Book The Dark Side of Knowledge Historie
Book The Dark Side of Knowledge Historie
Book The Dark Side of Knowledge Historie
Edited by
Cornel Zwierlein
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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issn 1568-1181
isbn 978-90-04-32512-8 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-32518-0 (e-book)
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on the Editor xi
Notes on the Contributors xii
List of Illustrations and Tables xviii
Part 1
Law
Part 2
Economy
Part 3
Semantics
Part 4
Political and Scientific Communicaton
Part 5
Theory
Prof. Dr. Cornel Zwierlein earned his PhD in 2003 from the University of
Munich (LMU) and the CESR Tours. He is teaching early modern and environ-
mental history at the university of Bochum since 2008, early modern history
since 2001 at Munich. He earned fellowships in France, Italy, Germany, and the
Max-Weber-Price of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 2010. He has been
Fellow (2013–2015) and Associate (2016) of the Harvard History Department
and at CRASSH, Wolfson College (Cambridge University, 2014). Monographs:
Discorso and Lex Dei. Die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert
und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien
und Deutschland (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: 2006). Der gezäh-
mte Prometheus. Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen Früher Neuzeit und
Moderne (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: 2011). The Political
Thought of the French League and Rome, 1585–1589. De justa populi gallici ab
Henrico tertio defectione and De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione (Jean Boucher,
1589) (Geneva, Droz: 2016) and Imperial Unknowns. The French and the British
in the Mediterranean, 1650–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Forthcoming is a revised English version of The tamed Prometheus (West
Virginia University Press).
Giovanni Ceccarelli
is Associate Professor of Economic History at the department of Economics of
the university of Parma, and 2016/17 Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical
Studies of Princeton University. He took his PhD at the Università Bocconi di
Milano in 2002 and his Abilitazione as Full Professor in 2014. He has studied
the medieval and early modern history of risk from several angles, includ-
ing gambling, insurance and risk management techniques, in theory but also
in business practice. He has published the monographs Il gioco e il peccato.
Economia e rischio nel Tardo Medioevo (Bologna, Mulino: 2003) and Un mercato
del rischio. Assicurare e farsi assicurare nella Firenze rinascimentale (Venice,
Marsilio: 2012).
Taylor Cowdery
is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. A scholar of late medieval and early modern poetry, Cowdery is currently
completing a monograph that links changing attitudes towards materiality dur-
ing the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with shifts in poetic theory and prac-
tice during the same period. Cowdery has published on a wide range of topics,
including late medieval translation theory, Humanism, and fifteenth-century
court poetry; his articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Reformation and
Studies in the Age of Chaucer. He received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard
University in 2016.
Lucile Haguet
has received her PhD in 2007 in History at the Sorbonne (Paris IV) (Aegyptus,
l’Égypte de l’Occident. Concept et représentations de l’Égypte à travers la carto-
graphie occidentale, du XVe au XVIIIe siècle). She has been associate researcher
at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. She is currently working as curator
in charge of the historical collections at the city library Armand Salacrou in
Le Havre. She is co-author of Artistes de la carte. De la Renaissance au XXIe
siècle (Paris, Autrement: 2012), forthcoming is Jean-Baptiste d’Anville, un cabi-
net savant à l’époque des Lumières (Oxford, Voltaire foundation).
John T. Hamilton
is the William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature
and Chair of the German Department at Harvard University. He stud-
ied Comparative Literature, German, and Classics in New York, Paris, and
Heidelberg. Among many fellowships abroad one might remind the resident
fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2005–2006) and at the Zentrum
für Literatur- und Kulturforschung at Berlin. His monographs are Soliciting
Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Harvard UP 2004),
and Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (Columbia UP 2008) and
Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton UP 2013).
Lucian Hölscher
is professor em. for Modern History and the theory of history at the Ruhr-
University in Bochum/ Germany. He was and is engaged in several national
and international research projects: on religion in the modern world, with a
special focus on the semantics of religious concepts, and on the history of past
futures in modern western societies. After his PhD on the history of the notion
of the public sphere (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta: 1979) and his habilitation thesis
on the History of Protestant conceptions of future in the German Kaiserreich
(Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta: 1989) he has published widely on the history of prot-
estantism in Western Europe, on the history of concepts, of futures past in
Europe, and many aspects of the theory of history including the role of remem-
brance and forgetting in history, of breaks and continuities in 20th century
European history and on concepts of time in modern historiography. Among
his more recent monographs are The Discovery of the Future (Die Entdeckung
der Zukunft, Frankfurt a. M., Fischer: 1999); The New Annalistic (Göttingen,
Wallstein: 2003); History of Protestant Piety (Geschichte der protestantischen
Frömmigkeit, München, Beck: 2005), and Semantics of the void (Semantik der
Leere, Göttingen, wallstein: 2009).
Moritz Isenmann
received his PhD 2008 from the European University Institute (Florence) and
is lecturer in early modern history since 2008 at the University of Cologne
(Germany). From 2011–2013 he has been fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-
foundation at the EHESS and the German Historical Institute in Paris. He is the
author of Die Verwaltung der päpstlichen Staatsschuld in der Frühen Neuzeit:
Sekretariat, Computisterie und Depositerie der Monti vom 16. bis zum ausgehenden
18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, Steiner: 2005) and Legalität und Herrschaftskontrolle
(1200–1600). Eine vergleichende Studie zum Syndikatsprozess: Florenz, Kastilien
und Valencia (Frankfurt a.M., Klostermann: 2010). His current research inter-
ests focus on economic and trade policy in early modern France. He has just
completed his habilitation thesis with the title: Der “Colbertismus” und die
Ursprünge des wirtschaftlichen Liberalismus. Französische Außenhandelspolitik
im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV.
Adam Kosto
is Professor of History at Columbia University, where he specializes in the
institutional and legal history of medieval Europe, with a focus on Catalonia
and the Mediterranean. He received his B.A. from Yale (1989), an M.Phil. from
Cambridge (1990), and his Ph.D. from Harvard (1996). He is the author of
Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word,
1000–1200 (Cambridge UP, 2001) and Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford UP,
2012), and co-editor of The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950–1350
(Farnham, Ashgate: 2005), Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation
and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (PIMS, 2002), and
Documentary Practices and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge UP,
2012). He is a member of the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique
and the ChartEx digital humanities project, and serves as program director for
Columbia’s History in Action initiative.
Marie-Laure Legay
is professor of Early Modern History at the university of Lille III. Having
received her PhD from Paris VII, she is specialized in political and financial
history of Europe during the Enlightenment. She has directed a research proj-
ect funded by the Agence nationale de recherche (2006–2010) on the reforms
within early modern public accounting administrations. Aside to numerous
memberships in national scientific and university Boards, she has published
widely on eighteenth century financial administration and public account-
ing. Her recent monographs are La banqueroute de l’État royal: la gestion des
finances publiques de Colbert à la Révolution (Ed. EHESS 2011), and Histoire de
l’argent à l’époque moderne (Paris: Colin, 2014).
Fabrice Micallef
received his PhD in History in 2013 at the Sorbonne (Paris I). His thesis on the
international dimension of the French wars of the religion in the Provence,
Southern France, Savoy, Italy and Spain has been published in a shortened ver-
sion as Un désordre européen: la compétition internationale autour des ‘affaires
de Provence’ (1580–1598) with the Presses universitaires de Sorbonne (2014). He
is currently teaching early modern history at Paris I and is working on a new
research project on catholic dissidents in Europe around 1600.
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg
has received his main academic formation in Germany at the universities
of Berlin (FU), Frankfurt/Oder and Erfurt after his undergraduate studies in
Melbourne/Australia. His 2012 PhD History as Subversion: Conspiracy Theory as
a Modern Concept and an Early Modern Facet of anti-Jesuit Polemic was directed
by Martin Mulsow at the Research Centre for Social and Cultural Studies, Gotha.
He is currently a Post-Doc Research Fellow at the Centre for Research into the
Arts, Socials Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge/UK in
Richard L. Evans’ Leverhulme Trust Project on Conspiracy and Democracy. His
publications focus on the History of Conspiracies during the Enlightenment.
William O’Reilly
teaches early modern History at the University of Cambridge, where he is a
Fellow and Tutor at Trinity Hall, and associate Director of the Centre for History
and Economics. Studying at NUI, Galway, Universität Hamburg and University
of Oxford, where he completed his MSt and DPhil, he has been a visiting
lecturer at Universität Hamburg, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Christian-
Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and Harvard University; a Senior Fellow at the
Institute of Advanced Study, Central European University Budapest, and a
visiting fellow at the Austrian and Hungarian Academies of Science. He has
received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in Atlantic history. His
research and teaching interests lie in early modern History in Europe and the
Americas, with a particular focus on the histories of migration, colonisation
and imperialism. Publications include Selling Souls. The Traffic in German
Migrants: Europe and America, 1648–1780 (Cambridge UP) and current research
focuses on the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI with a project entitled
Surviving Empire. Charles VI, the emperor who would be king.
Eleonora Rohland
is Assistant Professor for History of the Americas at the University of Bielefeld.
Rohland is an environmental historian with a geographical focus on the
Southern United States (New Orleans), the Caribbean, and Europe. She
received her PhD at the University of Bochum in 2014, her doctoral thesis
was awarded the dissertation award ‘cultural studies’ 2015 by the Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen. Her expertise is in historical disas-
ter studies, climate history, history of knowledge and technology and insur-
ance history. Current research interests include the cultural adaptation and
environmental transformation of colonial societies in the Americas. Rohland
is the author of Sharing the Risk. Fire, Climate and Disaster. Swiss Re 1864–1906
(Lancaster, Crucible Books: 2011) and of Hurricanes in New Orleans, 1718–2005.
A History of Adaptation (New York: forthcoming).
Mathias Schmoeckel
is Professor of Civil Law, German Legal History and History of Civil Law;
Director of the Institute of German and Rhenish Legal History at Bonn
University; Director of the Rhenish Institute of Notarial Law; member of the
Istituto Lombardo. Areas of expertise are Legal history and law of succession.
Research interests are the influence of religion on law, particularly canon law
and Protestant Reformation; history of international law; industrial revolu-
tion and law. His Monographs include Die Großraumtheorie. Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der Völkerrechtswissenschaft im Dritten Reich, insbesondere der
Kriegszeit (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot: 1994); Humanität und Staatsraison. Die
Abschaffung der Folter in Europa und die Entwicklung des gemeinen Strafprozeß-
und Beweisrechts seit dem hohen Mittelalter (Cologne et al., Böhlau: 2000);
Rechtsgeschichte der Wirtschaft seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, Mohr &
Siebeck: 2008, 2nd ed. 2016); Die Jugend der Justitia. Archäologie der Gerechtigkeit
im Prozessrecht der Patristik (Tübingen, Mohr & Siebeck: 2013); Das Recht der
Reformation. Die epistemologische Revolution der Wissenschaft und die Spaltung
der Rechtsordnung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, Mohr & Siebeck: 2014).
Stephen Walsh
has studied at Bard College (US), the Jagiellonian University Krakow and at
Harvard University where he received his PhD in Modern European History
in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Between the Arctic & the Adriatic: Polar
Exploration, Science & Empire in the Habsburg Monarchy. Having received
numerous fellowships during his doctoral studies and as Postdoc Fellow
(European University Institute, Florence; Smithsonian Institution, National
Air & Space Museum Washington) he is currently a Postdoc-Fellow at the
University of Erfurt. He has contributed substantially by editing the English of
all texts by non native speakers of this volume.
1 A ‘Grammar’
1 Simmel G., “Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel [1918]”, Chapter III: “Tod und
Unsterblichkeit” in Idem, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, ed. G. Fitzi – O. Rammstedt (Frankfurt a.M.:
1999) 303.
2 Ravetz J. R., “Usable Knowledge, Usable Ignorance: Incomplete Science with Policy
Implications”, in Clark W. C. – Munn R. E. (eds.), Sustainable Development of the Biosphere
(Cambridge: 1986) 415–432; Collingridge D., The Social Control of Technology (New York: 1980);
Wilson P., Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority (Westport – London:
1983); Smithson M. J., Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms (New York: 1989);
Ravetz J. R., The Merger of Knowledge with Power: Essays in Critical Science (London – New
York: 1990); Luhmann N., “Ökologie des Nichtwissens”, in Idem, Beobachtungen der Moderne
(Opladen: 1992) 149–220; Wehling P., Im Schatten des Wissens? Perspektiven der Soziologie des
Nichtwissens (Constance: 2006); Idem, “Vom Risikokalkül zur Governance des Nichtwissens.
the matter as is, classifying the whole issue as unimportant. In other words,
these were portions and parts of ignorance one could live with. The status of
ignorance being willed or unwilled has to be distinguished from the functions
of ignorance and from acts of ignoring within a society. This is because the
goals of a willed form of ignoring can coincide with its functions, but, as always
in social contexts, the proximate as well as ultimate functions can differ, unin-
tended outcomes can turn up that are not within a given actor’s ability to antic-
ipate and master. Finally, I would propose making a distinction concerning the
character of the knowledge/ignorance involved. There is a difference between
‘operative’ and ‘epistemic’ knowledge/ignorance. The first serves as guiding
schemes and principles in all forms of practice and action (political, economic,
agrarian, legal, etc.). No higher forms of written theoretical semantics may
exist for it, but an actor or a group still can either take advantage of it or lack it.
Epistemic, or perhaps ‘discursive’, knowledge/ignorance refers to more
theoretically developed forms that may be purely contemplative and without
direct usability within immediate practical contexts. This is helpful insofar
as it allows us to address manifestations, and highly reflective theories, of
oblivion, of forgetting, and of ignoring something, embedding humanist or
Enlightenment thinkers together with the less contemplative forms of igno-
rance that arose in the everyday practice of merchants or administrators—and
yet we still remain able to distinguish the one from the other. And treating
them together makes sense, as operative and epistemic forms of non-
knowledge are linked to each other and are often in an osmotic form of inter-
dependency. Daily practice can reach a theoretical level through descriptions
and observations, transforming quotidian procedures into discursive knowl-
edge and, vice versa, contemplative armchair theories can become direct
actions and establish whole institutions (later, by others, in different form), as
they become ‘enacted’. Several of the contributions gathered here address
those connections between operative and epistemic forms of specifying igno-
rance and of knowledge: abacco teachers and their writings about early forms
of calculation and the practice of risk specification in fifteenth century
Tuscany; the close interrelationships between mercantilist theories and every-
day administrative practice; political decision-making theories and the prac-
tice of analysing news, as well as planning and conceiving the unknown future
at the very moment of political action. As will be noted shortly below (3.2 ‘The
shift to empiricism’), several of those distinctions concerning ‘ignorance’ have
very long histories and very old roots. As we shall see, one does not require
twentieth century sociological terminology to distinguish between forms of
ignorance related to the perspective of individual actors and between several
voluntary forms of ignorance. But the Mertonian distinctions concerning the
2 Dimensions
There are some dimensions of ignoring and ignorance that intersect or link the
more thematic fields of discursive or practical congruity into which the contri-
butions may be classified (law, economy, politics, sciences, theory). Of those,
one may highlight here the relationships of ignorance/ignoring with time,
space, emotion, with the creation and processing of meaning (semantics and
semantic potentials of artefacts and communication), and historical reflec-
tions about the place and seat of knowledge as well as of ignorance (what is
the Instanz of knowing/ignoring?).
5 Fundamental still is the first collection of essays by Koselleck R., Vergangene Zukunft. Zur
Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a.M.: 1979). his later work deals with the same
themes; Pocock J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: 1999–2015); Dubois C.-G.,
La conception de l’histoire en France au XVIe siècle (1560–1610) (Paris: 1977); Ricœur P., Temps et
récit, 3 vols. (Paris: 1983–1985); Hartog F., Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du
temps (Paris: 2003).
6 Le Goff J., Pour un autre Moyen Âge. Temps, travail et culture en Occident (Paris: 1978) 46–79.
7 For an overview on research on the history of early modern chronology cf. Levitin D., “From
Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European
Historiography from Reformation to ‘Enlightenment’ ”, The Historical Journal 55, 4 (2012)
1117–1160.
8 Woolf D., “News, History and the Construction of the Present”, in Dooley B. – Baron S. A.
(eds.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London – New York: 2001) 80–118;
Behringer W., Im Zeichen des Merkur. Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der
Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: 2003). For the concept of ‘horizons of the present’ and avvisi
communication see Zwierlein C., Discorso und Lex Dei. Die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen
im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und
Deutschland (Göttingen: 2006) 198–294, 557–610, cf. Dooley B. (ed.), The Dissemination of
News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: 2010).
same time. On another level, an interesting question arises: to what degree and
how were actors aware of the forms of ignorance produced by the shape and
the selectivity of that ‘fluid present’? Newsletters usually contained only very
specific contents; more implicitly than explicitly they gave quality and density
of attention only to a tiny set of regions. They did not pay any attention to many
other coexisting events and realities in social strata not ‘seen’ by the political
elite, and their necessary transport meant that the mark of delay was unavoid-
able. These are two forms of consciously or unconsciously ignoring the present
and of ignorance produced by the historically specific representation of the
present which emerged in co-evolution with postal relay-based long distance
communication. It was first of all situated on an operative level of action, but
surely, it had great impact on ‘higher’ discourses, as several forms of reflecting
upon and coping with these forms of ignorance show, such as notation systems
like the famous double-entry bookkeeping, situated on an intermediate level
of merchant practices. This is, at its very core, a system that attempts to repre-
sent the present situation of a firm’s whole economic affairs despite the asyn-
chronic flows of income and expenses, of incoming and outgoing goods and
values in a system of stretched out inter-factory trade communication.9 The
transfer of this form of responding to ignorance through a synchronized form
of value representation into the administration of state finances took hun-
dreds of years between the first city government which adopted it in Italy and
the still failing reform attempts in mid-eighteenth century France.10 This long
process reminds the historian that the question of how one operated under
circumstances of partial ignorance for centuries, without a synchronized over-
view of state finances, and how the administrators witnessed the coexistence
of both forms of financial communication. On a still more discursive level, late
Renaissance theories of prudentia (following Bodin and Botero: contribution
Fabrice Micallef ) are historical theories of decision-making under circum-
stances of ignorance that are specific to these moments within the long devel-
opment of the present’s shape.
While there are also other causal factors and inner discursive developments
that the way the past and History were conceived between medieval and mod-
ern times, the just mentioned emergence of different representations of the
present also resulted in a different conception of the past. The emergence of
late humanist forms of history writing, heavily relying on collecting and digest-
9 One of the best introductions into the materiality of the notation system of the early capi-
talist Mediterranean merchants remains Melis F., Aspetti della vita economica medievale.
Studi nell’Archivio Datini di Prato (Siena: 1962).
