“Finally the Academies”: Networking Communities of Knowledge in Italy and Beyond

Abstract

FOR GIAMBATTISTA VICO in his Principi di scienza nuova (1744), academies represented the culmination of human civilization. His view has not always been shared, but, especially since the new millennium, academies have attracted growing international scholarly interest as cultural and sociopolitical hubs central to forming knowledge across all disciplines of the arts and sciences. Their study as a scholarly field in their own right was given new impetus around 1980 by Amedeo Quondam, Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Laetitia Boehm, Ezio Raimondi, and Gino Benzoni, and in the Anglosphere by Frances Yates and Eric Cochrane. This coincided with a growing sociohistorical interest in associative and relational culture, setting aside Burckhardtian concerns for the individual. More recently, the field has diversified considerably to include interest in cultural mobilities and transnational networks, while the availability of digital resources offers new research possibilities. The groundwork for studying these rather loosely defined institutions that proliferated in the Italian peninsula and beyond from around the turn of the sixteenth century was first laid out with Michele Maylender’s multivolume compendium Storia delle accademie d’Italia (published posthumously, 1926–30). This documents over two thousand academies of varying constitutions formed at various dates but