Why did people argue about curiosity in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, so much more than today? Why was curiosity a fashionable topic in early modern conduct manuals, university dissertations, scientific treatises, sermons, newspapers,
novellas, plays, operas, ballets, poems, from Corneille to Diderot, from Johann Valentin Andreae to Gottlieb Spizel?
Universities, churches, and other institutions invoked curiosity in order to regulate knowledge or behaviour, to establish who should try to know or do what, and under
what circumstances. As well as investigating a crucial episode in the history of knowledge, this study makes a distinctive contribution to historiographical debates about the nature of 'concepts'. Curiosity was constantly reshaped by the uses of it. And yet, strangely, however much people contested
what curiosity was, they often agreed that what they were disagreeing about was one and the same thing.
Introduction
Part 1
Institutions: University
Part 2
Institutions: Church
Part 3
Institutions: The Culture of Curiosities
Discursive Tendencies: Collecting
Part 4
Discursive Tendencies: Narrating
Sexes: Male
Part
5
Discursive Tendencies: Narrating
Sexes: Female
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Neil Kenny is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge.
There are no related titles available at this time.