10 Cf. for the latter problem the contributions of Isenmann and Legay in this volume.
ing past news,11 shows that impact. Here the past was conceived of as a succes-
sion of layers of past representations of present states of a given region—and
this could eventually lead authors to new states of awareness concerning their
ignorance of certain or large parts of that past, for the simple reason that no
such coherent web of archived news was available for earlier times. The ‘dark-
ness’ of the Middle Ages opened up by implicitly comparing the current form
of representing the present with the information provided by chronicles and
other compilations of data for previous and lost times.12 One could interpret,
for instance, the humanists’ rediscovery and high estimation of the letters of
Cicero and Pliny13 not only as a rediscovery of ancient ‘private life’ but as an
acknowledgement of a past representation of news flow and of the political
present enhanced by the Roman communication infrastructure of streets,
news carriers, and later of means of transport already relying on principles
11 This applies mostly to those historians who wrote histories of the recent past, but some-
times went back into earlier periods. For Italian humanists strongly relying on collected
archival and ‘past news’ material cf. Cutinelli Rèndina E., Guicciardini (Rome: 2009);
Zimmermann T. C. P., Paolo Giovio: the Historian and the Crisis of sixteenth-century Italy
(Princeton: 1995); for France for instance, Yardeni M., “Esotérisme, religion et histoire dans
l’œuvre de Palma Cayet”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 198 (1981) 285–305. The author of
the Chronologies of early times of Henry IV was linked to and succeeded by the editors
of the Mercure François, which was itself a precursor of Renaudot’s Gazette. For England,
Woolf D. R., The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford:
2003). In Germany, the relationship of that form of history writing with the emerging
genres of printed news or of annalistic summaries of recent events around 1580/1600 is
even closer, cf. the bibliography Bender K., Relationes historicae. Ein Bestandsverzeichnis
der deutschen Messrelationen von 1583 bis 1648 (Berlin: 1994).
12 On medieval organization principles and forms of history writing, retrieved mostly from
Central European examples cf. Goetz H. W., Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewußsein
im hohen Mittelalter (Berlin: 1999).
13 Witt R., In the Footsteps of the Ancients: the Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni
(Leiden – Boston: 2000) 224–229; easily to be overseen due to its concentration on
Agricola is Akkerman F., “De Neolatijnse epistolografie. Rudolf Agricola” [first 1985] in
Idem, Met iets van eeuwigheid (Groningen: 1999) 80–98, which gives a good overview on
that humanist interest from the fourteenth century in the epistola familaris and the phe-
nomenon that the emulation of factual narration of daily news mixed with private affairs
was perhaps the latest and most difficult form of humanist re-invention in dialogue
with Antiquity. Mostly (as with Alfred von Martin for instance), the epistola familiaris is
taken as the genre that re-established intimacy and ‘friendship’. Cicero’s and Pliny’s let-
ters contain information on the ancient private transport system, relying on tabellarii as
opposed to the cursus publicus established by Augustus which was restricted to state and
military purposes, cf. Kolb A., “Communications II: Classical Antiquity”, in Cancik H. –
Schneider H. (eds.), Brill’s New Pauly [Brill online 2006].
close to postal relay systems, closely resembling the humanists’ own days and
different from medieval times. If, in a next step, philosophers reflected on the
structure of History as a whole, of its shape, developmental character and the
causalities involved, this was all determined by that basic change of concept of
the past, relying on the aforementioned new form of the present. The problems
of ignorance and ignoring evoked there are mirrored and transferred in anal-
ogy to that new form of History, as the contribution of Lucian Hölscher shows.
The Newtonian shock of discovering a concept of absolute time, as was still
being digested by late Enlightenment German philosophers of History, was an
epistemic challenge nevertheless different from the abovementioned changes
in the perception of the past. The questions raised, however, are still highly
related. Questioning the past and History as its description regarding the voids
as those philosophers did, was the effect of becoming aware of the selective
shape and character of the information provided—now and in different forms
in the past. Instead of having an unquestioned idea of the past as an always
similar (for instance Biblical) narrative without gaps, as a seemingly dense
unity, things change if one accepts that sources do not say very much about a
given region or monastery for example. Records of past events, in other words,
were as selective as current news. And even more so because in the past, there
was not anyone who continuously produced written representations of pres-
ent conditions. If only from time to time, some letters or a chronicler working
from oral transmission and memory survived, History, measured against the
current form of the present, became perceived more like a network of loosely
connected nodes of knowns with a great deal of void between them instead of
that former idea of a dense tableau. Theories about how whole civilizations fall
and become ‘forgotten’ in diluvian forms of oblivion or how smaller instances
of destruction and the fall of empires, states or cities lead to the forgetting
of their past start to emerge in humanist times.14 Those reflections as well as
thoughts on causality and how History behaves according to divine or natural
laws and where forms of fortuna, hazard and contingency pose limits to such
lawfulness can be interpreted as a reflective supplement to the partially or
14 On Renaissance theories of general oblivion cf. Sasso G., “De aeternitate mundi (Discorsi,
II 5)”, in Idem, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, vol. 1 (Milan – Naples: 1987) 167–399,
and for the development of the Machiavellian topos until Ammirato, Zwierlein C.,
“Forgotten Religions, Religions that Cause Forgetting”, in Karremann I. – Zwierlein C. –
Groote I. (eds.), Forgetting Faith: Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe
(Berlin: 2012) 117–138. On the theme of individual forgetting and self-forgetting as a theme
of literature and as subfield of the ars memoriae cf. Sullivan G. A., Memory and Forgetting
in English Renaissance Drama. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: 2005).
largely unknown content of the Past by the form of a structure that prevailed
beyond the knowable and despite so many unknowns.15
While the present and past are logically knowable but empirically out of
reach, and their representation biased by current forms of communication,
the future has always been and is logically unknown. Much has been writ-
ten about the development from concepts of closed futures, linked to either
linear biblical time or cyclical forms of rise, peak and decline, to allegedly
modern concepts of an open future of, for instance, humankind’s progress.
All that concerns, again, more the level of philosophical discourse, linked to
the reflexive forms of conceiving laws of History already mentioned. It is less
represented in this volume, where more attention is given to the problems
of how, e.g.in terms of economic and state financial operations and political
planning, late medieval and early modern possible futures were fabricated as
forms of prognostics.16 To some extent, the line from proto-probabilistic forms
of risk modelling in late medieval Tuscany to the political arithmetic of future
scenarios of state finances and the balance of trade between nations, follows
well prepared historiographical paths. But the focus on future as just one con-
tent and object of ignorance allows us to understand these developments in a
wider context. One important potential here is the ability to see the intersec-
tion of different coincident epistemic fields and the conflation of their respec-
tive methods of reasoning about and of coping with future unknowns. The
Florentine proto-probabilistic form of risk conceptions, for example, seems
just to be a product of theological, merchant and mathematical (abacco)
approaches to shaping the future as a not-yet-present and to make it calculable
as the contribution by Giovanni Ceccarelli shows. For the late seventeenth cen-
tury, a similar widening of horizons allows us to understand that it is not just
the question how the techniques to model the future unknown by prognosis
became more and more subtle by more sophisticated mathematical calcula-
tions. If those mathematical calculations concerned such specific questions
as how exponential discounting can achieve a representation of the present
value of future corporate profits, then a new step was achieved. Techniques
15 Santoro M., Fortuna, ragione e prudenza nella civiltà letteraria del Cinquecento, 2nd ed.
(Naples: 1978).
16 Hamon P., ‘Gouverner, c’est prévoir: Quelques remarques sur la prévision financière dans
la première moitié du XVIe siècle’, in L’administration des finances sous l’Ancien Régime
(Paris: 1997) 5–15 with the distinction between a prognostics of state finances ‘au futur’
and ‘du futur’: sixteenth century messieurs des finances might have had a practical vision
of the near future of their accounting, but were not able to produce explicit fully devel-
oped tableaus of the state’s future financial situation as a whole.
to cope with future unknowns within the field of late seventeenth and eigh-
teenth century political economy did not just concentrate on the generation
of mathematized tableaus of possible futures, but they also tried to determine
the value of each such possible future that was thought to be the most likely,
in the now. The ignored was not only replaced by a probable known, it was
even transformed into a negotiable asset.
All three dimensions of time are necessarily linked to each other.
17 Greenberg J. L., The problem of the Earth’s shape from Newton to Clairaut: The rise of math-
ematical science in eighteenth-century Paris and the fall of ‘normal’ science (Cambridge:
1995).
18 Andrewes W. J. H., “Even Newton Could Be Wrong: The Story of Harrison’s First Three
Sea Clocks”, in Idem (ed.), The Quest for Longitude (Cambridge, Mass.: 1996) 189–234;
Barnett K., “ ‘Explaining’ Themselves: The Barrington Papers, the Board of Longitude, and
the Fate of John Harrison”, Notes & Records of the Royal Society 65 (2011) 145–162; Dunn R. –
Higgitt R., Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude (New York: 2014).
19 Surun I., “Le blanc de la carte, matrice de nouvelles représentations des espaces africains,”
in I. Laboulais-Lesage (ed.), Combler les Blancs de la Carte. Modalités et enjeux de la con-
struction des savoirs géographiques (XVIIe–XXe siècle) (Strasbourg: 2004) 177–135.
explaining the character and dimensions of the ‘emptiness’ and of what and to
what degree geography was still ignorant concerning that space. Mostly, some-
thing or even a great deal was known or at least partially known and narrated
concerning a given region, but now new standards within epistemic fields that
specialized and separated what was to be represented on a geographical map,
sought a return to the blank, a visual statement of unknowns that responded to
the new principles of measurement and standards of accuracy. The ignorance
exposed here was artificially constructed in some way and used as a heuristical
tool to promote further research by explicitly replacing older standards with
newer empiricist ones. It seems that the earlier shift of the so-called first geo-
graphical revolution followed just the reverse path when the humanist norma-
tive standard to follow re-discovered texts and Ptolemaic measurements, as
the Greek notation system was then understood, replaced the previously exist-
ing empirical but rather unexplicated knowledge of Portolan mapmakers.20
The juxtaposition between empirical findings as measured by voyagers and
Ptolemaic data—if existent at all for a given world region—was often noted
in travel reports as error during the sixteenth century, but it did not lead to
a coherent reflexive discourse on the overall scale and amount of ignorance
implied in the maps produced. Despite all the technical improvements such
as the different forms of spatial projection developed by mapmakers, such an
open exposition and even a willed use of re-defining all as ignored through the
visual aid of the empty space was reserved to Enlightenment mapmaking and
conceptions of space.
Beyond learned cartography, the link between ignorance and space con-
tinues to be of high importance. The impact on individual and collective
perceptions of distances has already briefly addressed the question of how
representations of the present depended on the transportation of news. But
we should bear some further points concerning that subjective perception in
mind. Groups and individuals both imagined space and journeyed through it,
and for several years scholars have discussed the question of the historicization
of ‘mental maps’, a matter that has a great deal to do with the historicization
of ignorance. Ignoring a distant space, receiving news about it, elaborating a
better defined vision and distinction between knowns and unknowns, all this
is not restricted to cartography, it also concerns all kinds of written and oral
20 Broc N., La géographie de la Renaissance (1420–1620) (Paris: 1980) 9–42; Jacob C., The
Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History (Chicago –
London: 2006) 62. For Ptolemy’s notation system cf. Mittenhuber F., Text- und Kartentra-
dition in der Geographie des Klaudios Ptolemaios. Eine Geschichte der Kartenüberlieferung
vom ptolemäischen Original bis in die Renaissance (Bern: 2009) 165–169.
narratives that are implied, in spatial orientation (for instance of long distance
migrants as in the contribution by William O’ Reilly). Granted, we know very
well in general how the concepts and ‘images’ of other countries evolved within
neighbouring or distant societies on a discursive level. Nevertheless, how trav-
elers planned their journeys and how they envisioned their destinations are
different questions. How precise or how fluid was this knowledge and how did
voyagers cope with partial points of complete ignorance, being forced to leave
without any clear idea of what the important conditions of their destinations
might be? Regarding the Americas, for instance, this surely evolved through
time. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the accumulation
of relevant information led to the gradual but more or less consistent reduc-
tion of what was ignored but identified as necessary, and in the eighteenth
century, it seems that something akin to a standard formula of basic points
had come together. Migration had become a standard activity and business,
and while in fact those who set off on a voyage still did so, viewed from outside,
under circumstances of great uncertainty and ignorance, within their society
of departure, the re-specification of ignorance according to constant incoming
news had relented. This leads to another problem that operated on the same
level of generality as the links between ignorance and representations of time
and space, the question of ignorance and emotions.
21 Delumeau J., La Peur en Occident (XIV e–XVIII e siècles) (Paris: 1978) 31–54: ‘Mer variable où
toute crainte abonde’, ‘2. Le lointain et le prochain; le nouveau et l’ancien’ (first thematic
chapters after the introduction). Delumeau basically elaborated a brief idea by Febvre L.,
“Pour l’histoire d’un sentiment: le besoin de sécurité”, Annales 11 (1956) 244–247.
evolutionary theories about how the human mind processes information and
how emotions are linked to that. But as far as I can see, the neuroscience of
emotions and of decision-making has not yet treated ‘ignorance and ignoring’
as an accepted object of research in terms of cognition processes, emotional
attitudes, and behaviour. Some attention has been paid to the willed ignorance
of emotions as a synonym for the ‘suppression of emotions’ during decision-
making processes, but the emotional attitude towards a subject’s awareness of
being ignorant in certain degrees does not appear to be a prominent focus of
research at the moment.22 Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to suggest that the
different forms of more or less conscious, more or less specified ignorance, as
present in this volume as well as in many contemporary situations today, bear
an emotional weight for the individuals involved. At least insofar as an unavail-
able piece of knowledge is sorely needed for a decision or for a given action,
fear and other negative emotions become attached to the state of ignorance
22 Agoraphobia, the fear of wide open spaces, is linked to the problem of animals and
primates feeling a lack of protection. Nevertheless, on a higher epistemic level beyond
instinctive forms of action, it could be interesting to consider other dimensions between
unmanageable spaces, ignorance, and fear. See Kaplan S., “Environmental Preference in a
Knowledge-Seeking, Knowledge-Using Organism”, in Barkow J. H. –Cosmides L. – Tooby J.
(eds.), The Adapted Mind (Oxford: 1992) 581–598. The standard neuroscientific accounts
of ‘emotion and decision-making’ discuss the problem of priority of emotion to cognition
and vice versa following William James, but do not address our problem, cf. e.g. Berthoz A.,
Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Science of Decision Making (Oxford: 2003) 23–50. More
specific theories are, for instance, those of neuroeconomics worked out by Glimcher P. W.,
Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain. The Science of Neuroeconomics (Cambridge, Mass. –
London: 2003), which uses stochastic Baynesian calculus as an algorithm for how cogni-
tion functions with primates and therefore addresses coping with uncertainty within the
very core of its model. But it does not consider the role of emotions regarding uncertainty
or ignorance. Cf. similarly Idem, Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (Oxford: 2011),
in which the ‘stochasticity’ of human choice and decision-making is put at the centre of
how to understand cognition. Still, the emotion of fear (pp. 365–366) is not linked to the
subject’s potential auto-perception of the uncertainties of that stochasticity. In the model
of the human brain’s functioning as a ‘predictive mind’, ‘uncertainty’ plays a role as a
trigger for a switch from cognitive impenetrability to penetrability (that someone leaves
his or her expectations and predictions aside and could be open to the perception of the
not-yet-known or not-yet-believed), but the considerations of emotions concern only the
question of how the predictive mind might unconsciously tend to prime those predic-
tions that promise the best emotional arousal, cf. Hohwy J., The Predictive Mind (Oxford:
2013) 155, 242–249. The focus, in other words, is either on emotion or on the cognitive
problem of uncertainty within neuroscientific theories of decision-making. Yet there is
less on emotions towards ignorance and uncertainty itself within those frameworks.
itself, together with, and even rather than, the potentially undesirable out-
come of the overall process in question. Certainly it is crucial to distinguish
precisely whether we are dealing with the fear of, e.g., the catastrophic pos-
sible future results of an attack in a war decided upon under circumstances of
ignorance, or if the fear is really focused on sheer ignorance, on the unknowns
concerning the character of a land, of a space and the unclear dangers associ-
ated with it. But both forms, linked to each other, exist and seem, at least logi-
cally, distinguishable.
Beyond reflections on neurobiological roots, which today cannot be ignored
in a discussion of the history of emotions, the greater problem is how to his-
toricize emotions concerning the attributions and reactions used and specific
to one period, or to one culture or region in the brief dimensions not of evo-
lutionary, but of ‘normal’ human history. Differences here are still great. While
men and women certainly had the same biological dispositions, the semantics
of emotional value, in addition to the trained and socialized forms of reac-
tions that produced fear, anger, joy etc. and how it was expressed, were very
different, as is well known and has been studied extensively.23 But no standard
methodology of writing such histories has yet been established. Within the pri-
mary focus on ignorance chosen here, the problem of emotional attributions
and reactions is present on several levels. It is not the aim here to enumer-
ate all possible applications, but we ought to mention a few as they are repre-
sented in this volume. One prominent area is the emotions processed during
travel. Ignorance might here be linked in many ways with fear, but also with
positive forms such as hope, overall concerning the dimensions of space, time
and events. In scholarship on the history of natural disasters, the expression of
fears has received wide attention—more specific is the question of whether
we can precisely determine expressions of fear and unrest concerning the very
problem of ignoring—ignoring the next time an earthquake or a hurricane
might happen, ignoring its potential dimensions and in so doing ignoring pres-
ent measures that could be taken to mitigate future needs (cf. the contribution
by Eleonora Rohland). This brings us immediately back to the issues of public
communication about the conceptions of past, present and the future. Even
within very ‘rational’ contexts, such as late seventeenth century English dis-
23 Reddy W., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge:
2001) claims to present a non-constructivist approach, but in comparison with evolu-
tionary psychology (as n. 22), it is in fact itself a mildly constructivist approach to the
understanding of emotions and their History, cf. for a discussion Plamper J., “The History
of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns”,
History and Theory 49 (2010) 237–265.
cussions on the accuracy of public accounting practices and the causes of mis-
matches between predictions and realities of calculations of balances of trade,
fear and emotion played a significant role: the unknown future, the uncertain-
ties and the emotions related to those seemingly technical issues were intrinsi-
cally linked with anti-Protestant and anti-English conspiracism. Better known
are the later Enlightenment conspiracy theories that were generated within
and about secret societies and their allegedly dreadful plans to destroy the
current states and societies. Those conspiracy theories were narratives that
compensated for the unknowns prevailing in a given society about a deed that
happened in the past or about plans being hatched by hidden agents for the
future. They thus introduced causal fictional but possible elements into an
otherwise factual description of the reality.24 They only functioned because a
huge amount of specified ignorance as object of social communication existed
in the early modern public sphere. Their relation to the collective emotions of
fear, uncertainty, unrest, and helplessness is evident, but still merits further
explicit attention and investigation (cf. the contribution by Andrew McKenzie-
McHarg in this volume).
