Academies, Learned

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ACADEMIES, LEARNED

ACADEMIES, LEARNED. At the beginning of the 1750s, four French academies—the local academies at Nancy and Pau in 1751, at Montauban in 1753, and the prestigious French Academy in Paris in 1755—advertised competitions for the best essay on different versions of the following question: Had academies advanced learning and the arts and was the multiplication of learned societies a good thing for society? In the decade following Jean-Jacques Rousseau's prize-winning essay (1750) for the Dijon Academy, in which he famously argued against the utility of the arts and sciences in improving the condition of mankind, no one was really sure if academies were a good thing or not. But their ubiquity made them a key feature of the institutional and cultural landscape of early modern Europe.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the number of learned academies and societies in Europe and its overseas colonies was in the hundreds, and many academies had come and gone in the preceding two centuries. Capital cities such as Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Florence, Madrid, and St. Petersburg boasted multiple academies, often funded by royal patronage as well as private initiative, that organized virtually every imaginable form of knowledge, invention, and artistic endeavor. Smaller cities and towns typically had one or two academies to promote knowledge as both a cultural and utilitarian endeavor; such academies were typically founded by leading citizens who considered the academy a civic necessity. Colonial outposts such as Philadelphia, Boston, Richmond, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Cap François formed their own academies, whose members were in correspondence with European academicians. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, perpetual secretary to the Paris Academy of Sciences (founded 1666), dubbed the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century the age of academies. He was absolutely right in his assessment that academies had become a crucial means of making knowledge a social endeavor that increasingly promoted the public good.

The eighteenth-century image of the academy as a nucleus of the Republic of Letters was a far cry from the academy's origins as a fifteenth-century reinvention of Plato's famous lyceum in ancient Athens. Prior to 1530, we can identify no more than twelve academies, all of them closely associated with the humanistic revival of ancient knowledge and the arts in Renaissance Italy. The term academy first appeared in the mid-fifteenth century as a means of describing associations of learned men who were devoted to revival of the values of Greco-Roman antiquity in one form or another. Most famous was the Platonic Academy, established in 1462 by the philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino under the patronage of the Florentine ruler Cosimo de' Medici, which celebrated and disseminated the works of Plato and other Greek authors through translations of important manuscripts. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there were many informal gatherings of scholars who never made their meetings part of any official organization. By contrast, the desire to give one's group a name, write up statutes that described the scope of its activities, elect a head of the academy, vote on candidates for new membership, appoint a secretary to record minutes, and create publications that celebrated its activities represented a different stage in the evolution of institutions of learning—the establishment of an alternative to the university as a structure dedicated to the promotion of knowledge. The academy, in other words, was a self-conscious scholarly community.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, academies multiplied rapidly, especially in the Italian city-states. On the Italian peninsula, 367 academies were founded before 1600. We can also find a few academies in northern Europe by the late sixteenth century, such as the Palace Academy of Henry III of France (ruled 1547–1559). During this period the key characteristics of the Renaissance academy emerged. These early academies were largely private gatherings of men and occasionally a few women who met to share their mutual interest in culture and conversation, often under the sponsorship of a "prince" who held a position of power within the local community. In such settings, scholars assessed new ideas in relation to more established traditions of learning. Whether attacking Aristotelian learning, debating the merits of Dante over Petrarch, or arguing for (or against) Tuscan as the preferred literary language of the Italian peninsula, Renaissance academicians came together to display their wit and erudition in public. Often such academies were encyclopedic rather than focused in their intellectual goals. The kind of wide-ranging, highly rhetorical learned dialogue described by Baldassare Castiglione in his best-selling Book of the Courtier (1528)—a fictionalized reflection of the culture of conversation at the court of Urbino—became the model for how an academician should speak about ideas.

Many Renaissance academies lasted not more than a decade, sometimes even just a few years, because they were not truly institutions but creations of individual patrons who wished to promote learning; they were private rather than public organizations. One key exception to this general rule was the Florentine Academy, which was founded informally by a group of Florentine scholars in 1540 and subsequently enjoyed official sponsorship of Cosimo I de' Medici; its goal was the preservation and dissemination of Tuscan literature and language. In this instance, we can speak of the early state-sponsored academy whose cultural mission was deeply political, since it played an important role in resolving the debate about literary Italian in favor of the Tuscan vernacular. Its successor, the Accademia della Crusca (founded 1582), created a series of important etymological dictionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that standardized this language and its usage. The success of Tuscan academies of science, art, and culture inspired other states to think of the academy as more than just a private association of scholars. French scholars explicitly invoked the Medicean model in urging their monarchs and ministers to found royal academies such as the Académie Française (founded 1635), Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (founded 1663), and the Académie Royale des Sciences (founded 1666). This last offered paid stipends and living quarters to Europe's most talented astronomers, mathematicians, and natural philosophers, essentially making them employees of the state.

