In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, objects, texts and people travelled around the world on board Dutch ships. The essays in this book explore how these circulations transformed knowledge in Asian and European societies. They concentrate on epistemic consequences in the fields of historiography, geography, natural history, religion and philosophy, as well as in everyday life. Emphasizing transformations, the volume reconstructs small semantic shifts of knowledge and tentative adjustments to new cultural contexts. It unfolds the often conflict-ridden, complex and largely global history of specific pieces of knowledge as well as of generally-shared contemporary understandings regarding what could or could not be considered true. The book contributes to current debates about how to conceptualize the unsettled epistemologies of the early modern world.

Schwerpunkt sind zum einen die Beziehungen zwischen judischem Binnenraum und nicht-judischer Umwelt, zum anderen das Spannungsverhaltnis zwischen Landesherrschaft und den imperialen, durch Kaiser und Reich bestimmten Rahmenbedingungen judischer Existenz. Beitrage von: Anette Baumann, J. Friedrich Battenberg, Stefan Ehrenpreis, Rainer S. Elkar, Andreas Gotzmann, Andre Griemert, Karl Harter, Vera Kallenberg, Verena Kasper-Marienberg, Thomas Lau, Gerhard Rechter ( ), Ursula Reuter, Stephan Wendehorst"