FelixArchief [City Archive], Antwerp, has worked meticulously to track down and reunite them virtually, and to add more letters which were not published by Hessels. The fruits of his ongoing research are now to be found here in EMLO and in an article in the current issue of Imago Mundi.

As with all the catalogues we are bringing together in EMLO, it is hoped very much that as further letters come to light these will be brought to our attention so the scholars who work on the relevant correspondence may be contacted and fresh metadata added. This is one of the joys of online publication: a catalogue need not be set in stone and letters may be inserted when and as they are verified. Both Joost Depuydt and EMLO would be extremely grateful, therefore, if scholars and archivists worldwide could keep their antennae charged and should additional letters to or from Ortelius surface be in touch. Naturally, all who contribute in any way will be credited in full. Last week I found myself writing about shadowy figures and missing portraits; this week we’re on the trail of letters, for it is only with the help of the scholarly community worldwide that we will be able to reassemble as completely as possible, letter by letter, our early modern correspondences and thus piece back into existence the networks of people that sit behind and within them. So, if on your travels, you encounter stray letters of ‘his majesty’s geographer’, please let us know …

This week sees publication in EMLO of the correspondence of the Dutch philologist, manuscript collector, and polymath Isaac Vossius. Son of the eminent scholar G. J. Vossius and his second wife, Elisabeth Junius, Isaac amassed over the course of a lifetime what was considered to be one of the era’s greatest collections of books and manuscripts and, ultimately, his collection was bought in 1710 for the sum of 36,000 florins by the University of Leiden, where it resides today.

EMLO’s catalogue of Isaac Vossius’s correspondence, containing 1,702 letters in total, was pieced together by Cultures of Knowledge’s Postdoctoral Fellow Robin Buning, largely on the basis of his research in three archives: Amsterdam University Library, Leiden University Library, and Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The letters encompass the full spectrum of Vossius’s interests: he published editions and commentaries on classical as well as contemporary authors; he conducted historical studies; he was regarded widely as an important scholar in ancient geography, patristics, and chronology. Although Isaac caused controversy with a series of treatises on the age of the earth, in later years he shifted his focus to mathematics and natural philosophy. A religious libertine, just prior to his death in Windsor in February 1689, Vossius is recorded as refusing the sacrament until the pleas of his fellow canons convinced him that this was something he should receive, if not for the good of his soul in the life hereafter, then at least for the sake of their reputation.

Unfortunately we know nothing about Isaac Vossius’s appearance: no portrait is thought to survive. Of course it’s possible that an image will emerge, perhaps from his years spent at the court of Christina of Sweden, or from the last two decades of his life in England. It is conceivable also that a portrait or print depicting him exists but is mislabelled and lies tucked away masquerading as someone else. We can but hope. And, whilst on the subject of identifying people, EMLO users might be interested to note that we shall be posting shortly a list of early modern individuals for whom little information is available at present but about whom a scholar or project would like to know more. I shall write in a future blog about this ‘wanted list’, but in the meantime should anyone wish to add a name — or names — please be in touch and let me know. Details of those seeking information will not be made public and should fellow scholars be able and willing to help, responses will be forwarded straight to the scholar or project posting the name. For now enjoy Isaac Vossius, but please keep an eye open for his portrait! It would be good to meet him face to face.

We are pleased to be publishing this week a catalogue of particular interest both to historians of science and to historians of collections: the correspondence of the first keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot. Metadata for this correspondence has been collated from the indispensable work of Robert Gunther, the zoologist, antiquary, and historian of science who between 1920 and 1945 published fourteen volumes entitled Early Science in Oxford and who was himself the inaugural curator of Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science.

