Abstract

The 17th century is characterised by two enormous ruptures. One is military: the overlapping series of protracted wars which range from the Baltic via central Europe and the Low Countries to the British Isles. The other is intellectual: the interconnected movements once confidently known as the scientific revolution and the birth of modern philosophy. Although each has attracted a vast historical literature, these two phenomena – one brutally concrete, the other seemingly disembodied – appear at first sight incommensurable, attract very different kinds of historians, and are rarely studied together. One point at which these two parallel historiographies intersect, however, is the university, an enduring institution which grounds the history of ideas firmly in time and space. This paper argues that the most celebrated chapter in the 17th-century history of European universities is unintelligible without reference to the endemic warfare of the period. Sketching the evidence in support of this statement serves to broach a larger thesis about the relationship between the military and intellectual histories of the 17th century, and to prompt some methodological reflections on the value of geography to intellectual historians.