Introduction

In recent years, Intellectual History has emerged as a field of enquiry that is of importance to a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. At a time when practitioners of these disciplines have increasingly made use of ‘textual' material, intellectual historians have brought a trained historical understanding to bear on the task of situating and interpreting writings belonging to earlier periods. Intellectual historians, therefore, are engaged in dialogue with the concerns of those working in Literature, Philosophy, Law, Politics, and Religious Studies, while at the same time pursuing their own concern with genuinely historical reconstructions of the cultural and intellectual life of the past.

Intellectual Contexts

This situation has only developed within the last generation, partly as a result of the increasingly ‘linguistic' or ‘textual' turn of neighbouring disciplines, but also because of a transformation within Intellectual History itself. Where previously the ‘history of ideas' or Geistesgeschichte was pursued by those chiefly concerned with studying the ‘pre-history' of single disciplines, or with searching for the timeless wisdom of canonical texts and great writers, recent work in Intellectual History is now done by those with an interest in a particular period, seeking to apply the same standards of historical evidence and judgement to the intellectual life of that period as their colleagues have traditionally displayed towards its political, social, and economic life. In turn, historians working on these aspects of the past have more and more recognised that Intellectual History is necessary to complete their own narratives, and hence that earlier abridgments of Intellectual History now have to meet higher standards. In other words, rather than constructing a ‘history of ideas' that serves as ‘background' to other types of history, or gives primacy to the logical structure of arguments treated only contingently as being located in the past, the informing aspiration of Intellectual History has been to recover the thought of the past in its full complexity. Intellectual History explores the intimate relationship between linguistic performance, meaning, and agency in particular branches of human activity. These interests now supplement the older concerns of Intellectual History with such vital traditional fields as historiography .

History and Literature

Intellectual History occupies a similar role in relation to imaginative literature and other creative arts. Various developments in recent decades have made it habitual for students in these fields to relate the study of literature and art to the values, institutions, politics, and social arrangements surrounding the creation and dissemination of literary and other cultural artefacts. For their part historians have become more anxious to treat literature and art as valuable sources of evidence, thereby acknowledging that much of their source material, whatever form it takes, is governed by conventions that can be called literary or aesthetic. In other words the borderlines between intellectual, cultural and literary history have become increasingly blurred, giving rise to rich mixtures of approaches, as exemplified in the work of scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, David Norbrook, Peter Lake, Christian Jouhaud, etc.

A number of PhD-projects at the EUI, including Marco de Waard's thesis on John Morley and the Liberal Imagination, Lucy Turner Voakes' work on The image of Italian Liberal Exiles in 19 th century Britain, Freya Sierhuis' project on political tragedies in the Dutch Republic, and Fotios Kaliampakos' study of the role of antiquity in the life and works of the nineteenth century Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal, situate themselves explicitly at the crossroads of history and literature.

History of Political Thought and Political Theory

During the last thirty years or so ‘political theorists' have tended to divide into his­torians of political thought and those interested in contemporary analysis. Many PhD projects at the EUI are at the vanguard of current approaches to the history of political thought, studying important thinkers such as the Napolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano --the subject of Matthias Roick's thesis--, Sir Robert Filmer --the central figure in Cesare Cuttica's PhD--, Paolo Sarpi, whose religious and political thought is the subject of Jaska Kainulainen's research, Hugo Grotius, who is at the heart of Martin van Gelderen's research projects, and Paolo Mattia Doria, whose contribution the European Enlightenment(s) is reappraised by Adriana Luna. Other projects explore neglected ‘forgotten' figures such as the radical artisan Pieter Plockhoy, whose life and treatises are studied by Henk Looijesteijn, and the eminent academic Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, whose conception of the Law of Nations is studied by Ere Nokkala . A third group of projects focuses more in intellectual debates and traditions, their formation and the development. Wendy Robins is trying to situate Catherine Macaulay as a radical, eighteenth century republican and feminist author, whilst Jovanka Stavreska is looking at Swedish readings of Pufendorf and Rousseau— of a distinct natural law tradition in Europe . Stefaan Marteel is involved in a major reappraisal of the political thought of the Belgian revolution of 1830.

