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-Cesar 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.

Up to the 18th century science and learning was largely an activity concerned with 'scholarly' knowledge: reading, learning, summarizing, compiling, editing and interpreting established knowledge. Here, thirteen international experts examine scholarly practices prevalent in the early modern age and the social and cultural conditions and contexts in which they were operative. Central topics are knowledge acquisition techniques and the media employed to that end (reading and summarizing), the connections between the scholarly activities of editors, philologists or academic teachers and the final products of those activities (research and teaching), the practices used for transferring knowledge to addressees (communication and representation), and finally the monitoring of scholarly communication and the rules and regulations governing it.

The study sets out to be both a history of the concept, self-preservation' in the Renaissance and to reconstruct the philosophy of Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588), the first to make this concept the central tenet of early modern nature philosophy and ethics. Telesio's thought is expounded in terms of the way it combines and enlarges on developments in Aristotelian philosophy and the medical thinking of Galen. The author further demonstrates how Telesio's, defensive modernization' became a catalyst for speculative philosophical developments in the late 16th century - Bruno, Patrizi, Stelliola, Campanella. Unlike the Cartesian conservatio sui tradition with its emphasis on 'perpetuation', the Renaissance idea of self-preservation revolves around sensualism, similarity and vibrant vitality.

This volume introduces the concept of late Renaissance philosophy to cover those intellectual currents in pre-mid 17th century Germany that saw themselves as inheritors of the (Italian) Renaissance but at the same time amalgamated their speculations with established Lutheran or Reformed metaphysics. Thirteen case studies by renowned scholars describe the full scope of this process with regard to metaphysics and anthropology, esthetics and ethics, philology and religious philosophy.

What does the covert history of the early Enlightenment period look like? Maturin VeyssiA]re La Croze was a Benedictine monk in Paris and later librarian to the Prussian king in Berlin. Tracing his escape routes, networks and intellectual predilections affords an insight into the links between his involvement in the scholarly debates of the day and his personal relations with Jews, atheists and Socinians. The motivating factor for such an inquiry is a French verse adaptation of the Ring Parable in which the tolerance issue is posed in the context of the situation in which exiled Huguenots found themselves after 1685. The quest for the author finally ends among the book producers and rA(c)fugiA(c)s in Holland around 1720.

Jakob Friedrich Reimmann stands between Baroque and Enlightenment. He is one of the major representatives of early 18th century historia litteraria, that forgotten discipline which set out to be a history of education, science and the book, and which Reimmann himself applied systematically to a whole range of subjects and cultures. His oeuvre may be seen as typifying the tensions emerging between an inherited faith in providentially ordained history and a new skeptical/hypothetical scientific culture.