In October 1778, the German physician Johann Adolf Behrends wrote Benjamin Franklin the eighteenth-century equivalent of a fan letter. In Latin, the language of Europe's literati, the doctor confessed to admiring Franklin as a human trinity: “founder of the fatherland, doctor of the human race on the matter of the bodies' electrical energy and illustrious member of the Republic of letters” (P 27: 656). Readers today know Franklin well in his roles as founder and scientist, but his literary personality has been explored differently - as a rhetorician, a humorist, and a print journalist. Franklin's contemporary reputation as a member of the international community of thinkers and writers then known as the “republic of letters” has received less attention, even though his contemporaries hailed Franklin as an important citizen of this border-crossing “republic.” His work enabling the conversation of the artistic and learned and his labors securing the liberty of the international exchange of ideas clearly mattered to Franklin's contemporaries. What, precisely, was the republic of letters? How did Franklin come to loom so large in its affairs?

The name “republic of letters” came into being on the Continent and in England in the later 1600s to designate an imagined community made up of authors and readers who recognized neither national boundaries nor religious affiliations in their quest for the free exchange of ideas, beliefs, and convictions. This community, a republic, not a kingdom, was organized by an implied social contract among equals. Not heritage, nor wealth, nor civil rank affected one's status in the community.