From Lisbon to Rome via the Gulf of Guinea and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, this book explores the strategies and practices that displaced scholars cultivated to navigate the murky waters of late Renaissance politics. By tracing the life of the Portuguese jurist-scholar Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) across diverse social, cultural, and political spaces, Fabien Montcher reveals a world of religious conflicts and imperial rivalries. Here, European agents developed the practice of 'bibliopolitics'– using local and international systems for buying and selling books and manuscripts to foster political communication and debate, and ultimately to negotiate their survival. Bibliopolitics fostered the advent of a generation of 'mercenaries of knowledge' whose stories constitute a key part of seventeenth-century social and cultural history. This book also demonstrates their crucial role in creating an inter-national and dynamic Republic of Letters with others who helped shape early modern intellectual and political worlds.
Author(s): Fabien Montcher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: xii; 333
City: Cambridge ; New York
Tags: Area Studies; European History after 1450; History; European Studies; History of Ideas and Intellectual History; Nogueira, Vicente, 1586-1654; Politics and literature--Europe--History--17th century; Intellectuals--Portugal--Biography; Booksellers and bookselling--Europe--History--17th century; Prohibited books--Europe--History--17th century; Inquisition--Europe--History--17th century; Europe--Intellectual life--17th century.
Acknowledgments vi
List of Abbreviations (Archives and Libraries) xii
Introduction: Mercenaries of Knowledge in a “Century of Improvisation” 1
Part I Growing Up under the Pax Hispanica
1 Coming of Age as Mercenaries of Knowledge 25
2 The Mercenary Republic 62
Part II The Severing: Trial and Exile
3 The Fabric of Dissent 99
4 The Proving Grounds 137
Part III Bibliopolitics and Conflict Management
5 Mercenary Diplomacy 177
6 Mercenary Bibliopolitics 219
Conclusion: Portraits from a Mercenary Age 268
Bibliography 285
Index 326