Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 2012
Shaping the Republic of Letters: Communication, Correspondence and Networks in Early Modern Europe
D. C. Andersson
Pages 9-19
On Borrowed Time: Internationalism and its Discontents in a Late Sixteenth-Century University Library
An analysis of the accession history, together with a few refinements thereto, of the Báthory Jesuit College in Transylvania tells us much about the international
and local buying practices of a humanistic reading community in a period of confessional strife. This short article makes a few corrections to our current knowledge of this library, together with a few obiter comments on Transylvanian book pricing and on the second-hand usage of student works. The Republic of
Letters depended, naturally enough, on the inculcation of a worldview that was not wholly parochial. Accordingly, the article also considers the nature of the intellectual culture that the partial reconstruction suggests and, finally, the division of labour between international and local markets for the sourcing of books.