Fathers of the Bride

In the 1970s and early 1980s—bizarre as the scenario now appears—it looked as if the soi-disant New Social History would sweep all before it. I recall having lunch in 1979 or 1980 with two distinguished practitioners of its quantitatively oriented, model-building subspecies. Both assured me that my own mushy, math-deprived subfield, intellectual history, would go extinct within a decade. (I am not making this up.) And indeed, in those febrile years, many intellectual historians wept, gnashed their teeth, even grew so desperate as to peek warily at hierarchical linear modeling and analysis of variance. A collection of conference papers published in 1980 as New Directions in American Intellectual History fossilizes the mood, a fly from the Eocene captured in amber. The authors of New Directions were really asking how to survive—without actually going so far as to enroll in the University of Michigan’s famous, fearsome summer course in quantitative methods.

One strategy cooked up was to convert intellectual history into social history, specifically the social history of intellectuals: a simulacrum of New Social History without the nasty numbers. The guiding principle was to investigate, not the ideational content of thinking, but the social relationships governing communities of intellectuals. (This required some fancy footwork to dance around the awkward fact that the “‘intellectual’” as a social type is a late–nineteenth-century invention.) But this New Social History of Intellectuals never really took wing, in part because the New Social History itself soon began to fizzle out. Perhaps, more basically, the social history of intellectuals did not catch on because, in its pure form, it left out the stuff that attracts readers to intellectual history: ideas. Yet, despite its pedigree in panic, the history of communities of intellectuals offered a potentially illuminating way of looking at intellectual life. The failure to integrate it routinely into intellectual history weakened the field.

Except—one very traditional type of intellectual history has long probed the social relationships of intellectuals as context for their ideas: the history of erudition. We might also call it the history of academic knowledge, if we remember that academic knowledge was not always housed within “the academy”—universities, colleges, and research establishments. An early seventeenth-century noble like Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc had a big enough inflow of écus not to need to work in any institution (although he held political stations fitted to his place in life).¹ Yet we have to call “academic” the complex, sophisticated, organized erudition that he lived for and contributed to—the sort of learning that then and later could well find a home in a university or royal academy. Some of Peiresc’s closest intellectual collaborators (Pierre Gassendi, for example) did hold professorships, at least for a time. Individuals like Peiresc and Gassendi also fit tolerably well into the later category of “intellectual,” since dealing with ideas occupied most of their time and energy. And the historians who today study them typically analyze their thinking in the context of the intellectual networks within which they functioned. In Peiresc’s case, “network” mostly means the virtual grid called the Republic of Letters, a thick web of correspondence and personal acquaintance that tied together such early-modern savants, whether they inhabited a university faculty or not. Community? What else do you call the Republic of Letters? (Okay, sometimes “bare-knuckle boxing.”) Intellectuals? Who comes closer to the modern notion than scholar-scientists like Peiresc?

The topic is hardly new. The history of erudition goes back to nineteenth-century scholars like the German philologist Jacob Bernays (Joseph Justus Scaliger [1855]) and the Oxford don Mark Pattison (Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614 [1875]), if not to surveys of learning written by German professors 150 years earlier. The genre now dominates early-modern European intellectual history. Think of current work such as Ann M. Blair’s Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010), the Stanford...