Whilst the history of political thought is flourishing at the EUI, there are also increasing signs of the willingness and even eagerness of historians to apply their insights to the problems of the present in a fruitful synthesis of the disciplines of history and political philosophy. On the one hand historians are now keen to recover what was ‘lost', i.e. recover political concepts and languages that have been lost in later debates and whose recovery will enable us to look more critically at our own current, conventional understandings of politics. On the other hand historians continue to shed light on the political concepts and languages we have kept, adopted and adapted from early modern debates in the main political theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular in European traditions of liberalism, socialism and Christian democracy.

Along these lines at the EUI Martin van Gelderen, Bo Strath and Peter Wagner are developing a research project on republican federalism. Focusing on republican theories of citizenship and (con)federal constitutions, the principal aim is to explore the riches of past European republican thought as resources for addressing key issues, that lie at the heart of the European Union's ‘democratic deficit', those concerning the nature of European citizenship and federalism. Thus the project is, amongst others, a direct attempt to explore how the historical study of political thought can be brought to bear on contemporary debates-- between liberals and communitarians, social democrats and Christian democrats.

  Catholic Agenda

It follows that Intellectual History must be catholic in its agenda and tastes; that it cannot be based on any one theoretical or methodological approach. Intellectual History should be seen as an arena in which alternative approaches can be explored. Nor can its subject matter be confined to the history of any one domain such as the history of science, literature, politics, or art. Thus, whilst some projects fall under the headings of ‘History and Literature' and ‘History of Political Thought', other projects explore different aspects of intellectual history. Both Holger Berg and Andreas Corcoran are seeking to explore the links between intellectual history and Alltagsgeschichte, with Holger's project focusing on conceptions of justice and punishment as used by preachers, jurists, and laymen in the everyday life of the Thirty Years War, whilst Andreas' project Professors, Demons and Witches explores the role of academics in seventeenth century witchcraft trials. Early modern ‘professors' are also central to Stefan Donecker's project on the myths, tales and scholarly studies of migration movements to Livland.

Thus the interdisciplinary nature of Intellectual History arises from its need to pursue answers to questions about the past that do not correspond with modern disciplinary boundaries and theoretical preoccupations. For this purpose the group of Intellectual Historians at the EUI aspires to do more than merely bring together contiguous specialisms. The group provides individual scholars –be at PhD or post-doc level—with an informal framework within which collaborative work across different periods, specialisms, and national boundaries can be conducted. It also acts as a safeguard against reversion to the single-disciplinary priorities of the more traditional arts and humanities groupings.

The EUI: European and Comparative Perspectives

Those who pursue Intellectual History have a more diverse set of affiliations than is characteristic of other branches of history. This reflects the haphazard and creative fashion in which Intellectual History has developed, and gives some indication of the way in which those who cultivate this branch of history have had to adjust to institutional frameworks. In the United States libraries such as the Folger, Clark, and Huntington are major centres of intellectual history. In Europe , some countries have ambitious collective research projects such as Begriffsgeschichte . Some of the most important recent work in Intellectual History has been done by British scholars, not least by those attached to universities such as Cambridge and Sussex .

In all of these places intellectual historians have been keen to debate the fundamentals of their fields of study—in the Cambridge School , in Begriffsgeschichte — opening up fields such as the history of reading and of reception. At the EUI Marie Curie Fellow Laszlo Kontler from the Central European University in Budapest is finishing a major project on the German reception of William Robertson and Edmund Burke. Questions of comparison and comparative research have been neglected in some the main schools of intellectual history. With notable exceptions, most studies still focus on national thinkers and traditions. One of the distinct features of many current research projects in intellectual history at the EUI is the attempt to open up comparative perspectives, to study thinkers and traditions within a wider trasnantional or European perspective. Arthur Weststeijn studies the European links of the eminent Dutch republicans Johan and Pieter de la Court, Cesare Cuttica looks at Sir Robert Filmer's reading and critique of continental authors such as Bellarmino and Du Belloy; Laura Manzano is doing a comparative study of the Dutch and Spanish debates on the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia. Liisi Keedus is doing a comparative study of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, as moving between and across national cultures, whilst Jens Pyper is finishing his research on how leading protagonists of ‘Historicism' in both Germany and Italy tried to come to terms with the catastrophes of the second World War.

One of the main assets of doing Intellectual History at the EUI is the encounter between diverse European historiographical and methodological approaches. Boccaccio's ambience and legacy provide unique opportunities to capture the varieties, contradictions, specificities, continuities and discontinuities that characterise Europe 's past—and its study.