Knowledge in Circulation
Ever wondered how people of the past tried to regulate their emotions or find solutions to complex problems, but in an efficient and available-to-all manner? One textual format persists throughout the ages and offers a glimpse into many ways in which people have confronted a variety of their problems and daily challenges: a recipe. You […]
“Alongside formal compositions, blanks spaces were used to record family histories, economic woes, and ritual practices. From the historian’s point of view, this means that even kabbalistic manuscripts – devoted to esoteric theological, cosmological, and ritual speculations – can be valuable sources for social and cultural history.”
Agata Paluch Mapping the Hand: Not Only Maniculae The visual model of hands has been well recognised as a vital element of the medieval and early modern representation of abstract concepts and cognitive processes. It played an important role as a teaching device in a variety of subjects, from rhetoric to mathematics to music, being […]
Agata Paluch [First published: https://historyofknowledge.net/2019/04/11/practical-kabbalah-and-practical-knowledge-kabbalistic-manuals-and-natural-knowledge-in-early-modern-east-central-europe/ ] An impressive handwritten codex at the National Library of Israel embodies the intricacies and peculiarities of crafting, reading, and transmitting practical knowledge in early modern Jewish contexts. The volume, known today as manuscript NLI 8º 1070, was likely produced in the 1730s somewhere in the Polish territories. A variety […]
Patterns of Knowledge Circulation is the Emmy Noether Research Group, founded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), based at the Department of Cultural and Historical Studies. It aims to explore how Jewish esoteric knowledge circulated throughout history in multiple moves of transmission and reception that took place in various social, cultural, and material contexts […]
