Knowledge, Science and Literature in Early Modern Germany

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Williams, Gerhild Scholz, and Stephen K. Schindler (eds.). Knowledge, Science and Literature in Early Modern Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. x + 310 pp. $49.95 hardcover. The collection of interesting essays presented here suffers from an overly ambitious framing of the topic. The introduction implicitly concedes this point by not even attempting a synthesis of the individual articles. Ideally, all articles would focus on the intersection of knowledge, science, and literature, but in reality the essays cover a wide array of issues from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, embracing different theoretical positions and methodological approaches. Of the twelve essays, half are in English and half in German, representing both German and North American scholarly traditions. The brief introduction does not include definitions. Notably absent is a discussion of what science means at this time when it could refer to a range of concepts from natural philosophy to rational empiricism. Systems of knowledge --which are undergoing equally profound transformations in the targeted time frame-are addressed only in the fine essay by Jan-Dirk Miller, who proposes that the organization of knowledge serves as an important indicator for transitions between periods and who identifies four useful markers for the shift in the reorganization of humanist knowledge. Three essays, including Muller's, deal with the emerging print culture and the resulting shifts in the structure of knowledge. Elaine C. Tennant examines how the printing privilege is used to manage the information explosion and to authenticate texts during the first century of book printing. Horst Wenzel explores the use of metaphors in poetological discourse in the transition from oral to written tradition with particular focus on bodily metaphors as metaphors for print culture. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann takes a look at changes in historiography in early Enlightenment which signal a disruption of the notion of universal history and a disappearance of topics as a paradigm structuring knowledge. This facilitates the founding of specialized histories, including a completely kind of art history before Winckelmann. The transition from neo-platonic thinking to the new science-the authors carefully avoid the term scientific revolution-is the focus of three essays. C. Stephen Jaeger and Gerhard F Strasser argue that very different figures like Johannes Kepler and Athanasius Kircher both simultaneously operate in poetic and empirical modes. …