Ingeborg van Vugt

This paper highlights the importance of books as dynamic actors within the Republic of Letters by means of multi-layered visualizations of epistolary networks. In the past decade, it has become increasingly common to make use of networks to study shifts in early modern scholarly exchange. Originally, almost all of these studies employed a single-layered network where one node of the graph represents a correspondent, and an edge between a pair of nodes corresponds to a letter exchanged between them. However, reducing the complex society of the Republic of Letters to a network in which actors are connected by one single type suggests a static uniformity that barely takes into account the multi-faced dynamics of epistolary exchange. In addition to letters, the Republic of Letters was tied together primarily by means of books. Therefore, this paper intends to discuss an approach that integrates both letters and books in a unified, dynamic multi-layered network representation. To this end, the epistolary network of the Dutch philologist Nicolaas Heinsius (1620-1680) with the Florentine Medici court, focusing in particular on the correspondence of the librarian Antonio Magliabechi (1633-1714), serves as a case study to illustrate the applicability of multi-layered networks in historical network research.

Among the scarce surviving correspondence of seventeenth-century Florentine merchants in the Low Countries, the most interesting may be that of Giovacchino Guasconi. During his tenure in Amsterdam as official agent for Grand Duke Cosimo III, he wrote on average once a week to the Grand Ducal secretary, Apollonio Bassetti (1631-1699). A substantial part of this thesis is devoted to the transcriptions of Guasconi’s letters, focusing in particular on those letters which describe Guasconi’s role as intermediary between the well-known Dutch philologist Nicolaas Heinsius and the Tuscan court. These documents enable to have a better understanding of the role of agents as Guasconi as active participants in the early modern process of cultural transfer. The present study can roughly be divided in two parts. The first part presents a short biography of the life of Giovacchino Guasconi, his network and activities. Next follows a description of the important role of Nicolaas Heinsius, focusing on his services for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and how his extensive network throughout Italy enabled him to provide these services. In the second part of this study – which consists of three chapters – a selection of Guasconi’s correspondence is examined in more detail. The first chapters discusses the international interest for the famous Dutch Van der Hem library, showing Cosimo’s interest for beautifully bound collector’s items. The second chapter opens with information on Heinsius’ famous and prestigious edition of the Virgil, the distribution of which sheds light on how books were dedicated and gifted in the seventeenth century. The last chapter focuses on Guasconi’s efforts to obtain books from the auction of Heinsius’ library, which was held in 1683 and drew much attention in the scholarly world.

[To be presented at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference (SCSC August 18–20 Bruges)
Session: “Visualizing the Early Modern World in Digital Space and Time”]

With this contribution, I would like to discuss how multi-layered visualizations of epistolary networks can contribute to a greater understanding of the circulation of illegal literature and ideas between Catholic Tuscany and the Calvinist Dutch Republic. If we wish to understand how scholars and booksellers were able to overcome these confessional barriers a network study of epistolary exchanges provides a very interesting addition to archival research. This study is based on the assumption that full data integration, in particular when dealing with early modern correspondences, is impossible for reasons of incompleteness, complexity and uncertainty in data. Therefore the focus should not be on analytical and statistical methods of network representations alone, but on approaches that allows us to handle, inquire and interpret these complex historical data. We do not need just networks as static representations, but also networks as interactive interfaces. To this end I will discuss a visualization of the epistolary network of the 'open minded' Florentine bibliophile Antonio Magliabechi (1633-1714). The representation of his correspondences over time and space, in which both persons and books constitute the nodes, provides very interesting angles to understand how knowledge circulated in Early Modern Europe.