Central European Pasts: Old and New in the Intellectual Culture of Habsburg Europe, 1700–1750

by Ines Peper (editor), Thomas Wallnig (Editor)

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 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 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. Wie stellte man in verschiedenen kulturellen Kontexten Wissen her? Welche zeitlichen Veränderungen und räumlichen Spezifi ka prägten den Umgang mit Wissen? Wie wurde Information gespeichert, verarbeitet, geordnet, angewandt und aufbereitet, aber auch zerstört und vergessen? Was galt überhaupt als Wissen und für wen? Wie veränderten sich die Antworten darauf im globalen Kontext? Diese Fragen stehen im Zentrum der Reihe, vorwiegend mit Blick auf eine ›lange‹ Frühe Neuzeit.

668 pages, Hardcover

Published July 18, 2022