JMP
听At the Crossroads of Early Modernity:
An Interdisciplinary Study of John Mair (c.1467-1550)
听
2024-2029 SNSF Project, led by Giovanni Gellera
听
John Mair (c.1467-1550, sometimes Major) was a Franco-Scottish scholastic theologian and philosopher. His extensive corpus provides a unique picture of the European intellectual landscape at the dawn of the modern age. As a distinguished university professor in Paris, Glasgow and St Andrews, Mair influenced, directly or indirectly, a cohort of students unparalleled in European history, including Juan Luis Vives, John Knox, George Buchanan, Francisco de Vitoria, Ignacio de Loyola, Jean Calvin, Pierre Viret, Fran莽ois Rabelais and Jacques Almain. At a time of increasing confessional divisions, Mair was able to win interconfessional praise: to the Reformed Knox he was 'an oracle in matters of religion', to the Catholic Vitoria he was 'a good and learned man'.
Despite his significance, Mair is not a household name in modern scholarship. Recent interest in the logic of Mair and in aspects of his theology has confirmed Mair's importance in the history of European philosophy and theology but it has also highlighted the fact that Mair represents a fundamental blind spot in our understanding of early modern European culture.
The project At the Crossroads of Early Modernity: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Mair (c.1467-1550) therefore aims to produce a comprehensive study of John Mair's thought and to situate it in its intellectual and historical context. The project is structured around three main axes:
1) Mair's intellectual system. The study of the interactions between Mair's philosophical and theological ideas is an untapped source in intellectual history.
2) Mair as a public intellectual. Unusually for a scholastic, Mair left behind wide-ranging reflections on the most pressing issues of his time.
3) Mair's crossroads network. Mair's extensive international and interconfessional network of influential students, colleagues and politicians is crucial to understanding the origins of the early modern period and can shed new light on the scholastic background of the Reformed Reformation.
Mair's works are complex, generally under-studied and not critically edited. The project will create digital versions of Mair's works by transforming them into Linked Open Data (LOD) resources. Their content will be semanticised to allow harvesting by distant reading methods. The data will be made freely available during and beyond the duration of the project.
The John Mair Project (JMP) aims to rediscover a thinker who was at the centre of philosophy, theology, politics and education at a crucial time in European history. A privileged witness of epochal changes. A European thinker at the crossroads of early modernity.