Correspondence was the oldest and long the most important form of written communication in the world of learning. For scholars, it constitutes one of the most productive sources for the study of developments in the history of scholarship. The often prodigious correspondence (sometimes 20,000 or more letters) of scholars of European importance (e.g. Erasmus of Rotterdam, Hugo Grotius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Christoph Gottsched) document the life of the early modern Republic …