The Idea of the Scholar: Johannes Woverius of Hamburg (1574-1612)
The Researchers
Professor Paul BotleyLink opens in a new window has studied the correspondence networks of early modern Europe for many years, and has published large letter collections by major figures in European scholarship from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the course of this research, he has compiled numerous inventories of scholarly correspondences, and these inventories allow the relationship between published and unpublished letters to be systematically investigated in large corpora for the first time.
The Challenge
Paul Botley is studying the career of the ambitious German scholar Johannes Woverius of Hamburg (1574-1612). Woverius is a very minor figure in the history of European scholarship, best known today for his treatise De polymathia (1603), an incomplete, flawed and possibly plagiarised study of universal learning. This project examines the ways Woverius presented his ambitions in his own correspondence and publications, and how Woverius鈥� life was posthumously represented to the world by his friend, rival, and literary executor Geverhard Elmenhorst (1583-1621). The project aims to show what made a career as a scholar attractive to young men in early modern Europe. It will demonstrate how the correspondences of men like Woverius were carefully manipulated by their earliest editors to sustain and propagate these attractions, and it will examine the foundations of the idea of the scholar in the period.
Our Approach
Woverius鈥� correspondence was published in an abbreviated and censored form in 1618 by his editor Elmenhorst (235 letters). Botley has located extensive manuscript supplements to the censored letters, and copies of 136 previously unpublished letters. This previously unpublished manuscript material will allow much of Elmenhorst鈥檚 censorship to be unpicked, and enable a substantially new edition of Woverius鈥� letters (400 letters). The new edition of the letters will supply the foundations of a surprising new biography.