SEDULITAS · Alsted in Transylvania, 1629-1638: the missing link in a major European intellectual lineage

Alsted in Transylvania, 1629-1638: the missing link in a major European intellectual lineage

The profound influence on the young Leibniz exercised by J. H. Bisterfeld has been known for a century; yet only very recently has scholarship begun to appreciate its significance. During the past decade, a series of monographs by H. Hotson have identified Bisterfeld's father-in-law - Alsted, the teacher of the renowned Comenius - as a central figure, the culmination of the greatest encyclopaedic tradition of his age. More recently still, M. R. Antognazza's pioneering biography of Leibniz has situated the encyclopaedic project inherited from Bisterfeld and Alsted as the centre-piece of Leibniz's work. This new scholarship thus raises for the first time the possibility of rooting one of central Europe's greatest thinkers within a highly distinctive but previously neglected central European intellectual tradition. Yet one crucial link has still been missing from this genealogy: a detailed study on Alsted's final decade in Transylvania. M. Szentpéteri sustained researches have unearthed a rich body of entirely fresh documentation which reveals beyond doubt Alsted's vital role in preparing the brilliant works published by Bisterfeld which so fired the philosophical imagination of the young Leibniz. Many of these findings have already been sketched out in Hungarian; but to bring them fully into contact with international scholarship they needed to be reworked in English in the midst of the scholarly community most responsible for driving forward research in this field and deeply committed to mentoring younger scholars. The major goal of Szentpéteri's stay at Oxford has been to rework his monograph on J. H. Alsted (Egyetemes tudomány Erdélyben, Budapest, 2008) into a revised version in English bridging the gap between the east-central and west European scholarship in the field and providing the missing link between central European Reformed intelligentsia and Leibniz. In 2010-11, material from the original book has been entirely translated, reworked and corresponding text editions have been produced. New findings encountered in the course of the research year still need to be incorporated into new chapters and introduced into the final polished version that is to be submitted for publication in the course of 2012-13 as the most important final result of the fellow's research training at Oxford. For the duration of his visit, the fellow was a member of the History Faculty, the Modern European History Research Centre, and the Cultures of Knowledge project group as well as being a Plumer Fellow in the St Anne's College. Membership in these diverse and overlapping groups provided ample opportunity to build interdisciplinary academic networks both within and outside Oxford while pursuing his major goal of the translation and redesign of his Hungarian book. The fellow also regularly attended seminars, workshops and conferences - as planned in Annex 1 Part B - which offered excellent opportunities to improve his research and complementary skills and academic English and Italian. The fellow gave a lecture at an Oxford conference and a seminar paper as well, testing and disseminating some of his results. In addition, extensive use of libraries in Oxford (esp. the Duke Humphries, Taylorian Institue, Sackler Library) and London (British Library, Warburg Institute) proved to be crucial in updating the primary and secondary bibliography of the original monograph. In addition to absorbing a great deal of information on best scholarly practice, more informal contacts also enabled the fellow to get up-to-the-minute insight into current issues in British higher education - for instance in thrice-weekly lunches on High Table meetings in the St Anne's College and as a member of the Oxford University's academic parliament, 'Congregation'.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union