Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History

Abstract

Intellectual historians have often associated contexts with places. In this paper, I examine the effects of this association and develop a different model more suited to transnational study. I guide my analysis by a study of neo-scholastics in the early part of the twentieth century, who wrote for a transnational audience. They were able to make their texts intelligible to readers in different countries by drawing on a shared archive of medieval scholasticism. Their example, I suggest, provides insights into the meaning and value of contextualization, and opens up new ways to understand how ideas transcend geographical and temporal divides.

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