Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History

How was knowledge about political practices codified and transmitted in the Venice of humanism and the Renaissance? The letter collection of aristocratic official Ludovico Foscarini (1409–1480) provides answers to this question. This volume is the first to comprehensively analyze this important source and provides an academic edition of the letter collection that Foscarini left to his sons as a handbook of political communication.

In premodernity, genealogy was of high societal importance, which is why genealogical knowledge was a central resource in struggles for rank and office. Numerous actors thus attempted to gain this knowledge and to present or reject it. This volume examines how contemporaries approached genealogical knowledge, and inquires into its construction, presentation, and reception.

This volume on medieval Germanist philology around 1700 asks what impact the context in which early modern editions were created had on their appearance. By looking at the editions of unjustly forgotten scholar Johann Schilter, it reveals a new approach to medieval vernacular manuscripts that was equally interested in sacred, historiographical, and legal texts.

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.

Archives are popularly seen as liminal, obscure spaces -- a perception far removed from the early modern reality. This examination of the central English archival system in the period before 1700 highlights the role played by the public records repositories in furnishing precedents for the constitutional struggle between Crown and Parliament. It traces the deployment of archival research in these controversies by three individuals who were at various points occupied with the keeping of records: Sir Robert Cotton, John Selden, and William Prynne. The book concludes by investigating the secretive State Paper Office, home of the arcana imperii, and its involvement in the government's intelligence network: notably the engagement of its most prominent Keeper Sir Thomas Wilson in judicial and political intrigue on behalf of the Crown.

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 17^th and 18^th 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 18^th and early 19^th 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 19^th 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.

The chapters in this book reflect on the special status of marginalia as an object of historical-philosophical interpretation and critical editions. They examine the practices of reading and writing from which this text form and the diversity of its purposes and contexts emerged. The focus is on the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophical traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Ancestry and kinship relations played an eminent role for influential, wealthy bourgeois families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book considers the example of families in Basel to examine different kinds of genealogical practices, showing how knowledge was generated and utilized through family trees, family histories, diagrams, family celebrations, and plays.

Reading history and marginalia have become more and more central for global cultural studies. The scholarly community already has in-depth knowledge of the reading habits and annotation systems practiced in vast portions of the modern world, particularly for the 16th and 17th centuries: from Africa to China, from Europe to the Middle East. However, there are still many questions for which we have no answers. Literary Genres and Reading Habits in the Early Modern investigates through various contributions how modern readers approached different textual forms: from Machiavelli’s political treatise to Aristotle's philosophical essay, from Scaliger's poetical work and Dante's literature to scientific and mathematical production. Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches that combine historical analysis and stylistic-formal inquiry, the volume aims to document two hypotheses: that reading is a multiple cultural (and ethical) practice, as varied as the genres to which it applies, and that marginalia and reading notes are analyzable and interpretable as an autonomous literary genre.

The volume explores the unpublished work of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Kyrillos Loukaris (c.1570–1638), specifically focusing on his sermons delivered between 1602 and 1626. The study centers on Loukaris’ extant sermons, preserved in an autograph manuscript corpus titled Didachae, currently housed in the collection of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre. Following a comprehensive codicological and paleographical examination and the compilation of an annotated inventory of the material, the volume delves into various scholarly inquiries. These include identifying the official corpus of Loukaris’ homiletic work, defining criteria for the standard form, structure, subject matter, and language of the sermons, and analyzing the numerous references to the preacher's diverse readings, including both Orthodox and Latin sources. Moreover, the inventory encompasses all entries found in the codices, presenting the internal classification of the sermons, their methodologies, arguments, the development of each topic, and the application of systems for subsequent processing and revision of the material. Consequently, the description of Loukaris’ unpublished Didachae, regarded as his magnum opus, significantly enriches the modern bibliography on the Patriarch and contributes to the growing field of Eastern Christian homiletics in the early modern period.

This is the first volume to deal with the migration of Greeks to the Holy Roman Empire in detail. It reveals that there were three types of migrants: almsmen, students, and traders. Greek migrants from the Ottoman Empire were of particular significance as "bearers of knowledge," with scholars and institutions viewing their presence as a great opportunity. The book also describes the resulting interactions and relationships.