The challenges here are to identify the precise forms of emotional expres-
sion and representation and how they were linked to forms of conscious,
unconscious ignorance, as well as to their degree and to the uncertainty they
provoked, not to an imagined positive or negative result of an action.
24 For a definition of “Conspiracy Theory” in that sense cf. Zwierlein C., “Security Politics
and Conspiracy Theories in the Emerging European State System (15th/16th c.)”, Historical
Social Research 38, 1 (2013) 65–95, here 72–73.
from others that defines it, the gap of distance/distinction between concepts
and the question of if and how they are related to each other in a system, opens
our purview to ignorance from the point of view of an observer and user of
that very system. Logically, an unbridgeable gap between different languages
would follow, because the semantic outline of a sign in one system can never
be exactly identical with that of a sign from another system. This means, for
a user/observer, a second level of ignorance between sign systems opens up.25
The threefold semiotic theory of Peirce, adding the interpretant to sign and sig-
nifier, which is more often used within text linguistics and closer to the larger
problems of a socio-historical approach to the communication of knowledge,26
likewise indicates many points where ignorance is at stake on a very basic level
of communication. This sometimes more vaguely addresses the bias of other-
ness, the problem of understanding foreign(ers) and foreign cultures, but can
also be formulated quite precisely in terms of a Peirce-Austin-Gricean prag-
matic approach to linguistics. If the interpretant lacks the necessary conven-
tional knowledge for a given communication, the very process of understanding
and communication stops, or at least is interrupted temporarily.27 Focusing
on those points of ‘breaks in understanding’, the weaknesses of those models
have become clear only quite recently, as they always implicitly refer to ideal-
ized contexts where the communicators are sharing common conversational
maxims. Four levels of knowledge that are necessary in empirical, not ideal-
ized, forms of communication eclipse Grice’s implicit cultural universalism:
‘(1) knowledge of the other participant’s culture, (2) knowledge of the other
participant’s personal conversational habits, (3) knowledge of and sensitiv-
25 François A., “Semantic Maps and the Typology of Colexification: Intertwining Polysemous
Networks across Languages”, in Vanhove M. (ed.), From Polysemy to Semantic Change:
Towards a Typology of Lexical Semantic Associations (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 2008)
163–216, here 165.
26 For a comparison of the language theories in their different variations and arguments for
the Peircian approach of semiosis in those contexts, see Dressler W. U., “Textlinguistik
und andere Disziplinen,” in Brinker K. (ed.), Text- und Gesprächslinguistik. Ein internatio-
nales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung (Berlin – New York 2000) 762–772.
27 ‘When we don’t know how to proceed, when we need to understand but find ourselves
at a loss for how to construct a tentative working image of speaker intention that will
allow us to move forward in the conversation, we are brought to an uncomfortable stop
[. . . one would need to investigate] more deeply into the difficult metalocutionary process
of exploring one’s own ignorance, one’s own lack of explanatory tools for understanding
this or that apparently insurmountable puzzler in ordinary conversations. [. . .] one could
argue that all we need here is better knowledge’ (Robinson D., Performative Linguistics:
Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words (New York – London: 2003) 194–195).
28 Ibidem, 199.
29 The basic concept was formulated—not for translations, but for communication in
general—in Shannon C. E., “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell System
Technical Journal 27 (1948) 379–423, 623–656.
30 Cf. e.g. Hermans T., “Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies”, in
Riccardi A. (ed.), Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (Cambridge:
2002) 10–23, here 11: ‘A translation cannot therefore be equivalent with its prototext, it can
only be declared equivalent by means of a performative speech act’, and Venuti L., “The
Difference that Translation Makes: the Translator’s Unconscious,” ibidem, 214–241, here
216–219 on the ‘irreducible differences in translation’.
and ‘correct’ text in the target language.31 Ignorance then biases the result,
and the constructive forces of ignorance become hidden to the reader of the
translation. Reflections on that process remained embryonic since Jerome in
premodern times, mostly outlined in prefaces and other paratexts as opposed
to specialized treatises on that subject; there are just not many texts that merit
the name ‘translation theory’ before the sixteenth century.32 But the human-
ist perception of distance from medieval text traditions and transmissions—
now detecting ‘errors’ hitherto unconsciously invisible—led also to a higher
degree of reflexivity concerning their own capacities of understanding during
processes of translation. These were, in fact, reflections on a specific border
between knowledge and ignorance concerning a given sign system, and they
emerged embryonically in a historically quite precise moment, for instance
with Caxton, as the contribution of Taylor Cowdery shows.
The selectivity of semantic potentials does not only concern words, sen-
tences or a given text in such processes of its activation—reading and trans-
lation being forms of activating semantic potential. Likewise, groups of texts
in their inherent discursive interlinkage, or even just in their material combi-
nation, being gathered or put together, have semantic potential. The limits of
this are thus characterized by the selectivity of that semantic potential that,
31 For an already classical critical overview within the narrower field of translation stud-
ies, see Snell-Hornby M., Translation Studies—An Integrated Approach (Amsterdam:
1988); for the more general approach of cultural transfer that emerged in the late 1980s
and is currently merging with postcolonial concepts of hybridization, cf. Espagne M.,
“Au-delà du comparatisme. La méthode des transferts culturels,” in Avlami C. et al. (eds.),
Historiographie de l’antiquité et transferts culturels. Les histoires anciennes dans l’Europe des
XVIII e et XIX e siècles (Amsterdam: 2010) 201–221. In its original formulation, the distinc-
tion between the original and target culture was more clearly upheld while formulating
the logical paradox but empirical reality of the transfer despite un-identity of the trans-
ferred; for Pierre Legrand’s concept of ‘Legal transplants’, used within the context of Legal
Comparatism and more recently also within Legal History cf. Graziadei M., “Comparative
Law as the Study of the Transplants and Receptions”, in Reimann M. – Zimmermann R.
(eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford: 2006) 441–475.
32 A recent reader is Rhodes N. – Kendal G. – Wilson L. (eds.), English Renaissance
Translation Theory (London: 2013). A recent introduction to the relevant literature
(F. M. Rener, Botley, Norton et al.) can be found in White P., “From Commentary to
Translation: Figurative Representations of the Text in the French Renaissance”, in
Demetriou T. – Tomlinson R. (eds.), The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England
and France, 1500–1660 (Houndmills – New York: 2015) 71–85. On paratexts in general and
the growth and pluralization of their content and function during the early modern
period cf. Ammon F. von – Vögel H. (eds.), Die Pluralisierung des Paratextes in der Frühen
Neuzeit. Theorie, Formen, Funktionen (Berlin – New York: 2008).
33 As introduction cf. Aitchison J., Words in the Mind: an Introduction to the Mental Lexicon,
4th ed. (Chichester et al.: 2012). The computational reconstruction of semantic and asso-
ciation networks is very advanced.
carefully watching all his lands and possessions, or even is like the ‘eye of the
Lord’ (ophthalmos despotou),34 started a form of stylizing the king or gover-
nor as the seat of knowledge in a quite counterfactual way. Whether he really
knew all that was needed or not, could be hidden behind the assertion that he
knew it, that his decisions put an end to all questions, to all ignorance. This is
a form of linking monarchical governance and knowledge/ignorance that was
enforced and continued throughout the European seventeenth and eighteenth
century, and cross-cultural comparisons suggest that it existed in a similar form
also in other highly centralized imperial forms of governance as in China at the
rise of the Manchu Qing regime.35 But if this was the ‘fashioning’ of the king
as omnipotent knower, to transfer the Burkian idea from ceremonial issues to
epistemic ones, real and empirical ignorance was thus a constant threat to the
political system as such. The century-long efforts of administrative reforms
to create a better integrated form of financial information management may
have had their very foundation in that emotional fear of ignorance threatening
the system (cf. the contributions by Moritz Isenmann, Marie-Laure Legay for
that).36 One might consider these counterfactual discourses as just fashioning,
but it seems to have been for a very long time the only answer of premod-
ern times to what today is more openly addressed as decision-making under
conditions of ignorance. Decisions about war and peace, of sending troops, of
taxing and levying money or not had to be and were taken despite of the lack
of greatly desired empirical information, and yet it was not acceptable that the
they lacked the necessary knowledge about the law that was to be adopted to
a given case. Some time passed before a moral and hermeneutical question
arose: if one—always ungodly deficient—human judge was better than a plu-
rality, or—to put it on a more general level—if plural and therefore partially
‘statistical’ or democratic forms of ‘the judge’ were more appropriate for such
an inductive empirical, and itself often open-ended instead of a deductive,
form of truth production. The shift to the empirical meant that in some way or
another ignorance could never be banished completely. There could always be
another clue, another fact discovered that might cast doubt upon the previous
state of accepted knowledge. The legal system (Beccaria reasoning about juries
instead of singular judges) had here again a parallel with the contemporary
political system (Abbé de St. Pierre reflecting on the polysynody of a plurality
of councils instead of the abovementioned all-knowing monarch for instance).
In both the fields of law and politics, the dimension of time was again intrinsi-
cally linked with the problem of ignorance. Ignorance, after all, prevailed and
grew the shorter the time to investigate empirical evidence took, and as pro-
cedures—if they existed at all—lengthened. For a long time Legal History has
placed tremendous value on the study of court records and those interrogatory
products of the aforementioned epistemic shift. One frequently finds noted
how often interrogated peasants or citizens answered with variations of ‘I do
not know’ to the judge’s or his officers’ questions. But seldom was this system-
atized and linked to the contemporary development of the legal discourse of
ignorantia in its many forms. Seen as part of a history of ignorance, these secu-
lar shifts within the legal and court system studied since the beginning of legal
history reveal an astonishingly and somewhat paradoxical process of constant
triggers and responses of ignorance, from the point of the one who judges to
the one who gives testimony and who is judged.
In both fields, the information sought was operative, usable, and applicable
as a parameter in a decision-making process. In the case of the legal system,
this was connected to a higher form of truth, a truth finally only owned by God,
the last judge. It seems that the philosophical parallel to this higher, less appli-
cable form of truth that one just aims for as a purpose on its own, is the search
for ultimate truth and wisdom. The late Enlightenment provides us again with
a surprising instance of the extent to which philosophers could stretch and
push an analogous form of reasoning about the last and final seat of possession
of knowledge. As the contribution of Andrew McKenzie-McHarg shows, secret
societies, starting with the Freemasons, developed a para-institutional dis-
course about the ‘unknown superiors’, their identity, their quasi constitutional
form—all that in a seemingly secularized parallel to the Deus absconditus.
There were supposed to be unknown superiors governing the secret society,
and its members rising in its ranks achieve an always higher position and
greater knowledge, but always remain ignorant of the identity of those superi-
ors who even never can be known. It is as if a rhetorical or logical playful figure
of thought had been transformed (impossibly) into an institution. But this was
actually meant seriously. Political, legal and philosophical epistemic settings
dealing with ignorance thus tend to anthropomorphize the target endpoint of
the epistemic process itself. And insofar the process is logically endless, those
forms of the god-like ruler, the God replacing judge, the unknown superiors as
the ultimate possessors of knowledge, serve as regulatory principles, targets
and even as compensations for what is unreachable in this world.
3 Problems of Historicization
While several historical specificities have already been indicated above, the
first section mostly served to consider the range of questions, the dimensions
of a History of Ignorance. Some short methodological remarks shall follow that
consider the problems of historicizing instances and processes of ignorance,
more specifically for the late medieval and early modern examples chosen here.
39 Schubring K., “Der Brief Konrads von Lützelhardt an seine Mutter. Erläuterungen und
kritische Edition”, DA 51 (1995) 405–432, here 428; Hoffmann H., “Zur mittelalterlichen
Brieftechnik”, in Repgen K. – Skalweit S. (eds.), Spiegel der Geschichte. Festgabe für Max
Braubach (Münster: 1964) 141–170, here 147. The extensive use of the descriptive narra-
tive, and therefore the emergence of a distinctive genre of newsletters or letters with
news, was a late arrival in the medieval literary culture, arriving mostly only after the
Aragonese paper revolution around 1300, cf. Zwierlein C., “Gegenwartshorizonte im
Mittelalter: Der Nachrichtenbrief vom Pergament- zum Papierzeitalter”, Jahrbuch für
Kommunikationsgeschichte 12 (2010) 1–58.
40 For a reconstruction of how Polanyi’s early concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ that integrates
the Peircean semiosis into the understanding of how much implicit knowledge is needed,
active and expressed in communication, and was transferred into the sociology of
knowledge—the ‘tacit know-how’ adduced above—cf. Zappavigna M., Tacit Knowledge
and Spoken Discourse (London – New York: 2013) 1–43.
values in court records still very often contained an explicit ‘I do not know’. The
historian can reconstruct the existence of experts’ know-how only by statisti-
cal induction from many cases; no explicit model to guide the process were
worked out, or at least they left no traces. Both are similar to the prior example
of the medieval functional equivalents to later identificatory communication.
But reconstructing ‘tacit knowledge’ is at once necessary but not sufficient in
all cases to show how things worked nevertheless. It is often unclear whether
tacit knowledge or ignorance was prevailing. The tacitness itself might be
sometimes a welcome formula to stop investigating into how it worked. The
interest lays in accepting and understanding these coexistent conscious and
unconscious forms of past ignorance. A history of ignorance can be just an
approach to investigate them and to make them visible by avoiding the neces-
sity of framing them within the narratives of genealogical precursorship. If
people managed for centuries to live and work with those intersecting forms
of ignorance (as we do in our own time with different forms), the historian’s
answer cannot always be simply that ‘they did not yet know . . .’. The question
must be how they did not know, how they even successfully ignored matters.
41 Winkel L., Error iuris nocet: Rechtsirrtum als Problem der Rechtsordnung, vol. 1: Rechtsirrtum
in der griechischen Philosophie und im römischen Recht bis Justinian (Zutphen: 1985);
Cerami P., “Ignorantia iuris”, Seminarios complutenses de Derecho Romano 4 (1992) 57–85.
It is important to note that during the whole process of reception, the notions of error and
ignorantia were constantly interwoven.
methodology of science, than in the context of the theory of action and the
question of how lacking knowledge (agnoia) affects human action.42 The scho-
lastic theory of the scientific method and cognition would therefore usually
start with the basic deductive scheme that the human reasoning can only pro-
ceed from knowns to grasp the unknown, distinguishing in introductory pas-
sages between the human form of cognition constraint to the discursus, then
proceeding step-by-step, while only God, and—a bit less—, the angels dispose
of the intellectus, the immediate cognition of the truth.43 As God’s knowledge
was perfect, encompassing all dimensions of past, present, and future, it was
absolutely stable. There could be no increase and no decrease, and reflections
about a nescientia Dei would be a contradictio in adjecto. The methodology of
the human rational process of cognition concentrated on the safe way to direct
that necessarily imperfect (as human) form of step-by-step reasoning and
therefore focused on the perfection of syllogistic reasoning, highly differenti-
ated in late medieval supposition logic. It was an enrichment in an involutive
way within the same directions. Even the late medieval schools that started to
move away from the deductive principle but still within the Aristotelian frame-
work (Zabarella, Nifo, Pomponazzi) did not work out more sophisticated rea-
soning about the opposite of the knowledge, of ignorance, because even the
combination of induction and deduction in a double regressus demonstrativus
could still concentrate on the perspective of the singular thinking human.44
The major field where related problems were dealt with was instead specula-
tions about contingency and debates over de futuribus contingentibus, and
here a line of reasoning about the borders between the knowable and the
45 Cf. e.g. Bowlin J., Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (Cambridge: 1999).
46 Hedwig K., “Agere ex ignorantia. Über die Unwissenheit im praktischen Wissen bei
Thomas von Aquin”, in Craemer-Ruegenberg I. – Speer A. (eds.), Scientia und ars im Hoch-
und Spätmittelalter (Berlin – New York: 1994) vol. 1, 482–498, here 491.
47 Cerami, “Ignorantia iuris” 69, 77–78.
48 On the late emergence of historical reading of the Roman law cf. Gilmore M. P., Humanists
and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: 1963); Troje H. E., Graeca
leguntur. Die Aneignung des byzantinischen Rechts und die Entstehung eines humanist-
ischen Corpus iuris civilis in der Jurisprudenz des 16. Jahrhunderts (Cologne – Vienna: 1971);
Idem, ‘Crisis digestorum’. Studien zur historia pandectorum (Frankfurt a.M.: 2011).
embryonic form in glosses to legal texts where they appeared mostly in histori-
cally later fragments, as with Labeo. Instead of that, we find a precise and logi-
cal distinction between different notions and forms of ignorance with nearly
every scholastic author that reasoned about moral theological problems,
among whom Thomas certainly achieved important canonical status.49 One
might say that for all distinctions of the notion of ignorance that concern basic
individual human action, that is the ‘actor’s perspective’ in current terminol-
ogy, one could easily replace the terms taken above from twentieth century
sociology with those from Thomas without any loss of precision. Nescience
(nescientia) is simply the complete absence before and beyond the moral dis-
course about its sinfulness (simplex negatio scientiae). But every ignoring is
finally considered to be a voluntary act from the perspective of moral theology.
Ignorance then is the privation from science (privatio scientiae) in a defective
form of will, unwilling (involuntaris), or in several forms of wilful ignorance
according to the degree of active voluntary concentration on the not-knowing
a) ignorantia voluntaris directa, b) ignorantia voluntaris indirecta (he defined it
with the adverb directe/indirecte) the latter meaning ignorance through negli-
gence—ignorantia per negligentiam contingens voluntaria—and c) purely
accidental ignorance, which can nevertheless entail sin: ignorantia voluntaria
per accidens.50 Current sociology certainly does not reason in terms of ‘sin’, but
the question of conscious, unconscious, willed, unwilled, and of the ‘negative
(non-)knowledge’—something ignored, of which someone knows that it is
knowable but he or she decides it to be unimportant—as discussed today are
all quite easily translatable into Thomist terms. This serves again as a reminder
that the application of a terminology to the historical objects as such can lead
to an ahistorical static form of history. The scholastic thinkers took several of
their terminological distinctions from Roman law, just as Roman law had been
partially influenced by Greek philosophical thought. Canon law received it
49 Hedwig, “Agere ex ignorantia”; cf. for instance the application of the already traditional
distinctions between nescientia simplex, ignorantia erronea and a threefold distinction
of the relationship between ignorance and sin, as well as the reception of the ‘ignoran-
tia facti’, not citing the Digests, within the question of whether Adam’s original sin was
committed through ignorance (Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, Dist. 22 unica = Opera omnia,
vol. III/1, ed. G. Lauriola (Alberobello: 1998) 1149–1150). Even if ignorance could be ‘invin-
cible’ as a legacy of man’s corrupt nature, it would not excuse the sinner, as was main-
tained by the Sant’Ufficio against Jansenists as late as 1690, cf. Delhaye P., “L’ignorantia
iuris et la situation morale de l’hérétique dans l’Eglise ancienne et médiévale”, in Études
d’histoire du droit canonique dédiées à Gabriel Le Bras, 2 vols. (Paris: 1965) vol. 2, 1131–1141,
here 1139–1140.
