Kristi Viiding „Arranging the learned literary and book culture around the Baltic Sea in the early 17th century: the case of the Livonian-Polish humanist David Hilchen“

Kristi Viiding (2024). Arranging the learned literary and book culture around the Baltic Sea in the early 17th century: the case of the Livonian-Polish humanist David Hilchen. In: Networks, Poetics and Multilingual Society in the Early Modern Baltic Sea Region. Eds. Kati Kallio & Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen & Anu Lahtinen & Ilkka Leskelä (Series: Library of the Written Word, Volume: 133). Leiden: Brill, 2024, 118-143. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004429772_006

In my article I analyse the unpublished Latin correspondence, ca 800 letters, of the most famous Livonian-Polish humanist David Hilchen (Heliconius, 1561–1610). The letters were sent to and by him within the period from 1577 to 1610. The network of his correspondents consisted of almost 200 people from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Livonia, Denmark, England, the Netherlands, etc., including such leading humanists as Justus Lipsius, Johannes Caselius, Isaac Casaubon, Joseph Justus Scaliger, etc. Hilchen who was a humanist from the periphery of Europe referred to very various literary practices in his correspondence: to the reading and reception of the published books, ordering of dedications and congratulatory poems for books of others, sending of factual materials about famous persons and contemporary events to humanists in other regions for invention, mediation of opinions and remuneration between patrons and authors, consultations about the appropriate literary genres, etc. Hilchen’s remarks and discussions about the topics demonstrate that, in addition to his local fame as a politician and the author of the Terrestrial Law for Livonia (1599), he must have been considered an important actor in arranging literary and book culture at an international level.