The Quest For Certainty In Early Modern Europe

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.

"A tour de force." - Vladimir Steffel, Ohio State University

An examination of a fundamental aspect of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.

This reader brings together original and influential recent work in the field of early modern European history. Provides a thought-provoking overview of current thinking on this period. Key themes include evolving early-modern identities; changes in religion and cultural life; the revolution of the mind; roles of women in early-modern societies; the rise of the modern state; and Europe and the new world system Incorporates new scholarship on Eastern and Central Europe. Includes an article translated into English for the first time.

Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the Frankfurt POLY (Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities) Lectures on "Pathways through Early Modern Christianities" brought together a virtual, global community of scholars and students in the Spring and Summer of 2021 to discuss the fascinating nature of early modern religious life. In this book, eleven pathbreaking scholars from the "four corners" of the early modern world reflect on the analytical tools that structure their field and that they have developed, revised and embraced in their scholarship: from generations to tolerance, from uniformity to publicity, from accommodation to local religion, from polycentrism to connected histories, and from identity to object agency. Together, the chapters of this reference work help both students and advanced researchers alike to appreciate the extent of our current knowledge about early modern christianities in their interconnected global context—and what exciting new travels could lie ahead.

Fifty years after the beginning of the debate about the "general crisis of the seventeenth century," and thirty years after theodore K. Rabb's reformulation of it as the "European struggle for stability." this volume returns to the fundamental questions raised by the long-running discussion: What continent-wide patterns of change can be discerned in European history across the centuries from the Renaissance to the French Revolution? What were the causes of the revolts that rocked so many countries between 1640 and 1660? Did fundamental changes occur in the relationship between politics and religion? Politics and military technology? Politics and the structures of intellectual authority?

European exploration and conquest expanded exponentially in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and as the horizons of imperial experience grew more distant, strategies designed to convey the act of witnessing came to be a key source of textual authority. From the relación to the captivity narrative, the Hispanic imperial project relied heavily on the first-person authority of genres whose authenticity undergirded the ideological armature of national consolidation, expansion, and conquest. At the same time, increasing pressures for religious conformity in Spain, as across Europe, required subjects to bare themselves before external authorities in intimate confessions of their faith. Emerging from this charged context, the unreliable voice of the pícaro poses a rhetorical challenge to the authority of the witness, destabilizing the possibility of trustworthy representation precisely because of his or her intimate involvement in the narrative. In Knowing Fictions, Barbara Fuchs seeks at once to rethink the category of the picaresque while firmly centering it once more in the early modern Hispanic world from which it emerged. Venturing beyond the traditional picaresque canon, Fuchs traces Mediterranean itineraries of diaspora, captivity, and imperial rivalry in a corpus of texts that employ picaresque conventions to contest narrative authority. By engaging the picaresque not just as a genre with more or less strictly defined boundaries, but as a set of literary strategies that interrogate the mechanisms of truth-telling itself, Fuchs shows how self-consciously fictional picaresque texts effectively encouraged readers to adopt a critical stance toward the truth claims implicit in the forms of authoritative discourse proliferating in Imperial Spain.