50 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, quaestio III, art. 7 et 8 (ed. R. Busa, cf. www.corpusthomis
ticum.org).
likewise, not only in the parallel passages on procedure and excuse, but also as
a more pragmatic problem of deficiency, as conditions to be checked with the
clerics and even as punishable crimes (a bishop ignorant of the scriptures and
a clericus illiteratus are problems canon law had to deal with).51 This level of
ignorance, just as human vice and deficiency, is different from the ignorantia-
facti-problem with which the more general epistemic question of acquisition
and distribution of knowledge was at least associated, even if obfuscated by its
normative treatment. When the famous Baldus de Ubaldis, who usually con-
centrated on civil law, offered some rare comments on Canon Law and the
problem of ignorantia around 1400, we see how all those fields of academic
reasoning were interwoven. He certainly cited canon law in his remarks, but
for the most part referred to the basic norms of the Digests, and to the scholas-
tic tradition of moral theology, especially Bernard.52 The most sophisticated
reflections on ignorance in late medieval times, the concept of the docta igno-
rantia, elaborated so admirably by Cusanus, excelled at linking the problem of
ignorance to the general problem of cognition, but otherwise remained in the
preformed framework set out by the already mentioned basic distinction
between human ratio per discursum and the absolute momentary and total
intellectus only possessed by God. It also only concerns one object of knowing,
God (with the subordinated problems of knowing God’s name etc.). The para-
dox of learned ignorance refers to man’s necessary imperfect step-by-step
approach toward the intellect’s target ‘object’, God, while also knowing its ulti-
mate impossibility. The follow-up paradoxes of God as the absolute intelligible
but at the same time the absolute unintelligible are well illustrated in the
image of a man looking into the sun. There is no question that the sun is the
most intelligible, brightest light at all, but looking into it is impossible; the eye
is too weak and has to be closed. The sun as sun therefore remains unintelligi-
ble to the eye even if it is the most intelligible object.53 This brought Cusanus,
51 Lottin O., “La nature du péché de l’ignorance. Enquête chez les théologiens du XIIe et
du XIIIe siècle”, Revue Thomiste 37 (1932) 634–652, 723–738; idem, “Le problème de
l’ignorantia iuris de Gratien à Saint Thomas d’Aquin”, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et
médiévale 5 (1933) 345–368; Merzbacher F., “Scientia und ignorantia im alten kanonischen
Recht”, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 2 (1965) 215–223.
52 Baldus de Ubaldis, “Apostillae ad mercuriales de Regulis iuris”, no. 26 ‘Ignorantia’. For that
rather atypical text of Baldus cf. Patrick J. Lally, Baldus de Ubaldis on the Liber sextus and
De regulis iuris; text and commentary, vol. 1, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Chicago:
1992) 318f.
53 Nikolas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia I, De Deo abscondito, De docta ignorantia II, Apologia
doctae ignorantiae, in Idem, Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften lat./dt., vol. 1, ed.
L. Gabriel, D.-W. Dupré (Vienna: 1964) 191–591, here 542 (for the metaphor of the sun).
54 Duclow D. F., Masters of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus (Aldershot: 2006)
184, 317; Dupré L., “The Question of Pantheism from Eckhart to Cusanus”, in P. J. Casarella
(ed.), Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance (Washington: 2006) 74–88 for Cusanus’s
concept of the knowability of God depending on Master Eckhart.
55 Petrarca Francesco, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, ed. E. Fenzo, lat./ital. (Milan:
1999) 216.
56 Locke John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689], ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
1975) IV, 3, § 22, 24, pp. 553, 555. The §§ 22–27 in the chapter “Of the Extent of Humane
Knowledge” represent something like a theory of ignorance within Locke’s cognitive the-
ory. An earlier parallel to that are several fragments in Pascal Blaise, Pensées [1670], ed.
M. Le Guern (Paris: 1977–2004) especially the famous n. 185 on the two infinities of sci-
ence, but also n. 77 and other fragments. Contemporary philosophy of science often refers
to those reflections by Pascal, e.g. on ‘knowledge’ as a ball and the question, if then the
border of ‘ignorance’ equates with the size of the surface or of the diameter of the ball, cf.
Mittelstraß J., “Gibt es Grenzen des Wissens?”, in Idem, Wissen und Grenzen. Pilosophische
Studien (Frankfurt a.M.: 2001) 120–137.
therefore only a shadow of God’s.57 With Locke, the pure logical other side of
(human) knowledge gained empirical heft. The empiricist shift made morally
indifferent ignorance—what would have been Thomas’ nescientia in which he
was largely disinterested—an object of its own concern. Now, the questions of
its shape, its size, the proportion of its development and potential growth in
relationship to its twin, knowledge, emerged. This entailed a methodology of
distinguishing between kinds of ignorance, delimiting and crafting the frame
of ignorance(s). One therefore had to devote distinct chapters to ‘ignorance’
in theories of cognition and methodologies of how reason can progress. In so
doing, empiricism reified ‘ignorance’—in different terminologies—as subject
and object of knowledge production itself. The above mentioned reflections
on its size and speed of its growth implicitly refer to a concept of collective
knowledge production and science, where the question is not how one human
can know and learn, but where the subject of knowledge production is, so to
speak, humankind, regardless of if one member really knew everything in his
discipline or not. Furthermore, the increase and possible decrease of knowl-
edge/ignorance was thought of in secular terms and, first implicitly, only later
explicitly, as open-ended. Pre-Darwinian botanists like Linnaeus still thought
the number of species to be discovered as strongly limited by God at the
moment of creation.58 Reasoning about biology’s unavoidable ignorance of the
majority of all biological species in the world, as we are used to today,59 were
certainly not possible even in the later eighteenth century. But despite such a
still prevailing imagined finite nature of the progress of science, it’s daily and
closer future horizon opened up with the empiricist turn.60
57 ‘Veritas corporis temporaliter contracta est quasi umbra veritatis corporis supertempora-
lis’ (Nicolas of Cusa, “De docta ignorantia II” 470).
58 Lepenies W., Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in
den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich – Vienna: 1976) 52–77; Koerner L.,
Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: 1999) 45.
59 Because we think firstly the overall number of species is far too large to ever be calculated
by the limited human resources of the planet’s specialized botanists, and secondly—and
logically far more important—because the observed object itself changes by the laws of
evolution, that observation is impossible—species dying out before ever being seen, oth-
ers developing.
60 It is impossible to cite all the major works in the History of Science here, but cf. on the
progressivist impulse of empiricism Rouvillois F., L’invention du progrès, 1680–1730 (Paris:
1996) 75–82; Licoppe C., La formation de la pratique scientifique. Le discours de l’expérience
en France et en Angleterre (1630–1820) (Paris 1996) 30 and passim on the link between the
epistemic turn and experiment/experience, the formation of a community of experi-
mentalists and ‘progress’, and the classic works on the institutionalization of empiricist
While not being a core problem of this volume, the shift to empiricism
certainly affects many of its contributions as a latent and hidden force. That
development and those shifts should be recalled here for comparing it with
the fields studied in this volume and the relationship between non-empiricist
and empiricist approaches beyond the field of science—itself, for sure, mark-
edly changing from a world of trivium/quadrivium university organization to
early modern differentiations. Many of the problems treated here concern,
for instance, empiricist or at least empirical turns before and beyond scien-
tific methodology. The shift to inquisitorial investigation created a practical
field of interrogation and knowledge production that was, in its way, empiri-
cist avant la lettre. The distinction between specialized spheres of law—the
law of merchants, but also of local customary law for instance—that arose
in medieval times gave rise to a myriad of empirical relationships between
knowledge/ignorance that superseded normative categories of cases under
existing law. Late medieval financial administration, taxation, early forms of
population estimation, notation and accounting, the early ‘mathematization’
of urban culture and trade presented here, and merchants’ practical ‘expert’
knowledge (cf. Daniel Smail’s contribution) are all empirical in their practice,
albeit institutionalized, even somehow empiricist, beyond a theoretical dis-
course that would have accompanied them.61 This means that for medieval
times one either concentrates on the prefigured manifestations of specula-
tive or moral treatment of ‘ignorantia’, or one largely applies questions and
terminologies which have themselves developed, shall we say, from Locke to
Merton and beyond, in other words, with a clearer cognitive distance between
language of description and that of the sources. For early modern times, the
situation is different, the later the more recursive. Certainly, descriptive lan-
guage and thoughts about empiricist ‘ignorance/knowledge’ remained usually
more restricted to or appeared first within one subfield of society—science/
academic philosophy—while other fields remained unaffected for a long time,
as in medieval times. But for those fields in which empiricist theory began to
inform practice, the historian’s task becomes a new one, insofar as the ques-
tion must be how a specific form of empiricist theory (Bacon . . . Lavoisier) had
a specific shape and prevailing assumptions about how to cope with unknow-
ables and ignorance that had an impact on the overall outcome of the scien-
tific, administrative or economic process in question.
Briefly put, the Middle Ages were characterized by a parataxis of a realm of
practice involving tacit forms of coping with ignorance on the one hand and
of moral theology and canon law theories of ignorantia restricted mostly to
clerical circles and largely contemplative in character on the other. The Early
Modern era, while inheriting terms and partially the semantics of ignorance
from those times, witnessed the development of different kinds of theoreti-
cal reasoning. There was a continuity of the normative form with many sub
differentiations embedded now as guiding norms of judgment into the frame-
work of territorial and church courts and other institutional bodies, such as
the Inquisition, penitentiaries etc. Another general level of theory emerged
concerning universal empiricist theories of memory and forgetting—of whole
civilizational achievements, but also in terms of the individual and smaller col-
lective processes. Mid-term ‘theories’ of administrative, political and economic
practice arose in which dealing with unknowns and ignorance became a part
of the approach. Practice itself—from the merchant communication system
to state administration—underwent significant ‘scripturalization’. The state
and other institutions became themselves actors in the empiricist shaping of
their own territories, their people, and the world. Decision-making processes
became ingrained within written communication, and along with that, the
distance between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ itself shrank. As the contributions of
Fabrice Micallef, Moritz Isenmann, Eleonora Rohland, Marie-Laure Legay show,
mémoires and advisory texts on political affairs, on state finances, means of
security production regarding natural hazards or on the balance of trade as
a whole oscillated between carefully formulated theoretical compendia and
the everyday work of advising, counselling, and controlling the decisions to be
taken. Awareness of uncertainty, incompleteness of knowledge, and the lack of
data, came to be seen as a problem from the bottom-up perspective of looking
for solutions for empirical problems and questions rather than from the top-
down view of the human intellect’s capacity for rational reasoning. It becomes
more of a functional problem to be coped with and to be solved, instead of
a moral deficit to be condemned. As such, this is very well established and
research can only proceed slowly in investigating more deeply new parts of
that process—no one here claims to re-discover old processes such as ‘state
formation’, ‘institutionalization’ and so forth. But the perspective on ignorance
and unknowns, in this wider dimension, still seems far less present in the rel-
evant studies. The major shifts involved can only be represented here, in a few
pages, by that parallel shift on the level of notions and concepts, but this is
not the whole. Instead, for each part of society, for each individual process
of institutionalization, the focus is on how unknowns were coped with, how
they were specified, conceived and theoretically framed, all of which should
grant new insights. At least in what has been read by the group of contributors
here, this subject still seems largely un- or underexplored, perhaps sometimes
mentioned on an isolated page in a book or article, but seldom raised to a more
generalized point of view.
linked just to one person organizing such an early modern system or a net-
work of knowledge and information. This is sometimes handled as problems
of knowledge loss and as a by-product of institutional breakdowns.62 Not sel-
dom in early modern administrations, an impetus to reform and react quickly
slowed down when the immediate threatening experience vanished. From
the point of view of non-knowledge cycles, the question would be, to put it
paradoxically, how ignorance becomes ignored and forgotten. Although each
such process of reform usually starts with surprise and an awareness of lack-
ing a piece of necessary knowledge for a given problem, for many reasons—
e.g. inadequate resources, a change of generation—, the initial problem fades
from people’s attention and the awareness of that ignorance likewise fades
away.63 Other such ‘mediate level’ forms of (non-)knowledge cycles would be
the use of specifically early modern queries and the attempts to find answers
to them, for example, directions for scientific voyages or the production of the
state’s knowledge about itself. Such activities typically created a huge amount
of data which had to be ordered and classified according to this form of spec-
ification of ignorance. Subsequently all that data could become obsolete as
new forms of what is ignored and what should be known become dominant
and are realized; a new process starts with each new specification.64 Claims
and polemical attacks—the most ‘bloody’ European battlefield was the con-
fessional one—could reveal ignorance—on the truth of a theologoumenon’s
presence in ecclesiastical history, for instance, the early Church’s episcopal-
ist structure right from the beginning—on both sides, eventually leading to a
century-long process of investigation into new manuscripts, testimonies, and
passages in scripture. However, that process could have an end due to external
as well as internal reasons—external insofar as the problematic constellation
could dissolve, internal insofar as research into possible sources reached an
end or that—more unlikely—a question was recognized as being resolved.
62 Burke P., “Reflections on the Information State”, in Brendecke A. et al. (ed.), Information
in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: 2008) 51–64; Zwierlein C., “Diachrone Diskontinuitäten
in der frühneuzeitlichen Informationskommunikation und das Problem von Modellen
‘kultureller Evolution’ ”, ibidem 423–453.
63 Some have tried to write histories of administrative dealing with natural disasters, occur-
ring unforeseeably at indeterminate frequencies, as ‘learning processes’, but given the
incredibly long periods covered and the many restarts ‘at zero’, the opposite question
of how attained expertise became lost again, and how reiterated cycles followed one
another, seems more appropriate for what happened in premodern times.
64 Stagl J., Eine Geschichte der Neugier. Die Kunst des Reisens 1550–1800 (Vienna: 2002) and
Collini S. – Vannoni A., Les instructions scientifique pour les voyageurs XVII e–XIX e siècle
(Paris: 2005).
4 Conclusion
65 For such an attempt cf. Zwierlein C., Imperial Unknowns. The French and British in the
Mediterranean, 1650–1750 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2016).
66 Proctor R. N. – Schiebinger L. (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance
(Stanford: 2008) mostly concentrates on the specific form of wilfully suppressed knowledge
or negative knowledge, close to censorship and taboos. Other contributions are situated
nearly exclusively within the field of literature studies and philosophy: Adler H. – Godel R.
(eds.), Formen des Nichtwissens der Aufklärung (Munich: 2010); Schäffner W., “Nicht-Wissen
um 1800. Buchführung und Statistik”, in Vogl J. (ed.), Poetologen des Wissens um 1800
(Munich: 1999) 123–144; Füger W., “Das Nichtwissen des Erzählers in Fieldings Joseph
Andrews: Bausteine zu einer Theorie negierten Wissens in der Fiktion”, Poetica 10 (1978)
188–216; Spoerhase C. et al. (eds.), Unsicheres Wissen. Skeptizismus und Wahrscheinlichkeit,
1550–1850 (Berlin et al.: 2009); Geisenhanslüke A. – Rott H. (eds.), Ignoranz: Nichtwissen,
Vergessen und Missverstehen in Prozessen kultureller Transformationen (Bielefeld: 2008).
nication and all the other topics touched upon here, would take unconscious
forms of ignorance into account, and consider the precise historical forms of
how ignorance was specified by individuals and corporative bodies, scholar-
ship would reap great benefit, because the far more common narrative is that
of knowledge growth, of knowledge revolutions and explosions thanks to bet-
ter and more and more powerful administrations, and by more powerful media
such as the printing press. The reader might try him- or herself to re-read major
standard accounts and even works of great depth in these fields looking for an
explicit treatment of how unknowns were ignored by historical actors, looking
for how much attention is paid to that other side of knowledge; usually these
are just isolated remarks.
This introduction has tried to generalize themes and ideas present in the
contributions of this volume, hopefully showing how they touch upon many
problems of any history of ignorance. These points are so general that they
concern many contributions at the same time (the dimensions of space, time,
the cycles etc. naturally recur in many of them). The volume does not follow
the structure of this introduction, but is organized by way of a more traditional
clustering of common dominant themes and a chronological order within
those groups. In so doing it becomes even clearer that every enterprise has
its limits and selectiveness, as many possible themes, issues and authors are
not present and cited—but how could it be otherwise, for ignorance is always
more extensive than knowledge.
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* Abbreviations: PRO = The National Archives Kew, Public Record Office; SP = State Papers;
BL = British Library; CUL = Cambridge University Library; Bodl. = Oxford Bodleian Library;
SOAS = London School of Oriental and Asian Studies; ASV = Archivio segreto Vaticano; AS =
Archivio di Stato.
The Levant (or in the early days, the Turky) Company, first established by
Elizabeth’s 1586 charter, renewed in 1662, operated in a privileged zone of
the Eastern Mediterranean with three main factories at Aleppo, Smyrna and
Constantinople (Pera). Other English (‘Italian’) merchants that were not mem-
bers of the Company could only operate in the Western Mediterranean, mostly
with Livorno as main port of exchange. The English had been very success-
ful in the first decades of the seventeenth century, competing with the Dutch.
After the Colbert reforms and the establishment of the Marseille monopoly
in 1669, the French caught up. Around 1700, they were the main competi-
tors with the English for the linen and silk trade and other goods, while the
Dutch fell slightly back. By 1740 the French had largely surpassed the other
European nations, dominating also the carrying trade. In the last quarter of
the eighteenth century, due to new competitors and other factors, the situation
changed again. Although the Atlantic trade became more and more impor-
tant for the British during the eighteenth century, one should not forget that
the ‘southern’ trade, mostly the Mediterranean, still represented a third of all
import and export in London and the outports until 1750, a proportion not less
than the Continental European or the Atlantic trade.1 The institutional and
economic development of the Levant Company was studied thoroughly in the
1930s.2 The religious and cultural life of the Company’s members’ has received
less scholarly attention, with the exception of the dense portrait of Paul Rycaut,
his life and work in the Company, as drawn by Anderson, along with studies by
Hamilton and others that looked into how certain members of the Company
contributed to the gradual development of early modern academic Oriental
(largely Arabic) studies.3 While Wood drew a picture of merchants gaming,
1 Davis R., “English Foreign Trade, 1660–1700”, The Economic History Review 7 (1954) 150–166,
here 164–165; Idem, “English Foreign Trade, 1700–1774”, The Economic History Review 15 (1962)
285–303. For the dominant port of London French C. F., “London’s Overseas Trade with
Europe 1700–1775”, Journal of European Economic History 23, 3 (1994) 475–501, here 482.
