Union Académique Internationale

Project nº3 , adopted in 1920

Correspondence of Hugo Grotius 1597-1645

Hugo de Groot (Delft, 10 April 1583 - Rostock, 28 August 1645), who is better known in intellectual circles by his Latin name, Hugo Grotius, was a leading figure in both the government and the scientific world during the first half of the 17th century. However, it was his academic prowess in the fields of Dutch law, international law, philology, exegesis, and historiography in particular that won him international fame. His vast correspondence is the most important source of information concerning his life and work. This publication contains the texts of letters that were written both to and by Grotius, each one of which is furnished with a brief commentary on its historical context. Four indices enable the interested researcher to gain direct access to the contents of the letters which are in Latin, Dutch, French and German. The work spans seventeen volumes, each one of which contains correspondence in chronological order. The final volume is a supplementary one that has been rounded off with three Addenda, that make it easier to gain access to the different volumes of the Correpondence. These Addenda, which include an additional index of personal and place names for volumes I to XVII, are now available online.

Published Editions:

Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, eds P.C. Molhuysen, B.L. Meulenbroek, P.P. Witkam, H.J.M. Nellen and C.M. Ridderikhoff (The Hague, 1928–2001).

The edition was published under the auspices of the Huygens ING Institute. The complete text of Grotius’s correspondence as edited in the Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius (The Hague, 1928–2001), including the extensive annotation, indexes and introductions, is available online as The Correspondence of Hugo Grotius, digital ed., 1st edn (October 2009).

CKCC Project

The Circulation of Knowledge project [CKCC] was established in 2008 as a partnership between the Descartes Centre at the University of Utrecht, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Huygens ING), the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The project began by digitizing the metadata and curating existing full-text transcriptions of c.20,000 letters to or from nine prominent intellectuals resident in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. In 2013, this material was published as open access in a sophisticated web application — the ePistolarium — which provides scholars with multiple means of exploring and analysing both metadata and full texts across all nine correspondences. As well as conducting full-text searches, mapping and graphing the metadata, and extracting people mentioned, the ePistolarium is capable of interrogating the entire corpus to analyse and visualize co-citation networks, and produces the results of keyword extraction and experimental topic-modelling.

CKCC’s 20,020 records represent the largest single data set contributed to EMLO during the second phase of Cultures of Knowledge. The re-publication of these records within EMLO marks the inauguration of the rolling incorporation of major new catalogues which will continue through 2015 and beyond. As well as integrating CKCC’s metadata into an expansive union catalogue, EMLO’s records link back to the original letter texts published within the ePistolarium.

The metadata and transcripts for Hugo Grotius’s correspondence were supplied to CKCC by Huygens ING Institute.