Note publique d'information : A compelling alternative account of the history of knowledge from the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment. Until now the history of knowledge has largely been about formal
and documented accumulation, concentrating on systems, collections, academies, and
institutions. The central narrative has been one of advancement, refinement, and expansion.
Martin Mulsow tells a different story. Knowledge can be lost: manuscripts are burned,
oral learning dies with its bearers, new ideas are suppressed by censors. Knowledge
Lost is a history of efforts, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, to counter
such loss. It describes how critics of ruling political and religious regimes developed
tactics to preserve their views; how they buried their ideas in footnotes and allusions;
how they circulated their tracts and treatises in handwritten copies; and how they
commissioned younger scholars to spread their writings after death.Filled with exciting
stories, Knowledge Lost follows the trail of precarious knowledge through a series
of richly detailed episodes. It deals not with the major themes of metaphysics and
epistemology, but rather with interpretations of the Bible, Orientalism, and such
marginal zones as magic. And it focuses not on the usual major thinkers, but rather
on forgotten or half-forgotten members of the "knowledge underclass," such as Pietro
della Vecchia, a libertine painter and intellectual; Charles-César Baudelot, an antiquarian
and numismatist; and Johann Christoph Wolf, a pastor, Hebrew scholar, and witness
to the persecution of heretics. Offering a fascinating new approach to the intellectual
history of early modern Europe, Knowledge Lost is also an ambitious attempt to rethink
the very concept of knowledge
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