James Ussher and the Making of Protestant Knowledge in the Early Modern World

ongoing

This action will make a ground-breaking contribution to the history of knowledge in early modern Europe. Where previous studies have focused on Protestant scholars as individual actors, this project will use the case of Archbishop James Ussher to show how a leading Protestant ecclesiastical position underwrote and enabled the creation of knowledge. Based at Trinity College Dublin and supervised by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, the innovative interdisciplinary project will combine the study of Ussher’s unpublished books and manuscripts with the disciplines of cultural, book, gender, and religious history, art history, the sociology and history of science, and the digital humanities in order to create a novel account of the production of knowledge in early modern Europe. Having reconstructed Ussher’s intellectual networks, it will then show how these made possible new kinds of advanced scholarship in terms of the study of scripts, how Ussher read and used his collection of printed books and manuscripts in his chronological research, and ascertain the role played by assistants and amanuenses in Ussher’s working life. In so doing, the action will reveal the importance of confessional networks rather than the pan-confessional Republic of Letters, how far new scholarly methods depended on ecclesiastical preferment and patronage, how the history of reading must use manuscript notebooks in tandem with the evidence of printed books, and how the ascription of published works to individual authors has long obscured the vital roles played by others in their creation. All told, the action will provide a landmark contribution to the making of knowledge in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and demonstrate the need for a reconceptualisation of intellectual history and the history of scholarship in this era based on a recognition of the symbiotic relationship between works of erudition and the settings in which they were created.