The Dark Side of Knowledge

Histories of Ignorance, 1400 to 1800

Buch | Hardcover

454 Seiten

2016
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-32512-8 (ISBN)

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Thoroughly researched contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris on coping with ignorance in late medieval and early modern administrative practices, science, literature and the arts, are tightly connected by a new theoretical framework on how to historicize ignorance.

How can one study the absence of knowledge, the voids, the conscious and unconscious unknowns through history? Investigations into late medieval and early modern practices of measuring, of risk calculation, of ignorance within financial administrations, of conceiving the docta ignorantia as well as the silence of the illiterate are combined with contributions regarding knowledge gaps within identification procedures and political decision-making, with the emergence of consciously delimited blanks on geographical maps, with ignorance as a factor embedded in iconographic programs, in translation processes and the semantic potentials of reading. Based on thorough archival analysis, these selected contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris are tightly framed by new theoretical elaborations that have implications beyond these cases and epochal focus.

Contributors: Giovanni Ceccarelli, Taylor Cowdery, Lucile Haguet, John T. Hamilton, Lucian Hölscher, Moritz Isenmann, Adam J. Kosto, Marie-Laure Legay, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Fabrice Micallef, William T. O´Reilly, Eleonora Rohland, Mathias Schmoeckel, Daniel L. Smail, Govind P. Sreenivasan, and Cornel Zwierlein.

Prof. Dr. Cornel Zwierlein, since 2008 Univ. Bochum, PhD 2003 LMU Munich/CESR Tours; Fellow Harvard History 2013-2016. Monographs Discorso und Lex Dei, 2006; Der gezähmte Prometheus, 2011; forthcoming The Political Thought of the French League (Droz, Geneva) and Imperial Unknowns (Cambridge UP).

Notes on the Editor and the Contributors
List of Illustrations

Introduction: Towards a History of Ignorance
Cornel Zwierlein

PART 1: LAW

1 Law and the Uncertainty of Value in Late Medieval Marseille and Lucca
Daniel L. Smail

2 Nescience and the Conscience of Judges. An example of Religion’s influence on Legal procedure
Mathias Schmoeckel

3 Speaking Nothing to Power in early modern Germany: Making Sense of Peasant Silence in the Ius Commune
Govind P. Sreenivasan

PART 2: ECONOMY

4Coping with unkown Risks in Renaissance Florence: Insurance, Friars and Abacus Teachers
Giovanni Ceccarelli

5(Non-)Knowledge, Political Economy and Trade Policy in Seventeenth-Century France: The Problem of Trade Balances
Moritz Isenmann

6Ignorance in Europe’s State Financial Culture (Eighteenth Century)
Marie-Laure Legay

PART 3: SEMANTICS

7 Voluptas carnis. Allegory and Non-Knowledge in Pieter Aertsen’s Still-Life Paintings
John T. Hamilton

8Humanist Styles of Reading in the Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton
Taylor Cowdery

9Coexistence and Ignorance: What Europeans in the Levant did not read (ca. 1620 to 1750)
Cornel Zwierlein

PART 4: POLITICAL AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION

10Ignorance about the Traveler: Documenting Safe Conduct in the European Middle Ages
Adam J. Kosto

11International Crises as Experience of Non-Knowledge: European Powers and the ‘Affairs of Provence’ (1589-1598)
Fabrice Micallef

12Dealing with Hurricanes and Mississippi Floods in Early French New Orleans. Environmental (Non-) Knowledge in a Colonial Context
Eleonora Rohland

13‘Unknown Sciences’ and Unknown Superiors. The Problem of Non-Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Secret Societies
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg

14Specifying Ignorance in Eighteenth-Century Cartography, a powerful way to promote the Geographer’s Work: The example of Jean-Baptiste d’Anville
Lucile Haguet

PART 5: THEORY

15Semantics of the Void Empty Spaces in Eighteenth-Century German Historiography – A First Sketch of a Semiotic Theory
Lucian Hölscher

16Non-Knowledge and Decision Making: The Challenge for the Historian
William O’Reilly

Index nominum
Index rerum

Erscheinungsdatum	18.07.2016
Reihe/Serie	Intersections ; 46
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	812 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
ISBN-10	90-04-32512-3 / 9004325123
ISBN-13	978-90-04-32512-8 / 9789004325128
Zustand	Neuware