Robert Plot was known during his lifetime as ‘the learned Dr Plot’. He published natural histories of Oxfordshire and Staffordshire, and was appointed simultaneously Oxford’s first professor of chemistry and curator of Elias Ashmole’s substantial donation to the University, which formed the foundation of the Ashmolean. Plot lived and worked in the building in Broad Street (now the fittingly the Museum of the History of Science) that was constructed especially to display Ashmole’s gift alongside a School of Natural History, which was located on the middle floor, and a chemical laboratory, which was set out in the basement. Opening in 1683, the museum was the first institutional collection in England to permit access to the general public. Gunther is a mine of information about these crucial years of scientific advancement in Oxford, and there is many a treat in store for those who have not encountered his volumes hitherto. When discussing Plot’s resignation as secretary of the Royal Society, for example, Gunther considers the coach service between Oxford and London, speculating that this might have been a factor in Plot’s decision. ‘Between 1660 and 1669,’ Gunther writes, ‘a diligence ran from Oxford to London in two days. The passengers slept at Beaconsfield. In 1669 a Flying Coach started from All Souls College at 6 a.m. and reached the capital at 7 p.m. The cost was about twopence-halfpenny a mile.’ Somewhat pricey, my colleague the John Wallis scholar Philip Beeley has pointed out, when bearing in mind as comparison that a standard letter could be sent from Oxford to Scotland at a cost of just 5 pence.

Of course there is significant overlap between these letters published by Gunther and those in a number of alternative catalogues available already in EMLO, in particular those of Martin Lister and Edward Lhwyd (Lhwyd was Plot’s assistant at the fledgling Ashmolean and, from 1690, his successor to the post of Keeper), as well as with records in the Bodleian card catalogue. With the assistance of current Oxford students these parallel letter records are being linked to enable EMLO’s users to toggle between different interpretations of the same letter within the union catalogue, and this feature will be in place very shortly. In the meantime, we trust you will enjoy Plot’s letters, and we hope also you will take this opportunity to explore Gunther’s volumes.

In the week that a possible ninth planet appears in the BBC news firmament, we are exceptionally pleased to announce serendipitous publication in EMLO of the first installment of our catalogue of Johannes Kepler’s correspondence. Thankfully Kepler — following initial leanings towards theology — kept his gaze fixed steadfastly upwards and turned his attention to the heavens by making astronomical observations. ‘I wanted to become a theologian’, he explained in 1595 to Michael Maestlin, the Tübingen professor of mathematics who had first introduced him to Copernicanism, ‘and for a long time I was restless. Now however, behold how God is being celebrated in astronomy.’

We should be thankful also that it has been possible to compile this epistolarly calendar for Kepler in a number of stages. First, Professor Adam Mosley kindly made available to EMLO the treasure-trove that is his working spreadsheet of astronomical correspondence collated in the course of his research and publication on Tycho Brahe, from which we extracted records of Kepler’s letters and passed these to Dr Francesco Barreca of the Museo Galileo, Institute and Museum for the History of Science, Florence, for significant scholarly expansion. Working from Johannes Kepler. Gesammelte Werke (ed. Max Caspar, et al., currently 20 vols [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1938–]), Dr Barreca expanded the metadata considerably, enriching each letter record with invaluable and searchable abstracts and keywords, and by creating links between letters to indicate which letter is in reply to or is answered by which. Each letter record includes also a link to the indispensable Kommission zur Herausgabe der Werke von Johannes Kepler where, if users click through to ‘KGW Digital’, searchable PDFs of the relevant volumes may be downloaded.

Alongside Tycho Brahe, Kepler is one of the very central figures in early modern cosmology and astronomy, and together these two astronomers are forming the firm foundations of what we hope will develop into a rapidly expanding cluster of astronomically focussed correspondences in EMLO. As a first step towards this, eagle-eyed of users of the union catalogue may have spotted a change in how we are choosing to list and group our ever-expanding list of correspondences. Were you to visit EMLO’s catalogue page you would find now the full index of our correspondences set out alphabetically within the ‘Catalogues’ section in a manner you will recognize, as well as work-in-progress areas where we plan to enable in the very near future chronological, geographical, and thematic searching and where we will provide a number of bird-eye-view visualizations. We will be compiling also useful listings set out both by contributor to EMLO and by holding institution of manuscript versions. We hope you will find these of use as you navigate the expanding EMLO universe; please keep revisiting as it will not be long before you will meet both Kepler and Brahe again in the astronomically themed section. As our work continues, you will notice increasing links being forged between correspondences, across the subject matters contained therein, and among the people and places involved. It is in this way that we will begin to shed light on those who in the period under our investigation worked on, amongst a myriad of other topics, cosmographic mysteries.

