Threatened Knowledge

Renate Dürr is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Tübingen. Her research focuses on Jesuit missions within the context of global history and the history of knowledge. Together with Ulrike Strasser (San Diego) she is currently writing a monograph De-centering the Enlightenment: Global Knowledge, Emotions, and Jesuit Practices in a German Cultural Encyclopedia.

Threatened Knowledge discusses the practices of knowing, not-knowing, and not wanting to know from the middle ages to the twentieth century.

1. Introduction: Practices of Knowing and Ignoring from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century Part 1: Negotiating Uncertainties and the Reliability of Knowledge 2. What (not) to Read in Times of Crises. Responses to the First Index of Banned Books (c.500 to c.1100) 3. Precarious knowledge and the Problem of Reliability: the case of prognostic texts in the Carolingian period 4. "Doubt all before you believe anything": Stock Market Speculation in the Early Twentieth Century United States Part 2: Creating and Misunderstanding References 5. Knowledge and Violence in a Society Under Stress: Death Penalty Under Charles the Bald (843-877) 6. Global Encounters - Precarious Knowledge: Traces of Alchemical Practice in Indonesian Batavia 7. Biculturalism, Multiculturalism and Indigeneity as a Strategy of Memoria. Canada and Australia Defining Themselves in Times of Threat Part 3: Knowing and Ignoring as Reciprocal Answers 8. Rhetoric and Divination in Erasmus's Edition of Jerome: Ancient and Modern Ways to Save Dangerous, Vulnerable Texts 9. "Ignorance is power, as well as joy": Trying to Manage Information in turn-of-the century America 10. Corresponding Knowledge: Arguments about Emotions and Entertainment in Berlin and Cairo around 1900