This note is a summary description of the set of scholars and literati who taught at the University of Utrecht from its inception in 1636 to 1800. For more detailed information about these individuals, please visit the comprehensive database available at https://shiny-lidam.sipr.ucl.ac.be/scholars/.

Calligraphy is an understudied aspect of the reception of Chinese art in early modern Europe. Chinese visitors to Middelburg (1601) and Amsterdam (1654) first demonstrated it as a cultural practice. Other written samples circulated in the Dutch Republic, an emporium for Chinese goods. This article focuses on a previously unknown participant in this exchange: Anna Maria van Schurman, Europe’s first female university student, who had mastered various Asian scripts and was expected to try her hand at Chinese and Japanese. In 1637 Andreas Colvius sent her samples of East Asian writing to copy ‘by her own hand’. This exchange makes possible a transcultural study of the calligraphic gift. Via the popular writings of Matteo Ricci, Van Schurman’s correspondents may have learned about the role of calligraphy in fostering social relationships in late Ming China. Some of the visual and material qualities of East Asian writing must have made it look like a fitting tribute to a female European scholar of high profile and, in being exchanged as a gift, calligraphy acquired new meanings even while remaining illegible. In seventeenth-century China and Europe, the friendly exchange of calligraphy expressed new forms of sociability.

Locke has often been hailed as the father of an empiricism that provided a philosophical basis to natural science in the Age of Enlightenment. In this article his empiricism is compared with that of the little known Dutch Aristotelian professor Gerardus de Vries. There are striking parallels between Locke's brand of mechanist empiricism and the pragmatic and flexible Aristotelianism of De Vries. These parallels put strictures on both the archaic character of the Aristotelianism embraced by De Vries and on the modern and forward-looking character of Locke's philosophy of science.

The volume offers the first large-scale study of the teaching of Descartes' philosophy in the early modern age. Its twenty chapters explore the clash between Descartes' "new" philosophy and the established pedagogical practices and institutional concerns, as well as the various strategies employed by Descartes' supporters in order to communicate his ideas to their students. The volume considers a vast array of topics, sources, and institutions, across the borders of countries and confessions, both within and without the university setting (public conferences, private tutorials, distance learning by letter) and enables us thereby to reconsider from a fresh perspective the history of early modern philosophy and education.