Projets de recherche ESR - quinquennal 2015-2019

The project CoNetCol will study the Correspondences, Networks and Collections of men of letters who, during the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, maintained closed relationships with political powers in Europe. It will compare different collections formed by these men by making an archeological study of the practices and uses of their papers. The study of the intellectual patrimony of men of letters will offer a better understanding of the relationship between Knowledge and Power in Europe during this period. The collections that will be analyzed by CoNetCol were shaped at the same time by both intellectual debate and political practices. With the exception of some catalogues that introduce these scholars’ patrimonies, these collections have never been studied as a whole. The aim of CoNetCol is to analyze the intrinsic dimensions of these collections by offering a systematical, interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of these collections at a Global Scale