The Europe of 1688 differed from that of all previous centuries and from all its contemporary “great others” in the commerce and culture of thought. Gazettes of daily news circulated widely in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Monthly journals presented reviews of books, reports ofscientific findings, and contributions to current debates to an audience of intellectuals all over central and western Europe. One of the most remarkable of the latter was the Acta Eruditorum, published in Leipzig. Through it we can see the European intellectual world facing back to its classical and Christian heritages and forward into an open, uncertain world of science and state politics. A rough-and-ready tabulation of the 171 books reviewed in the Acta during 1688 shows 72 of them dealing with theology (including a small amount of what we would call philosophy), church history, and other aspects of the Christian heritage; 44 dealing with science and medicine, some of it still deeply engaged with texts and ideas from Greek and Latin antiquity, but much of it experimental and mathematical; 10 on contemporary political problems; only 7 on language and literature; 19 on topics in European history; and 19 reporting on some part of the world outside Christian Europe. Among the books reviewed were a work on the medicinal benefits of coffee, tea, and chocolate; the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus; and Newton’s Principia, published in 1687, which was hailed for “rescuing natural phenomena from the shadow of occult qualities and bringing them back into the light and law of mathematics.”
Of the 171 books, 111 were in Latin, 42 in French, 5 in Italian, 7 in English, and 6 in German. The reviews were all in Latin, still the learned language of the German-speaking world. (Note the small number of German books reviewed in a journal published in a German-speaking city.) A sample of learned reading in England or France would reveal somewhat different proportions, but still a great deal of serious writing in Latin. French was everywhere the dominant modern intellectual language, and French prose style set a standard for apt, elegant, humane expression of all kinds of opinions, skeptical and pious, snobbish and disrespectful. English certainly had come into its own as a medium of poetry, drama, and prose by this time, but the Acta sample should remind us that it was not nearly as widely known on the Continent as French. Italian was in decline except in the form of words to be sung. Dutch had never really managed to spread outside its homeland, and many would say that by this time it was losing its literary vitality there.
The Acta sample is biased toward the world of abstract thought and authoritative tradition. It tells us little about what people read to amuse themselves or what plays or spectacles they watched. If we read more widely in the world of words of 1688, we find challenges to old authorities in these amusements as powerful as those of the men of learning. A woman draws on her own experiences and grievances to write a vivid fictional attack on the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. In the Europe of cities and trade, books were bought and sold in sufficient quantities to make it possible, as it was for Saikaku, for a person to make a living writing in a highly individual fashion. In the world of abstract thought, theological preoccupations still were powerful, but there emerged landmarks of a secular science and philosophy: Locke’s philosophies of knowledge and of political right and the awesome achievement of Newton. There still was one great intellectual who hoped to reconcile old and new and to encompass all human knowledge within his system of thought. There is no better place to end these notes on the world of European writing than in the projects and frustrations, the works completed and left undone, of the great Leibniz.