A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Mokyr Joel

Author:Mokyr, Joel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

1 The idea of academic superstars over whom patrons would compete was already present in the late sixteenth century: the eminent French classical scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) was tempted to join the faculty at Leyden University in 1593 with the promise of a salary higher than that of the law professors and a complete release from teaching duties.

2 Perkinson (1995, p. 74) stresses the importance of a community of scholars forming “a collection of widely scattered readers … who kept abreast of the state of knowledge in a given field” and who subjected each new idea to a critique and a set of validity tests, yet he insists on ascribing this community entirely to the printing press.

3 Marc Fumaroli (2015, pp. 50, 294–96) assigns special significance to the Venetian satirist Trajano Boccalini (1556–1613) who published in 1612 a best-selling work, Ragguagli de Parnaso (Newsletter from Parnassus), which was translated into many languages. In Fumaroli’s opinion, this work established the idea of an independent intellectual community among a large transnational and transreligious constituency and constituted a precursor of Bayle’s later work.

4 Some scholars, such as Goodman (1991, p. 184), see the Parisian salon as the primary form that gave the Republic of Letters a source of organizational order for its social relations and discourse, a somewhat Francocentric point of view perhaps (Melton, 2001, p. 211).

5 The renowned Flemish philological and humanist scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), though a lifelong Catholic, seemed to have little trouble conforming formally to Lutheranism while teaching at Jena between 1570 and 1572 and in Calvinist Leyden between 1579 and 1592. The Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, nominally a Catholic, was the patron of Protestant scholars, including Kepler (who had steadfastly refused to convert to Catholicism).

6 This was equally true at a more local level: Cohen (2012, p. 585) points out that it was during the “unruly” English interregnum in the mid-seventeenth century when censorship broke down and hence all kinds of “half-baked ideas and projects had a chance to gain a hearing.”

7 Not all members of the Republic of Letters adhered loyally to its principles of openness and transparency; the great Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), for example, still clung to secrecy and concealed much of his evidence. He was concerned that the ancient wisdoms he thought he had unearthed should not fall into the wrong hands and should be kept from the common people (Malcolm, 2004). Such attitudes, however, increasingly fell into disrepute as the Republic of Letters matured during the seventeenth century.

8 The English inventor Hugh Plat was knighted in 1605 in recognition of his many inventions which he placed in the public domain through such books as his The Jewell House of Arte and Nature, Conteining divers rare and profitable Inventions, Together with Sundry new Experiments in the Art of Husbandry, Distillation, and Moulding, (1594). The book contains a plethora of practical detailed prescriptions but also illustrates the appropriability issues involved in invention by listing “An offer of certain new inventions which the author proposes to disclose upon reasonable considerations.

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