"Despite the wars and despite different religions. All the sciences, all the arts, thus received mutal assistance in this way: the academies formed this republic. (…) True scholars in each field drew closer the bonds of this great society of minds, spread everywhere and everywhere independent. This correspondence still remains; it is one of the consolations for the evils that ambition and politics spread across the Earth.” — Voltaire "The Republic of Letters (...) organized itself around cultural institutions (e. g. museums, libraries, academies) and research projects that collected, sorted, and dispersed knowledge. A pre-disciplinary community in which most of the modern disciplines developed. (...) Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed. (…) Intellectuals across Europe came to see themselves, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as citizens of a transnational intellectual society—a Republic of Letters in which speech was free, rank depended on ability and achievement rather than birth, and scholars, philosophers and scientists could find common ground in intellectual inquiry even if they followed different faiths and belonged to different nations.” - Amira