From Pansophia to Public Humanities: Connecting Past and Present Through Community-Based Learning

Abstract

This chapter describes a course that explores the public humanities by combining service learning with historical documentary analysis. Students pair with community partners working to address a range of pressing local, national, and global issues. Through analysis of public and historical records, they develop broad strategies for understanding and contextualizing “competing views of social justice, radicalism, patronage, network analyses, structure and agency, and the practical application of the liberal arts.” They then deploy similar strategies in analyzing digitally archived primary sources on seventeenth-century polymath Samuel Hartlib and his pan-European circle of scholars. Comparing the circle’s utopian ideals of pansophia—universal wisdom—with its more severe proposals for reform amidst the turbulent contexts of war and social change, students historicize these discrepancies and gain critical purchase on contemporary approaches to solving similar social problems.