Letter from the Editor

It is with great pleasure that I write this letter to our members. As most of you know our constitution has been passed. You will find it published following this letter. Future initiatives will be explored by Stephen Gaukeroger and the Officers of the Society and will be published in the next issue of Intellectual News.

Levent Yilmaz organized an excellent conference in Istanbul; we are all indebted to him. At times it did not seem anyone there was not smiling. The English anthropologist, Jack Goody, and Donald Kelley, one of our Society’s founding intellectual historians, gave the plenary talks: “Alterity and Modernity” and “Alterity Across the Ages: ‘Barbarism’ in Space and Time”. One of the great successes of our conferences, it seems to me, is that scholars from different disciplines meet and discuss topics that open up their own fields of research in reciprocally interesting, but also unpredictable ways. Two scholars, for example--Jack Goody and Siep Stuurmann--planned to stay in Istanbul to take up temporary professorships in the city. As they used to say of the late Mayor Daly’s Chicago, (father of the current Mayor) ‘I have seen the past and it works’. Istanbul has one of the most delightful pedestrian streets I have ever visited. The Istikial Caddesi, a street build at the turn of the last century with many art nouveau buildings in which are a myriad of shops, from book shops to carpet and clothing stores and seemingly endless restaurants sell Turkish pastries. There I was introduced to the writings of the now-famous Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, by the proprietor of a book store with Bonnie Smith and Don Kelley. It had the improbable name of Robinson Crusoe. I am currently reading Pamuk’s book, My name is Red. Some call it a Turkish version of The Name of the Rose, but it is more – for it captures the aesthetic and cultural conflicts between the old Middle East and the late Renaissance west as played out in miniature ateliers around 1580.

Summer issue
One specific area we focused on in this issue was modernity: in particular, the diverse ways in which the concept continues to play a significant role in the research of our members. Jacqueline Broad, Katie Lynch and Saheed Adej umobi each offered reflections on how that concept continues to be debated, as well as used, in their fields.
Our forthcoming issue (I.N.# 14) will include three essays on Frances Bacon, each giving a different perspective, but also a fresh perspective, on this English philosopher. Graham Rees, the editor (with Lisa Jardine) of the new edition of Francis Bacon texts at Oxford University Press will write about his forthcoming edition of Novum Organum. Jürgen Klein and I will discuss different aspects of Bacon’s reception and influence, Klein in seventeenth century Germany and I in eighteenth century England. Klein has discovered texts previously unknown to the Anglophone world that give a new perspective on the importance of Bacon in Germany during and after the religious wars. My own essay draws attention to the way the English edition by Peter Shaw, entitled Bacon Methodized (1733) demonstrates the great influence of the German tradition of historia literaria: Shaw’s footnotes chronicle the advancement of learning in precisely the areas recommended by Bacon in his text of that name. We will also reprint Shaw’s introductory essay to his whole edition Bacon, as well as his separate introduction to the Advancement of Learning. Finally, there will also be on essay on the intellectual history of libraries, in particular the transformation of the Istituto Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence. How have its holdings become so important, not only for historians of science, but for historians of art, architecture, and cultural history?

New topics for Intellectual News - Essay reviews.

At Stephen Gaukroger’s suggestion we will add in I.N. #14 book reviews, as well as continued what we view as the important section on members book announcements. It is important that these reviews not imitate the usual short notices but be international in scope or survey of the literature in the subject.. With this in mind we are planning a review of Howard Hotson’s books Alsted and Leibniz on God, The Magistrate and the Millenium, text ed. Howard Hotson, (Wiesbaden 1999), Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588 -1638, Between the Renaissance Reformation and Universal reform, (OUP 2000) and Paradise Postponed, J. H. Alsted and the birth of Calvinist Milleniumism, Dordrech, (Klewer 2001). This review, by Czech and Hungarian scholars who attended the Istanbul conference, will also discuss recent research on Alsted in their own countries. Colette Nativel will review the literature on Junius when assessing the recently published collection of letters: For my worthy French Franciscus Junius, 1591-1677 ed. By Sophie van Romburgh (Brill 2003) while also highlighting the surprising importance of this antiquarian to the development of aesthetics. The review by Camilla Russell of Kate Lowe’s Nuns’ Chronicles, (CUP, 2004) notes the important new research being done on the use of convents and places of free intellectual exchange during the Counter Reformation and other reviews.

Interviewing contemporary intellectual historians

We will continue what I hope will be a tradition of interviewing key intellectual historians who have done a great deal of work that has been paradigm changing – if one accepts that word. In this number, we have Cees Leijenhorst’s excellent interview of Charles Lohr, and in the next issue we will have a study of a scholar whose name is a secret at this point.