Manuscript archives hold a truly incredible corpus of early modern correspondence, which is only recently being started to be mined in a more concerted way. However, because the Herculean task of producing some kind of cross-collection finding aid / “map” of both correspondence and correspondents has yet to be taken up, this remains a very fragmented field of study.
The following is merely a short selection – for a much longer bibliography, see the page from the Scaliger Project listed at the end.
15th century – proto-Republic of Letters
- Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Collected letters of 1436, 1438/1444 and 1455.
16th century – Republic of Letters
- Erasmus (1469–1536) published his own correspondence in 1521 (Epistolae ad diversos) and 1529 (Opus epistolarum). Latin.
- Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). Italian.
- Guidiccione, Caro, Ruscelli, Domenichi, Tasso, Tolomei (all mentioned in “Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe”)
- Pedro Mártir de Anglería (c.1456–1526) – 813 letters, published in 1530. Latin.
- Tadeas Hajek
- Andreas Dudek
17th century – correspondence collections & projects
- Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) Project at Leiden University
- Tycho Brahe – correspondence edited by Dreyer as “Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera Omnia” (better known as “TBDOO”) in 15 volumes (Copenhagen 1913-1929).
- Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) – Correspondence published in 17 volumes
- Lipsius – La Correspondance de Juste-Lipse conservée au Musée Plantin-Moretus
- Linnaeus
- Peiresc (1580-1637) Correspondence Network – Tamizey de Larroque edited seven volume of the “Lettres de Peiresc”, but died before completing the project.
- Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz (1606-1682)
- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – Correspondence Volume I (1622-1659) and Volume II (1660-1679) edited by Noel Malcolm.
Correspondence projects organized under the aegis of CELL at Queen Mary College, London:-
- Correspondence of Francis Bacon
- Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley
- Letters of William Herle
- Letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (three volumes, OUP)
- William Dugdale
- Work diaries of Robert Boyle
Web Resources
The Scaliger Project at the Warburg Institute has a hugely helpful webpage on early modern correspondence, listing references for many obscure figures such as Caspar Barlaeus (1602-1648), Jacques Daléchamps (1513-1588), Joh. F. Gronovius (1631-1671), André Rivet (1595-1650),Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), etc.
LIAS – sources and documents relating to the early modern history of ideas.
Nick,
In re Elizabeth Stuart, “Queen of Bohemia”: Elizabeth I ? Henry VIII’s daughter? I shall take the opportunity to peruse that file if that is the case.
On another “front” ,and several hundred years later:
The City of San Jose, California has some correspondence (mostly missionary) in climate-controlled storage/display. In the 1970’s the City hired a professional historian/translator to
decipher the archaic writing. It turned out that he was unable to translate because the manuscripts were written in an “archaic secretarial hand” known only to the court scribes.
Perhaps you know someone who has the credentials to approach the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, CA (holder of microfilm copies). I’m not sure, but I think the Historical Museum in San Jose, CA also gives access to the original documents to credentialed researchers/professionals. Just thought you might like a new cipher to “chew on”.
Do I remember correctly that Rene Zandbergen has researched Stanford University’s holdings of the Kircher material in regard to Rudolph II’s/Maximilian’s (Habsburg’s) huge estate archives?
BTW: Shortly before things went kablooey, I had visited some of your “sidebars”. I found “fart-propelling rabbit on a “skateboard” particularly funny. Medieval weaponry-warfare?
bdid1dr 🙂
In re my query re Elizabeth — nevermind. I have just read the partial bio. I’ll be returning to do more reading.
In re my query as to whether you or some of your correspondents (Rich Santa Coloma, Sergi Ridaura maybe) would be interested in translating/deciphering missionary documents for the Pueblo de San Jose California — I hope to see your response, here on this topic page. I’ll check daily for another week or so.
A tout a l’heure!
A must read.
http://www.archive.org/stream/cipherdispatches01reid#page/n5/mode/2up
Code breakers may find Googling the YouTube videos ‘Homer the Astronomer-1’ and ‘Homer the Astronomer-2’ of interest.
I greatly admire the work done by Florence Wood, whose papers were edited for publication by her son. It is flawed (she assumed Homer knew the constellation of the Scales), but has been overlooked and underestimated.
I’d like to think her work had been made the basis of a film of some kind.
Hello _ this would be an interesting project. I have read Charles Dickens invented his own shorthand to write specific things. It would be interesting to see this broken and read from this iconic author.
Hello Nick – this may be a little long but I need to explain my reasoning. The Donna Lass Cipher. I cut and pasted it Google email- there is a translate at the end of the line in Google mail. I asked what language is this. It said Azerbaijam. I then picked that language to English. That was the only words. What translated into english was only the To and Subject. That told me something more must be done. So I found this: “These underlined alphabets are just shortcut to perform some task with the combination of Alt Key and underlined letter.” To break the code I believe you would copy the whole thing in email, and try Alt and each letter or just once. Unfortunately my whole email is in Azerbaijam and I cant read it. ALL of it. I had never seen underlines done by him so that had to be it. I was suspicious of it. What is your opinion ? Thank you. (if you have time) If this translates, it has to be Z or David Oranchak.