2 Ambrose G. P., The Levant Company mainly from 1640–1753, B.Litt. thesis (Oxford: 1932);
Russell I. S., The Later History of the Levant Company, Ph.D. Dissertation (Victoria University of
Manchester: 1935); Matterson C. H., English Trade in the Levant, 1693–1753, Ph.D. Dissertation
(Harvard University: 1936); Wood A. C., A History of the Levant Company (New York: 1964);
Davis R., Aleppo and Devonshire Square: English Traders in the Levant in the Eighteenth
Century (London: 1967); Pennell C. R., Piracy and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century North
Africa. The Journal of Thomas Baker, English Consul in Tripoli, 1677–1685 (Cranbury et al.: 1989).
3 Anderson S. P., An English Consul in Turkey. Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667–1678 (Oxford: 1989);
Hamilton A. – van den Boogert M. H. – Westerweel B. (eds.), The Republic of Letters and the
Levant (Leiden: 2005); Hamilton A., The Copts and the West, 1439–1822: The European Discovery
of the Egyptian Church (Oxford: 2006); Russell G. A., The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural
bowling, hunting, and even playing tennis, it has been clear for some time that
they also spent their time engaging in many other forms of ‘cultural life’. It is
likewise clear that they had that time; often, as was customary in Cairo, all
trade business was conducted in the morning, the rest of the day remaining for
other pursuits.4 With the exception of a transcription of one private English
merchant library catalogue in the appendix of an unpublished 1932 Oxford
B.Litt. thesis and one article from 2011 by White about the music libretti found
in Rowland Sherman’s library, no studies of book ownership and the libraries
of the Levant Company exist.5
If we put exceptional cases such as those major politico-economic play-
ers within the European state system, who ascended to nobility and even to
territorial lordship (for example, the Fugger and Medici) aside, merchants
were generally latecomers among the important book owners and readers as
book history has shown for several cities and regions.6 Most of those studies
concentrated on inner-European settings. More comparable with the
Levant Company here might be studies on early colonial libraries and book
ownership.7 But such a comparison is not the primary goal of this article. In
Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden – New York: 1994); Toomer G. J., Eastern
Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: 1996).
4 Wood, Levant Company 241–242.
5 Ambrose, The Levant Company xc–xcvii; White B., “ ‘Brothers of the String’: Henry Purcell and
the Letter-books of Rowland Sherman”, Music & Letters 92, 4 (2011) 519–581.
6 Martin H.-J., Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVII e siècle (1598–1701), 2 vols. (Geneva: 1969)
vol. 1, 538: ‘des membres de toutes ces catégories sociales ne détenaient qu’exceptionnellement
quelques livres chez eux [. . .] le marchand n’a normalement pour toute bibliothèque que
“ses heures pour prier Dieu et son almanach pour savoir les foires” ’, vol. 2, 952 (later sev-
enteenth century): ‘dans la plupart des cas, marchands et maîtres de métiers semblent,
d’après nos dépouillements, n’avoir point conservé de livres chez eux’; quite the same:
Gautier B., “L’Habitat des marchands bordelais au XVIIe siècle d’après les inventaires après
décès”, Annales du Midi 216 (1996) 505–520, here 518–519. Books in probate inventories were
‘extremement rare’; these findings are nuanced by those of Mellot J.-D., L’édition Rouennaise
et ses marchés (vers 1600–vers 1730). Dynamisme provincial et centralisme Parisien (Paris: 1998)
418–459, 654–667. About 40% of merchants owned at least one book in the last quarter of
the seventeenth century, but only a small number of books compared to clerics and nobles.
Among the 350 library catalogues of university colleges, cathedrals and private owners from
1500 to 1640 listed in Jayne S., Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Berkeley – Los
Angeles: 1956/1983), only a very tiny number was of merchants.
7 E.g. Martinez T. H., Bibliotecas privadas en el mundo colonial (Frankfurt a.M. – Madrid: 1996);
Wolf E., The Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and
Booksellers (Oxford: 1988); Green J. N., “The British Book in North America”, in Suarez M. F. –
Turner M. L. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge:
any case, there are evidently significant differences between the setting of the
Levant Company factories and those of the early settler colonies or of factories
and forts in mostly non-literate ‘native’ cultural environments, such as on the
Cape in South Africa for instance. The Europeans in the Mediterranean were
immersed in a poly-cultural and multi-ethnic environment under Ottoman
overlordship in which the Ottomans themselves were only one group produc-
ing and cultivating their own (largely manuscript) book and reading culture,
alongside the Greeks, Armenians, Jacobites, Copts, and various groups of Jews
and Arabs.8 Delineating the profile of the European merchants’ reading cul-
ture in the Mediterranean and reconstructing its selectivity and its ways to
block out other possible readings will thus lead to something different from
those aforementioned colonial settings. The significance of not possessing
and not reading the writings produced by one’s physical neighbours, in other
words, the significance of ignorance, was different in the Mediterranean than
in many of those colonial settings.
2009) 544–559; Regourd F., “Lumières coloniales: les Antilles françaises dans la République
des Lettres”, Dix-huitième siècle 33 (2001) 183–199; Hayes K. J., The Library of John Montgomerie,
Colonial Governor of New York and New Jersey (Newark – London: 2000); Robert M., “Le livre
et la lecture dans la noblesse canadienne, 1670–1764”, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française
56 (2002) 3–27. In those cases, book ownership was certainly nearly always predominantly
European books, as also was the case for the members of the East India Company in India
(cf. Fazle Kabir A. M., The Libraries of Bengal, 1700–1947 (London – New York: 1987). Note,
however, the exception of important Oriental holdings acquired around 1800 during the
process of territorial colonization of India. For the book ownership of the merchants and
the Company itself, see Shaw G., “The British Book in India”, in Suarez – Turner (eds.), The
Cambridge History 560–575; Fourie J., “The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony:
measurements from eighteenth century probate inventories”, The Economic History Review
66, 2 (2013) 419–448.
8 Without aiming for bibliographical exhaustiveness, let the following suffice: cf. Heyberger B.,
Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Rome: 1994) paints a rich
picture of the manuscript reading and library culture among the diverse Christian groups
in Syria (p. 146). But he still stresses a ‘culture avant tout orale’ (p. 149). This is confirmed by
Aslanian S. D., “Port Cities and Printers: Reflections on Early Modern Global Armenian Print
Cultures”, Book History 17 (2014) 51–93, who addresses the question of media change within
the Armenian community, but also reminds us (p. 85 n. 12) that the number of all books ever
printed in Armenian is estimated at approximately 1000 editions which would be just 1% of
what Central European presses produced during the sixteenth century. For Greek orthodox
libraries cf. also Podskalsky G., Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–
1821). Die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des Westens
(Munich: 1988), index s.v. ‘Bibliothek’.
9 The Serenissima regularly published the public part of the avvisi (news) from
Constantinople that they received from the bailo. Agents, ambassadors and commercial
avvisi writers could then take copies of that, cf. the regular posting of those Constantinople
avvisi as early as 1548 by the duke of Mantova’s agent Benedetto Agnello from Venice to
Mantova: The delay between sending the avvisi and their publication in Venice was usu-
ally between 25 and 39 days (AS Mantova AG 1480). Cf. Infelise M., Prima dei giornali: alle
origini della pubblica informazione, sec. XVI e XVII (Rome 2002) 113. The diaries of Marino
Sanuto reveal that, in earlier times the postal connection was far more irregular (between
15 and 81 days), see Sardella P., Nouvelles et spéculations à Venise au début du XVI e siècle
(Paris: 1948).
10 ‘I have bin very earnest in my solicitations both to publick & private persons for ye
stamped Foglietti of News, I have bin daily promised them but without effect [. . .] [he
only has access to some news in private letters not to ‘Gazetts’] Your Excellency who is so
well acquainted with the Solidity of Venetian News will know how far to trust to this. We
heave abundance of foolish storys here, but, after all our search are in reallity as ignorant
of Christian News as if we were still in Turky’ (John Evans to Lord Paget, Corfu, 7 July
1694, SOAS Ms. Paget 4/31i [box 7]). Evans had travelled before across the Peloponnese
which was ‘Turky’ for him in this context. The ‘Foglietti of News’ clearly refers to a specific
form of Italian printed avvisi newsletters that appeared in the middle of the seventeenth
century and partially replaced handwritten avvisi. They were usually distributed and col-
lected in the same form as their precursors, cf. e.g. AS Modena, Cancelleria, Avvisi e noti-
zie dall’estero busta 142 (seventeenth century) and ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Avvisi 23Aff
(several buste with printed avvisi after 1654); Infelise, Prima dei giornali 79–105.
11 Pennell, Piracy and Diplomacy.
12 BL Ms. Sloane 4051, fol. 156r (s.d., but in fact 10 October 1729 as the content relates to the
mailing preserved and dated in BL Ms. Sloane 3986, fols. 47–53). For Sloane as physician
of George II cf. Brooks J., Sir Hans Sloane. The Great Collector and his Circle (London: 1954)
85; Churchill W. D., “Sloane’s perspectives on the medical knowledge and health practices
of non-Europeans”, in Walker A. – MacGregor A. – Hunter M. (eds.), From books to bezoars:
Sir Hans Sloane and his collections (London: 2012) 90–99.
13 Cf. e.g. McClellan III J. E. – Regourd F., The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas
Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: 2011) 446–475.
Aside from the well-known manuscript collection of Paul Pindar, first consul
and then ambassador, the earliest well-documented records of considerable
book possession in the Levant and by a Levant merchant are probably those for
Lewes Roberts (1596–1641). He had done his apprenticeship mostly in
Mediterranean commerce between 1615 and 1625, voyaging to Malaga, Algiers,
and Tunis and staying longer at Constantinople. He also traded on the Ionian
Islands and in Asia Minor, getting to know the factories of Aleppo and Smyrna
personally, in addition to many French, Italian and Dutch mercantile cities. A
Merchant Adventurer since 1625 and citizen of London since 1626, he had just
returned to England when war was declared against Spain, a conflict to be
fought mostly in the Mediterranean. He then wrote two major books, the
Merchants Mappe of Commerce (1638) and the Treasure of Traffike (1641). In
many respects, they belonged to the tradition of Ars mercatoria, but they sur-
passed that genre by a very reflexive form of an almost proto-Baconian meth-
odological approach to the observation of commercial realities and a
geopolitical vision of the link between the forces of trade and the growth of
what was as yet an informal empire on a global scale. In these books, that
themselves became standard items often found in late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century Levantine libraries, Roberts very rarely cited any author
because he was largely relying on his own observations and on information
apparently gathered from other merchants in London.14 As he was member of
the Merchant Adventurers, the Levant Company (even with the office of hus-
band from 1633 to 1641), the East India Company (with the office of director in
1639/40), and of the French and the Spanish Company in London, he was
densely immersed into the London merchant networks and had privileged
access to information, for which he explicitly acknowledged the governors of
the companies.15 In his final published book, the Warrefare epitomized (1640),
a typical Art-of-War book that he wrote as a Captain of the London militia, he
14 He often noted the exact date when he had been personally in a port city described,
Roberts Lewes, The Merchants Map of Commerce [. . .] (London, Thomas Horne: 1700),
65 (Algiers, 1619), 92–94 (Asia Minor, Troy, Smyrna, 1620), 94–95 (Bithynia, 1620), 95–96
(Paphlagonia, Galatia, Angora, 1624, 1630, 1634), 167 (La Rochelle, 1611), 174 (Languedoc,
Provence, 1618), 208–209 (Siena, Pisa, 1619), 224 (Netherlands/Haarlem, 1625), 276 (Islands
of Zante, Zeffalonia, and Ithaca, 1619, 1624), 278 (Palermo, 1619). I retain the old place
names. For other places, he noted no date, but it becomes evident that he had seen them
on his own (Aleppo, Constantinople, and other Italian and Mediterranean cities).
15 Roberts, The Merchants Map 272, 294–295.
aims of this article),18 on possibly existing marginal notes and other traces of
use, as it seems that most of the copies are still extant in the Fellow’s Library
of Jesus College. This is the case also for the first items of the list, three thir-
teenth century Hebrew manuscripts (a Pentateuch, parts of the Old Testament
and Hebrew lectures on the books of Prophets—the liber Haphtaroth) that
were among the Constantinople dispatch. In his own works, Roberts did not
leave any sign of an ability to read or cite biblical Hebrew in medieval manu-
scripts, so those items are a little bit surprising, but he even included a table of
contents in the third of them.19 Moreover, the last title is a Welsh Communion
book. As Roberts was born on the Welsh Island of Anglesey, this points quite
likely to him not only as donator but also as possessor and reader of all or most
of the books. From his own written works, it is quite clear that he read Latin
and several vernacular languages well. While the eleven Opera editions in
Greek and Latin of the church fathers20 as well as Dionysius (Areopagita?) and
Plotin in Greek and Latin are likewise surprising as the possessions of a mer-
chant, he nevertheless might have profited from the Latin translations. There
are other vernacular books (Livy, Plutarch, Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum in
French), the works of King James I, La Primaudaye’s French academie in English
(1616), the Historia de los condes de Barcelona of Francisco Diago (1603), the
Della nuova geometria libri XV of Francesco Patrizio da Cherso (1587), and
Guidobaldi del Monte’s Mechanicorum liber (Pisaro 1577) which fit well with
his occupations and voyages. The huge collection of church fathers together
with some other theological and philosophical works seems then to reveal a
religious side of Roberts which would remain hidden if one would judge just
from what he left in print and what is documented in the London merchant
companies’ record. While one has to be careful about presuming that the con-
tent of books correspond with the convictions and beliefs of their owner, there
seems to be an affinity for and interest in forms of neoplatonic and astrological
Christian philosophy21 and for a specific form of Catholic apocalypticism aside
18 A longer study of Lewes Roberts would be very desirable. The best recent contribution
is by Gauci P., The Politics of Trade. The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720
(Oxford: 2001).
19 Cf. Jesus College Library Mss. 95–97, ‘In initio codicis [sc. 97] descripta est tabula conten-
torum manu Lud. Roberts, dat. Constantinopol. 1624.’ (Coxe H. O., Codicum Mss. qui in
collegiis aulisque Oxoniensibus hodie adservantur (Oxford: 1852), pars II, [separate pag. for
Cat. cod. Mss. Collegii Jesu] 34).
20 Athanasius, Basilius, Gregor Nazianzenus, Origenes, Eusebius, Theodoret, Justin Martyr,
Gregor Nissenus, Isidor, Damascenus, Cyrill of Alexandria and Jerusalem.
21 Colle Giovanni, De idea et theatro imitatricium et imitabilium ad omnes intellectus, fac-
ultates, scientias et artes libri aulici (Pesaro, Flaminio Concordia: 1617), stemming from
the court culture of Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, amalgamates all
academic disciplines and para-academic forms of learning into one compendium with
strong parts on astrology and a mixture of neo-Aristotelism and neo-Platonism as its
framework. Tommaso Contarini, Librorum de humana tranquillitate Aeneas una (Venice,
Grazioso Percacino: 1572) is a philosophical contemplative work mixing neo-Platonism
with the prisca theologia tradition (Zoroaster, pseudo-Hermes Trismegistos reception);
Del Monte’s Mechanicorum liber is also helpful for astronomy/astrology, not only for pur-
poses of geometrical measurement; Francesco Patrizi was also a neo-Platonist. Arrighi
Paolo, Perutilis tractatus de bonitate principis [. . .] (Florence, Giorgio Marescotti: 1578) is a
neo-Thomist mirror of princes for Francesco I de’ Medici.
22 Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Loci communes, probably the edition (Heidelberg, Daniel and
David Aubry – Clemens Schleich: 1622), Polansdorf Amandus Polanus a, Syntagma theolo-
giae (Geneva, Pierre Aubert: 1612).
23 He possessed an edition of the curious work, Lumnius Johann Friedrich, De extremo Dei
iudicio, et indorum vocatione libri II (Venice, Domenico Farri: 1567). The author, pastor
of the Begijnenhof in Antwerp, interpreted ecclesiastical time in a reversed parallel to
Lutheran apocalypticism, in which the prophet Luther revealed the Antichrist. Lumnius
regarded Luther as the last (negative) precursor of the Antichrist and, therefore, the last
judgment was close. Given that perspective, missionary work had to be done, with the
‘Indians’ (Lumnius did not always distinguish clearly between the West and East Indies,
but he mostly referred to the Americas) being the last people that could and should be
converted. In scholarship, he is largely known as the originator of the ‘lost tribe theory’
holding that the Indians were descendants from Jews dispersed in the world. The work of
the Antwerp Jesuit Scribani Carolus: Civilium apud Belgas bellorum initia, progressus, finis
optatus (s.l.: 1627), especially the appendix Reformata apocalypsis batavica, draws a pic-
ture of European and global competition between the confessionalized trading empires
in an apocalyptical framework.
The oldest ‘institutional’ library of the Levant Company was that in Aleppo. It
seems that the Company decided around 1650 that its central factory in that
city needed a library. The Company’s Register for 1648 to 1688 contains an entry
with 51 titles and their prices, together worth �50, that Robert Frampton, newly
elected to the chaplaincy of that factory in 1655, should ship to Aleppo.25 The
24 Cf. John Harrison, ‘A Proposition to his Majesty and the State Renued by John Harrison
late Agent from his Majesty into Barbarie’, PRO SP 71/1, fol. 493r: ‘As the State now stand-
eth the daungerous or rather desperate estate of Gods Church at this daies the house of
Austria being growne soe stronge, & the princes of the Religion soe weake, there is noe
other waie in all outward appearance to divert him (the Spaniard I meane) from making
himselff an absolute Monarch over all the world [. . .] but by assaultinge him on his owne
coast & first to take Mamora on the coast of Barbarie from him [. . .]’, cf. Matar N., Britain
and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville et al.: 2005) 42f. and passim on Harrison’s Calvinist
imperialism.