During the seventeenth century a new kind of academy came into existence that had greater longevity than its predecessors and reflected the new intellectual concerns of the period. The Italian and French academies devoted to language and culture gave way to a succession of academies whose members often explicitly declared that they would put aside religious and political differences in order to make common cause in the study of nature. Beginning with the Accademia dei Lincei (1603–1630), founded by a Roman noble, Federico Cesi, and counting the Florentine mathematician and philosopher Galileo Galilei among its members, the idea of the scientific academy promoted the centrality of natural knowledge to early modern society. The Lincei was followed by the Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667), a Florentine academy of followers of Galileo devoted to the pursuit of experimental knowledge, as well as more permanent endeavors such as the Royal Society of London (founded 1660), which included such figures as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Isaac Newton among its early members. The Royal Society engaged in international correspondence with other philosophers, collected natural specimens, perfected instruments such as the air pump and the microscope, and published the results of experiments, reports of intriguing natural phenomena, and book reviews in Philosophical Transactions (established 1665), the first periodical published by an academy. Francis Bacon had dreamed about the idea of a scientific society in his posthumously published New Atlantis (1627), and this dream was now on the verge of becoming a reality. While lacking the kind of financial support enjoyed by the Académie Royale des Sciences, the Royal Society nonetheless could claim royal patronage and an earlier and more successful publication program that was widely discussed in many countries.

Between 1660 and 1793 approximately seventy scientific academies and societies were founded, invoking either London or Paris as their model. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz found himself realizing Bacon's fantasy of advising rulers about how to make science central to the state when he helped to design the academies of science in Berlin for the Electress Sophie Charlotte (founded 1700) and in St. Petersburg for Tsar Peter I the Great (founded 1725). At the beginning of the eighteenth century scientific academies such as theIstitutodelleScienzeofBologna(founded 1711) hadanexplicitlypedagogicalpurposethat madetheir utility more explicit. While King Charles II of England (ruled 1660–1685) never quite figured out whether Boyle's air pump experiments were good for anything, enlightened patrons of academies did not sharehis confusion aboutthepromiseofscience. The founder of the Istituto delle Scienze, Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, created professorships in subjects such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, natural history, cartography, and military science because the university curriculum did not adequately cover these subjects. He had the Istituto's professors offer lessons at hours that did not conflict with the university curriculum in order to ensure that students could take advantage of both courses of study. He created an astronomical observatory in his academy and filled the rooms with specimens and instruments. Visitors thought it was the New Atlantis realized.

Marsigli's idea of the academy as an alternative educational institution reached its fulfillment at mid-century when the majority of new academies and societies were founded on the premise of making knowledge available to a broader public. The academy became associated with the idea of progress and increasingly focused on subjects designed to produce this result. The Patriotic Society of Hamburg (founded 1765) described itself as a "Society for the Promotion of Manufactures, Arts, and Useful Trades," drawing inspiration from French and British models of learned associations that emphasized the role of such organizations in improving society through knowledge. The members of the Patriotic Society envisioned literate farmers and artisans as their potential audience. The Royal Dublin Society (founded 1731)—which published a weekly column in the Dublin News Letter in order to ensure a wider circulation of practical knowledge on a wide variety of subjects ("Husbandry, Manufactures, and Other Useful Arts," as the full academy name enumerated)—had a similar target audience, as did Britain's Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (founded 1754), on a national level. The concern of such groups was the application of learning to key problems of society, among them the creation of an agricultural science, the development of better machines and instruments, and the application of scientific principles to the political, moral, and economic problems of the day. The academy was no longer a closed world of experts talking primarily to each other, but was now a site for enlightened citizenship. These new societies, as they were more often called to distinguish them from earlier academies, no longer favored Latin as the language of learning. Instead they preferred to communicate in the local vernacular, on the premise that their audience was no longer the international Republic of Letters, already well served by the seventeenth-century learned academies, but local citizens who needed to be persuaded that learning might improve their lives.

The more academicians argued for the utility of academies, the more they also wondered how useful they really were. As academies became true institutions, housed in buildings stocked with well-furnished libraries and collections of natural specimens, instruments, and models of machines and bodies to stimulate the curiosity of their members, and as they became sufficiently endowed to sponsor prizes and publications, academies more readily facilitated the global exchange of knowledge within the Republic of Letters. Provincial scholars throughout Europe and the Americas found books, periodicals, and pamphlets in plentiful supply, and academies served to legitimate the idea that a knowing person was a productive, perhaps even patriotic citizen who could collaborate with others in solving society's problems. But did knowing more make one think better of humanity? A young Rousseau, responding to the Dijon Academy's question in 1750, was quite pessimistic about what the age of academies had wrought. Therein lay the paradox of the new system of knowledge that early modern Europeans had created.

See also Art: Artistic Patronage ; Citizenship ; Classicism ; Communication, Scientific ; Enlightenment ; Humanists and Humanism ; Renaissance ; Republic of Letters ; Scientific Revolution ; Universities .

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