"WissensWelten"- Theme of the Conference 2024

The topic addresses early modern history as history of knowledge, under two aspects: On the one hand, it targets knowledge cultures and milieus such as court, city, and university, tackling by no means only academic and taught knowledge, but above all its interaction with other types of knowledge such as social, pictorial and craft related knowledge. Last but not least, we should address the knowledge embedded in practices and material culture, its ties to class and gender, its circulation in networks and media.

On the other hand, the term "knowledge worlds" aims at a globalization and decentering of our perspective: focusing on knowledge in and from other world regions. Global history of knowledge, however, is more than just a reconstruction of knowledge cultures in non-European milieus. It tackles the connections and non-connections of knowledge worlds, of isolation or penetration, of transfer or the refusal of transfer.

Thus WissensWelten means both: knowledge cultures and global history of knowledge .

The theme picks up on the research focus practiced at the Gotha Research Centre, and it also draws on the location of the residence city: Courtly knowledge - archived in large collections, libraries and archives -, free from academic constraints, but connected to dynastic representation, with its proximity to military, artistic and possibly even alchemical-laboratory know-how is a paradigmatic case for the history of knowledge - and it can be observed just as well as in Gotha in Istanbul, in Delhi in Peking or in Mexico City. There were worlds of knowledge here as well as there, and reports about the worlds of knowledge of the others can be found everywhere in the archives.

Thus, according to our conception, the conference should span a wide range of topics and include panels on both European and non-European cultures of knowledge and on their interconnection.

The Call for Papers will be issued in spring 2023.