25 PRO SP 105/144, fols. 71v–72r. The entry is not dated, but it is placed between one of 1651
and the next of 1656 and Frampton set off to Aleppo in 1655, so it is highly probable that
he was charged with buying the books on behalf of the Company and taking them with
him on the ship to Aleppo.
titles are found again in the 1688 catalogue of the library,26 so it is clear that
those books were destined for the factory’s library and not for private mer-
chants’ libraries. They were probably its founding consignment, as we read of
no institutional library in Aleppo before. Robert Frampton (1622–1708) received
his B.A. from Christ Church (Oxford), in 1641. His appointment as chaplain was
sponsored by Sir Daniel Harvey. He served in Aleppo from 1655 to 1667 and later
became Bishop of Gloucester in 1680, belonging then to the conservative side
of the non-juring bishops after the ‘Glorious Revolution’, when, in 1691, he was
deprived of his office by the king.27 This was long after his service in Aleppo,
but it is absolutely consistent with a general characteristic of the Company’s
chaplains, a majority of whom were High Church conservatives, with many of
them having served before 1688 in the Levant and then later becoming non-
jurors after their return to England.28 Unlike the French system, in which the
protection of the Catholic (‘Christian’) faith by the ambassador and consuls as
representatives of the French King was a formal element of the French capitu-
lations with the Porte, which was also part of the consul’s everyday work con-
tinuously reported to Paris/Versailles,29 the religious and ‘cultural’ functions
were less well defined in the English system. Neither the first nor the renewed
charter of the Levant Company contained a paragraph on chaplains.30 The
instructions from the governor of the Company to ambassadors and consuls
when they were sent into the Levant enumerated many points on trade politics
and concerning the competencies of criminal justice, but very rarely touched
on religion and ‘culture’. Only late, after the Glorious Revolution, in the royal
instructions for the ambassador, different from the Company’s own instruc-
tions, do we find the protection of religion mentioned, which shows that, fol-
lowing the Anglican concept of the King as head of the Church, this remained a
26 ‘A Catalogue of the Library belonging to the English Nation at Aleppo, taken in the yeare
of the Lord 1688’, PRO SP 105/145, p. 157–164.
27 Cornwall R. D. in Oxford National Dictionary of Biography, article 10061, accessed August
2015: He was deprived from his office along with the other non-juring bishops in 1691, cf.
Spurr J., The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven – London: 1991) 84,
94, 229; Overton J. H., The Nonjurors. Their Lives, Principles, and Writings (London: 1902)
69–74.
28 Zwierlein C., Imperial Unknowns: The French and British Empires in the Mediterranean,
1650–1750 (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming 2016) chapter 2 (‘Religion’).
29 Ibidem, and Heyberger, Les chrétiens 241–273.
30 A remark already made by Pearson J. B., A biographical sketch of the Chaplains to the
Levant Company, maintained at Constantinople, Aleppo and Smyrna, 1611–1706 (Cambridge:
1883) 8.
royal prerogative not delegated to the Company.31 But the chaplain was elected
by the general court of the Company whereby the merchants showed their
belief in the need for worship and religious support in their factories. Some
rare cases show the involvement of the merchants themselves—and not the
chaplains—as conscious representatives of their confession in the Levant,32
largely in opposition to the Catholics despite there usually being an overarch-
ing sense of common Christianity between the French and the English, their
rivalry in trading affairs aside. As the customary right that every major factory
received a chaplain solidified, the establishment of factory libraries, obviously
first conceived of as a support for the chaplain’s work and then for the whole
community of merchants, was a later development without any firm legal or
contractual basis.
The first titles Frampton bought for the factory’s library were exclusively
theological in character. Only four of them were printed in the sixteenth century,
all the others were seventeenth century editions. It therefore seems that they
were freshly bought in London. That original stock of the library betrays a
continental European character as the majority of the books were printed in
Cologne, Mainz, Geneva, Paris, Lyon, some in the Netherlands and only a mod-
erate, but not overwhelming, proportion in London, Cambridge and Oxford.
It bears thus the stamp of typical sixteenth century English inventories of
book possession which shows how the import of books from the Continent
was of greater importance, specially for voluminous editions of major theo-
logians and church fathers, than their own printings.33 This changed after the
31 They were copied into the Company’s registers, cf. PRO SP 105/144 and 145 for the second
half of the seventeenth century. Note the paragraph ‘In all the time of your residence
there you must be carefull to maintaine a good Correspondence with all the Ambassadors
and Agents of Christian Princes, especially with those that shall be in a nearer degree of
Amity & allyance with us, embloying your selfe likewise towards the good of all Christians
in generall, of what Nation, degree, quality or opinion soeaver they be, and more particu-
lary [sic] those of the Reformed Religion that shall desire your protection, endeavoring
to procure them Justice and fitting favour upon all occasions wherein they shall apply to
you.’ (Instruction of King William to Sr. William Trumbull, 5 August 1689, PRO SP 105/145,
pp. 153–156, here 153).
32 The factor John Purnell gave an account of an interrogation he conducted with an Italian
servant of the company, examining his Venice imprint Italian Bible—the second com-
mand of the Decalogue was missing and the tenth divided into two—and claimed to have
convinced him to convert to Protestantism by revealing those errors (letter to Lord Paget,
Smyrna, 11 March 1696/7, SOAS Ms. Paget 4/27ii [box 5]).
33 Leedham-Green E. – McKitterick D., “Ownership: private and public libraries”, in The
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: 2002) 323–347,
here 327.
34 What Machet A. “Le marché italien”, in Martin H.-J. – Chartier R. (eds.), Histoire de l’édition
française (Paris: 1984) 363–369) writes for the French book trade in and via Venice based
on the Venetian archival records can be transferred to the situation for books in other
languages.
35 Andrewes Lancelot, XCVI. Sermons [. . .] (London, Richard Badger: 1641).
36 Davenant John, Expositio epistolae D. Pauli ad Colossenses [. . .] (Cambridge, Thomas and
John Buck: 1627).
37 Hildersam Arthur, CLII Lectures upon Psalme LI [. . .] (London, George Miller for Edward
Brewster: 1635).
38 Lake Arthur, Sermons With some Religious and Diuine Meditations [. . .] (London, William
Stansby [et al.] for Nathaniel Butter: 1629).
39 Prideaux John, Viginti-duae Lectiones de totidem religionis capitibus [. . .] (Oxford, Henry
Hall for Henry Cripps [et al.]: 1648).
40 Reynolds Edward, Three treatises of the Vanity of The Creature, The Sinfulnesse of Sinne, The
Life of Christ [. . .] (London, Felix Kingston for Robert Bostock: 1632).
Jon, the letters of Ignatius and Barnabas in the Vossius edition).41 The sys-
tematic works, the biblical commentaries and even the church histories were
overwhelmingly Catholic, with only a few Calvinists represented: Thomas
Aquinas, Petrus Lombardus, Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici, Martinus Becanus,
Roberto Bellarmino, Willem van Est, Leonhard Lessius, Jean de Lorin, Juan de
Maldonado, Francisco de Mendoza, Benito Pereira, Francisco de Toledo, Paolo
Sarpi’s Historie of the Councel of Trent in English, Gregory Sayrus, in other words,
a largely neo-Thomist and strongly Jesuit collection. On the Calvinist side were
Beza’s annotations to the New Testament, Isaac Casaubon, Daniel Chamier,
Simon Episcopius, Augustin Marlorat, Peter Martyr, André Rivet, and Theodor
Spanheim. With the exception of Peter Martyr, not one of the major sixteenth
century Reformation figures was present in 1655, no Calvin, no Zwingli, Bucer,
Bullinger, no Luther nor Melanchthon. In 1688, Calvin was present, but oth-
erwise this seventeenth century picture remained unchanged. The Lutherans
were represented only by Martin Chemnitz, Heinrich Möller (but in a Geneva
reprint) and mostly by the systematic compendium of Johann Gerhard.
Acquired and shipped in 1655 under the Protectorate, this was decidedly
no Puritan library. Research on the content of the average libraries of English
bishops during the first half of the seventeenth century has shown that it was
common to possess such a combination of church fathers with Thomas and
some controversial Catholic work, Bellarmine always leading the list. The
selection of Protestant reformers, however, was usually quite different: ‘Bucer,
Bullinger, Calvin, Melanchthon, Walther and Zanchius appear more frequently
in these collections [sc. of smaller average diocese or bishop’s libraries] than
Bèze, Brenz, Hospinianus, Luther, Musculus, Oecolampadius, and Vermigli’.42
For a Puritan library, this would have been very different; one would expect
Perkins, much of Calvin, Beza, much of the Huguenot theologians before
and after Mornay, and many Dutch theologians. What was shipped to Aleppo
was very scant in terms of sixteenth century reformers in general, and the
Calvinist-reformed works of bible commentaries and systematic theology
41 This edition was a first important step in a seventeenth century dispute about the Ignatian
letters which usually served to support a (moderate or strict, depending on the exegesis)
episcopalist interpretation of early church history. Already by the late first century, the
Church had a fully established hierarchy and distribution of bishops, cf. Quehen H. de,
“Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy,” The Seventeenth Century 13, 1 (1998)
69–84; Spurr, Restoration Church 138–143. Several chaplains, like Huntington, continued
searching for new manuscripts of the Ignatian letters to possibly support a better under-
standing and new readings in desired directions.
42 Pearson D., “The Libraries of English Bishops, 1600–40” The Library 6th ser. 14 (1992)
221–257, here 228.
simply represented the mainstream. This choice of the books rather shows the
desire to have the latest huge compendia and Bible commentaries at hand,
and from a moderate Protestant, sometimes even Jesuit, point of view. Earlier
commentaries on the Bible (like those of Bucer, Calvin etc.), whose date of
composition made them ‘outdated’ in 1655, were not included by way of nor-
mative selection and the construction of a reformed tradition as would have
been the case for a more straightforward Calvinist-Puritan or even further ‘left-
wing’ choice. The six chosen seventeenth century English divines confirm this
characteristic of Frampton’s selection. With Andrewes he chose the major late
Elizabethan and Jacobean bishop-theologian who, while being denounced for
controversial writings against Bellarmine during affairs revolving around the
oath of allegiance, even opened the door for a partial reception and dialogue
with Catholic doctrinal theology. With Lake and Davenant he chose the major
representatives of the English moderate Calvinist solution of ‘hypothetical uni-
versalism’ at the Synod of Dordrecht between Arminians and Remonstrants.
Hildersam is the only nonconformist in the group, but is only present with ser-
mons, not with controversial or systematic work. Prideaux was a royalist even
in the 1640s, and the only divine still living in 1655. Reynolds, however, was
the moderate Presbyterian who mediated between the Cromwellian govern-
ment and the university theologians after 1649. He later went on to actually be
accepted as negotiator by the Crown at the beginning of the Restoration and
was even named a royal chaplain and later nominated as Bishop of Norwich.
One could not have chosen more carefully dead but hardly attackable authors
or living but moderate writers if one wanted to build in 1655 a non-Puritan,
non-Cromwellian library under Cromwell.43
43 As projecting from the authors and books to the ‘mentality’ of chaplains and merchants
in Aleppo is certainly problematic, let those short characterizations suffice along with a
few references to Milton A., Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in
English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: 1995) 16 (Andrewes, Willet), 52, 288–289
(Trent in English thought), 304, 326 (Prideaux); Patterson W. P., King James VI and I and the
Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: 1997) 196–219 (early interest in the Greek Orthodox
Church, Lucaris with the literature after Trevor-Roper and Hering), 260–292 (Synod of
Dort); Lake P., “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the
Court of James I”, in Peck L. L. (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge:
1991) 113–133 (for the characterization of Andrewes’ middle position as proto-Arminian);
Moore J. D., English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed
Theology (Grand Rapids – Cambridge: 2007) 173–213 (for the line from Ussher to Davenant
and Preston concerning the redemptory act and effect of Christ’s salvation, hypotheti-
cally universal not only for the elected, but also for the reprobate).
The extant records do not allow us to be absolutely certain that all books
printed earlier than 1655 and listed in the 1688 catalogue, and that were not
on Frampton’s list, arrived in Aleppo after 1655. Some could have already been
in Aleppo or have belonged to private men and were later donated to the
newly founded central library. Nevertheless, it is clear that the English theo-
logical character of the library became prominent within thirty years. While
only a few continental authors and texts came into the library’s possession in
this period (Arminius, Mornay, Ursinus, the decrees of the Council of Trent,
Francisco Suarez, the English recusant edition of the New Testament printed
in the English college at Reims),44 many works by divines of the Church of
England entered its catalogue. These included the founder of Concord/
Mass., Peter Bulkeley (1583–1659), the Cambridge Concordance, Joseph Caryl
(1602–1673), the Eikon Basilike, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Thomas Goodwin
(1600–1680), William Greenhill (1597/8–1671), Joseph Hall (1574–1656), Henry
Hammond (1605–1660), Daniel Heinsius, Homilies of the Church of England,
Thomas Horton (–1679), King James Apophthegmes, John King (1559–1621),
Edward Leigh (1602–1671), Henry More (1614–1687), Edward Pococke (1604–
1693), John Preston (1587–1628), Robert Sanderson (1587–1663), Richard
Rogers (1550–1618), Alexander Ross (1591–1654), Richard Sibbes (1577–1635),
Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Samuel Torshell (1605–1650), John Weemes (1579–
1636), John (1570–1615) and Francis White, and Andrew Willet (1561/2–1621).
The choice of these divines is a little less strictly moderate or conservative as
Frampton’s original selection was, but there are still no real ‘left-wing’ authors,
Levellers or similar writers represented. Instead, of 28 English divines, we
find that ten had been royal chaplains or tutors to the royal family’s children
and at least seven bishops. Nearly all of these authors, as usual, were edu-
cated either at Oxford or Cambridge, and many of them were also famous
preachers and readers in Cambridge and Oxford. This means they were very
probably the Levant Company’s chaplains’ own preaching teachers, as those
chaplains were likewise educated overwhelmingly at Oxford or Cambridge.
Nonconformist and Parlamentarian divines are not represented at all by con-
troversial or polemical work concerning the problematic theological positions,
but instead by sermons, exegetical and devotional works (Goodwin’s Christ
set forth, Greenhill’s exegesis on Ezekiel, the sermons of Horton, and Caryl’s
44 On the 1582 Reims New Testament translated by Gregory Martin at the English College
at Douai and supported in Reims by William Allen (who was to be created cardinal in
1587), cf. Walsham A., “Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and
the Vernacular Bible”, Journal of British Studies 42, 2 (2003) 141–166.
exegetic work on the Book of Job).45 Horton, in his huge volume of sermons for
instance, always remained close to the Biblical text, stating theological posi-
tions only positively, and never mentioning concrete modern opponents. The
definitions of church and points of doctrine were reduced to the essential (the
church as community of believers, each having a contract with Christ), with no
comments on the problematic episcopalism or state/church relationship.46 In
contrast, for instance, the library held the 1620s sermons of Robert Sanderson,
who was attending in 1648 loyally king Charles on the Isle of Wight. These
homilies are highly controversial and polemical, certainly anti-Arminian, but
also anti-nonconformist, positively referring to Aquinas and openly condemn-
ing all contemporary opponents.47 The books that were pioneers in the mar-
tyrisation and heroification of King Charles, such as Symmonds’ Vindication
of King Charles (1648), which paralleled his sufferings with those of Jesus
Christ and the Eikon basilike, were also present in Aleppo. The latest system-
atic compendium of church doctrine found in Aleppo, Edward Leigh’s A sys-
teme or Body of Divinity (1654) was written by a man who was elected to the
Parliament and at first anti-royalist, but who then opposed the regicide and
was imprisoned by the New Model Army. He disappeared from public life
after the Restoration, but in his Body of Divinity he openly defended the primi-
tive institution of the episcopacy de jure divino against Presbyterianism and
independents as the oldest ‘monarchical’ against aristocratic or democratic
forms of church government.48 In this he was far clearer than the other earlier
English doctrinal system existent in Aleppo, Andrew Willet’s Synopsis papismi.
Willet strongly refuted Presbyterianism during his lifetime, but in his Synopsis
he also denied the divine institution of the episcopacy.49 A closer look at the
books by English divines present in Aleppo thus shows that the widening of
45 Goodwin Thomas, Christ set forth [. . .] (London, for Robert Dawlman: 1642); Greenhill
William, The Exposition of the five first chapters [. . .] of Ezekiel (London, Matthew Simmons
for Benjamin Allen: 1645); Idem, The Exposition continued upon the Nineteen last Chapters
of the Prophet Ezekiel [. . .] (London, for Thomas Parkhurst: 1662); Caryl Joseph, An exposi-
tion with Practicall Observations continued upon the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth
Chapters of the Book of Job [. . .] (London, Matthew Simmons for John Allen: 1654).
46 Horton Thomas, One hundred select Sermons upon several texts [. . .] (London, for Thomas
Parkhurst: 1679) 344, 371, 429, 447.
47 Sanderson Robert, Ten Sermons preached I. Ad Clerum 3. II. Ad Magistratum 3. III. Ad
Populum 4 (London, for Robert Dawlman: 1627) – strongly polemical right from the begin-
ning, cf. 334–335.
48 Leigh Edward, A systeme or Body of Divinity [. . .] (London, Abraham Miller for William
Lee: 1654) bk. VI, ch. 2, 3, p. 454–469.
49 Cf. Milton, Catholic and Reformed 16.
the spectrum of included persons beyond the moderate and conservative ini-
tial choice of Frampton did not mean the inclusion of a different theology.
The doctrinal positions that someone using the Aleppo library could positively
support as the Company’s chaplain were clearly of a royalist-episcopalist char-
acter, and it was as such already under the Protectorate. More cannot be said,
as, certainly, the books present in Aleppo were open to different readings and
interpretations ranging from Calvinist, to Arminian and even crypto-Catholic.
But the close overlapping of former chaplains with later non-jurors shows that
the conservative theological character of the Levant Company’s library hold-
ings is also consistent with post-1688 developments.50
The non-theological content of the library consisted of many classical
authors, historical works (de Thou, Somner, Machiavelli’s History of Florence,
Cambden), some more practical items related to merchant interests, some
works of poetry, vernacular and political philosophy (Lodovico Dolce,
Guicciardini, Lipsius: De Constantia, Boccalini), in addition to some medical
(Cogan, Culpeper) and geo/cosmographical works (Heylin, Ferrari, Botero, De
Bry). These might deserve further reflections in comparison with the content
of private merchant libraries. But for the questions raised here concerning the
selectivity rather than the fields covered by the book ownership in the Levant,
the restriction to theological content—serving the primary function of the
chaplaincy—helps to characterize these forms of selectivity more clearly.
There were very few titles with a certain ‘oriental touch’. Most of those were
works that had been produced in England in a collaboration between the chap-
lain network and early Arabist and Oriental studies. The Walton Polyglot Bible
(1657)51 was present in Aleppo in 1688 and it was also the first precious donation
from the governor of the Company to the chaplain John Luke when he began
to establish a library in Smyrna in 1666,52 following the example of Aleppo.
We also find Grotius’ De veritate Religionis Christianae in an Arabic transla-
tion by the former chaplain and great Arabist Edward Pococke. Returning from
his second journey to the Levant, he met Grotius in Paris in 1641, received his
50 For the non-jurors in general cf. Overton, The Nonjurors; for a synthesis of the theological
positions Cornwall R. D., The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglican and Non-
Juror Thought (Newark – London – Toronto: 1993). For the link between non-jurors and
the Levant chaplains Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns, chapter 2.
