A multi-faceted study of intellectual transformation in early modern Europe as seen through the eyes of a leading French scholar and cleric, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Early modern Europe's most extensive commonwealth -- the Republic of Letters -- could not be found on any map. This republic had patriotic citizens, but no army; it had its own language, but no frontiers. From its birth during theRenaissance, the Republic of Letters long remained a small and close-knit elite community, linked by international networks of correspondence, sharing an erudite neo-Latin culture. In the late seventeenth century, however, it confronted fundamental challenges that influenced its transition to the more public, inclusive, and vernacular discourse of the Enlightenment. Transforming the Republic of Letters is a cultural and intellectual history that chronicles this transition to "modernity" from the perspective of the internationally renowned scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Under Shelford's direction, Huet guides us into the intensely social intellectual worldof salons, scientific academies, and literary academies, while his articulate critiques illumine a combative world of Cartesians versus anti-Cartesians, ancients versus moderns, Jesuits versus Jansenists, and salonnières versus humanist scholars. Transforming the Republic of Letters raises questions of critical importance in Huet's era, and our own, about defining, sharing, and controlling access to knowledge. April G. Shelford is Assistant Professor in the History Department at American University, Washington, D.C.

"A very welcome and accomplished contribution to our growing understanding of early modern European intellectual history." - JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY

"Shelford's rich and fascinating study . . . succeeds not only in offering an integrated and more complete study of Huet, but also in providing a more subtle and nuanced account of the means by which the old Republic of Letters operated. . . . [A] meticulously researched study . . . of an important period in the history of ideas." - AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, June 2008

"Huet is a formidable subject to treat in a single book, but Shelford has done an admirable job with full documentation in the notes, mainly from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Laurenziana, since few of Huet's works are available in modern editions." - RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY, May 2008

"Shelford's book is a well-researched, thoughtful, and critical study of Huet and the transformation of the older Republic of Letters into the more widely studied one of the eighteenth century. [It] provides us with a more subtle understanding of the cultural changes in the period that does not read contemporary ideals backward, proleptically, into the past." - SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEWS