Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at Historyof Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about the Republic of Letters with Howard Hudson,

who is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford.

Hello, Howard.

Hello, Peter. Nice to be with you.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

You're an expert on the Republic of Letters, which is good because you can tell us what it is. I already did an episode about it last

time, but I don't think I actually tried to define it. I just talked about it. So can you venture a

definition? Yeah, sure. In fact, there's quite a bit implicit in this term that needs to be carefully unpacked.

And the best starting point is with that Latin phrase, which is really at the root of the whole phenomenon, the res publica literaria.

A res public is, of course, a public thing.

And this kind of emphasizes that we're talking about a community of learning which is common to all

nations and perhaps created and sustained collectively, collaboratively as well. The term

is public obviously connotes Republic or Commonwealth, and this suggests something very

attractive, I think, to modern historical

scholarship, as well as perhaps in the period, namely the notion that this Republican Vettors

is an independent entity, autonomous, sovereign, self-governing a law into itself, not subject

to the authority of churches and states in the post-Reformation period, in the period of absolute monarchy.

Princes don't dictate the axioms of geometry or the principles of natural theology.

Churches don't legislate for grammar or rhetoric or history or optics.

This is a republic in which the laws are made by the citizens themselves. And the fact that it's

...