51 Toomer, Eastern Wisdome 202–210; Barker N., “The Polyglot Bible,” in Bardnard J. –
McKenzie D. F. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–1695
(Cambridge: 2002) 648–651, here 648 (‘argueably the most distinguished as well as sub-
stantial product of the British press in the century’).
52 Pearson, Chaplains 32.
permission and translated the work which was then only published in 1660.53
Instead of an Anglican catechism, the library possessed an Arabic translation
of Bellarmine’s Catholic catechism, printed in 1627 in Rome by the typography
of the congregation De Propaganda fide.54 The Aleppo library owned William
Seaman’s Turkish Grammar (in latin, 1670), perhaps the most widely distributed
English Orientalist text in the Levant merchant libraries, as well as the Arabic
Grammar of Matthias Wasmuth (1654), Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman
Empire, the Political Reflexions upon the Government of the Turks (1656), and
Busbecq’s Letters, a standard book read and used by diplomats for an introduc-
tion to the manner and ceremonies of the Ottoman court, as described by an
earlier diplomat. But this is all. An enumeration what a library does not contain
makes no sense as such, being close to infinity. But in light of what research
concerning European interactions with the Ottomans and Ottoman subjects
might sometimes suggest, it might be exceptionally helpful to dwell on some
of those absences. The library obviously did not contain any manuscript in
any Oriental language.55 It did not hold any work and translation of the well-
known European Arabists and Orientalists, such as Bedwell—not even his The
Arabian Trudgman—, Golius, Erpenius, Hottinger, Ludolf, and Galland, nor of
any other specialized Orientalist. Besides the translation of Grotius just men-
tioned, Pococke was represented only as Hebraist with his biblical commen-
taries on the books of Micah and Malachi. However, for instance, his famous
early contribution to the beginning of the European study of Arabic history
as opposed to only language and grammar or works useful for religious stud-
ies, his Specimen historiae Arabum, was present neither in Aleppo, nor in the
other two factory libraries nor in any of the English merchants’ libraries whose
inventories I could study.56 Some names which are common within the history
of early Oriental studies, such as Lancelot Andrewes, Alexander Ross and John
Prideaux, were present in Aleppo, but only through their theological work.57
This does not mean that the famous Orientalist chaplains of the Levant
Company were not doing what we know they did, diligently collecting a huge
number of Oriental manuscripts which they brought then back to England,
mostly to the Bodleian at Oxford.58 But a short note on the library by one of
the greatest scholars of seventeenth century English Oriental studies and their
link to the Levant shows some of the more suggested than proven relation-
ships between the book culture of the merchant nation in the Levant and
Oriental studies:
57 Lancelot Andrewes is known as one of the earliest promoters and sponsors of Oriental
studies in England, protecting and supporting, among others, William Bedwell (cf.
Hamilton A., William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563–1632 [Leiden: 1985]), but his 96 Sermons
(1641), present in Aleppo, has no link to those activities. John Prideaux learned Arabic
from Mathias Pasor in 1625 (Toomer, Eastern Wisdome 98), but his very erudite Viginti-
duae Lectiones (1648), also possessed by the Aleppo library, containing speeches held on
the occasions of doctoral and baccalaureate graduations at Oxford, are marked by their
significant use of Hebraist and Greek scholarship for biblical exegesis and interpretation
of church history, even of the science of Egyptians in the tradition of the prisca theologia,
but they betray no use of Arabic. Alexander Ross is usually known as editor of the English
Alcoran translation published in 1649, but this was done from a previous French transla-
tion, not from the original (Toomer, Eastern Wisdome 200, n. 54). His Pansebeia (1653) held
in Aleppo, an overview of the world’s religions then known, uses only European authors
as sources, such as Knolles, Camerarius, Giovio and others for Morocco and the Ottoman
Empire.
58 Wakefield C., “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: the Seventeenth-Century
Collections”, in Russell, The ‘Arabick’ Interest 128–146.
59 Hamilton A. “The English Interest in the Arabic-Speaking Christians”, in Russell, The
‘Arabick’ Interest 30–53, here 43. The information on the number of the library’s books is
taken from Wood, Levant Company 242–243 with n. 9.
The establishment of the library postdates in fact the times of Pindar, Robson
and even Pococke, but most of all, its content seems to have been far less
related to the orientalist occupations of the chaplains—as the paragraph above
suggests—than with their main religious function in the Levant. The chaplains
must have also used and read those manuscripts collected in the Levant at
some point, but there is extremely scarce evidence of any influence of what
they read and collected on the culture lived and practiced by the merchants
in the European merchant colonies. And Huntington himself, for instance—
while searching for manuscripts of the Samaritans, the Ignatian letters, and
Oriental manuscripts—in his function as chaplain was mostly concerned with
using translations like that of Grotius for missionary purposes in competition
with the Catholic orders in the Levant. He and his followers in the last quarter
of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries wanted to present
Anglican content to Arabic-speaking and Greek Orthodox Christians, but there
seems to have been very little or next to no ‘content flow’ in the other direc-
tion, that is, information concerning the local community’s own culture in the
port cities. At least until now, no account of Pococke studying and instructing
Englishmen in the Levant with the content of the manuscripts he had gathered
has ever come up. All major works of Oriental scholarship, the editions and
partial translations that appeared during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies were, in the end, academic products of Oxford, Cambridge, and Leiden,
detached physically from the Levant, either being completely ‘armchair’ prod-
ucts or being composed long after the authors’ return from the Orient. If one
studies how those early Orientalists worked, one recognizes that the writing
process was overwhelmingly, if not completely, done in Europe, such as Ockley
traveling to and sitting in the Bodleian for his long studies for the History of
the Saracens (1718), the only early eighteenth century work that contributed
new elements to Pococke’s Specimen for that period of early Arabic history,
written in the vernacular. Even Thomas Shaw, who had lived for so long on the
Barbary Coast did not start writing his Travels before his return to England, and
it still took him nearly a decade. We even know from comparing his letters with
his printed work that the editions of ancient and other authors he used in his
small personal library in Algiers were different (and worse) than those he con-
sulted while actually preparing his book. Only when the Barbary Coast travel-
ler had re-transformed into the Oxford armchair scientist, did he produce a
work that really was superior—in contemporary terms—to prior works, and
he used even more Bodleian sources for that than his own ‘authentic’ findings.60
This is certainly a contrast to the results only gained by direct examination in
(PRO SP 105/143–156) only contain entries on the decision of the General Court of the
Company to appoint a chaplain, the Aleppo letter books (SP 110/10–53), however, provide
a more lively picture of the factory itself, usually concentrating on the merchants’ busi-
ness affairs. Therefore scholars would have to collect small pieces of information from
many sources that predominantly deal with other matters.
64 Both is evident from the inventories and auction lists in the chancery registers, e.g. PRO
SP 110/60–66, 73. In this, they were always supported by dragomen. On the dragomen
and their formation, literature is expanding, but for Venice cf. Rothman E. N., Brokering
Empire. Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca – London: 2010), and
a dense case study of the ‘normal exceptional’, Arbel B., “Translating the Orient of the
Serenissima: Michiel Membrè in the Service of Sixteenth-Century Venice”, in Fuess A. –
Heyberger B. (eds.), La frontière méditerranéenne du XV e au XVII e siècle. Échanges, circula-
tions et affrontements (Turnhout: 2013) 253–275; for the French enfants des langues there
are some contributions in Hitzel F. (ed.), Istanbul et les langues orientales (Paris: 1997). The
service of English dragomen seems to be less studied.
65 See below n. 155.
66 Cf. on that slightly later 1628/30s context, Miller P., “A philologist, a traveller and an anti-
quary rediscover the Samaritans in seventeenth-century Paris, Rome and Aix: Jean Morin,
Pietro della Valle and N.-C. Fabri de Peiresc”, in Zedelmaier H. – Mulsow M. (eds.), Die
Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: 2001) 123–146.
It may be helpful to jump from that example of a time before the establishment
of the chaplains as ‘orientalizing experts’ to a point in the eighteenth century,
when the early Arabick interest in England had declined for several reasons,
and therefore loosening the link between chaplains and Oriental studies that
is so well known in scholarship that it can sometimes obfuscate the cultural
realities of the majority of the merchants in the Levant themselves.70 We can-
not reliably determine the further development of the factory libraries as we
possess only one catalogue for each, representing late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century content. However, private merchant libraries in the eigh-
teenth century were now growing considerably themselves. They can be used
to study the influence of European court culture and the ‘Enlightenment’ upon
the Mediterranean port cities, but once again, they usually did not contain
many ‘Oriental’ books or manuscripts, if any. We may take Rowland Sherman
69 Cf. Sacy S. de, Correspondance des Samaritains de Naplouse, Pendant les années 1808 et suiv.
(Paris: 1813) 8–9.
70 Toomer, Eastern Wisdome 269–305.
New Testament by Salomon Negri in London74 and he had paid for a whole
ship laden with Protestant books to be distributed in Aleppo free of charge.
As was usual among the competing missionaries, the Propaganda demanded
both the burning and the buying of the whole stock of books and it seems that
even the English King ordered Sherman to stop those activities around 1730.75
Sherman was apparently a member of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in June 1701 by several High Church Anglicans
at the initiative of Thomas Bray. In Sherman’s inventory of goods—not in
the catalogue section—a ‘Large Parcell of Books belonging to the Society for
Propagating the Gospel in foreign parts’ is noted to be located in ‘a Room upon
the Terrass’.76 Scholarship usually only associates the SPG with activities in the
colonies, mostly Northern America,77 but it seems that Sherman transferred
that impetus and its goals from what were real settler colonies to the trad-
ing imperial context in the Mediterranean. What remained of those activi-
ties is the section ‘Arabian and Turkish Books translated’ in Sherman’s library
catalogue after his death in 1747. While the rest of the catalogue is written
in the original European language of each item, the scribe of the catalogue
switched here to Italian.78 This section contains 73 titles, and its inscription
74 Salomon Negri (Sulaimān al-Aswad) had been taught by Jesuits in his native town
Damascus, he then went to France and London, where he met Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf.
Ludolf sent him to Halle where he taught Arabic at the Pietist orphany of the Francke
foundations that in those years were becoming the centre for Lutheran foreign mission
activity in the Levant and e.g. in Tranquebar/India. Negri travelled back to the Orient,
Aleppo, Constantinople, a second time to Halle and finished his life in London where
he worked for the SPG. Several Arabic Christian manuscripts copied by him are dated in
Aleppo in the second decade of the eighteenth century, so he probably knew Sherman
personally. For his Arabic edition of the Psalms and his translation of the New Testament
cf. Graf G., Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur (Vatican City: 1944–1953) vol. 1,
118–119, 140–141, cf. also vol. 3, 108, vol. 4, 278–279 and Bochinger C., “J. H. Callenbergs
Institutum Judaicum et Muhammedicum und seine Ausstrahlung nach Osteuropa”, in
Wallmann J. – Sträter U. (eds.), Halle und Osteuropa. Zur europäischen Ausstrahlung des
hallischen Pietismus (Tübingen: 1998) 331–348.
75 Heyberger, Les chrétiens 476.
76 PRO SP 110/73/2 (7), p. 63 (“Inventory of goods taken in presence of William Cooper and
Josiah Chitty”, Aleppo, 22 January 1747/8).
77 ‘The SPG, constituted by royal charter, directed its attention exclusively to the colonies’
(Porter A., Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion,
1700–1914 (Manchester – New York: 2004) 17.
78 The catalogue of the books and manuscripts was taken in presence of the chaplain John
Hemming and Josiah Chitty and signed by the factory’s chancellor Nathaniel Free, but as
this is the copy entered into the chancery registers, I am not sure if we can identify Free
‘Arabian and Turkish Books’ is somewhat surprising. If all those titles were
Arabic translations of Greek Orthodox and Anglican Protestant texts along
with some other Arabic and Ottoman titles, this would have been an impres-
sive collection. But one cannot ascertain this because the manuscripts were
sold by auction in 1748 and have either not survived or not been identified as
formerly belonging to Sherman and the Italian rendering of their titles does
not allow us to determine their original language with absolute certainty. The
identification of the titles would be tedious work with much room for specula-
tion and uncertainty and would take up more space for argumentation than
is available here. The majority were in fact originally Greek texts. The con-
flict mentioned in the archives of the congregation of Propaganda is repre-
sented by such titles as ‘Composto di Gabriel Arciuescovo di Filadelfia [. . .]
Libro di Gabriel Arciuescovo di Filadelfia [. . .] Prete [sic, ?] di Abdalla Zacher
dup<licata>’.79 The opuscula of the Metropolitan of Philadelphia, residing in
Venice, Gabriel Severos (1577–1616), had at that point already been translated
into Latin by the Paris orator Richard Simon and edited in 1671.80 They were
of importance within the French controversy between Catholics, mostly the
Jansenists around Arnauld, and the Calvinists concerning the understanding
of the Eucharist, in which the Jansenist Catholics maintained that the Greek
Church, while separated from the Roman by the different understanding of
the filioque in the Creed, had always been united with the Romans by the sup-
posedly ancient doctrine of transubstantiation.81 But there were also Arabic
translations of Severos’ works in Aleppo. The same holds true for other older
Greek Orthodox texts of which Sherman possessed copies, such as the famous
confession of faith in the form of a dialogue by Patriarch Gennadios from the
as the one who actually noted each title. Italian was usually the dragoman language for
translating Arabic documents, cf. for instance Italian translations of Arabic commercial
documents by the second dragoman Nicolo Facker, 11 June 1752 in PRO SP 110–73/2 (2),
pp. 165–167 or by him and Elias Gadban on 25 October 1752 ibidem, pp. 178–179.
79 PRO SP 110/73/2 (7), pp. 71–72.
80 Severos Gabriel, Fides Ecclesiae Orientalis seu Gabrielis Metropolitae Philadelphiensis
Opuscula, nunc primum de graecis conversa [. . .] Adversus Claudii Calviniani Ritus [. . .], ed.
Richard Simon (Paris, Gaspare Méturas: 1671). Severos popularized the term μετουσίωσις
for the understanding of the Lord’s Supper in Greek Orthodox teaching.
81 Cf. Mansi 37, 117–227. Abdallah Zakher ‘catholicus’ was involved in the disputes between
the Greek Orthodox, represented by Chrysanthos of Jerusalem, and the ‘Romanizing’
Christians in Aleppo that had started with questions about the Greek Orthodoxy of
Patriarch Athanasius of Antioch, previously Metropolitan of Aleppo, elected in 1720
(ibidem, col. 127). Cf. also the following synods ibidem, 227–254 in Constantinople.
82 ‘Discorso di Genadio Vescovo con il G. Sig. Mahemet’ seems to denote a dialogue on faith,
not, in fact, with the Sultan but with a Muslim that occurred at the order of the Sultan
which was printed in 1530: Γενναδίου τοῦ Σχολαρίου [. . .] ὁμολογία ρηθεῖσα περὶ τῆς ὀρθῆς
καὶ ἀμωμήτου πίστεως τῶν χριστιανῶν [. . .] Ἐρωτηθεὶς γὰρ παρὰ τοῦ Ἀμηρᾶ σουλτάνου τοῦ
Μαχμέτη, in I. Karmires (ed.), Τὰ δογμάτικα καὶ συμβολικὰ μνημεία τὴς ὀρθοδόξου καθολικὴς
ἐκκλησίας, 2nd ed. (Graz: 1968) vol. 1, 432–436, translated into Arabic by the Melkite
Makarius ibn az-Zaʿīm around 1700 (Graf, Geschichte vol. 3, 109). This is not the sermon
dated shortly after 1453, edited by Eusèbe Renaudot in 1709, that contained the important
term μετουσίωσις for the first time, the terminological parallel to ‘transsubstantiatio’ in the
Greek Church during the seventeenth century.
83 Likewise one wonders which ‘Padre Simone’ or ‘Padre Simone Episcopo Anglicano’ is
meant in this Aleppo context who figures as author of several replies and surreplies to
Catholic doctors.
84 Cf. Mansi 37, 369–624.
85 Cf. Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns chapter 3.
to his death in 1747, while the English and even more so the French merchants
usually remained a few years, sometimes up to a decade, in one location, often
moving between Aleppo, Smyrna and Constantinople before returning after
some time to Europe. Only a few consular dynasties tended to extend their
stays and—in the French case—obtained governmental permission for that.
Still, even Sherman’s catalogue contains only a minuscule proportion books or
manuscripts concerning Muslim or other Arabic or Ottoman texts that would
indicate a deeper interest in and acquaintance with non-Christian Syria and
other parts of the Ottoman Empire and its population. And if not in Sherman’s
library, then, a fortiori, this holds true even more so for all other merchants
until at least 1750.
If one makes statements about ignorances of the past, the historian has
always first to start with the gaps in his own knowledge. This is no coquetterie,
but a hermeneutical starting point. It is, after all, far easier to discuss what
was known and existing at a given time than what was impossible to know,
unknown or not existing, even if the latter reveals perhaps more about the
past than the former. At least for the question of differences between periods
and cultural settings, the question of unknowns and the limits of knowables
are of far higher importance than their opposite, an old Foucaldian insight. In
the present case, the argument developed here could be tainted with errors on
several levels, through my own manifold ignorances and because of my back-
ground as a historian of Western Europe. Besides even larger possible faults of
having overlooked an important English or French work on the issue, I could
have overlooked, for instance, recent research in Russian or Hebrew about an
important collection of heavily annotated Ottoman chronicle manuscripts
owned by an English Levant merchant who died in 1700 in Smyrna and which
have now been discovered in a local monastery or former madrasa library. All
research written in Western languages could have a blind eye for certain reali-
ties and sources, either not yet studied at all, or only briefly mentioned some-
where. Then there is the classical problem, which is a problem of ignorance, of
accurately estimating what has never existed and what has been lost by incom-
plete transmission.86 Maybe Lewes Roberts had another, still larger library in
London with a huge portion of Arab and Ottoman manuscripts and he was a
silent devotee of Ibn Khaldun, of which no trace remains (and which would be
a huge surprise given the current knowledge about the very late rediscovery and
re-reading of Khaldun around 1700, by both, Arabic and Ottoman and Western
scholars), and he gave just a small, unproblematic portion of his library to Jesus
College. And this part would have been preserved because institutions always
preserve their holdings better than private individuals. I do not have to expand
these speculations, but they certainly remind us that the argument brought
forward here about not or very rarely existing items and about epistemic forms
unknown by certain groups during a certain period are highly ‘vulnerable’ to
objections and falsifications. The mere discovery of new sources such as the
hypotheticals above would prove the argument to be at least partially wrong.
But, in an old-fashioned Popperian sense, that is not a sign of weakness but of
the strength of the argument: only narrow propositions in a clearly falsifiable
form are theses in a Popperian sense.
