Correspondence networks of post-White Mountain scholars in the Czech lands

The correspondence of the Flemish Jesuit mathematician Theodore Moretus (1602–1667) and other Jesuit mathematicians active in the Bohemian lands, and likewise of the Silesian doctor and publisher of the first medical journal Miscellanea curiosa medico-physica Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim (1627–1672) form an integral part of this project. Among those who received their letters were the leading scholars of the time Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Henry Oldenburg. The correspondence documents the scholars’ attachment to the European republic of letters, and thus too that of the region, and together with the correspondence of Jan Marek Marci contributes to the knowledge of post-White Mountain learned community and its intellectual world in the Bohemian lands.

The catalogue of the correspondence of Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim was published for the first time online on the pages of the international database of scholarly correspondence Early Modern Letters Online in 2015 http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=philipp-jakob-sachs-von-lowenheim . The transfer of the catalogue from EMLO to HIKO runs in cooperation with the Oxford University project Cultures of Knowledge sponsored initially by the Andrew W. Melon Foundation and, subsequently, by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council. The expansion of the catalogue and its development are supported by the programme Strategy AV 21 Memory in the Digital Age 2021. The project team of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic consists of Iva Lelková, Kateřina Šolcová and Vladimír Urbánek.