Promoting Civility in the Republic of Letters: Three Sedan Scholars and the Secular Muse

Abstract

In the Reformed academy of Sedan in the early seventeenth century a manuscript was compiled containing poems which have remained largely understudied, despite the manuscript’s publication in 1913. The poems were the work of Arthur Johnston, Andrew Melville, and Daniel Tilenus, two Scots and a Silesian; all were professors in the Huguenot Academy. As teachers there they operated in the world of Reformed scholasticism, and historiography has understandably tended to view their lives, therefore, through a religious lens. The poems in this manuscript suggest, however, that such a perspective is misleading. Intertwined with the Reformed context of their lives in Sedan was a strong sense of humanist community, focusing upon the classical world; the writing of neo-Latin poetry allowed these men, who could be at variance in the confessional world, to share concerns and offer supportive advice to each other. The poems reveal a friendship among them which was public enough for their poems to be grouped as the spine of this manuscript.