“Finally the Academies”: Networking Communities of Knowledge in Italy and Beyond

Abstract

This is a copy of the final version of the essay (27 Sept. 2019) accepted by Chicago University Press for publication in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, issue Fall 2019. Any references should be made to the final printed/online formatted version.] For Giambattista Vico in his Principi di una scienza nuova, academies represented the culmination of human civilization. 1 His view has not always been shared, but especially since the new millennium, academies have attracted growing international scholarly interest as cultural and socio-political hubs central to forming knowledge across all disciplines of the arts and sciences. Their study as a scholarly field in their own right was given new impetus around 1980 by Amedeo Quondam, Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Laetitia Boehm, Ezio Raimondi, and Gino Benzoni, and in the Anglosphere by Frances Yates and Eric Cochrane. This coincided with a growing socio-historical interest in associative and relational culture, setting aside Burckhardtian concerns for the individual. More recently, the field has diversified considerably to include interest in cultural mobilities and transnational networks, while the availability of digital resources offers new research possibilities.The groundwork for studying these rather loosely defined institutions which proliferated in the Italian peninsula and beyond from around the turn of the sixteenth century,