"For My Worthy Freind Mr Franciscus Junius"

Sophie van Romburgh, doctorate (2002) in Arts, Leiden University, is a lecturer in philology and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Leiden English Department. She has published on early-modern Germanic philology, and studies Renaissance ideas on medieval Germanic literature.

All those interested in early-modern intellectual history, English and Dutch elite culture, Germanic philology, art history, and learned correspondence.

"With the present book, Sophie van Romburgh adds an essential contribution which, I hope, will lead to a comprehensive study of the life and work of this learned scholar, "who may be called the father of both modern art theory and comparative Germanic philology"...Junius seems to come close to the ideal Renaissance scholar: his wide-ranging interests include theology, philology - lexicology in particular - arts, and sciences. Furthermore, he was a real polyglot: besides being fluent in vernacular languages, such as Dutch, French, German, and English, he was also a "vir trilinguis" with expert knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and was more than conversant in the Scandinavian and Germanic languages, both dead and living. Hence, the edition of the 226 letters that could be retrieved, most of which are written in Latin, promised to be an arduous task, one of which Van Romburgh has acquited herself in an exemplary way in order "to make this correspondence accessible on all levels for further research."
Jeanine de Landtsheer, JEMH, 2005.

"...a book which a variety of students of seventeenth-century intellectual life in England and the Low Countries will keep returning to during the course of their scholarly lives; a book which will absorb the reader with its innumerable amount of facts, as detailed as only a scholarly life itself can be."
D.K.W. van Miert, De Zeventiende Eeuw, 2005.

"Despite his French father and Brabantine mother, Franciscus Junius always considered himself Dutch, but in fact he was one of the more international citizens of the Republic of Letters...His letters, a few in English, but most in Latin and Dutch, accompanied here by an English translation and excellent notes, become increasingly interesting as discussions about family matters give way to more scholarly debates concerning the many fields of learning to which he was drawn."
Alastair Hamilton, TLS, 2005.

"Junius's network of correspondents and their epistolary relations form such an institution, both social and material, that is the very medium of European intellectual life in the early modern period. It is worthy of study in itself, not as adjunt to the printed book but as the vital matrix in which the published products of humanist culture took shape."
Ernest B. Gilman, Seventeenth Century News, 2004.

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Life
Corpus
Intellectual Exchange
Composition
Modesty
Edition

Editorial Principles
List of Correspondents and Letters Exchanged
Inventory of the Corpus

Texts, Translations and Commentary

Appendix

Bibliography
Index