A Brill Calendar: January 28

"Serendipity"

Few observers, investigators and facilitators of today’s academic 'machineries' and routines take the idea of contingency - innate in innovating scholarship - seriously into account.

One reason for this may be that a philosophical binary distinction as it used to be obligatorily made in European Universities since their beginnings doesn’t seem to be important to managerial plans and administrative schedules any longer: the distinction between what is contingent and what is necessary; blind, mindless coincidence being quite something else.

From the evidence of a letter written on January 28, 1754 our forefathers knew better. On that day an eccentric English aristocrat of independent means and a fashionable gentleman at leisure, Sir Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, commented in one of his innumerable letters to a friend in Florence, the diplomat Sir Horace Mann, on one of his sprightly, sudden insights: ‘This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call ‘Serendipity’, a very expressive word […] I once read a silly fairy tale, called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of […] you must observe that no discovery you are looking for comes under this description.’

Walpole (1717 – 1797), was the owner of a vast library - and an exquisite private printing press to boot. His quaint ‘Gothic’ villa, known as ‘Strawberry Hill’ near Twickenham, not far from London, is a perfect example 'made brick and mortar' of enlightened imaginations of the ‘Age of Voltaire’. Walpole was at the same time a one-man catalyst of a new Romantic Era in its widest sense: not restricted to visual and performing arts and literature, but including philosophy and scholarship as well.

A quarter of a millennium later, the concept ‘serendipity’, once jocosely used, is firmly entrenched in epistemology, the study of the nature and value of human knowledge.