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How was knowledge produced by different people in different times and at different places? How was knowledge stored, managed, classified, organized, deployed, forgotten, and recycled? Finally, how did such practices affect what counted as knowledge? The series invites contributions on the ‘long’ early modern period in Europe and publishes also works on global cultures of knowledge under European influence.
From the Renaissance, the unique Juleum in Helmstedt was the site of collecting for the university library. To reconstruct its collection history and the organization of knowledge, this book analyzes documents from the library archive and traces of ownership and use in books, painting, and furniture. It emotively describes the various activities carried out in the university library, inviting readers to take a journey through time in their minds.
During the early modern period, regional specified compendia – which combine information on local moral and natural history, towns and fortifications with historiography, antiquarianism, images series or maps – gain a new agency in the production of knowledge. Via literary and aesthetic practices, the compilations construct a display of regional specified knowledge. In some cases this display of regional knowledge is presented as a display of a local cultural identity and is linked to early modern practices of comparing and classifying civilizations. At the core of the publication are compendia on the Americas which research has described as chorographies, encyclopeadias or – more recently – 'cultural encyclopaedias'. Studies on Asian and European encyclopeadias, universal histories and chorographies help to contextualize the American examples in the broader field of an early modern and transcultural knowledge production, which inherits and modifies the ancient and medieval tradition.
"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.
Be it angels, meteorites, or harps – there is a wealth of knowledge in the more than one-hundred publications that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had appeared in four languages under the name of Johann Jacob Wecker (1528–1586/88). Broad networks were created in order to collect and disseminate this knowledge. The practice of compilation formed the basis of this so far largely overlooked, successful production of books.
The polymath Leibniz was a prominent member of an early modern network that comprised a wide range of international scholars. Officials from politics and society presented, discussed, and modified innovative knowledge, thereby taking part in seminal developments. The contributions in this volume illuminate how this created the breeding grounds for an early modern public sphere.
The Luxembourg-born scholar Johann Friedrich Schannat (1683–1739) was one of the most significant Catholic historians of his generation. This volume looks at his correspondence in order to examine the diversity of the practices that characterized historical-critical scholarship in the early eighteenth century. The letters provide insights into how the scholar generated knowledge and emphatically point to the central role played by his network.
What was the significance of searching for and finding "family" and kinship through the ages? Which methods and strategies did actors use to produce relational connections, and into what structures and discourses can these practices be categorized? This volume takes up new insights from research into premodernity based on the history of knowledge and praxeology.
Präsentationsvideo (4. Folge der Reihe 'ÖGE18 Update')
Anyone wishing to look beyond the paradigm of Western progress needs to understand how it came into being. In the intellectual culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, the competitive comparison of Ancients and Moderns and their respective relations to civilization and barbarism constituted one of the formative discourses. Yet alternative ideas of time and historicity are encountered not only in cultural contexts outside of Europe but also in the largely forgotten professional knowledge of the Old World: Thomism, Peripatetism, moderate forms of criticism, political theory, and legal practice.
This book introduces a broad panorama of such intellectual cultures in Central Europe. It situates theological, historical, and philosophical scholarship in its institutional and epistemological environments: the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the emerging Habsburg Monarchy. In doing so, it identifies struggles over competing pasts – Christian, ethnic, legal – as the core of those domains' intellectual development.
The study addresses the question of how scholars in the 18th and early 19th centuries constructed knowledge of ancient Gaul using novel sources of both a material and an immaterial nature. It examines the processes of understanding extending from viewing an object as evidence of the past through the practices and methods whereby it was brought to verbal expression, including its inclusion in historical narratives.
Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach (1639–1691), a patrician and the mayor of Frankfurt, was one of the greatest book collectors of his time. Yet neither his collections nor personal role as a scholar have been researched. In the conference volume, these themes are addressed from the perspective of historiography, philosophy, the history of knowledge, paleography, and art history.
The Philhellene Carl Jakob Iken (1789–1841) is considered the founder of the field of Modern Greek studies. For the first time, the book presents his life and work. The author demonstrates how a passionate 19th century researcher of Greek organized his knowledge, envisaged it, and established networks to disseminate it. The appendix contains letter to illustrious contemporaries, such as Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Thiersch.
How did historians research the past in the early modern era? How did historians, genealogists, and scholars of antiquity “create” relevant knowledge and position themselves in courts, toward benefactors, and to an academic audience? This volume examines academic practices in the fields of heraldry, diplomacy, genealogy, and historiography along with economic aspects of research, travel, and publishing.
This book examines how genealogical knowledge was produced in Early Modern Europe. It studies the procedures and difficulties of genealogical research and highlights the many challenges that had to be overcome in the process of establishing family histories. Archives had to be visited, stone inscriptions had to be deciphered, and countless individuals had to be identified. The papers demonstrate that none of these tasks were simple and that the results of the research efforts often remained ambivalent. How early modern genealogists went about studying these questions is investigated here in a comparative perspective that includes cases from Germany, Italy, France, Wales, and beyond.