Mercenaries of Knowledge
Vicente Nogueira, the Republic of Letters, and the Making of Late Renaissance Politics

Explores the strategies that displaced scholars cultivated to navigate the murky waters of Late Renaissance politics.

Fabien Montcher (Author)

9781009340489, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 April 2025

346 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.501 kg

'In this fascinating and exhaustively researched study of the 'republic of letters' in the seventeenth century, Fabian Montcher examines the life of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654), a highly educated but mostly unpublished Luso-Hispanic bureaucrat, intellectual, book editor, and eventually book buyer and library advisor … Montcher's careful reconstruction of Nogueira's life and importance is built on an impressive body of archival as well as printed primary sources and an extensive examination of secondary sources pertaining to Nogueira's many correspondents.' Stuart B. Schwartz, Journal of Modern History

From Lisbon to Rome via the Gulf of Guinea and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, this book explores the strategies and practices that displaced scholars cultivated to navigate the murky waters of late Renaissance politics. By tracing the life of the Portuguese jurist-scholar Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) across diverse social, cultural, and pol-itical spaces, Fabien Montcher reveals a world of religious conflicts and imperial rivalries. Here, European agents developed the practice of 'bibliopolitics'– using local and international systems for buying and selling books and manuscripts to foster political communication and debate, and ultimately to negotiate their survival. Bibliopolitics fostered the advent of a generation of 'mercenaries of knowledge' whose stories constitute a key part of seventeenth-century social and cultural history. This book also demonstrates their crucial role in creating an inter-national and dynamic Republic of Letters with others who helped shape early modern intellectual and political worlds.

Introduction
Part I. Growing Up Under the Pax Hispanica
1. Coming of Age as Mercenaries of Knowledge
2. The Mercenary Republic
Part II. The Severing: Trial and Exile
3. The Fabric of Dissent
4. The Proving Grounds
Part III. Bibliopolitics and Conflict Management
5. Mercenary Diplomacy
6. Mercenary Bibliopolitics
Conclusion: Portraits from a Mercenary Age
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]