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The richer and more influential members of the college [of cardinals] summoned others to their presence. Seeking the papacy return to tiffany sale themselves or their friends, they begged, made promises, even tried threats. Some threw all decency aside, spared no blushes and pleaded their own cases, claiming the papacy as their right. . . . Each [of them] had a great deal to say for himself. Their rivalry was extraordinary, their energy unbounded. They neither rested by day nor slept by night.

Ah, the ironic distance of the true intellectual! The only problem with this familiar narrative is that Piccolomini was describing his own election as Pope Pius II. Let us grant that Pius II was not among the nobler popes, and that there is irony not just in his narrative style but in the name he chose on his election to the Holy See: It remains the case that citizenship in the republic was compatible, and understood to be compatible, with almost any attitude toward tiffany necklaces on sale we now call "organized religion."Grafton freely acknowledges this fact, and, for someone interested in the intellectual history of Western religion, one of his more interesting chapters is on the Jesuits, many of whose members possessed citizenship in the learned republic and who, added together, cover the whole field of options in relating faith to learning.

If there is any historical period likely to be associated with the Republic of Letters, it is die eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment: Consider in this light of the tide of Dena Goodman's 1996 book The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the tiffany pendants on sale Enlightenment or the work of Robert Darnton, which consistendy sees the RepubUc of Letters as finding its fullest flowering and best home in eighteenth-century France. Yet Grafton sees this era as the one in which the Republic of Letters "reached its natural end," and neidier Voltaire nor any of the other luminaries of the various enlightenments (Kant, Hume, Diderot) are considered in Worlds Made of Words. Grafton silendy passes over this extraordinary period in European intellectual history in order to deal with certain developments diat he sees as the modern heirs of the republic: the rise of the discipline of intellectual history, the emergence of the "public intellectual," the recent creation of vast digital libraries. (The heirs are manifesdy inferior to their great predecessors, but Grafton writes about them incisively.)

Since Worlds Made by Words is not an argument but a collection of essays and reviews about the republic, this is one of the places where we are left to piece together the parts of the story that Grafton chooses not to tell. Why does he think that the RepubUc of Letters died during the period that others see it at its peak?There's one suggestion: the replacement of Latin by French as the official language of die repubUc. Grafton does not expUcidy deplore this, but, especiaUy in one essay on Renaissance Latin and its decline, he shows die virtues of a scholarly community built around Latin. Not only did it provide a universal language tiffany rings on sale with no particular existing culture or polity, but it also, through its arcaneness, created a linguistic space in which matters of great delicacy could be explored and debated. Scholars who wouldn't have dreamed of talking about sex in their native tongues wrote of it freely in Latin.

But I dunk- though I am not sure that Grafton would agree- that this story suggests another reason for the decline of die republic. If you take Grafton's view, the republic flourished from the fifteendi through die seventeenth centuries and then declined; if you take die more familiar view, it flourished in die eighteenth century and then declined. But all agree that it had effectively ceased to function by the nineteendi century.Is it purely accidental dut this decline and fall followed so closely after Voltaire and his allies enlisted die republic in a campaign against organized religion? If there is any one figure we are likely to associate tiffany accessories on sale die French Enlightenment, it is Voltaire, and if there is any one belief dut we are likely to associate with Voltaire, it is bis insistence that the task of the philosophe is to Ecrasez l'infame- crush die infamous one, the Church- even diough he knew perfecdy well that in more violent times the system of dual citizenship had worked quite well for multitudes of scholars.