Stanford Humanities Center
Republics of Letters is a digital journal of scholarship, reflection, and conversation concerned with the period 1300 to 1900. The journal’s range is uncommonly broad, not only in period but in discipline and approach, embracing history, literature, art history, music, and other fields of scholarship about the late medieval, early modern, and colonial past.
Our title evokes the forms of social life organized around knowledge, not only the well-known res publica litterarum of seventeenth-century Europe but the many earlier and later intellectual networks that animated premodern societies around the world. Founded in 2009 and reestablished in 2023 after a hiatus, the journal aims to publish articles, interviews, and documents that not only study the period in the usual ways but reflect on the present moment in our fields. We especially welcome work by or about scholars who have recently contributed to dialogue and debate within our community, including advanced Ph.D. candidates.
A longstanding practice of the journal is to publish not only discrete numbers but topical Fora that appear across numbers and evolve over time. We invite contributions of all sorts: articles, brief essays on emerging research, interviews, and Fora. Articles are peer-reviewed, while briefer contributions are reviewed by the editorial board.
The editorial collective is organized as the board of editors, Rowan Dorin, Roland Greene, and Sarah Prodan, and the managing editor, Poornima Rajeshwar. Everyone in the late medieval and early modern community at Stanford University is encouraged to advise and contribute.
Republics of Letters is a publication of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Renaissances in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the Stanford Humanities Center, all at Stanford University. The journal proudly participates in the Open Access movement in scholarly publishing.
