Republic Of Letters

The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.[1] These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic... The first known occurrence of the term in its Latin form (Respublica literaria) is in a letter by Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini dated July 6, 1417;[3] it was used increasingly in the 16th and 17th, so that by the end of that century it featured in the titles of several important journals... There are some historians who disagree and some have gone so far as to say that its origin dates back to Plato's Republic.[5] Part of the difficulty in determining its origin is that, unlike an academy or literary society, it existed only in the minds of its members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Letters

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