The ecclesiastical history of early seventeenth-century Protestant Germany presents a generally gloomy picture. Lutherans and Calvinists, locked in increasingly uncompromising fratricidal controversy, divide the heartland of the Reformation against itself, thereby unwittingly preparing for the Habsburg reconquest of subsequent decades. In the light of this ensuing disaster, the heroes of the era are naturally identified as those few figures who attempted to combat the leading tendency of their age: the ecclesiastic irenicists, who appealed to the quarrelling theological groups to set aside their differences and join forces in defending the advances of the Reformation. In this they were destined to fail, but modern historians have nevertheless credited them with helping to break the ground later cultivated by the more successful proponents of reconciliation in the nineteenth century and the yet more broad-minded ecumenists of the twentieth.

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Intellectual history is traditionally text-based. Sometimes regarded as synonymous with the history of ideas, its natural starting points are the texts in which ideas are expressed and the authors who write them. Many intellectual historians now also situate authors, texts, language, and ideas in economic, social, political, and cultural contexts; and the scope of the field is now broadening further to consider the role of material objects and practices in shaping intellectual activities (Grafton, 2006; Kelley, 2002; Whatmore & Young, 2016). Data now offers a further opportunity to enrich the field. Digital technology affords intellectual historians the capacity to extract insight from previously unmanageable quantities of highly granular data. In a manner in some ways analogous to the focus on material culture, this capacity facilitates the writing of intellectual history from the ground up. Instead of beginning from canonical texts and working downward to explore their reception, historians can potentially situate individual texts and authors within shifting landscapes of intellectual activity, animated by huge bodies of digital data previously immobilized on the printed page. This paper explores how one source of such data-university matriculation registers-can be used to map out one kind of intellectual exchange-student migration-at a scale and pace which makes visible for the first time patterns which structured the intellectual lives of hundreds of thousands of people across vast swathes Europe. More specifically, this paper examines the densest concentration of universities in early modern Europe at the most tumultuous moment in their

During the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the Moravian pedagogue and pansophist, Jan Amos Comenius (1592‒1670), articulated an all-embracing program of “universal reformation.” Retracing the roots of this now unfamiliar vision reveals that Comenius drew inspiration from a large number of intertwined traditions, many dating back to the pre-Reformation era, united by their dissatisfaction with the magisterial Reformations of Luther and Calvin, and sustained by the desire to pursue further reformation on a broader front. Together, these neglected traditions bridge the historiographical chasm between the radical reformation of the early sixteenth century and the advent of Pietism in the latter seventeenth and thereby have the potential to reshape conceptions of the “long Reformation.”

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