Early modern knowledges and the intercultural encounter

Course goals

After completing this course, the student can:
1. Characterize different ways of knowing that existed in the past (specifically, in the early modern period), and analyze the relations between them, enabling them to reflect critically on current disciplinary relations and on how today’s global challenges may require creative combinations of different forms of knowledge.
2. Use historical examples to argue that the historical development of science in Europe should be understood in a global perspective, enabling them to understand how cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary encounters generate new knowledge, and also to reflect on the conditions under which there may be meaningful exchange across borders that are at once geographical, cultural and epistemic.
3. Show that science is not practiced in an ‘ivory tower’, but that forms of knowledge and knowledge-making practices are embedded in a wider societal context, enabling them to reflect on the place of science in today’s society and on their own social identity as citizen-scientists.
 

Content

The past, it has been said, is a different country. This is also true for the history of knowledge. Views of what counts as knowledge, where, how and by whom it is produced, what purpose it serves, as well as what it is possible to have knowledge of – these have all been subject to tremendous changes over the course of time. Early Modern Knowledges and the Intercultural Encounter dives deep into the world of late medieval and early modern scholarship. Traditionally, a course on this topic would have focused on what historians called ‘the Scientific Revolution’ or the birth of modern science. It would have focused on theories in astronomy and physics, formulated by a select (and predictable) group of geniuses. In this course, however, we try to cover a much broader range of knowledge-making practices, including for example natural history, tropical medicine, and philology. Intellectual giants like Vesalius and Newton are now put into context and will be discussed side-by-side with obscure and indeed sometimes anonymous figures who were vital to scholarship too. Although we do not pretend to do full justice to their contributions, women, workmen and non-European people are included in the discussion as well. We hope that the new history of early modern knowledges here offered, will give a refreshing experience that is at times entertaining, at times disturbing, but always instructive.