The Dark Side of Knowledge : Histories of Ignorance, 1400 To 1800.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on the Editor -- Notes on the Contributors -- List of Illustrations and Tables -- Introduction: Towards a History of Ignorance -- Part 1 Law -- Chapter 1 Law and the Uncertainty of Value in Late Medieval Marseille and Lucca -- Chapter 2 Nescience and the Conscience of Judges. An Example of Religion's Influence on Legal Procedure -- Chapter 3 Speaking Nothing to Power in Early Modern Germany: Making Sense of Peasant Silence in the Ius Commune -- Part 2 Economy -- Chapter 4 Coping with Unknown Risks in Renaissance Florence: Insurers, Friars and Abacus Teachers -- Chapter 5 (Non-)Knowledge, Political Economy and Trade Policy in Seventeenth-Century France: The Problem of Trade Balances -- Chapter 6 Ignorance in Europe's State Financial Culture (Eighteenth Century) -- Part 3 Semantics -- Chapter 7 Voluptas Carnis. Allegory and Non-Knowledge in Pieter Aertsen's Still-Life Paintings -- Chapter 8 Humanist Styles of Reading in the Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton -- Chapter 9 Coexistence and Ignorance: What Europeans in the Levant did not read (ca. 1620-1750) -- Part 4 Political and Scientific Communication -- Chapter 10 Ignorance about the Traveler: Documenting Safe Conduct in the European Middle Ages -- Chapter 11 International Crises as Experience of Non-Knowledge: European Powers and the 'Affairs of Provence' (1589-1598) -- Chapter 12 Dealing with Hurricanes and Mississippi Floods in Early French New Orleans. Environmental (Non-) Knowledge in a Colonial Context -- Chapter 13 'Unknown Sciences' and Unknown Superiors. The Problem of Non-Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Secret Societies -- Chapter 14 Specifying Ignorance in Eighteenth-Century Cartography, a Powerful Way to Promote the Geographer's Work: The Example of Jean-Baptiste d'Anville -- Part 5 Theory.

Chapter 15 Semantics of the Void: Empty Spaces inEighteenth-Century German Historiography. A First Sketch of a Semiotic Theory -- Chapter 16 Non-Knowledge and Decision Making: The Challenge for the Historian -- Index Nominum -- Index Rerum.

Thoroughly researched contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris on coping with ignorance in late medieval and early modern administrative practices, science, literature and the arts, are tightly connected by a new theoretical framework on how to historicize ignorance.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.