De Leyde, duquel aucune revelation, dans le domaine de l'information historique, n'etait a attendre, pour ne s'attacher qu'au premier groupe, a celui qui couvre la periode 1649-1658. Car ces dix annees-Ia corres pondent a la seconde moitie, et meme davantage (dix annees sur dix huit) de la longue et fächeuse lacune que presente le {laquo}manuscrit Sainte-Beuve{raquo}. Soixante-dix-sept lettres, pour la plupart assez etendues, regulierement reparties sur une periode de dix ans, representent un contenu informatif non negligeable. Et leur valeur s'accroit si l'on songe qu'elles sont presque tout ce qui subsiste, et qui soit actuellement connu, d'une production epistolaire perdue qui dut atteindre, en dix-huit ans (1641-1658), quelque deux mille unites. Pourtant leur interet historique n'est pas l'unique raison quijustifie leur publication, et on va voir que sur ces autographes de Leyde peut enfin s'appuyer une veritable etude litteraire du style epistolaire de Chapelain. Le {laquo}manuscrit Sainte-Beuve{raquo} a fait l'objet d'une edition, qui a malheureusement du rester partielle: elle a ete etablie par Ph. Tamizey de Larroque, qui a publie son precieux recueil sous les auspices du Ministere de l'Instruction publique 4.

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) is the most famous humanist scholar of the Dutch Golden Age. He wrote influential works on the laws of war and peace, Dutch history and the unification of the churches. His plea for a freedom of the seas in Mare liberum offered the Dutch East India Company a ready justification for the establishment of a trading empire in the East Indies. As far as his daily duties left him any spare time, he penned confidential, learned and beautifully-written letters. This voluminous correspondence offers a trove of information on Grotius’ life and works, and forms the basis of his newest biography which sketches a life caught in a fierce struggle for peace in Church and State.

A multi-faceted study of intellectual transformation in early modern Europe as seen through the eyes of a leading French scholar and cleric, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Early modern Europe's most extensive commonwealth -- the Republic of Letters -- could not be found on any map. This republic had patriotic citizens, but no army; it had its own language, but no frontiers. From its birth during theRenaissance, the Republic of Letters long remained a small and close-knit elite community, linked by international networks of correspondence, sharing an erudite neo-Latin culture. In the late seventeenth century, however, it confronted fundamental challenges that influenced its transition to the more public, inclusive, and vernacular discourse of the Enlightenment. Transforming the Republic of Letters is a cultural and intellectual history that chronicles this transition to "modernity" from the perspective of the internationally renowned scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Under Shelford's direction, Huet guides us into the intensely social intellectual worldof salons, scientific academies, and literary academies, while his articulate critiques illumine a combative world of Cartesians versus anti-Cartesians, ancients versus moderns, Jesuits versus Jansenists, and salonnières versus humanist scholars. Transforming the Republic of Letters raises questions of critical importance in Huet's era, and our own, about defining, sharing, and controlling access to knowledge. April G. Shelford is Assistant Professor in the History Department at American University, Washington, D.C.

Before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later eighteenth century, how did European readers find out about the varied cultures of Asia? Orientalism in Louis XIV's France presents a history of Oriental studies in seventeenth-century France, mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here produced books that would become sources used throughout the eighteenth century. Nicholas Dew places these scholars in their own context as members of the "republic of letters" in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment.

A quarterly journal from the low countries devoted to manuscripts and printed books.

Essays on French writers of the seventeenth-century, or Classical century. What best defines the literature of this period are political order and the growing awareness of literature as a separate domain in need of rules and regulations. Discusses the political turmoil during this period as well as the Reformation and the Counter Reformation encouraging research on ancient tests, methods of research, and the standardization of the French language.