Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded / Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen: wie Sammler entscheiden

Drawing on case studies from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, covering Europe and beyond, Collectors’ Knowledge: What is Kept, What is Discarded investigates how knowledge was acquired, organized and sometimes lost. It examines collections of texts and objects—libraries, textbooks, miscellanies, commonplace books, data collections pertaining to historical events, encyclopedias, royal and ducal treasures, curiosity cabinets, galleries and museums—to uncover the processes of accumulation, organization, selection and rejection that have shaped learning. The essays emphasize the complex relationship between the intentions of collectors and the limitations they encountered—issues of format, presentation, display and storage—as well as outside forces that disrupted their aims, including pillage and natural disasters.

Contributors include: Stephen Bann, Laurence Brockliss, François de Capitani, Livia Cárdenas, Steven Conn, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony T. Grafton, Janet Grau, Jürgen Leonhardt, Ulrich Marzolph, Paul Michel, Jürgen Oelkers, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Nicola Schneider, Gerald Schwedler, Iolanda Ventura, Monika Wicki, and Marc Winter.

Achtzehn europäische und aussereuropäische Fallstudien vom dreizehnten bis zwanzigsten Jahrhundert fragen in “Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded – Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen – wie Sammler entscheiden”, wie Wissen erworben und organisiert wurde und weshalb es verloren ging. Die Autoren untersuchen Sammlungen von Texten und Objekten – Bibliotheken, Lehrbücher, Sammelbände, Datensammlungen im Zusammenhang mit historischen Ereignissen, Enzyklopädien, herrschaftliche Schätze, Wunderkammern und Museen. Ihr Ziel ist es, Prozesse der Akkumulation, Organisation, Auswahl und Ablehnung aufzudecken, die unser Wissen über die Epochen geprägt haben. Die Aufsätze unterstreichen die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen den Absichten der Sammler und den Zwängen, mit denen sie konfrontiert waren – in Fragen des Formates, der Präsentation oder Speicherung –, sowie den Kräften, die Verluste bewirkten, beispielsweise Plünderung oder ideengeschichtliche Umwälzungen.

Anja-Silvia Goeing is anniversary fellow at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and Privatdozent at the University of Zurich. She is currently preparing a book on practices of knowledge transfer at the Zurich lectorium in the sixteenth century. Her work includes studies on fifteenth-century biographies written about the Italian Humanist Vittorino da Feltre (1999; 2013).

Anthony T. Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His interests comprise humanist scholarship and the writing of history in early modern times. Recent publications relating to this volume include a collaborative study of Isaac Casaubon as reader of Hebrew texts (2011) and a collection of early visualizations of timelines: Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time (2012).

Paul Michel is Professor Emeritus of German Literature to 1700 at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on the study of encyclopedias and the organization of knowledge. His latest monograph, Physikotheologie was published in 2008.