Searching for Missing Links in the Republic of Letters: Vossius and the Dutch Dimension of Hartlib's Circle.

Confronted with evidence that the Republic of Letters was densely interconnected, scholars note that it was a small world in which everyone knew everyone. Confronted with the opposite evidence, they retreat to the opposite truism: that it was riven by factions. This case study develops and tests a tool designed to adjudicate between such competing truisms by identifying and quantifying second-degree connections. First, the tool identifies Gerardus Joannes Vossius as the person on Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) with whom Samuel Hartlib shared the most correspondents without the two men ever exchanging letters directly, and vice versa. Second, it analyses the pattern of exchange with those shared correspondents. Do these indirect links compensate for the lack of direct connections, or confirm that the circles of Hartlib and Vossius were tangential and scarcely intersected? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]