History

... Figure 2: Gold Sun Mask of King-Elector Augustus II of Saxony (Inventionsmaske), 1709 SOURCE: Dresden, Rüstkammer. ... was a modest provincial town in the second half of the seventeenth century, but it was the residence of Frederick William I, the “Great Elector” of ...

I This essay was first presented at the Institut fur Europaische Geschichte, Mainz. I would like to thank the members of the Institut, as well as Kathleen Canning, Diane Hughes, Susanne Pohl, Dana Rabin, Lyndal Roper and Thomas Tentler for their criticism and advice. 2 'Den ...

. A jurisdictional dispute o er the burial of suicides in Electoral Saxony in the years 1702–1706 brought into sharp contrast conflicting iews of the body in popular belief and Lutheran pastoral theology, and in the secularizing project of the early Enlightenment. The dispute ...

... in the Banquetting‐House, or rather her Pagent.” Music and dancing were primary to the masque, and the addition of speeches from characters on stage probably led Carleton to use also the term “pageant.” These court masques, with theatrical designs by Inigo Jones, “brought ...

This article uses a wide range of evidence, including images and accounts from foreigners (primarily English and German travellers) to place the early history of coffee and cafés in France in a sharp comparative perspective. These references to the contexts of coffee consumption (where, with whom and with what other products did one consume coffee?) allow us to test and reframe key claims linking cafés, the public sphere, gender and social hierarchy in the Old Regime. The rise of the Parisian café was shaped by fears about the social inclusivity of tobacco smoke, questions of access for elite women, a focus on luxury décor and a distinctive approach to conversation and sociability. A careful exploration of these contexts of consumption can qualify and nuance our view of the café as a locus of the public sphere in the first half-century of public coffee-drinking in Paris.

What color was the blood of Africans?  A strange question, to be sure. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars writing in the Transactions of the Royal Society in London and in the Francophone scholarly journals of Europe claimed that the blood of African people was somehow "darker“ than the blood of Europeans. Physicians reported from the colonies directly: Dr. Thomas Townes, writing from Barbados in 1675, claimed to have „seen the blood of at least 20 [Africans] both sick and well... and it all is as dark as the bottom of any European blood.“  The French physician Pierre Barèrre cited his work in Cayenne to make a similar claim published in 1741. Many involved in this learned discussion lived in cities such as London or Amsterdam with significant African and Asian populations – they could have directly observed or deliberately tested the color of the blood of men from all over the world by simply walking to their city’s docks. Yet for over a century scholars considered the question unresolved and called for more inquiry into what we would consider an obvious and universal aspect of human physiology.

In my paper I will argue that questions about the color of human blood were constructed by a certain “will to ignorance” – the necessary counterpart to a Foucauldian “will to truth.” In this view, ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge; it is equally a product of history and epistemology. Drawing on research in early modern English, French, and German medical publications and travel accounts and on insights from the new field of agnotology (Proctor and Schiebinger), my paper traces the diffusion of learned ideas about African blood across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My paper will document one specific example of the relationship between the production of knowledge about Africa and the production of ignorance about Africa.

Over the last few decades the human skin has emerged as a distinct site of research for humanists, and specifically for historians of race, art, science, and medicine. In the early modern centuries Europeans at home and in the wider world transformed their understanding of skin.

This book examines the human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional church: Luther's doctrine of salvation 'by faith alone' made the foundation of the traditional funeral, intercession for the dead in Purgatory, obsolete. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

During the seventeenth century, Europeans intensified their study of human skin and skin color. But for these early modern researchers, skin "color" meant dark skin: its blackness demanded explanation in a way that white skin never did. Europeans sought to locate, conceptually and physically, the blackness upon which new legal categories and sources of profit depended. This new "anatomy of blackness" led physicians and scholars to examine human skin through the microscope. The Dutch-German anatomist Johann Nicolas Pechlin (1646–1706) carefully observed and clearly located the physical cause of dark skin in the rete mucosum, a mesh of pigmented vessels that lay between the epidermis and the dermis. Pechlin transformed the learned consensus on the physical site of skin color, but he also showed that this pigmented layer was entirely superficial. During the 1690s Pechlin's work was referenced by members of England's Royal Society when they discussed questions of climate, race, and skin color. This empirical approach (practiced by Pechlin and championed by the Royal Society) developed under constant pressure to fix dark skin firmly in African bodies and tie it to deeper or more innate characteristics. Thus, in the Atlantic world, blackness could never be understood as a superficial phenomenon, despite the evidence revealed by the scalpel and the microscope.