Regulating the Exchange of Knowledge: invoking the ‘Republic of Letters’ as a speech act

Abstract

This article seeks to answer the question how people in the early modern period could build enough trust amongst each other to expect fair treatment and reciprocity. It does so by adopting a socio-linguistic approach. I will analyze the way in which early modern learned letter writers employed the phrase ‘Republic of Letters’ as a speech act in the Austinian sense: an illocutionary act. The repetition of these acts created patterns of behavior that, overtime, started to act as regulative ‘rules’ about what and how to communicate. The ‘Republic of Letters’ is hence regarded in this article as a speech community with shared norms that became more and more explicit and finally even codified.