Hard on the heels of the correspondence of Flemish mystic Antoinette Bourignon, which was published in EMLO earlier this month, our final catalogue to appear this side of Christmas is that of Amalia von Solms, daughter of Johann Albrecht I of Solms-Braunfels, lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth of Bohemia, and wife of the Dutch statholder Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau. Although much of her correspondence is no longer extant, Amalia, who exercised significant political influence both during the lifetime of her husband and after his death, corresponded extensively with her secretary, Constantijn Huygens, on a myriad of subjects — everything from matters of state to the education of her grandchildren — and it is these letters that form the focus of the catalogue at present. The metadata for Amalia’s correspondence are being made available to EMLO by Dr Ineke Huysman of Huygens ING and over the course of the coming weeks and months additional letters, metadata, and links to external resources will be added. And of course both catalogues — those of Amalia von Solms and Antoinette Bourignon — will contribute in no small measure to the work being conducted by our colleagues at Women’s Early Modern Letters Online.

Whilst the correspondence of Constantijn Huygens, currently with metadata taken from J.A. Worp’s edition (The Hague, 1911–17) and provided to EMLO by our partners at the Circulation of Knowledge project from their text-mining database, the ePistolarium, may be consulted in tandem, users will find it particularly useful to follow the links provided in Amalia’s catalogue to the Huygens Brieven Online database, where manuscript images, transcriptions, translations, and printed copies, may be consulted. Hugyens Brieven Online is also under the expert oversight of Dr Ineke Huysman and we are working together to ensure the most accurate and up-to-date metadata is available to scholars in EMLO.

On this short, winter-solstice day, as many continue to consign to the mail cards and parcels for friends and relations, I’d like to post an epistolary gift to you, our invaluable community of early modern scholars. It comes in the form of two short videos, both directed by Nadine Akkerman of Leiden University and Jana Dambrogio of MIT. The first, A Tiny Spy Letter: Constantijn Huygens to Amalia von Solms, 1635, shows a reconstruction demonstrating how Amalia would have opened one of the smallest pleated letters known to have existed, before tucking it safely into her sleeve. The second, Amalia von Solms’s Holograph Letter to Eleonore de Volvire: A Letter of Condolence, 1670, reconstructs the folding, sealing, and addressing of the letter in which Amalia commiserates with Eleonore on the loss of her husband, François de l’Aubespine (1584–1670), Marquis de Hauterive-Châteauneuf and Governor of Breda. Do watch and marvel, and perhaps even venture to consider how today we could economise on envelopes and fold our Christmas missives …

On behalf of all at EMLO, I wish you neat locking and a happy midwinter break!

A landmark publication appears in EMLO this week in the form of the correspondence of an early modern individual so central to the epistolary networks being pieced back together by our research project Cultures of Knowledge that he needs little by way of introduction. Suffice it to say we could not be more delighted to usher into the union catalogue our first installment of the catalogue of Henry Oldenburg’s correspondence. During the past year, work has been underway to collate metadata from the edition published between 1965 and 1986 by Alfred Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, and our intention is to release the resulting calendar in three batches over the course of the coming few months.

As secretary, Oldenburg conducted almost all of the official correspondence of the early Royal Society. The metadata of the Halls in their remarkable edition represents, therefore, the core correspondence of the Society from its inception until Oldenburg’s death in September 1672. This first third of the correspondence, taken from volumes I to V and spanning the years 1641 to the end of May 1669, intersects seamlessly with five of the key foundation catalogues around which EMLO was constructed: namely those of John Aubrey, Samuel Hartlib, Edward Lhwyd, Martin Lister, and John Wallis. Users of EMLO may wish to note that these are scheduled to be joined shortly by catalogues of many of Oldenburg’s other correspondents, including Robert Boyle, John Collins, David Gregory, James Gregory, Robert Plot, and Francis Vernon.

