Monastic Enlightenment & the Benedictine Republic of Letters

The correspondence and papers (1709-1762) of the brothers Bernhard and Hieronymus Pez, Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Melk (Lower Austria), are among the most important sources for the history of erudition in Austria and Southern Germany in the period between the Late Humanist Catholic reform and the "Catholic Enlightenment". The network of learned monastic clergy that is revealed through them was the forum of an intellectual culture that is today largely ignored by researchers and forgotten to the public, one whose self-image remained anchored in medieval categories, and which was destined to be deeply transformed - in both a social and an intellectual sense - in the course of the 18th century by the process of "Enlightenment". Some one thousand letters addressed to the Brothers Pez by over 250 correspondents in Austria, Germany, France, Italy and Bohemia are presently held in the Abbey Archives in Melk and are being prepared for publication by the members of the project. The primary goal of the project is to meet a high editorial standard through the publication of the letters along with German summaries, commentary and a bio-bibliographical index. The Internet is used in parallel with more traditional means of publication to make relevant texts (both in the original Latin and in translation) and archival documents (e.g. manuscript library catalogues and biographical sketches) available to the public. Proceeding from the content of these sources, the project aspires to contribute to current discussions in both the history of historiography and the larger field of sociologically inspired history of science and intellectual culture. Influence of the proposed work on the development of the field The project will provide a basis of biographical and bibliographical reference for the milieu of monastic erudition in the 17th and 18th centuries, which is currently almost entirely lacking. The project will contribute to the understanding of the hitherto largely unexplored intellectual landscape of Austria and Southern Germany before the penetration of "Enlightenment". The letters provide indications on currents in the development of not only historiography, but also philosophy, natural science and especially theology. The letters are also source material for a wide range of disciplines in Early Modern history: ecclesiastical and political history, history of art and literature, history of everyday life and even gender history.

What was the intellectual climate in Austria and Southern Germany at the time when, in the early eighteenth century, in Western Europe, the foundations of modern thought were being laid? Centred around the learned correspondence of two Benedictine monks from the Lower Austrian abbey of Melk, Bernhard (d. 1735) and Hieronymus Pez (d. 1762), the START project Monastic Enlightenment and the Benedictine Republic of Letters has created a basis for addressing this question, thereby methodologically advancing the fields of Digital Humanities (A), and European intellectual history (B). A.Initially departing from a traditional editorial agenda for the Pez correspondence (with more than half of the letters published or ready for publication at the end of the project, the rest is available as a first draft), the START project has acquired wide experience in digitizing cultural heritage material (Pez papers online), and has developed a digital workflow that will allow for the transformation of the corpus into one of Austrias first historical Virtual Research Environments. This ongoing process is warranted by the former PI, now co-chairing one of Europes largest research networks in the field (www.republicofletters.net), as well as by several spin-off projects run by former project members. It not only presents a real-time adoption of cutting-edge DH developments, but it also shows the presence of Austrian data in the growing European data pool and research infrastructures. B.The availability of properly edited data from the Catholic south of the Holy Roman Empire is particularly important if the early modern Republic of Letters is at stake; and if we want to conceive this pre-modern, trans-confessional, trans-national, knowledge-based civil society as a truly European phenomenon. Something similar can be said about the Catholic variants of the Enlightenment. The intellectual history of (Catholic) Central Europe is still remarkably understudied as related to Western Europe, which is (still) providing the master narrative in the field. The START project has been able to tackle this problem from various angles: showing that critical practice in historical research was shared throughout early Enlightenment Europe, even if the consequences drawn from that could not have been more different between, say, religious apologists, and radical philosophers; that Catholic knowledge can only be properly understood when related to its institutional framework, and not viewed through any individual scholar; and that, eventually, the divide between Catholic and Non-Catholic Enlightenment seems to be a particularly German issue, reflecting the Kulturkampf of the late nineteenth century more than the actual circumstances in the eighteenth. Hence, the START project, carried out in a period of accelerated technical and conceptual development, has successfully restored Southern German and Austrian scholarship of the early modern period to its wider European context, and has developed the necessary requisites for placing both the developed historiographical approach, and the digital methodology, at the core of any future take on the pre-modern intellectual history of Central Europe.