SEDULITAS · Alsted in Transylvania, 1629-1638: the missing link in a major European intellectual lineage

The profound influence on the young Leibniz exercised by J. H. Bisterfeld has been known for a century; yet only very recently has scholarship begun to appreciate its significance. During the past decade, a series of monographs by H. Hotson have identified Bisterfeld’s father-in-law—Alsted, the teacher of the renowned Comenius—as a central figure, the culmination of the greatest encyclopaedic tradition of his age. More recently still, M. R. Antognazza’s pioneering biography of Leibniz has situated the encyclopaedic project inherited from Bisterfeld and Alsted as the centre-piece of Leibniz’s enormously variegated life’s work. This new scholarship thus raises for the first time the possibility of rooting one of central Europe’s greatest thinkers within a highly distinctive but previously neglected central European intellectual tradition. Yet one crucial link is still missing from this genealogy: a detailed study on Alsted’s final decade in Transylvania. My sustained researches have unearthed a rich body of entirely fresh documentation which reveals beyond doubt Alsted’s vital role in preparing the brilliant works published by Bisterfeld which so fired the philosophical imagination of the young Leibniz. Many of these findings have already been sketched out in Hungarian; but to bring them fully into contact with international scholarship they now need to be reworked in English in the midst of the scholarly community most responsible for driving forward research in this field and deeply committed to mentoring younger scholars. The group working in Oxford on 17th-century intellectual networks provides the ideal context for bringing my long-standing research to its richest possible conclusion. Situating Transylvania at the centre of this important new intellectual lineage, in turn, will demonstrate how an expanded EU can enrich Western scholarship and transform key elements of our common intellectual heritage while laying a firm basis for my research career in Hungary.