Creating Knowledge

Papers on the ways in which knowledge -- social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific -- is produced in Early Modern literature and culture are welcome.
How did authors challenge established institutions, disciplines, practices, and policies to create new modes of knowledge? What was the author’s role within established institutions? What is the relationship between the production of knowledge and its dissemination through educational practices? What are innovative practices, research programs, explanatory models, and theoretical modes on the creation of knowledge?

Papers might speak to the following issues:

• The forms of display and the creation of knowledge in the natural history cabinet (Raritätenkabinett)
• The embattled issue of latinitas
• New approaches to Sprachgesellschaften
• Innovative insights from the history of science
• The role of the family as creator of social knowledge
• The writer and his/her role in taste formation
• Sociability as a form of social and cultural knowledge
• Games and other leisure pastimes as creators of knowledge
• The portrayal of travel as creator of cultural/political knowledge
• The objects of material culture and the creation of knowledge
• Fashion as conveyor of social and political knowledge

Papers may focus on specific writers or works or take a thematic approach.

Papers might also focus on the way we, as scholars of the Early Modern, create and convey knowledge on our field to students, graduate students, administrators and the public at large. How do we argue for the importance of the Early Modern in a “presentist” academic and general cultural climate?

Send one to two-page abstracts by MARCH 10, 2005 to: