Workshop report by Dr Robin Buning.
More than five years after the workshop Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and Prophecy: Eschatological Expectations between East-Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670 in January 2009, which was the first event of the Cultures of Knowledge project, Prague was again the scene of a two-day conference on intellectual networks.
The Cultures of Knowledge 2014 Michaelmas seminar series begins Monday 20th October! In case you haven’t seen the posters or email announcements yet, we hereby invite you to join us for this term’s seminar series, The Digital Humanist: Open Resources, Shared Standards, Virtual Communities. The set of five talks will be held on Mondays at 5.15pm, at the History Faculty in Oxford, and all are welcome to come to the seminar and join us for a glass of wine in the common room afterwards.
Introducing the new COST Action ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500-1800: A digital framework for multi-lateral collaboration on Europe’s intellectual history’.
It’s been a hugely busy and very productive year thus far in the C of K office, and as I sit indoors with the early June sun rising outside it seems high time to offer the world a brief project update on our work to date.
Caspar Schott S.J. (1608-1666) is a remarkable representative of the passion for scientific knowledge that, in the first two thirds of the seventeenth century, possessed enough educated people across Europe as to create a new social entity – the Republic of Letters – the service of which became their primary loyalty. They did not know exactly where they were headed, nor did they particularly foresee the magnitude of their impact; what they did know with blazing conviction was that the long tradition of philosophical theorising without the support of quantitative experiment was bankrupt. As Schott’s mentor and hero Athanasius Kircher says: ‘All philosophy unless grounded in experiment is empty fallacious and useless…Experiment alone is the arbiter of disputed questions, the reconciler of difficulties and the one teacher of the truth’1. This common conviction bonded scholars of disparate religious and philosophical outlooks to the citizenship of a republic of learning.
The Leverhulme Trust has recently announced that that it is to fund the publication of a substantial portion of the extensive correspondence of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614). This project, directed by Dr Paul Botley at the University of Warwick, will produce a critical edition of Casaubon’s correspondence during his last years in England, from his arrival in 1610 until his death in 1614.
We’re excited to announce a part-time, fixed term job opportunity with Cultures of Knowledge, available from 1 March 2013. Are you an eagle-eyed lover of data? Do you love early modern letters? Would you like to work behind the scenes for one of the University of Oxford’s largest and most exciting digital humanities enterprises? If so, read on…
We are seeking a highly motivated and meticulous digital editorial assistant with strong IT skills to work part-time with us for 9 months. The successful applicant will contribute to the digitisation of metadata on early modern correspondence by using bespoke data-entry and data manipulation software. Working on a variety of datasets of early modern letters, he or she will help us accurately and responsibly expand our union catalogue, ingesting thousands of records of letters from archives and libraries around the world. Full training on using our software will be provided. It is essential that the successful applicant has a keen eye for detail and is confident with maintaining the highest standards of accuracy during the often mechanical tasks necessary to process large amounts of data.
Early Modern Editor? Cape and hat optional.
Tommaso da Modena, ‘Hugo of Saint-Cher’, 1352 (wikimedia commons)
The closing date for this position is Wednesday 12th February. For further details of the post and instructions on how to apply, head over to the University job site (Further Particulars also available here). We have other opportunities in the pipeline – in the coming months we will be advertising for a Digital Humanities Fellow, and we will also be recruiting more ad-hoc, hourly-paid Digital Fellows to help us reach our ingest targets. To stay informed of these vacancies, please sign-up to the blog’s RSS Feed, Follow Us on Twitter, or join our Mailing List.
If you have any queries about the position, email Lizzy Williamson at elizabeth.williamson@history.ox.ac.uk or call +44(0)1865 615026. We look forward to hearing from you!
We are thrilled to announce the publication of a new volume of Jan Amos Comenius‘ Opera Omnia, by our esteemed colleagues in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, partners in our ongoing project around the correspondence and networks of Comenius.
Christmas is just around the corner and for those with young children this may well entail – as well as wrapping late and waking early – obligatory attendance at the traditional school plays that re-enact a particularly famous birth. The Nativity may be unique, but whether for celebration, ritual or act of witness, the account of a birth has a real potency, and rarely more so than in the context of dynastic royalty.
We are delighted to report that, from 1 December 2013, Robin Buning will be joining Cultures of Knowledge as a Research Fellow, working on the detailed reconstruction of the epistolary community of Samuel Hartlib (c.1600-1662). Robin’s work on this celebrated network will continue a long-standing collective effort, advanced most recently by Dr Leigh Penman during his fellowship within Cultures of Knowledge between 2009 and 2011.