The edited volume Memory and Identity in the Learned World Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science, edited by Koen Scholten, Dirk van Miert, and Karl Enenkel, was recently published in Brill’s Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture series. The work is published in Open Access and can therefore be downloaded for free on Brill’s website.

The volume offers a detailed and varied account of community formation in the early modern world of learning and science, tracing how collective identity, institutional memory and modes of remembrance helped to shape learned and scientific communities.

The case studies in the book analyse how learned communities and individuals presented and represented themselves, for example in letters, biographies, histories, journals, opera omnia, monuments, academic travels and memorials. By bringing together the perspectives of historians of literature, scholarship, universities, science, and art, this volume studies knowledge communities by looking at the centrality of collective identity and memory in their formations and reformations.

Contributors include Lieke van Deinsen, Karl Enenkel, Constance Hardesty, Paul Hulsenboom, Dirk van Miert, Alan Moss, Richard Kirwan, Koen Scholten, Floris Solleveld, and Esther M. Villegas de la Torre.

Click here to download the book.