Over the past three years increasing numbers of catalogues containing listings of the correspondences of key western philosophers have been collated on Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO] and are available now as finding aids within the union catalogue. These inventories, the vast majority of which include links that lead users from from the individual letter record in the EMLO to an edited text published on a discrete platform hosted and maintained as a separate resource, have been brought together in partnership with a variety of scholarly contributors, research projects, publishers, and online initiatives.1
In addition, ongoing collaboration with a number of partners, each with an interest in early modern philosophy and the publication of relevant texts and letters, has enabled the following curated inventories to be created for the correspondence of a selection of major English philosophers:
George Berkeley (1685–1753)
Anne Conway (1631–1679)
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
David Hume (1711–1776)
John Locke (1632–1704)
Henry More (1614–1687)
The epistolary conversations conducted by these individuals may be viewed within a broader philosophical landscape when set alongside the catalogues of a growing number of European philosophers published in EMLO. At present, these include:
Pierre Bayle
Isaac Beeckman
Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld
Tommaso Campanella
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia
René Descartes
Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach
Jean Le Clerc
Blaise Pascal
Henricus Reneri
Baruch Spinoza
An increasing number of fledgling catalogues are also in the process of being prepared in EMLO. These include metadata for the correspondences of major figures in the history of western philosophy, as well as large numbers of their key correspondents. At the most recent stocktake of statistics, EMLO was found to contain descriptions of letters for more than 350 early modern individuals tagged with ‘philosopher’ in the field of ‘occupation’ or ‘area of interest’, and scholars, students, and research projects are continuing to contribute on an ongoing basis to ‘starter’ catalogues for key figures in the history of English philosophy, any one of which might develop further to form the basis of a complete edition, whether published in hard-copy or born-digital format.
‘Starter Catalogues’ of English Philosophers’ Correspondence
Thanks to a partnership with Oxford’s English Philosophical Texts Online project and as beneficiaries of a small grant awarded by the John Fell Fund, EMLO has identified and highlighted a selection of ‘starter catalogues’ for the correspondences of English philosophers. Metadata for these correspondences have been partially compiled in the course of EMLO’s publication of other catalogues, but significant work and further research remains in order to bring each inventory to completion. The philosophers for whom letters remain to be itemized or described in greater detail include:
Hester Chapone (1727–1801)
Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688)
Henry Dodwell (1641–1711)
Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680)
Damaris, Lady Masham (1658–1708)
If you are a student either in search of a topic or you are interested in working with early modern correspondence, we invite you to be in touch to discuss how you might engage with these figures. Alternatively, should you be a more senior scholar—or a member of a research project team in the process of drafting an application for funding—and the correspondence of one or more of the individuals listed above is integral to your work, we should be delighted to discuss the possibilities of working together. Over the past twelve years EMLO has developed a range of tools and workflows to assist in the collation of descriptions of letters, and we are able to offer advice and assistance regarding the visualization and analysis of the resulting epistolary metadata.
EMLO works with a number of different resources and partners in Oxford, including the Bodleian Library, Digital Scholarship at Oxford [DiSc], Electronic Enlightenment [EE], English Philosophical Texts Online [EPTO], Oxford Scholarly Editions Online [OSEO], Oxford University Press [OUP], and the Voltaire Foundation (Vf], as well as with students and scholars from the Faculty of Philosophy.
The Cultures of Knowledge research project, based in the Faculty of History, is grateful to Oxford’s John Fell Fund for the award of a small grant to pilot this work with philosophers from the British Isles.
Further resources
English Philosophical Texts Online project, University of Oxford.
History of Oxford Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.
philosophy bites: podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics (including Peter Millican on Hume’s Significance).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Oxford History of Philosophy series, Oxford University Press.
Notes:
1 Please be aware that a number of the letter texts in these catalogues are published on platforms hosted elsewhere that require access either from within a subscribing institution, such as a university or civic library, or with a personal subscription. As EMLO staff collate summaries of letters and transcriptions within the union catalogue, these continue to be released on open-access.