“The Internet Of The Enlightenment”

The leading lights of the Enlightenment weren’t as worldly as we imagine they were, according to recent research from Stanford:

CESTA’s biggest project is Mapping the Republic of Letters, a catch-all title for a series of studies, including [Giovanna] Ceserani’s, that aim to shed light on the internet of the Enlightenment: the network of correspondence that linked intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries. “We’re like the NSA,” says Dan Edelstein, a professor of French. “We look at who wrote to whom, when and where.”

An obvious target for this form of surveillance was Voltaire.

Among his many contributions to the Enlightenment was his “Lettres Philosophiques”, published in 1734, which he claimed introduced Locke to a French readership. Voltaire had lived in Britain for three years and spoke English. So when Edelstein first looked at the visualization of his correspondence, “what jumped out at me was that Voltaire wrote so little to Britain. There were only 140 letters out of a total of around 15,000—less than 1 percent.” …

This is a recurrent theme in the Republic of Letters project. The networks of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment were far more restricted than the academics had imagined. Paula Findlen, a professor of Italian history, says the same was true of Galileo. “We think of him today as perhaps the first scientific celebrity. But he lived in a relatively local world until he was forced not to.” It was only after this great polymath came under the menacing gaze of the Inquisition that he reached out for help to non-Italian intellectuals.