Sarpi and the Atlantic Republic of Letters: Imagining Trent in Early America

While the historiography on the ‘Republic of Letters’ has long focused on Europe and its capitals, recent scholarship has reconceived the concept, extending its geography and its participants to the larger world of the ‘global early modern.’ Contributing to this shift, this paper examines the circulation of Paolo Sarpi in early North America, showing how colonial readers appropriated his works and learned about early modern Catholicism. While a distinctive feature of the Republic of Letters in early America was its overwhelmingly Protestant culture, Sarpi helped American readers to become familiar with the history of the Council of Trent as well as with other Catholic practices and institutions, from the Inquisition to the Index of Prohibited Books. In focusing on Sarpi, this paper – as the larger project behind it –applies the concept of the ‘Republic of Letters’ to the intellectual history of eighteenth-century America, tracing the transatlantic circulation of scholarly information and recovering its entanglement with Euro-American colonialism.