We hope very much that you relish EMLO’s early mid-winter gift of Oldenburg and, when his calendar is brought to completion, that you will watch as links are created and ‘dots’ joined. In the interest of joining still more dots, it should be remembered that although EMLO in its current iteration is primarily a catalogue of epistolary metadata, many individual letter records can accommodate a great deal of further work. Scholars and students focussing on individual catalogues, or portions of catalogues, are warmly invited to enrich them with additional data: people, places, or events mentioned; abstracts; transcripts; or links between series of letters sent and received. If you are interested in making a contribution of this nature, please do get in touch. These are the invaluable details that will help knit together crucial connections across the union catalogue and integrate its innumerable parts into a more densely interlinked whole.

For those who did not have the pleasure of attending the paper presented in the very first Cultures of Knowledge seminar series by the renowned scholar Professor Mirjam de Baar of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen (the podcast of this paper may be downloaded from our previous website), or for those who have not encountered before the subject of Professor de Baar’s research, I should like to introduce here Antoinette Bourignon, the Flemish spiritual mystic and prophetess, whose catalogue of correspondence became available in EMLO this week.

EMLO is particularly fortunate to have worked with Professor de Baar to make available online the calendar of this remarkable woman’s letters. Born in Lille in 1616, Bourignon, who received no formal education or theological training, embarked upon — to quote Professor de Baar — ‘a spiritual voyage of discovery, one that led her to take a critical and independent stance in relation to the church and its doctrinal authority’. Bourignon, who felt herself compelled to gather together true Christians and professed herself chosen by God to restore true Christianity on earth, purchased and ran her own printing press in a bid to disseminate her message via a myriad of published epistles. Among Bourignon’s more-renowned followers were numbered the Dutch natural scientist Jan Swammerdam, the French theologian Pierre Poiret, the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle (whose correspondence catalogue will be released in EMLO shortly), and one of the subjects of last week’s blog, Moravian-born pansophist Jan Amos Comenius. Large numbers of Bourignon’s disciples, both male and female, who gravitated to her from a wide spectrum of social backgrounds and political situations across the face of Europe, wrote to Bourignon for guidance on spiritual and personal matters, and their concerns and individual voices may be discerned clearly in Bourignon’s published responses. Where scans of Bourignon’s published letters are available online, EMLO provides links from the relevant letter record in the calendar and we urge you to take advantage of these to read some of her letters. Bourignon wrote a spiritual autobiography, published under the title La Parole de Dieu in 1663, and for further biographical information we could not recommend more highly Professor de Baar’s biography (‘Ik moet spreken’. Het spiritueel leiderschap van Antoinette Bourignon [1616–1680]), which was published in 2004 by WalburgPers.

Bourignon is just one of a number of intriguing and influential early modern women whose correspondences are in preparation at present for inclusion in EMLO’s union catalogue. Within the next few months, for example, calendars for the correspondences of Amalia von Solms and of Elizabeth of Bohemia will be released and, of course, we are working with our long-term partners at the British Academy project Women’s Early Modern Letters Online, headed by Professor James Daybell and Dr Kim McLean Fiander; their collection of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century women’s correspondence will be made available within EMLO and it will be possible soon to conduct searches either exclusively within the cluster of women’s correspondence or to expand out from this across the EMLO catalogue as a whole. These are productive times for the studies of early modern women, and we look forward greatly to publication of these catalogues as well as to the spotlight being shone onto the fascinating networks surrounding them when the prosopgraphical tools we are creating here in Oxford are brought into wider play.

This week’s publications in EMLO are focussed firmly around ongoing work orchestrated in ‘the Lands of the Bohemian Crown’ and we see the correspondence of Amandus Polanus of Polansdorf join the union catalogue, together with an ‘omnium gatherum’ of the correspondence of late-sixteenth and early seventeenth century Czech students who travelled to the Protestant learned centres of western Europe.

