Catchment Areas and Killing Fields: Towards an Intellectual Geography of the Thirty Years’ War

Abstract

Intellectual history is traditionally text-based. Sometimes regarded as synonymous with the history of ideas, its natural starting points are the texts in which ideas are expressed and the authors who write them. Many intellectual historians now also situate authors, texts, language, and ideas in economic, social, political, and cultural contexts; and the scope of the field is now broadening further to consider the role of material objects and practices in shaping intellectual activities (Grafton, 2006; Kelley, 2002; Whatmore & Young, 2016). Data now offers a further opportunity to enrich the field. Digital technology affords intellectual historians the capacity to extract insight from previously unmanageable quantities of highly granular data. In a manner in some ways analogous to the focus on material culture, this capacity facilitates the writing of intellectual history from the ground up. Instead of beginning from canonical texts and working downward to explore their reception, historians can potentially situate individual texts and authors within shifting landscapes of intellectual activity, animated by huge bodies of digital data previously immobilized on the printed page. This paper explores how one source of such data-university matriculation registers-can be used to map out one kind of intellectual exchange-student migration-at a scale and pace which makes visible for the first time patterns which structured the intellectual lives of hundreds of thousands of people across vast swathes Europe. More specifically, this paper examines the densest concentration of universities in early modern Europe at the most tumultuous moment in their

Materialities and mobilities in transnational capacity building projects: Uneven geographies of knowledge production

“…As argued by Hotson () and Schwinges (), academic mobility has been an inherent aspect of the university since its beginning about 1,000 years ago. Scholars' mobility has changed with technological innovations such as the printing press and postal services, which significantly changed the materiality and mobility of knowledge and knowledge production.…”