1st Edition

Threatened Knowledge Practices of Knowing and Ignoring from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Edited By Renate Dürr Copyright 2022
266 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

266 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

266 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Threatened Knowledge discusses the practices of knowing, not-knowing, and not wanting to know from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. In times of "fake news", processes of forgetting and practices of non-knowledge have sparked the interest of historical and sociological research. The common ground between all the contributions in this volume is the assumption that knowledge does... Read more

1. Introduction: Practices of Knowing and Ignoring from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Renate Dürr 

Part 1. Negotiating Uncertainties and the Reliability of Knowledge

2. What (not) to Read in Times of Crises. Responses to the First Index of Banned Books (c.500 to c.1100)

Irene van Renswoude

3. Precarious knowledge and the Problem of Reliability: the case of prognostic texts in the Carolingian period

Carine van Rhijn

4. "Doubt all before you believe anything": Stock Market Speculation in the Early Twentieth Century United States

Daniel Menning

Part 2: Creating and Misunderstanding References

5. Knowledge and Violence in a Society Under Stress: Death Penalty Under Charles the Bald (843–877)

Warren Pezé

6. Global Encounters – Precarious Knowledge: Traces of Alchemical Practice in Indonesian Batavia

Martin Mulsow

7. Biculturalism, Multiculturalism and Indigeneity as a Strategy of Memoria. Canada and Australia Defining Themselves in Times of Threat

Sebastian Koch 

Part 3: Knowing and Ignoring as Reciprocal Answers

8. Rhetoric and Divination in Erasmus’s Edition of Jerome: Ancient and Modern Ways to Save Dangerous, Vulnerable Texts

Anthony Grafton

9. "Ignorance is power, as well as joy": Trying to Manage Information in turn-of-the century America

Susan J. Matt and Luke Fernandez

10. Corresponding Knowledge: Arguments about Emotions and Entertainment in Berlin and Cairo around 1900

Joseph Ben Prestel

Biography

Renate Dürr is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Tübingen. Her research focuses on Jesuit missions within the context of global history and the history of knowledge. Together with Ulrike Strasser (San Diego) she is currently writing a monograph De-centering the Enlightenment: Global Knowledge, Emotions, and Jesuit Practices in a German Cultural Encyclopedia.