Les Grands Intermédiaires culturels de la République des Lettres: Études des réseaux de correspondances du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles (review)

Reconfiguring the intellectual networks of the past is one way to breathe life back into what can be very dry documents: letters exchanged between men of learning. The essays in this volume visit fourteen of the big names in intellectual networking from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in the following order: Erasmus, the brothers Dupuy, Peiresc, Grotius, Mersenne, Oldenburg, Huygens, Mencke, Leibniz, Bayle, Bignon, Marchand, Gottsched and Formey. The essays follow a similar format, outlining the volume of the correspondences and the way that could vary over the years for different reasons, the painstaking means used to set up epistolary networks, the strategies used to send letters as cheaply and quickly as possible, the ways letters were shared among groups of learned friends, the relationship between letters and the printed word, and the disasters that befell the letters which never arrived. Some contributors provide a map of the correspondence network, which makes it easy to visualize; it would have been helpful to have maps of each network studied, and particularly the map of Peiresc's correspondence to which Peter Miller refers (p. 106), but which never made it into the book. Inevitably, given the repetitive nature of the subject matter, there is a conceptual sameness to the chapters, although readers learn a lot of facts about individual correspondences. At the heart of both this book and its subject lies a frustration, which some contributors are brave enough to voice: letters were always second best. The correspondents longed for face-to-face exchange and the shifting contours of talk and thought that resulted from lively intellectual debate. Letters were a poor substitute, which the learned men studied here used to communicate the latest news about books or scientific discoveries and experiments, occasionally philosophical or religious ideas, and the latest political news (more rarely, political opinion). However, they often preferred to save what they really wanted to say for the next time they met or could communicate verbally through a third party. So, although the brothers Dupuy were at the centre of an international correspondence web, they probably learned more during the daily afternoon meetings of their Cabinet in their famous library in Paris, to which their friends and visitors brought the letters they too had received from their own networks. But eavesdropping on those conversations is impossible, which leaves historians of learned culture on the outside looking in at exchanges just out of earshot. Real insight into the inner world of the correspondents is also hard to come by, 'car Bayle é crit beaucoup et se livre peu', as Antony McKenna remarks (p. 334); he was not alone. Networks both enabled and symbolized a connectedness to the world of learning, which was vital but fragile; correspondents protected their links by avoiding subjects that divided – as did Huygens, resident in Paris during the Dutch War, which he never once mentioned in his correspondence with Oldenburg. Reticence may be fetching in life, but it is not in letters to which historians turn hoping for an insiders' guide to the galaxy of early modern learning. Nonetheless, there is much to learn here about the material culture of epistolary exchange from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Would it be too much to ask Champion to bring back professional in-house editing, as other publishers are now doing, so that the many typographical and linguistic errors that mar this scholarly book could be avoided in the future?