Amandus Polanus, the Silesian-born theologian, studied in Troppau [Opava], Breslau [Wroclaw; Vratislav], Tübingen, Basel, and Geneva, before settling as professor of Old Testament in Basel. The calendar of his correspondence has been assembled thus far under the aegis of a project established in Prague, ‘Correspondence networks between Central and Western Europe: From Comenius and Kircher to Hartlib and Oldenburg’, which was funded by the Czech Academy of Sciences for three years from mid-2012 to support cooperation between the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Oxford. Members of the project’s team have investigated the relationship of the Unity of Brethren to the Reformed centres of education in the Empire and Switzerland, the connection of Jan Amos Comenius [Komenský] and his circle to the large international communication networks of the seventeenth century (in particular to the circle of Samuel Hartlib), the overlaps between Jesuit mathematicians in Prague and the correspondence networks of Athanasius Kircher and Christiaan Huygens, and contacts of scholars from Silesia with the Academia naturae curiosorum and the Royal Society. Funding from this project has enabled scholars working in these areas to be brought together and a series of workshops, meetings, and talks were conducted in Oxford, Prague, and Vienna at which new research topics were discussed and presented. Two exemplary workshops were organized in Prague: ‘Databases in Early Modern Research: Tracing People, Books and Letters’ took place in September 2013 and was followed a year later with ‘The Practice of Scholarly Communication: Correspondence Networks Between Central and Western Europe, 1550–1700’. A volume, edited by Vladimír Urbánek and Iva Lelková and based on reworked contributions from the latter workshop, as well as newly commissioned papers, is in preparation currently for publication next year with Ashgate. The project also funded extensive research in the archives and libraries in Wrocław, Berlin, Budapest, Leipzig, Halle an der Saale, Herrnhut, Oxford, London, Basel, Zürich, Olomouc, and Brno, and a number of hitherto unpublished letters from Comenius’s correspondence have been discovered and added to the catalogue in EMLO. Together with Czech participation in the European COST Action Reassembling the Republic of Letters, this project has enabled continuation of the fruitful collaboration between the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History of the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences and our own Cultures of Knowledge here at Oxford.

In addition to the Polanus catalogue, for which metadata of the letters from the Swiss archives (Universitätsbibliothek Basel, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, and Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich) is published this week with further letters from a number of Czech archives to be added in the near future, a catalogue has been compiled of the correspondence of the physician Philipp Jacob Sachs von Lewenheimb, and this was published in EMLO last year. Meanwhile, ever eager to pull its weight, Cultures of Knowledge has rolled up its proverbial sleeves and, in partnership with our Prague colleagues and the Digital Library of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, has assembled a calendar taken from František Hrubý’s 1970 edition of correspondence of Bohemian and Moravian students who studied at Protestant universities in Western Europe. It is a truly fascinating selection of letters and, all in all, these publications in EMLO and the work of our partners in Prague are a cause for celebration. We hope very much you will explore in EMLO some of the research being headed by Vladimír Urbánek at the Czech Academy of Sciences and enjoy the fruits of an invaluable collaboration.

Dissent and nonconformity are firmly in focus this week with the quatercentenary of the birth of the ejected minister and religious writer Richard Baxter (1615–1691) to be celebrated on Thursday and, in consequence, we would like to draw your attention to an important editorial initiative as well as to a related symposium and to the beginnings of Baxter in EMLO.

Here in the UK, an international group of scholars at the Richard Baxter Correspondence Project are in the process of embarking upon their formidable task of preparing a comprehensive critical edition of Baxter’s extensive correspondence. This edition is to be published in nine volumes by Oxford University Press. Building on the detailed foundation laid in 1991 by N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall in their Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (which may be accessed, for those at a contributing institution, on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online [OSEO]), this edition will present for the first time the full text of every surviving letter within the corpus and the prefatory epistles to Baxter’s printed works, and will provide in addition extensive annotation and material description of the very manuscripts themselves. As this correspondence project begins, its elder sibling, the AHRC-funded Reliquiae Baxterianae Project, which is committed to providing — once again for the first time — a fully annotated and reliable scholarly edition of the complete text of Baxter’s 800-page folio Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), is nearing completion. Both projects are to be congratulated and celebrated in the course of this Baxterian week.

