At the intersection of the history of knowledge and science, of European trade empires and the Mediterranean, this major empirical study presents a new method for understanding the history of ignorance across politics, religion, history and science during the early Enlightenment.
In this major study, the history of the French and British trading empires in the early modern Mediterranean is used as a setting to test a new approach to the history of ignorance: how can we understand the very act of ignoring - in political, economic, religious, cultural and scientific communication - as a fundamental trigger that sets knowledge in motion? Zwierlein explores whether the Scientific Revolution between 1650 and 1750 can be understood as just one of what were in fact many simultaneous epistemic movements and considers the role of the European empires in this phenomenon. Deconstructing central categories like the mercantilist 'national', the exchange of 'confessions' between Western and Eastern Christians and the bridging of cultural gaps between European and Ottoman subjects, Zwierlein argues that understanding what was not known by historical agents can be just as important as the history of knowledge itself.
Large city fires were a huge threat in premodern Central European every-day life; only quite late, institutional forms of fire insurances emerged as a post-disaster instrument of damage recovery. During the nineteenth century, insurance agencies spread through the World forming a plurality of modernities, safe or unsafe.
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.
Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676). They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities"--
Every four years, the international Calvin Congress convenes to share insights in the theology and context of the 16th century Reformer John Calvin. A selection of the papers is published in this conference volume.
Since the nineteenth century, the political thought of the French Catholic League (1585-1595) has been considered to be mere plagiarism of Calvinist monarchomach texts written after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572). Based on the original manuscript of the most important Leagueist treatise, composed by the Sorbonne for the Council of the Sixteen and for Mayenne, and sent to Pope Sixtus V in March 1589, this book shows that the real traditions in which the Leagueist thought was rooted are the radicalized Thomism of the school of Salamanca, Canon Law, Conciliarism and Gallicanism. It was in fact the Calvinists who hid their Thomist legacy. The archives of the Vatican, of the Inquisition, and in France reveal the new insight that De justa populi gallici ab Henrico tertio defectione had first been a secret document serving within the international relations between the League and the pope. Only after the assassination of Henri III (August 1589), it was published in an expanded version and became known as authored by Jean Boucher. The tyrannicide had been actively embraced from March 1589 as part of the League ́s constitution. The French crisis and intellectual developments in 1589 thus prefigure many later Catholic-Protestant conflicts on the European scene, such as the controversy between James I and Bellarmine around 1610 and even the Bohemian Revolt of 1618.
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