For decades before the Thirty Years War, Protestant communities in Poland-Lithuania, the Czech lands, and Hungary-Transylvania, lacking fully functional local universities responsive to their needs, sent their sons westward to study in Germany’s numerous universities and academies. The resulting contact and reciprocal influence knit the intellectual histories of these regions together in inextricable ways. The three decades of war which followed disrupted many of these institutions and replaced these patterns of academic travel with fresh waves of intellectual refugees fleeing in all directions

Intellectual traditions to be explored include the following:

* Universal education: institutional networks and intellectual exchange
* Universal wisdom: encyclopaedia and pansophia
* Universal communication: the early modern European media revolution
* Universal communion: ecclesiastical reconciliation in central Europe
* Universal history: millenarianism, prophecy, and propaganda

further international conferences organised by the Project will take place in 2011 and 2012. For full details of our activities, please see www.culturesofknowledge.org.

Anton Tantner (University of Vienna)
Intelligence Offices in Early Modern Central Europe

Tomáš Nejeschleba (Palacký University)
Jan Jessenius, Patrizzi, and Zoroasther

John Young (University of Sussex)
Utopian Artificers:
German Technology and the English Commonwealth

Jean-Paul de Lucca (University of Malta)
Campanella’s Renovazion del Secolo: Religious and
Political Reconciliation, Reform, and Unity