EMLO is delighted to be working both with the Baxter Correspondence Project and with our trusted partners at OUP. To mark the beginnings of the Project’s work towards this monumental undertaking, we are publishing this week a fledgling catalogue, the introductory page for which will serve to update its followers with postings regarding progress and relevant items of interest. As the Baxter scholars proceed with their work in the months and years to come, a full epistolary calendar in EMLO will be pieced together. You will find just eight letters within the catalogue at present — a curious number, you may think — but these pioneer letters have been mounted as a foundation because they have been selected by Baxter editors Johanna Harris and Alison Searle to feature in a small online exhibition, created to celebrate the quatercentenary as well as to act as what we at EMLO hope will seve as the pilot in an ongoing series of correspondence-related exhibitions.

Concerning the week’s concrete celebrations, we would like to draw your immediate attention to a one-day symposium hosted by the Baxter Correspondence Project in collaboration with Dr Williams’s Library, the leading research library of English protestant nonconformity. In the course of Friday’s proceedings, our own Cultures of Knowledge Project Director, Professor Howard Hotson, will deliver a paper entitled ‘”What I had out of books”: Richard Baxter and “the general reformation of common learning”’, and members of the two Baxter projects will present their research and discuss work on the forthcoming edition. Of course, the Baxter archive at Dr Williams’s Library, testifying as it does to Baxter’s arguably unrivalled social, political, religious, and intellectual connections, is a truly invaluable resource and there could be no more fitting place in the world to stage this event. Should you happen to be in London on Friday, 13 November, and would like to attend, please be in touch with the organizers; further details of the day’s proceedings may be found here. And to conclude this run of celebrations, were you to tune into BBC Radio 3 this coming Sunday you would hear broadcast as part of the New Generation Thinkers series a programme, presented by Dr Thomas Charlton from the Reliquiae Baxterianae Project, on the life and ‘trouble-making’ thoughts of our ‘man of the week’. Dissenters enjoy!

by Philip Beeley and Miranda Lewis

As a postscript to last week’s round-up of work in EMLO on mathematical correspondence, we would like very much to draw your attention to the latest volume of Leonhard Euler’s Opera Omnia. Edited by Martin Mattmüller and Franz Lemmermeyer, Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia vol. IVA 4: Commercium Epistolicum cum Christiano Goldbach — which is the first volume to appear in the ongoing series since 2004 — presents Euler’s correspondence with Prussian jurist and amateur mathematician Christian Goldbach (1690–1764).

Goldbach’s mathematical career can be said to have begun in Oxford. In 1712, while on a Grand Tour of Europe, he bumped into the Swiss mathematician Nicolaus I Bernoulli, also on European travels, in the Bodleian Library. When in discussion within those illustrious walls Goldbach declared he knew nothing of higher mathematics, Bernoulli lent him a book on infinite series by his uncle Jacob. After numerous false starts, Goldbach was able finally to establish himself as a mathematician and in 1725, then in Moscow, he began his epistolarly exchange with Euler. The new and comprehensively edited volume contains 196 letters, each one transcribed in the original language (either German or Latin) and supplemented with a full translation into English. The correspondence between the two mathematicians charts their lifelong friendship and spans more than thirty-five years. Their fascinating exchange offers an overview of eighteenth-century number theory, its sources, and its repercussions, as well as a glimpse into scholarly circles in St Petersburg and Berlin between the years 1725 and 1765, and, as it reconstructs the development of many of Euler’s most significant achievements, this volume will prove invaluable to mathematical historians around the globe.

For further details, and an order form, see here.