Mercenaries of Knowledge
Mercenaries of Knowledge
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 pol-itical 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.
- Reveals the many and diverse spaces and actors involved in the production, circulation, transformation, and consumption of information and knowledge during the early modern period
- Adds new voices and profiles to the history of the Iberian monarchies, moving away from a focus on state elites and aristocracies
- Bridges several different national scholarly traditions, connecting Spanish and Portuguese history with the history of the Republic of Letters and a more social history of ideas
Product details
April 2025Paperback
9781009340489
345 pages
229 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from March 2025
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Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Growing Up Under the Pax Hispanica
- 1. Coming of Age as Mercenaries of Knowledge
- 2. The Mercenary Republic
- Part II. The Severing: Trial and Exile
- 3. The Fabric of Dissent
- 4. The Proving Grounds
- Part III. Bibliopolitics and Conflict Management
- 5. Mercenary Diplomacy
- 6. Mercenary Bibliopolitics
- Conclusion: Portraits from a Mercenary Age
- Bibliography
- Index.