That said, the line from the early Levant Company of Lewes Roberts in the
1610/20s to that of Sherman reaching close to 1750 seems to reveal develop-
ments as well as a certain continuity concerning the problem discussed here
of ignorance/knowledge in the relationship between European merchant
colonies and their local cultural environment. This continuity is the absence
of any deeper acquaintance with the Muslim Arabic or Ottoman past or his-
tory in any direct form, even among the later more learned members of the
eighteenth century merchant community, in the sense that they read and
studied the relevant manuscripts. A further continuity is the, somewhat para-
doxical, spatial and temporal disentanglement between the emergence and
growth of Western European Oriental Studies in leading academic circles and
in the Levant regions themselves, even if and because many of the important
scholars and manuscript collectors visited Constantinople, Pera or Smyrna at
some point and used the merchants’ infrastructure for support and transporta-
tion. No, or at the most very small, feedback loops between advances in those
fields in Oxford, Leiden and Paris and the everyday culture of merchants in
Aleppo can be retrieved from the library lists and the books and manuscripts
possessed. One discernible development, however, concerns the ‘native’ (to
use the colonial term) Christians. The missionary impulse evidently led, for
some exceptional members of the merchant community and the chaplains,
to a higher degree of exchange and dialogue, through Arabic translations and
apparently also through active observation and participation in the local dis-
putes of the Oriental Christian churches themselves. We still know far less
about these Anglican enterprises than about the Roman ones. If the first point
concerning the average interest in and knowledge of Muslim parts of the local
87 Miller K. A., Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late
Medieval Spain (New York: 2008) 15 with n. 35.
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88 Eldem E., French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden – Boston – Cologne:
1999).
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Cambden, William 243 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 9, 76, 200, 207, 210,
Cambyses II, king of Persia 369 232
Camden, William 258 Clairaut, Alexis Claude 12
Camerarius, Philipp 245 Clarke, Samuel 389
Campbell, Archibald 254 Claro, Giulio 77, 95–98
Cano, Melchior 79 Clauwez-Briant, Charles 159f.
Cantilupe, Walter de 278 Clement III, (anti)pope 291
Carcès, count of, see Pontevès, Gaspard de Clement V, pope 339
303 Clement, Titus Flavius of Alexandria 238
Cardano, Girolamo 124 Clouzier, François 324
Cardona, woman of Mutigliano 57 Coattino, Francesco 79
Carpzov, Benedikt 98, 100 Cogan, Thomas 243
Caryl, Joseph 241f. Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 140f., 146–153, 158,
Casaubon, Isaac 238f. 160f., 164f., 226, 379
Casaulx, Charles de 304f. Colle, Giovanni 233
Cassiodorus, Magnus Aurelius 273 Collier, Jeremy 254
Castiglione, Baldassare 199 Columbus, Christopher 321f.
Castro, Paolo di 121 Concordia, Flaminio 233
Catanzariti, Johannes Baptista 251 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de
Catherine the Great 398 Caritat de 163, 170, 172, 368, 373, 375f.
Cathon, broker in Marseille 60 Conrad, Joseph 360
Cato, Marcus Porcius 209f. Constantine, emperor 73
Cavelier, René-Robert, sieur de La Salle 315, Contarini, Tommaso 234
317 Cooper, William 252
Caxton, William 197–221 Coquereau, Jean-Baptiste 169
Cayet, Pierre Victor-Palma 9 Corbizzi, Niccolò 128
Cervantes, Miguel de 199 Corboli, Aurelio 95, 98
Chaize, sieur de la 305f. Coronelli, Vincenzo 369–371
Chamier, Daniel 239 Cotrugli, Benedetto di Giacomo 130
Charlemagne 276, 389 Courcy, Jean de 282
Charles I, king of England 242 Court, Pieter de la 144
Charles II, king of England 146 Covel, John 247
Charles V, emperor 132 Cripps, Henry 238
Charles-Emmanuel, duke of Savoy 297–299, Cromwell, Oliver 240
301–304, 306f., 309f. Culpeper, Nicholas 243
Charlotte-Elisabeth of Bavaria, princess Cusson, Jean-Baptiste 163
Palatine 162 Cyprian, Caecilius, of Carthago 73, 238
Chaucer, Geoffrey 204, 208 Cyrill of Alexandria 233
Chazelles, Jean-Matthieu de 363
Chemnitz, Martin 239 d’Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon 358,
Child, Josiah 151, 235 368, 371–379, 387
Chitty, Josiah 252 Dacier, Bon-Joseph 375
Chlingensperg, Christoph von 98 Damhouder Josse de 78
Chouët, Leonard 97 Danet, Guillaume 368
Churchill, Awnsham 247 Danner, Adrian 104, 107f.
Churchill, John 247 Danner, Hans 104
Chrysanthos Notaras, Greek Patriarch of Darwin, Charles 35
Jerusalem 253 Datini, merchant family 117, 119, 126, 128, 131
Abbaco calculus 11f., 28, 36, 118, 125–129, 136 Cognition 2f., 6, 15, 27, 29f., 33–36, 70, 84,
Absolutism, monarchy and knowledge 133, 168, 250, 270, 272, 276, 279, 284,
139–153, 157–173 286, 291, 296–311, 321, 333, 337, 379, 394,
Accident, accidence 32, 131f., 298–300, 336f., 400–404, 407f., 411, 414f.
387, 394f. Colonial(ism) 227–230, 246, 252, 256,
Adaptation 15, 79, 314, 317–320, 326–328, 314–329, 361, 398f., 409
404f. Commercial law 121–124
Administration, bureaucracy 3f., 11, 23, Commodities, commodification, consumption
36–41, 52, 58, 67, 139–153, 157–173, 19, 54, 62, 98, 130, 141, 144–151
274–292, 401, 404 Confessional, confessionalism 10, 24, 39, 79,
Advisory, councelling communication, 234–257
projects 139–153, 157–173, 296–311, 323–325 Conscience 24, 29, 51, 70–84, 194
Agnosticism, agnostic 342f., 353 Conscious/unconscious, see Ignorance,
Agnotology 40, 319, 402, 412 conscious/unconscious
Allegory 22, 179–194, 198, 201–205, 215, Conspiracy, conspiracicsm 17, 333–355
219–221, 354, 364 Contingency 10, 30–32, 129–132, 391, 394,
Apocalypticism 233f. 405, 409, 413
Archaeology 6, 245, 248, 317, 328, 365–377 Contracts, contracting 3, 55, 58, 60, 65, 67,
Aristotelism 22f., 29f., 34, 202, 210, 234, 94, 100f., 117–135, 237, 242, 248, 258f.,
336 308
Arithmetics, see Mathematics Conventional knowledge 17f., 53, 94f., 187f.,
Auctions 56, 59f., 63f., 66f., 229, 248, 253 334, 413
Conversation, communication 3, 5–9, 15,
Balance of trade 11, 17, 22, 37, 139–153, 165f., 17–19, 23, 26, 28, 35, 37f., 158, 181, 225,
170 250, 259, 273–292, 318, 323–325, 335,
Bankruptcy 54, 58, 161, 163, 170 337, 395, 404, 407f., 409, 415
Blanks, blank spots 6, 12f., 82, 358–378, Credit 58f., 61, 63–66, 97, 122f., 168
385–387 Cross-cultural contact 225–259, 269–292,
Books, bookownership 5, 21, 126, 128, 314–329
130, 160–163, 165, 167f., 171f., 197–200, Curiosity 165, 346, 348, 354, 361, 403f.
225–259, 377–379 Customs, customary law 24, 36, 55, 58, 107,
Budget 165, 168, 172 172, 217, 237, 257f., 302, 322, 303, 306
Customs (taxes) 140, 142, 146, 148f., 150f.,
Calculation, quantification 4f., 11f., 17f., 28, 159f.
36, 118, 124–126, 140–142, 145–147, 152,
160, 163, 171, 327, 412 Debt collection 54–68
Canon Law 32f., 37, 51–53, 57, 70–84, 88, Decision-making 1, 4, 7f., 15, 23–25, 37, 72,
94f., 97, 100–103, 121–123 76–83, 117, 130, 158, 164, 171, 208, 211, 300,
Causality 6–8, 10, 17, 30, 56, 61, 93, 95, 96, 303–311, 355, 397–417
129, 132–134, 213, 215, 321, 324, 326, 328, Deus absconditus 22, 25, 33
335, 343, 346, 378, 389, 394f., 405–407, Didactics, pedagogy 31, 73f., 124–126, 194,
410 201f., 208, 210
Censorship 40, 158f., 188, 347, 416 Discovery 9f., 13, 35, 51–53, 81, 125, 314–322,
Chronology 6, 9, 161, 167f., 389–392 349, 351, 355, 369, 373
Dissemblance, resemblance 183, 190–194, Faith/belief 10, 15, 73, 75, 82, 84, 179f., 184f.,
201 189–191, 219, 233–237, 253f., 337, 341,
Divine knowledge, divine will, divine laws 348, 368f., 389, 395, 404, 406
10, 24–26, 33–35, 74–84, 158, 181, 193f., Fiction 17, 54, 60, 66f., 200–202, 209–212,
214f., 242, 308f., 334, 349, 351, 409f. 220, 329, 340, 354
Double-entry bookkeeping 8, 160f., 167f., Flesh, corporality 35, 41, 179, 182, 184, 186,
171 190–194, 219
Doubt 25, 78, 96, 152, 216, 299, 340, 350, 359, Forensics 51
363, 368, 406f. Freemasonry 25, 339–355
Future 4–6, 11f., 14, 16f., 24, 28, 30, 35, 117f.,
Economics 8, 11f., 36–38, 54–67, 117–176, 122, 125, 129, 131, 133, 135f., 165, 170, 378,
226–228, 401, 411–415 392, 406, 409–414
Emotion 14–17, 184, 355
Agoraphobia 15 Gambling 122, 125
Anger 16, 107, 206 Geography, Cartography 12f., 230, 277, 288,
and Decision-making 14–17 314–316, 322–327, 358–380, 386–390, 398
Fear (danger) 23, 71, 101, 142, 150, 172, 174, God and knowledge/ignorance, see Divine
180f., 184, 188, 284, 304f., 317, 321, 328, knowledge
353, 354, 368, 401f., 404, 407–409
Hope 16, 181, 249, 336, 348, 359 Hazard, fortuna, chance 10, 28, 37, 120, 124,
Joy 16, 180, 202 136, 314, 318, 320, 325, 327–329
Neuroscience 14–17 Heritage, heritability 37, 53, 56, 59, 89–98,
Social vs. biological determinants of 101, 106–109, 136, 180, 364
14–17, 184 Historiography, history writing 2, 4–13, 308,
Suppression of emotions 14–17 310, 314, 334, 336, 339, 349–352, 376f.,
Emphyteusis 94–98, 100, 109 385–395
Empiricism, empirical, experience 4, 11, 13, Holy Roman Empire 88, 140
18, 20, 23–25, 29–38, 124, 232, 257, 297, Humanism, humanist 3f., 6, 8–10, 13, 20, 31,
303, 305, 307f., 352, 391, 393, 395, 400, 34, 38, 127, 165, 197–222, 232, 301f., 310
402–405, 410, 413
Emptiness 12f., 27, 52, 361, 369, 385–395 Iconoclasm 179–195
Enlightenment 3f., 6, 10, 12f., 17, 25, 27, 38, Identity, identification 18, 20, 25–29, 53f., 67,
169f., 250, 299, 333–355, 386–394 250, 269–292, 339, 344, 346, 354, 404
Environmental (non-)knowledge 228, 248, Ignorance
314–329, 403, 409, 414, 415f. Conscious/unconscious ignorance 3,
Equity 80f., 95–97 6–8, 15, 17, 19f., 22, 26, 29, 41, 152, 257,
Error 13, 20, 29, 63, 71, 160, 168, 250, 255, 354, 310, 339, 403f., 408, 415f.
397, 406, 416 Epistemic or theoretical knowledge/
Esoterism 9, 336f., 341–343, 352f. ignorance 4–6, 204, 206, 213–221,
Estimation 28, 36, 54–67, 82, 132, 170, 255 255–259, 297, 301, 308–310, 403
Eucharist 186, 190f., 194, 253f. Functions of ignorance 2, 20, 27, 54, 193,
Exceptional normal 90 225, 259
Experts 28f., 36, 39, 52, 56f., 61, 64–66, 134, Ignorantia
157, 161, 164, 250, 320, 349, 404, 410 Legal terminology 1, 29–32, 70–84
Terminology in Moral Theology
Fact 3, 24f., 29, 32f., 52–54, 60f., 67, 70–75, 30–35, 139, 182, 400
100, 273, 277, 281, 284, 290, 324f., 388, Docta ignorantia 33–35
390f., 401, 406, 408–410 Negative knowledge 3, 32, 40, 401, 410
Probability 11, 28, 31, 82, 118–136, 373, 409, 51, 134, 230, 244, 247, 311, 317, 319, 327f.,
411–413, 416 333, 338, 341–343, 353, 355, 360, 363, 368,
Prognostics 11, 131, 324 371, 374–377, 386f., 390, 397, 401f., 405,
Proof 51, 74–84, 97, 102, 120, 143f., 211, 340, 408–414, 416f.
375, 388, 395, 416 Scientific voyages 39, 61, 247, 249, 358,
Property 55–64, 89–108, 122, 274, 279, 322, 362f.
327 Seat of knowledge 5, 7, 22–25, 70–84,
Protection 15, 162, 236f., 239, 243, 270, 103–105, 135, 147–152, 164–166, 207,
273–275, 278–282, 284–288, 292, 297–311 215–217, 256–259, 310f., 333–355, 392f.
(Public) accounting 11, 17, 28, 36, 132, Secret, secrecy 17, 25, 51, 59, 158f., 163, 276,
159–161, 164–173 306, 333–355
Semantics 17–22, 385–395
Queries 39, 168, 315 Activation of semantic potentials 21
Prototype semantics 21f.
Ratio(nality) 15f., 30, 37, 125, 131, 153, 158, 214, Selection of meanings, selectivity
292, 301, 303, 336, 349, 386, 391, 394f., 179–194, 197–221, 225–259
405f. Semantic potentials 179–194, 197–221,
Reading, reading styles 20f., 191, 197–221, 225–259
225–259, 364 Semiotics, semiology 179–194
Realism 2, 7, 17, 20, 22, 143, 158, 364, 387, 393, Silence 24, 88–110
395, 400f., 404, 406, 410 Sin 53f., 67, 70–84, 121–126
Reason of state 158, 297, 308, 311 Space
Reflexivity 4, 7, 11–13, 20, 24, 27, 30, 33f., 102, Distances, their perception, mental maps,
152, 173, 182, 231, 333, 408, 414, 416 spatial projection 8, 12–14, 127, 129f.,
Reforms 8, 23, 39, 157–170, 226–259, 335, 132, 142, 185, 240, 359, 368, 371–373,
340, 342, 345 385f., 390, 392, 398
Reformation 38, 72, 80–82, 181–184, 190, 191, and Migration 16, 286, 288, 319, 399,
193, 340 403–407, 416
Renaissance 7f., 10, 12f., 30f., 38, 117–136, Physical space 12, 129
198–221, 358f., 364f. and Traveling 14–16, 27, 269–292
Representation 7–14, 21f., 27, 72, 76, 94, 136, Security 17, 27, 37, 57, 117, 171, 274, 280–282,
149, 170f., 181, 183, 185, 190–194, 232, 236, 285, 286, 289, 304, 405, 409
238–244, 257, 274, 289, 299, 334, 337f., State building 157, 164–173
350f., 354, 364, 369, 372, 375, 379, 387, State finances 139–153, 157–173
392f., 413 Statistics 25, 28f., 40, 67f., 90, 118, 124–126,
Rhetorics, rhetorical 26, 30, 72, 74, 200–207, 131, 133, 140, 142, 170–172, 413
212, 214, 219f., 307–310, 374, 380 Still life 179–194
Risk 28, 117–136, 296, 304, 306, 310, 317, 320, Suspicion 78, 340
324, 326–329, 399, 402, 407–414
Roman law 31f., 51, 56, 58, 70–84, 88–110 Tacit knowledge 28f., 37, 51, 54, 66, 337, 402,
416
Safe conduct 26f., 54, 269–292 Taxation 23, 36, 54f., 64–67, 92, 142–144,
Sceptic, Scepticism, expression of doubts 147–151, 160f., 167, 169, 304, 399
25, 78, 216, 299, 339f., 342, 350, 359, 363, Tenancy 89–94, 96–100, 103–107, 109
368, 398f., 403, 405–407 Testimonies, witness 24f., 37, 39, 51, 53, 55,
Scholastic, scholasticism 3, 5, 30, 32–34, 123, 57–60, 76, 78, 81, 83, 97, 99, 103–108,
201, 203, 210, 214, 219, 307, 377 247, 281, 375
Science, scientific academies and Thomism 21, 31–33, 70f., 75, 79, 123, 182, 234,
institutions 2, 3, 5, 15, 30, 32, 34–36, 239, 242, 308
Time (horizons) Transmission 10, 19f., 40, 215, 248, 250, 255,
Absolute/relative time 10, 389f., 392 349f., 391, 402
Future, futurity Transport system 7–9, 12f., 16, 23, 129–131,
Closed future 11, 117 140, 143, 145, 229, 249, 256, 323, 396
Future scenarios 11, 117f., 122, 135, 165, Truth, veracity, verity 24f., 30, 34, 39, 51f.,
170, 378, 392, 403 73–75, 79–81, 82, 84, 90, 142, 152, 179, 181,
Future unknowns 4, 11f., 17, 28, 30, 198f., 209, 211f., 288, 307, 340f., 348–353,
125, 129, 135 397
Open future 5, 11, 35, 409f.
Possible/impossible futures 11, 16, 131, Usurer, usury 53f., 67, 121–123, 126
133, 411, 413
Linear/cyclical 5, 11, 40 Value 3, 8, 11f., 16, 25, 28f., 51–67, 81, 107, 118,
Past 6, 8, 10, 33, 66, 125, 131, 255f., 339, 122, 139f., 142, 145, 148, 152, 168, 170, 179,
388–395 181, 184, 194, 199, 202, 204, 209, 213, 215,
Present 6–8, 10f., 13, 30, 165, 335, 258, 284, 318, 349, 400f., 410, 416
388–395, 413
Synchrony/asynchrony 6–8, 387 War 23, 74, 130, 132f., 146, 149–151, 158, 161f.,
Time of churchmen/merchants 6 166f., 174, 181, 208f., 216, 231, 273, 296f.,
Torture 51, 76f. 355, 390, 398, 405, 411
Translation, Translation theories 18–21, 56,
182f., 187, 197–221, 233, 241, 243–246, Zero 392
248, 251–254, 256f., 259, 272, 286, 290,
315, 333, 340, 342, 347