Byline: Floris Solleveld

In 1771, a French scholarly adventurer by the name of Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron shocked the Republic of Letters with his translation of Zend-Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre. Published in three volumes with a long series of appendices and a book-length introduction about Anquetil’s travels in India, it offered the first known example of a monotheistic text with…

Johann Christoph Gatterer was a data gatherer. As a professor of history in Göttingen, from 1759 until his death forty years later, he compiled collections of medieval manuscripts, coins, heraldic tables, maps, and even weather reports. He did not only collect them: he also transformed his hoard into manuals for studying heraldry and medieval charters,…

Antoine Court de Gébelin, koninklijk censor en geleerde sensatie van het late Ancien Régime, stierf in verdachte omstandigheden in Parijs op 12 mei 1784. In zijn laatste jaar had hij zich laten behandelen door de Weense wonderdokter Mesmer, en was uiteindelijk zelfs bij hem ingetrokken. Een mesmeristische behandeling houdt in dat het ‘dierlijk magnetisme’ van…

Historians of scholarship should love hybrid works. By ‘hybrid works’ I mean works that don’t fit neatly into a specific genre or format, but that combine the characteristics of different genres and information from disparate kinds of source material, often even texts from different authors. Historians should love such hybrid works for three reasons. First,…

In the Summer of 1829, Franz Bopp and August Wilhelm von Schlegel quarreled about Sanskrit sound shifts. They quarreled so badly it ended their correspondence, and they never met again.

By Floris Solleveld Giambattista Vico died in poverty in January 1744, having spent his last pennies on a new edition of the Principi di Scienza Nuova. Outside Naples, nobody cared. No notices appeared in the learned journals; no obituaries were read at royal or local academies. Eighty years later, his work was translated into German…