This article provides an introduction to the history of the familiar letter along with a case study of Johannes Sambucus’s correspondence. It compares the Latin to the vernacular familiar letter in the sixteenth century, stressing their paral-lel development and mutual influence and the difficulties of achieving the level of privacy, naturalness, spontaneity and directness that was typically expected of a “conversation halved”, i.e. the familiar letter. Although in theory the use of the vernacular enabled the letter writer to be more (...) playful and spontaneous, in reality, learned correspondence remained self-reflective and the feel of spontaneity had to be reinvented both in Latin and the vernacular. The great advantage of Latin over vernacular letters – and this is the main thesis of this article – was their increased potential for networking, especially when it came to connecting men of different social standing on the basis of collegiality and in the name of meritocratic values. As his correspondence makes abundantly clear, Sambucus was a master at addressing social or intellectual superiors within these terms. His letters created and maintained an ethos of equality – founded on shared cul-ture and learned interests – which was the fundamental fuel that kept the Republic of Letters alive. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This review article is a discussion of some of the conclusions in Lenka Řezníková’s book Ad majorem evidentiam. Literární reprezentace „zřejmého“ v textech J. A. Komen-ského [Ad majorem evidentiam: Literary Representations of the Obvious in the Works of Johann Amos Comenius]. Řezníková gives an extensive and precise analysis of Comenius’s work in relation to the notion of “evidence”, or to a textual and discursive “production” of evidence. It is necessary to differentiate the two meanings of “evidence”: evidence in actual consciousness (...) versus evidence in a text. Furthermore, it is necessary to differentiate the objectives. Is it primar-ily how Comenius gnoseologically treats “evidence”? Or how he handles the term “evidence” within discourse and “textual practice”? Or, finally, to use Řezníková’s words, how he “produces evidence” and “suggests evidence” without necessarily pondering or even using the term evidentia? Attention is given to Comenius’s social theory of knowledge, Comenius’s conception of magnetism, the question of faith, and other sources of evidence apart from the senses and reason: visual evidence and historical evidence. One of the central themes of this review article is a discussion about whether “production” of evidence by “textual practice” can be considered without respect to extra-textual, extra-discursive experience. The article puts forward an antithesis: evidence is not a thing produced by a text, but rather a process induced. The source of evidence is outside a text, outside a discourse: it is in experience, for instance. This standpoint is grounded in a different paradigm from that of Lenka Řezníková, which does not, however, imply the illegitimacy of the latter. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Friedrich Menius, a German humanist, historian and hermet-icist who called himself “Mercury” because of his permanent exile from Germany to what is today Latvia and then to the provincial town of Dorpat in northern Livonia and later Sweden and his self-identification as a deliverer of education and literature to barbaric Eastern Europe, can surely be considered one of the most productive and distinguished professors at the early modern University of Dorpat. Within a short period in Dorpat, he produced more texts (...) than some scholars do in a lifetime. Not only was he aware of his own knowledge and wisdom, but he liked to share this awareness, praising himself in po-ems that were meant to be addressed to others, and thus, also demonstrating his multifaceted linguistic performance and skills. Both inter-and intrasentential code-switching can be seen in Menius’s various multilingual texts where the approach taken depends mostly on whether the item was a printed or handwritten text. Insertions, alter-nations and congruent lexicalisation also abounded in his multilingual writings, clearly indicating that while Menius was a rather ordinary scholar for his era, in the context of the seventeenth century University of Dor-pat, he was one of the first professors to use multilingual practices in both com-munication and education. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The article deals with a period in the correspondence between the Jesuit Bohuslav Balbín and Alois Hackenschmidt, the canon of Teplá monastery and a secretary to Abbot Rajmund Wilfert. To this end, it draws on 80 surviving letters from this era which supported the flow of information between the scholars and their cooperation. This surviving correspondence also illuminates several of Balbín’s works and their reception. Apart from the content of these letters, I discuss their style and pay particular attention to (...) salutations, valedictions and expressions of esteem, willingness and readiness to help. Some of the correspondence has a rather confidential and familiar tone, which sheds light on the relationship between the two scholars. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The article deals with changes in the epistolary style of Jan Amos Comenius during the 1630s – the period in which Comenius expanded his epistolary networks and became an important figure in the Republic of Letters of that time. The au-thor analyses how Comenius fashioned himself and how he changed his rhetorical strategies when approaching various groups of scholars. Comenius was concise, firm and self-confident in his correspondence with German educatio-nal reformers. When it came to his confessional opponents, however, he (...) did not hesitate to employ harshly defamatory and mocking rhetoric. Special attention is paid to the emotional codes and language of scholarly love which Comeni-us used in his communication with Samuel Hartlib from 1634 onwards. The au-thor shows that these usages related both to an idea of non-utilitarian friendship and mutual love between scholars and to strategies for acquiring financial support. Comenius adopted only some aspects of emotional language during the 1630s. These were likely those parts which were moderate enough to be re-conciled with his religious identity and self-fashioning. Instead of developing a specific discourse of male intimacy or a homoerotic vocabulary, he adopted elements of the epistolary rhetoric shared by Hartlib and his collaborators. His emotional codes belonged to a learned practice of letter-writing that Comenius mastered by reading and imitating letters circulated within the Hartlib circle. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Originating in Horní Slavkov in West Bohemia, Christoph Crinesius belonged to a close-knit group of experts on Oriental languages. The small collection of his surviving letters to Sebastian Tengnagel, a librarian at the Viennese court library, begins during Crinesius’s studies at the university in Wittenberg where he later worked as a lecturer. This fragmentary correspondence not only reveals new facts about Crinesius’s life but also tracks his search for employment that would enable him to continue his studies of Oriental languages. (...) Among other things, the letters bear witness to the rarely high-lighted trend of Lutheran intellectuals from West Bohemia seeking financial sup-port and employment in Austria. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This case study of the correspondence between the German humanist Johannes Caselius and Livonian humanist David Hilchen demonstrates the decisive importance of rhetorical strategies in humanist correspondence around the turn of the 17th century. These strategies clearly depended on the social positions, ages and occupations of the correspondents, and they changed constantly, especially in long-running correspondences. The older correspondent initially reflected on his younger counterpart’s deeds, adapting the style and rhetoric of his letters to the level of his younger partner, (...) that is, the level of school rhe-toric or progymnasmata. In letters to the almost adult correspondent, the use of rhetorical devices increased while the syntax became more complicated and the rhetorical figures more variable. After long disruptions to the correspondence, and particularly where this was due to changes in the political or social position of one of the correspondents, new rhetorical strategies were standard. © 2019, Czech Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. (shrink)